Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

  OVER THE DAYS that followed the boat often ran aground. We worked upstream around the curve of the Niger’s bend, and south through the grassy swamps of an inland delta where the river broke into streams so narrow that at times we brushed against the grass. We passed close to hippopotami. I sought the shady sides of the upper deck, and watched the plains beyond the water’s reach as they turned gradually from Sahara to Sahel. Now a bush, now a tree, now a lone shepherd, waving. The shepherd held a sheet of cardboard over his head for shade. His land was bright, thin, and yellow. His goats were sinewy.

  Amadou came to sit beside me in companionable silence. I noticed that he had torn his shirt, and repaired it, and that he had lost weight. When I told him he looked hungry, he refused to admit it. Afterward I simply gave him food.

  I do not know by what measure we finally left the desert. We passed herds of cattle standing on French-built dikes, and beyond them, a few irrigated rice fields. But away from the fields, the land stretched in parched plains. We neared Mopti, the boat’s final port, after eight days on the river. We passed villages built around classic mud mosques with fanciful spires and protruding beams. After the sun set, the villages, which had no generators, were lit at night by orange fires, and by the yellow beams of mopeds piercing the smoke and dust.

  Mopti was different. It had electric lights and a riverfront too busy to submit entirely to our boat’s arrival. Built at the confluence of the Niger and the river Bani, it stood on three islands of solid ground, surrounded by swamp and water, connected to the mainland by a causeway. It was a poor place, with dirt streets and mud-walled houses, but also an important trading center. I walked through the town, luxuriating in its commotion, checked into a cheap hotel, and bathed from a bucket in the yard. The next day was market day, when women from the bush streamed in to trade, carrying bulky sacks of grain on their heads to exchange for fish and vegetables, and manufactured goods from Asia. People here suffered, but did not starve. Life’s hardest edges had been softened by the river. The few Tuaregs walked about unmasked, and there was no sign of war. I stood in the shade of a tree by the river port, satisfied that in Mopti I had left the desert.

  The following day I went by shared taxi through the brushy savanna south of town. The driver did not handle himself with the discipline of a desert man. He drove his old Peugeot too fast down donkey tracks, and spun the wheels ineffectually in pockets of loose sand. In the afternoon, on a stretch of dirt road, he accelerated aggressively toward goats that were crossing ahead, and ran directly into one of them without so much as a swerve. The goat flew over the hood, landed, and hobbled off bleating. Coolant poured out of the car’s smashed radiator. The driver kept driving until the engine seized, then he broke into tears. I felt sorry for him, and for the goat, but secretly delighted in the freedom he felt to wreck his car. I took it as further evidence of the land’s abundance.

  That night back in Mopti, Amadou invited me to dinner at his aunt’s house, which stood by the mosque in the old part of town. It was a poor, mud-walled house with a large and smoky room lit only by a cooking fire, too dim to make out the faces of the people there. We ate rice and sauce from communal bowls. Amadou’s aunt turned out to be the cousin of his grandmother. She was an old woman who had lived always in Mopti, and spoke little French. Amadou translated for us. She did not make conversation, but hearing that I had crossed the Sahara, said sternly, “The north is not good. The north is death.”

  I thought her fear was old-fashioned. But while we ate dinner, the harmattan came. It is the hot wind that blows from the north, carrying the desert’s soil. I walked alone through Mopti’s dark streets in air thick with dust, and went to the river port, where the market had been shuttered and abandoned. The street lamps cast futile halos. The harmattan is not a bad wind, but it is a reminder. I stood facing it, tasting the Sahara. In the morning I left with Amadou by bush taxi for the capital, Bamako. The trip took all day. The driver drove carefully and complained about the damage caused to his car by the sand. He said it had gotten worse in recent years. That night, the harmattan blew through Bamako.

  29

  THE

  DESERT IS

  DOWNTOWN

  AMADOU LIVED IN a desert that looked like a city. You can imagine that in ancient times his Fulani ancestors had inhabited the Sahara’s central highlands, and had painted the rocks there, and had fought the first Tuaregs in the period before camels, and had moved south with their cattle. In the nineteenth century his ancestors were perhaps the savages who thrilled and frightened European explorers. And then only yesterday they were the type of tradition-bound tribespeople studied by classic ethnologists. They had elaborate ceremonies, surprising beliefs, and a rich vocabulary to describe cows.

  Amadou was remotely aware of all this. He said, “I have cousins who live still as cattle herders. Somewhere in Mali, or in Burkina, I’m not sure where.”

  “Do you regret losing contact with them?”

  He looked at me with surprise. “Regret? Why?”

  He was right, of course. He could have saved his money and bought a cow, but where would he have grazed it? The pastures were already taken. In good years the savanna could support some wandering families, but in bad years it could support fewer. Population pressures and the new national boundaries to the south held the herdsmen hard against the droughts.

  I asked Amadou about the family’s move to Bamako. He shrugged and said he didn’t know the details. All that was before his time. “Already when my parents were children the brousse had nothing for us.”

  This may explain why Amadou told me he did not worry about desertification, the famous coming of the Sahara. Those were the concerns of his old aunt in Mopti. But for him, whether the grasslands endured or turned to sand, the savanna was already a desert. He was a Fulani, but a modern one, at home only in Bamako.

  He said, “Country people are afraid of Bamako, but Bamako offers everything a modern man could want. It has cinemas that show the latest movies. It has the best discotheques in West Africa. It has the most beautiful girls, and the easiest. It is so well lit at night that you can find a dropped needle in the street. It is like your San Francisco. It is one of the world’s greatest cities.”

  But Bamako is just an overblown African village—a dusty, smoky sprawl of cinder-block and mud-walled slums extending loosely from both sides of the Niger River below sparsely wooded hills. It has grown up around a gray stone train station, which stands at one end of the 800-mile track laid by the French to link the Niger to the Atlantic port of Dakar, Senegal. When the first train ran, in 1904, Bamako was a fishing village with a population of about a thousand. The French made it an administrative capital from which they could go forth and civilize the African hinterland. In the end the opposite occurred, and the hinterland arrived to civilize Bamako.

  Today the fishing village has a population of nearly a million. It has a bridge that crawls with mopeds and communal taxis. It has a new mosque built by the Saudis, and a People’s Palace built by the North Koreans. In its small and undeveloped center, the shaded colonial buildings have gently decayed, the pavements have crumbled, and the streets have filled with far more people than they were intended to hold. The crowding brings with it the commotion of markets and people, the richness of the African crowd. Bamako is not as great a city as San Francisco, but it is more vibrant. At night the air turns soft, and music mixes through the voices of the people. You can wander the streets, or sit in the outdoor cafés and watch all Mali go by. The bustle is surprising. By night or day, the capital rarely rests. But after a while you may notice something wrong: the commotion begins to feel frantic and seems to provide few results; when you look into the crowd and sort out the individuals, you find that they are malnourished, destitute, and even desperate. If Bamako is enterprising, it is also poor. Divorced from the unproductive land, connected to the sea by a thin thread of an old railroad, the poor sell to the poor in a cycle of slowly diminishing returns. Richer nations do not c
ompete for Mali’s love, and now even France is pulling back. There is no magic to the economy, no critical threshold to cross. Traders grab the famine aid not only in selfishness, but in despair. Country people are right to fear such a city. If Bamako could truly provide men with what they need, their children would not go dressed in rags, there would be peace in the north, and Amadou would not have tried to sell cassettes to Timbuktu. The Sahara takes many forms. Even a marketplace requires rain.

  I stayed at the Hôtel de la Gare, built into the train station. One morning I climbed a hill above the city and followed a trail to an overlook. For hours I sat there, contemplating the expanse below. Seen from a distance, Bamako hardly moved. Smoke floated from piles of burning refuse. Traffic inched across the bridge that spanned the river. A pirogue floated by. Uniformed players sauntered down a soccer field. Dust hung in the air. I sweated and grew thirsty. A truck rattled down a bad road. An airliner climbed through the haze for Paris. The sky was pale, the earth was dry and hot. The view I had was a desert view.

  I also saw it up close. One evening Amadou took me to his mother’s house, where he still lived. We rode a communal taxi, a Toyota minivan which at one point carried thirty-two people, including the driver and his toll collector. Those who could not cram into the inside stood on the bumpers and running boards, and hung from the roof. The driver managed to steer. We endured the bridge crossing, and proceeded slowly along the convulsed dirt streets into the slums.

  Amadou’s family had claimed a plot thirty years before, and now had a nice cinder-block house with four rooms, cement floors, electricity, and a latrine and vegetable plot protected by garden walls. We sat in a brightly lit kitchen by a wood stove and a radio.

  Amadou’s mother was a wrinkled old woman who thought I was French, and treated me with deference. She mentioned that her husband had worked for the French on the railroad, that he had died, that the family had always been the friends of France.

  She said, “Vive la France.”

  Times were harder now, but she had thirteen children, and they took good care of her, as she had known they would. Amadou was her youngest and her favorite. She kept attesting to his qualities, as if I might offer him a job.

  “He is a good boy. He is smart, and a hard worker. He does not steal. I swear he will never give you trouble.”

  We drank powdered coffee. The house slowly filled with family: Amadou’s older brothers and sisters, their spouses and children, and their children’s children. All told, twenty-seven people lived in the house, sleeping on mats and mattresses. I asked Amadou how they earned their livings. He said two were mechanics, one was a watchman, and the others just tried to get by. He said the children sometimes did not eat well.

  I later discovered that Amadou had offspring of his own, at least three of them, by different women. He was proud of this, and showed me wallet photographs.

  “Nice children,” I said, surprised that he had not mentioned them before. “Do you see them often?”

  “Not too often,” he said. “Birthdays, you know.”

  “You don’t get along with the mothers?”

  He grinned. “There are plenty of women here. Why should I marry?”

  I thought at least one reason was AIDS.

  Amadou took me to meet his friends, young men about his age. We sat outside a tin-roofed shack, drank beer, and listened to some of the cassettes that Amadou had been unable to sell along the river. The men laughed about Amadou’s business venture, but had equally desperate schemes of their own. The best plan, they all agreed, would be to leave Africa entirely. This I now found was what Amadou wanted as well. The day I left Bamako for Dakar, he insisted on seeing me to the train. I gave him my address because he gave me his. But when he asked whether I wouldn’t write to the American embassy on his behalf, I told him honestly that it would do no good, that I could not get him to America. He looked disappointed. He was young, and kept having to turn and face the drought.

  THE CLOCK IN the Bamako station ran precisely five minutes fast. The clock in Dakar may have, too. The schedule that linked them was a small wonder of symmetry. Two trains worked the line—one Malian, and one Senegalese. Each made two trips every week—one out, and one back. This meant there were two trains weekly from Bamako, and two from Dakar. The timing called for simultaneous departures from both cities at 9:00 A.M., on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and simultaneous arrivals exactly thirty hours and thirty minutes later. The trains were meant to pass each other at the international border, which happens to lie halfway between the cities. The simultaneous border formalities were expected to take exactly one hour, through the midpoint of the night. All this came as a shock to me, and I was strangely relieved that none of it worked out.

  The train left Bamako two hours late, with the whistle blowing. Traffic stopped as it rolled across the boulevards, westbound into the open Sahel. I sat in an open doorway in a hot wind of dust and diesel smoke, and let Mali go by. We passed through low rolling hills of red earth and tan grass, with scrub trees and baobabs, small rivers, footpaths. The villages had round mud huts with conical thatched roofs. Children ran beside the tracks. By abandoned plantations, the ruins of colonial stations still had signs proclaiming DAKAR—NIGER. We stopped in the larger towns—places with names like Sebekoro, Badinko, and Boulouli—where girls balanced buckets on their heads, and sold water by the ladle. We entered a burning valley where flames licked the tracks and ash swirled through the doorway. At night the moon lit pale grass.

  We passed the border and by dawn had left Tambacounda, the principal town of eastern Senegal. The savanna was colored softly at first by the morning light. The day passed in growing heat. Families of monkeys now perched in the trees. A paved road ran beside the tracks. Among the huts in the villages stood French-style square buildings, power poles, and microwave transmission towers. In the town of Thiès we passed yellow commuter trains. The last huts were replaced by long wooden shacks like those once built for migrant workers in the American south. When the Atlantic came into view off our left, I was startled by the deepness of its blue.

  We rolled west through shantytowns, which grew together and became Dakar. Passengers threw fruit to the crowds of children who ran alongside the train. Adults watched sullenly from a distance. The pools of green sewage that flooded their yards dried into dust beside the tracks and swirled into the train. The city grew denser, and rose into the central district of banks and luxury apartments. A billboard advertised direct flights to New York. A neon sign advertised a supermarket. Container ships nestled by cranes in the harbor. From the station a taxi whisked me to a hotel shower.

  Dakar has a modern European downtown, but a porous one, through which seeps the Sahel. Beggars, cripples, and thieves inhabit the sidewalks. Senegal is another flawed jewel of the old French colonial empire. It keeps growing poorer. Crops fail. The Sahara lies close to the north in Mauritania. The Moors move south and set up small groceries to sell to the Senegalese, whom they have always detested. During droughts, the Senegalese riot for food, kill a few Moors, and loot their shops. This happens now even downtown. Dakar occupies the westernmost peninsula of continental Africa, as if it had been caught by the desert.