A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  ‘And he sent against them swallows in flocks; claystones did he hurl down at them.’

  Some writers have speculated that the idea of the swallows hurling stones may have arisen from a mistranslation: rather than ‘stone’ the original sense may have been ‘smallpox scab’, implying that the swallows spread disease among the Christian army. Although there is no biological record of swallows carrying disease to people, in our own time there have been numerous scares about bird-borne diseases. West Nile Virus and Avian Flu both summon images of birds dropping from the sky, dead, bringing plagues against which our frontiers, our lines of control and all the demarcations with which we divide the world, are powerless.

  White Peugeot taxis are the way to go north to Sokoto. We are cramped again, but not nearly as badly as I have been. We are driven too fast again, but yesterday has raised my terror threshold. The road sweeps out of Abuja and the scenery rapidly changes: first the greens become duller and more tired, then the petrol tankers are replaced on the roads by lorries carrying tottering stacks of firewood, all heading north. As the Sahel becomes denuded and the Sahara spreads south this most ancient form of fuel is trucked up to the pasturalists of the north.

  The ground is yellower and hotter and the towns become whiter. Now instead of churches we pass mosques. Changing taxis at Kaduna, where riots over a Miss World competition killed 150 in 2002,a woman begs for food or money – the first time I have been asked for either since Congo. We travel all day. Strangely, though the sun sinks in the afternoon the temperature does not abate. The truck-stops and taxi parks are chaotic, crammed and deafening, but away from the towns the country seems to stretch out and empty. We come to Sokoto in the dark. The hotel is hot and stuffy; in the room next door a large party of Muslims ignore the Prophet’s injunctions against alcohol and play loud warbling music. I have a hotel routine, now. Check for hot water. Seal all cockroaches in the bathroom. Strip bed and check for insects. Run through all the television channels, right to the end of the sixty-ninth screen of fuzz. Watch one cycle of TV5 Monde, the French rolling news channel. Write diary, if not too tired (in which case do it over breakfast), otherwise watch a film. Lying on a bed on the Nigeria–Niger border I watch Mark Wahlberg in the true story of an out-of-work, divorced man who becomes the star of an American Football team. The film makes great play of the hardship of living in a depressed, post-industrial American city, but it fails to make it unattractive: people stick together; men play football; there is a pretty barmaid interested in Mark Wahlberg, who gets a job in the same bar. Philadelphia looks fantastically advanced compared to Sokoto or even Abuja. The camera’s polarising filter makes colours richer than they are; the casting director has chosen an attractive supporting cast. The hardship of western life is made to seem seductive, like the first part of a fairy tale destined to end happily. The films which come closest to showing our lives as they really are are never worldwide blockbusters. It is as though we cannot help but flaunt our fortune in the face of the rest of the world, or, alternatively, that we cannot quite bring ourselves to be honest about it.

  The next morning another crammed truck-stop yielded a comically cool driver and a battered Nissan.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Niger.’

  ‘Right let’s go!’

  ‘But I want to share with other travellers.’

  ‘Ha! No one else is going to Niger – what’s there, after all?’

  ‘Oh OK then . . .’

  A dusty landscape turned into a sandy one, with thorn scrub, acacia trees, and camels. If there was still a distinction between the Sahel and the Sahara I could no longer see it.

  We stopped a little way short of the frontier at a roadblock. The driver performed a U-turn.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Look for a boy with a motorbike.’

  The boy appeared. We rode for a while, then turned off the road at the border, a collection of huts scattered like litter around some thorn trees. My motorcyclist whirred me from one to another. Neither he nor any of the other locals crossing the frontier was asked for anything by the border guards, which gave the disorienting and peculiar impression that a frontier invented by Europeans was still manned and maintained primarily for their use. A young man who said he was a member of Niger’s security police beckoned me into a hut where the fan had died and the table was not safe to put weight on. We were about the same age, equally bemused, and addressed ourselves to the task of completing various documents as though it was a joint test, which we passed, to mutual satisfaction, in record time.

  The pale grey heat of the morning deepened and the sky became a hot, naked blue. The roads of the little town of Birni n’Konni were soft sand and the atmosphere was entirely changed and yet familiar, suddenly, as if the breath-held tension of Nigeria was released, in crossing the border, into an endless sigh. People moved slowly, keeping to the shade, drank coffee and spoke French again. I sat at the perfumed feet of a money-changer who explained that all the Central African CFA francs I had brought with me from Cameroon were useless: here in Niger they use the West African CFA, and no one would change one to the other. The bus station was a quiet sandy compound, a shaded waiting area and one or two other passengers, including a young jewellery trader who showed me silver from the desert and talked about rebellion.

  ‘The Touareg are at war,’ he said.

  The boys selling fizzy drinks and boiled eggs waited in the shade, emerging reluctantly into the flaying sun when someone approached their stall. The bus appeared, on time, and we boarded. Most of the passengers huddled in their seats, holding ragged curtains across the windows against the light. My neighbour was a Touareg, an elderly man whose dark brown face was beautifully framed by his blue robes and turban. We compensated for having no common language with elaborate politeness. We never took a sip of anything without offering it to the other; he stood aside for me with great show; I thanked him with bows and smiles.

  Beyond the window the desert was made of light overlapping in unfinished rectangles: silver-yellow sand ran to a sky which leached into a sun too hot, too bright, too vast to look at. Shadows were small, dark living things; everything else was still. The thorn trees, the scattered dark stones and the emptiness around them were motionless. Road-workers and swaddled men hanging on to passing trucks waved, moved and made noise, but under the rule of the heat and the intense light the midday seemed indifferent to life, if not hostile.

  We stopped every couple of hours in little villages of colour and shadow, where clay walls made dwellings and yards conjoin, simplicity multiplying into intricacy: a hut was linked to another via a compound wall which in turn was connected by a passage to a mosque. It was as if the villages were seed-beds for growing and propagating shade. As we pulled in, people rushed forward: women half-sold, half-begged; boys waved bottles; men had furls of mutton skin and fat, frying on hot plates, and long knives with which they pared pieces off. Many of our passengers disappeared, at a sundown stop, to pray.

  At one stop we all disembarked to eat and relieve ourselves. The lavatories were a row of low huts at the far end of the compound where the coach had halted. Those in need hurried towards them, then, as they approached, veered sideways away from the doors. The stench was stomach-turning. I followed the stream of passengers around to the back of the building, where a narrow strip of ground between the shed and the fence was strewn with faeces, with people squatting among huge lizards which seemed to be feeding off the waste. It was the most revolting latrine I had ever seen. I’ll hold it for as long as it takes, I resolved.

  As the sun sank and the sky trembled with carmine and purple streaks, the driver turned on his radio and a high, racing song came from the speakers: a keening sound, fiercer than a lament and more urgent, driven by drums. My neighbour saw me lift my head to it and he smiled and said the only words of his I understood: ‘Rai!’ he said. ‘Algerie . . .’

  Rai is a form of protest music fro
m Algeria, as culturally powerful and pervasive as hip-hop is in the West. The drums race, the melody is fast and breathless and vocals are a kind of bitter, longing wail. I could not make out many of the words of this song except the chorus line: ‘C’est payant, Monsieur, c’est payant . . .’

  ‘It costs, sir, it costs . . .’

  While hip-hop has spawned a global industry in which enormous profits are made from ever-higher production values, rai is composed of the caustic, sometimes scornful, anthems of an entire generation of young Algerian men who grew up squeezed between violence, corruption and poverty. Rai does not sell perfumes, jeans or trainers.

  As the desert darkened, the sound seemed to swell. It was like a secular mirror of the summons of the muezzin, but it was neither a call to prayer, nor to arms or celebration; it was more like a sardonic lament. While hip-hop’s central motif is machismo, the aggression of young men, their totemic evocation of guns, gangs and girls and their rage against the ghetto, rai sounds like the product of a sadder, wiser culture. It is not the sound of an oppressed section of society, but of entire societies, entire countries, ghettoised; it evokes archipelagos of the dispossessed.

  CHAPTER 7

  Niger: A Quiet Little War

  Niger: A Quiet Little War

  THE CANOE LEAKS steadily: we pass around the cotton and the knife, taking turns at tearing off strands from the grey-white lump and packing them into the cracked wood with the blade. While one of us does this the other two paddle. Niamey soon fades back from the banks and the town becomes the country: low sandy shores crumble into the ruddy river. In some places the edges of the water are alive with people washing, swimming, splashing or fishing; between them are peaceful stretches peopled with kingfishers, geese, ducks, herons and ibis. Sundown on the Niger is a busy time. Our captain knows many of those we pass: fishermen coming downstream on their canoes wave or nod gravely. Our captain is a person of some importance.

  ‘Giri-giri,’ he says, with a wink, as if this explains it.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Giri-giri – witchcraft!’

  ‘Are you a witch doctor?’

  ‘Not any more. I was.’

  ‘What happened? I mean, what changed?’

  ‘Ah, well, people became frightened, so I had to stop.’

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘Yes! Imagine, if a man comes to attack you and he comes running at you and just before he hits you he raises his stick, his club, and Paff! The stick in his hand turns into powder! That happened to me, and people began to say I was giri-giri, so I stopped.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘No. And my wife is happy that I stopped – ha ha!’

  ‘Is there much giri-giri in Niger?’

  ‘Oh yes, a great deal. Your swallows, for example.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘You can use swallows for witchcraft.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well first you must catch a swallow. That is very hard to do. But you must catch one and kill it – with a sling, or with gum on the reeds where they roost. But it is very hard.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You get a pot and heat some water on the fire and you add some special herbs.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  ‘Then you add some more herbs and heat the water for a long time, stirring and stirring . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .?’

  ‘And then you put in the swallow, not the lungs, but the heart and everything else, and a tiny bit of oil, and heat it for a very long time, stirring and stirring . . .’

  ‘Uh-huh . . .’

  ‘Until it makes a kind of paste. Then you eat it and you will be protected from car accidents.’

  ‘Car accidents?’

  ‘Yes. And plane accidents.’

  ‘Plane accidents!’

  ‘Yes! Imagine you are in a plane and something crashes – bang! The plane goes down. But not you. When the plane crashes you will not be there.’

  ‘Where will I be?’

  ‘You will be standing not far away, on the ground. Zap! Like that! If you are in anything, a train, a truck, a plane, a car and it crashes – bang! Zap! You will not be in the crash, but you will be near by, if you have eaten the swallow paste.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Yes. Protected. But only for five years.’

  ‘Five years? Then what?’

  ‘Then you must be very careful.’

  After a while we turned downstream again. One or two swallows had passed over in the early morning, and now one or two more came upriver, but they were few compared to what I had hoped for. Staring at the map I had imagined the Niger would form a great swallow highway, running from the Gulf of Guinea north into the heart of the Sahara. Perhaps they did not need the river: the birds do use watercourses – I had seen them flying up the Rhône in great numbers one spring – but in good weather, with insects abundant, it seemed likely that they were either fanning out, feeding as they went, or had already taken to higher altitudes, where they might find tail winds to help them across the Sahara. I scanned the skies in vain. My timing was still good – I had not fallen behind the main body of the migration, as far I could calculate it – but my positioning was out. A great many swallows must already have been engaged in the desert crossing.

  According to the maps the single greatest obstacle to a European-breeding swallow’s migration is the Sahara, but the statistics contradict this impression. Storms, collisions with traffic, predators and most of all sudden and severe changes in weather patterns are the principal killers of swallows: the greatest desert on earth, it seems, presents a surmountable challenge.

  Before they fly south in autumn the birds build up fat reserves to fuel the crossing of the Mediterranean and the desert: those flying down the Italian peninsula, which make the longest sea crossing, add between 30 and 40 per cent to their lean body weight; those flying down through Spain add slightly less. The heaviest birds will set out weighing around 24 grams, around 4½ grams of which will be fat. It has been calculated that those 4½ grams are sufficient to fuel up to 1,600 kilometres of flight – allowing the biggest birds, incredibly, to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in one long-distance flight, without stopping.

  The birds also put on weight before the migration up from the south, adding the same 2 to 4 grams of fat. To cross the sands they must fly non-stop for fourteen to sixteen hours a day: there are few recorded sightings of them in the desert itself. The cost of this effort is clear in a study of swallows arriving in southern Europe in 2002: on average they weighed 13.4 grams and were carrying only ½ gram of fat. This would still have afforded them 200 kilometres of flight, and beyond that, like other migrant birds, swallows have an emergency reserve: when fat reserves are close to expended they are able to break down proteins from the breast muscles and gut.

  According to another study, the keys to survival for large numbers of north-bound birds lie in the weather, vegetation and insect populations of North Africa, especially Algeria. While the sea and sand crossings come early in the south-bound migration, when the birds are carrying their maximum fat reserves, on the north-bound leg these two obstacles come at the other end of the journey – especially for the furthest-flying, most northerly breeding birds. Only after several thousand miles of Africa do they reach the Sahara. Conditions in the rich coastal crescent beyond the sands are therefore crucial: here many will feed and build up strength for the push into the various weathers of the European spring.

  My first sight of Niamey, that night, coming in on the bus, was of a low-built, dimly lit town, which even after eleven at night still seemed to pulse with heat. On the first morning I rose at dawn and scanned the skies for swallows. I crossed the John F. Kennedy Bridge, one of Niamey’s few landmarks, where camels were as much part of the rush hour as lorries, and peered through my binoculars at downstream islands of rice paddies, gum trees and reeds. Very few swallows came over. In the heat of the day I began to research the next stage of the pursui
t. Everything was an effort; the heat drained strength first, then will, then concern. Walking 50 yards out of the shade seemed an intolerable test. I hid in shack-like bars, in the company of old men, and made calls. Very soon my own Sahara crossing was in trouble: Akly in Agades was adamant that I could not cross to Algeria from northern Niger.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There is a war.’

  ‘Seriously? Surely not . . .’

  ‘It is too dangerous. The frontier is closed.’

  ‘What is the danger?’

  ‘The conflict between the army and the Touareg.’

  ‘I have not heard anything about this.’

  ‘No one has!’ he cried, with a joyless laugh. ‘This is the war that does not exist! But believe me, I am here in Agades, I have lived here for many years, and it is not safe to the north, and the border definitely not. It is not safe for you to go there and it is not safe for me to help you.’

  The Touareg formally describe themselves as Imashaghen, ‘the noble and the free’. They are also known as the Kel-Tamasheq, the people who speak Tamasheq. Their culture has been dated to the first century AD but it is almost certainly older. Traditionally there were four Touareg kingdoms, based in the four mountain ranges of the central Sahara: the Tassili, the Adrar, the Hoggar massif and the Air Mountains. The Touareg have always lived in a world of great spaces, relatively recently divided by frontiers: the entities of Niger, Mali, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya have all been imposed on their timeless homelands of sands and stone. Their first uprising, against the formation of the state of Mali, began in 1960 and was swiftly crushed. The second began in 1990: this time they fought the governments of Mali and Niger, in the name of autonomy, and again they lost, though peace agreements signed with both countries (with Mali in 1992 and Niger in 1995) called for the decentralisation of national power. Then, in February 2007, a group of Touareg, ‘the Niger Movement for Justice’, rose again. Niger declared a state of emergency in the north of the country: this conflict was now over a year old, and unresolved.