The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  It dwarfed the people walking outside. Among them, I met two religious students called Yunus and Adama. Weighed down with wooden prayer tablets and tomato-can begging tins, they were garabouts, come to Djenné for the sake of learning, inspired by its status as the Oxbridge of the Malian madrassah system. They hailed from Diré, a river town about 200 miles north, on the way to Timbuktu.

  ‘Our fathers brought us here’, said Yunus, ‘so we can learn the Quran.’

  They had been in Djenné for three years now. In all this time, they had seen no one from their families. I walked alongside them to their school in the Kanafa district, a mud-brick house hanging over the banks of the Bani.

  ‘We beg from eight in the morning till twelve,’ said Yunus. ‘Then we go to the school to learn Quran.’

  ‘Do you get enough to eat?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes. But whatever we find, we always come together at the school and share it out, so everyone has something.’

  It sounded like a West End musical – the plucky kids tramping across their shattered country, surviving on solidarity and thrift and sheer good-heartedness.

  Oh, to be a garabout!

  It may not seem a lot,

  There’s not much food, and never fruit,

  But one thing that we’ve got …

  Each other, yes it’s true, so when you’re running out of pennies,

  You’ll find a brother here amongst the garabouts of Djenné!

  That evening I sat on the steps of the school, trying to disentangle the Southern Cross, watching watery streaks of moonshine to the beat of croaking bullfrogs. It was all very idyllic. I thought I could stay here forever; although I would definitely have to leave by Friday. I soaked it all up, all this fine beauty, then I turned back to the paupers behind me and asked them more questions.

  ‘Do you ever get homesick?’

  Yunus had tugged his straw sleeping mat to the doorway to carry on talking.

  ‘Not now, but sometimes … I did, at the beginning. But if you have bad feelings, the marabout can do something. He knows a special verse to help you forget.’

  ‘Forget?’ I leaned closer, trying to make sense of his words. ‘What do you mean, forget?’

  But Yunus was tired, and so was I. Like any initiate, I would have to be patient.

  Over my week in Djenné, I met dozens of garabouts. Hamadou, thin as a reed, was characteristic. He had left his village with his friend Ali to follow a popular marabout who had been preaching in their neighbourhood. They walked for six days to Djenné, sleeping on the ground, with no possessions except their clothes. That was 11 years earlier. In the intervening time, each had been home just a couple of times.

  ‘I hope I can be a marabout myself one day,’ said Hamadou. ‘I already know a lot of secrets, but I want to learn more.’

  ‘What sort of secrets?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, for example, I know how to save someone from the police.’

  ‘By reciting a verse?’ I was intrigued. I wanted to know the technical details. Whether or not it worked seemed less important than how you arranged it.

  ‘It isn’t only by reciting,’ said Hamadou. ‘You can say the verse into your hands, then you spit on them and rub your hands down the person’s face. Or you make them drink the verse. Or you write it out in a special way on a piece of paper, and the person wears it, wrapped in an animal skin. We call that a gris-gris. It’s the best way if you want to protect yourself.’

  I thought of my thumb war with Moussa in Bamako, his gris-gris rolling down his arm. I had seen other gris-gris, poking out of ripped shirts and lumping people’s sleeves everywhere I had travelled in Mali.

  ‘If you are going on a big journey,’ said Hamadou, ‘maybe you should ask the marabout for a gris-gris. I think you will regret it if you don’t.’

  The cynic in me wondered if he was touting for business. Haven’t I already forked out on three guineafowl and a sheep? But his eyes were fixed on me, his cheeks lifted in warm consideration. I was too worried about the coming journey to turn him down: incredulity is a luxury for people who know they are safe.

  In the daytime, I wandered through the stew of the town, down narrow alleys where high mud walls fended off the sun. Goats and chickens rootled among broken calabashes and plastic bags, hopping over gravel-bottomed sewage trenches so thick with gunk they looked solid. I would spot a yellow-headed lizard on a downpipe, dewlaps dilating over its shadow; or a pair of doves, cooing in the recess of a rooftop battlement. It was that kind of place, where people and animals live cheek by jowl, too busy with their own affairs to mind any other species unless they are planning to eat it.

  In one of these neighbourhoods, I sat down beside a mud-brick hut under a cluster of rodier palms. Boys kicked off flip-flops before stepping inside. Each of them carried a tablet made from the wood of the karité tree. One of them was balancing a reed basket on his head. He crouched in the lee of the hut next to another boy, who was holding a pen chiselled from a bamboo stick, carefully tapered into a nib. The first boy lowered his basket and pulled out a tub of charcoal ink, which he uncapped for the other boy. I was entranced. I had a flashback to Fez and all my Arabic lessons, trying to weave those sinuous patterns, the most beautiful script I know.

  The marabout was sitting inside, his belly slumped over his lap, his legs crossed over a sheepskin. He held up his bamboo pen like a wand. Known as Bamoyé, he had worked as a religious teacher for the last 20 years, having risen through the same Quranic school himself. There were more than 60 boys in the hut with him, but less than a dozen in the inner circle, bending in turn to recite from their tablets. The other students sat in pools of shadow around the room, peering at the verses, swiping mosquitoes or fanning themselves, waiting for their turn to join the inner sanctum.fn3

  Marabouts possess two kinds of knowledge: a public tradition (known as bayanu) and a secret one (known as siri). The former allows them to teach the Quran, while the latter is used for the esoteric practices that supply most of their income. Any student with ambitions to prosper would certainly hope to be inducted in siri. I saw an example of it later in the afternoon. The marabout was sitting in the shade beside the wall of his school, filling a piece of paper with a grid of neatly written Arabic verses.

  ‘We call it kawateen,’ he explained. ‘It is for somebody who is struggling in life. Maybe they need a job, or they would like their wife to bear a son. Either you wash the ink into a cup and drink it, or you use it when you are cooking. Sometimes you use it for washing and there are also herbs I advise at the same time.’

  Later, Hamadou took me to the market to see the stalls where these special herbs were sold. Among bags of kola nuts and tennis ball–sized cakes of traditional soap were green bottles of Bint al-Sudan or ‘Black Girl’ (‘it’s good for getting you a wife,’ he explained); black bottles of Aroura (‘this helps you get your baccalaureate’); black-green bottles called Al-Hajj (‘this gets you respect’) and numerous other potions, concocted by quacks and pharma-fraudsters whose trade is one of the most recession resistant across the region.

  Hamadou had used these potions many times himself. There was a girl in his neighbourhood who had spurned his advances, and her rejection was making him feel sick. ‘She is very beautiful’, he said, ‘and she has a kind heart. I cannot imagine my life with anyone else. So I went to my marabout and told him my problem. He didn’t give me the answer straightaway, he needed time to think about it. Then he told me to recite a verse and throw three eggs in the path where she goes to school.’ His dreamy smile sharpened for the denouement. ‘A week later, she wrote me a letter and now her father has accepted me to marry her.’

  The longer I spent with Hamadou and his friends, the more stories I heard of how the marabouts had helped them. There was the guy possessed by a djinn, who had been exorcised by washing in the ink from a Quranic verse mixed with crushed palm leaves. There was the one who found love thanks to a judicious combination of a holy verse and the Bint as-Sud
an herb. And there was the story of a friend saved from the law. ‘He drank alcohol and caused a really bad accident in his car’, Hamadou explained, ‘and many people were injured. So he was arrested and they sentenced him to two years in jail. But his mother visited a marabout and asked for help. He wrote out a verse and gave her the ink, telling her to use it to cook the meals she took to the prison. Just three days later, the sentence was reduced to two months.’

  Everybody in Djenné had a story about marabouts. Their faith was contagious. I felt naked, surrounded by all these enchanted people. One afternoon, I made my way back to Bamoyé the marabout and handed over a few banknotes. Later that evening, he gave me a rolled-up scroll bound in sheepskin, pasted with glue from the baobab tree, ready to wear on my arm like a sweatband. Its contents were ‘a mixture of verses from all through the Quran, they will make sure you are safe’.

  The gris-gris contained no words to which I could attach any belief, but wearing it gave me comfort. It was a transmission of local faith, a link to the people around me. I was taking part in an old tradition of European travellers procuring native charms. René Caillié did something similar, paying ‘a few charges of gunpowder’ for his own gris-gris. ‘As long as I kept it about me,’ he was told, ‘I might travel in safety and without fear of illness.’ If it’s good enough for René, I thought, then it’s good enough for me.

  The School for Nomads

  Lesson Six: Lore

  ISMAIL’S HOME LOOKS MORE LIKE A CAVERN THAN A TENT. IT IS A FRAME TENT, made from a patchwork of skins as threadbare and tattered as its owner’s clothes. Forked corner posts of acacia give it shape, lashed to crossbars and horizontal arch pieces, bearing the weight of the skins and mats of plaited palm leaves. An organic extension of Ismail himself, it feels more permanent and charismatic than Lamina’s streamlined, flexible pavilion.

  Two white kittens scuttle out of the aperture, scratching at palm-reed matting and pawing the ring pull on a tin of sardines. One of them glares at me, eyes narrowed, as if it is subjecting me to a proper scrutiny and is a bit miffed that nobody else has done so already. Abdul-Hakim scoops it up and strokes the silky coat; a head turns and nuzzles his shoulder. A couple of chicks circumambulate the tent, like patrol guards, embroidering the sand with jagged lines of arrowheads. Apparently, they are very good at getting rid of scorpions. Ismail pats down the sand and I sit down beside him, accepting a hanky full of snuff, while Lamina takes over the brazier to prepare our dinner.

  ‘This is God’s blessing,’ says Ismail. ‘Take it and praise him. Oh, God is great! God is great!’

  He looks impossibly old. His skull is palped, the smile on his lips only distinct from his mandibles by the palest integument. Liver spots tattoo his skin, which is crumpled like tissue paper, as ragged as the mesh of cotton folded over the bare hollow of his stomach. Whether this was once some kind of gown or not, it certainly isn’t any more. Hemless, sleeveless, neckless, it is patched with nothing but air, and over the course of our stay I notice pieces of it tacked around tent pegs or binding the handles of cooking pots.

  Ismail crouches on the windward side of the brazier, receiving the warmth of the flames while Lamina stokes it. Sometimes, he lifts it up by a rag-knotted handle and swings it, like a priest with a thurible. He lives up here on his own, a mystical old man of the dune. He is too lame to go on the caravan trail any more, but he doesn’t want to give up the desert, so he has found the ideal compromise: taking care of the well, a couple of days’ ride from Timbuktu.

  ‘Oh, the old days were hard,’ he says. ‘Praise God for his mercy! There was a single well, all the way to Taoudenni. Can you believe this? These youngsters have no idea how blessed they are. Do you know, there was a journey I made, we got a lot of salt that time, it must have been the beginning of the season … but oh, say the oneness of God! We set out with fourteen men and only eight returned. We buried the dead in the sand and made piles of rocks to mark the graves. And all the money we gave to the widows, so we had to set out again or our own families would go hungry.’

  I think of Leo Africanus, who also experienced the desert’s cruelty: ‘many are found lying dead upon the same way’, he writes of the tract north of Timbuktu, ‘in regard of extreme thirst’. Ismail’s memories are a glimpse into the ruthless ferocity of the Sahara, but I feel like I’m peering through the window of an ion chamber. The sado-masochist inside me wishes I could experience more of this hardship for myself.

  The tent sits on an elevated hump. In Saharan tradition, the entrance faces due south, so in the evening we look towards Timbuktu: the red blip of its transmission mast, its houses like termite mounds. The town is more than 20 miles away, but seeing it reminds me of our circular, meandering journey, which must soon come to an end.

  Still, there are plenty more lessons to absorb. The teapot squeaks and gurgles, and so does our host, matching every glass of tea with another tale. He hasn’t read the Tarikh as-Sudan, or the chronicle of Ahmad Baba, or Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa. But he knows plenty of history all the same, and he lectures me in paragraphs as spidery as an essay crammed with footnotes.

  He tells of the kinship between the Berabish and the religious Kounta tribe; of the arrival of the French (and how everyone was amazed by the shortness of their hair). He tells of a French officer who married an Arab chieftain’s daughter; of a chief called Sidi Mohammed, who fought against the colons. He conjures up a dizzying whirl of characters, drifting into genealogical digressions, side anecdotes about tent size, enumeration of sons, a bizarre story that sounds like a parable, about a man who ran for two weeks through the desert, all the way to Arouane, because he mistook a jackal for a djinn. Of all these characters, the one who sticks in my memory is Mahmoud Ould Dahman, a wily old chief who advised against direct conflict with the French and held a key role in Berabish politics until his death, in the early years of Malian independence, at the age of 101.

  The picture Ismail draws is a surreal mix of divine magic and realpolitik: a people of rigid religious observance, cannier and more cautious than the Tuareg. He speaks with the philosophical good humour that is a hallmark of Arabic conversation, sprinkling his talk with proverbs and bon mots and ecstatic declarations of tawhid, the oneness of God. He is absolutely thrilling to listen to.

  Woolly headed but all ears, I scribble down as much as I can absorb. Abdul-Hakim holds up a torch to help, and every so often points at a word, asking me to say it aloud. The men exclaim at my English – ‘barak allah, God’s blessings’ – and Lamina laughs, quietly, into his beard. Yet I can feel my head drooping, snapping back with a slosh of cooling blood. I need to physically concentrate to keep awake. So, after a weary patch in which I have understood very little, I excuse myself to lie down.

  It will take more than sleep to discourage Ismail. He carries on gabbling, and I am not sure if he still thinks I’m listening, or if he has turned his attention to Jadullah, who throws him the occasional grunt. But the old man’s voice is soothing, smoothly continuous. I get the feeling he hasn’t had anyone to talk to for a very long time. Occasionally, his chatter breaks off and the air tingles to a delicate chant – ‘La illaha ill’allah w Mohammed resul allah’, there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet – the refrain to which I feel myself falling into slumber.

  Part Seven

  Plain

  In the Maghreb, sedentaries and nomads have never tried to live together without the one disgorging the other.

  EF Gautier, Le Passé de l’Afrique du Nord

  18

  Paradise Lost

  STARLINGS SKITTERED OVER THE STUBBLE FIELDS IN SEARCH OF GRAIN AND goats tiptoed to reach the lower branches of the balanzans. I was moving south, taking a detour away from the riverlands to visit some of the most distinctive nomads in the region. As the gap from the Niger widened, the trees began to narrow, their trunks became crooked and shields of rock battened the earth from the sun. Two rows of neem trees formed an entry parade to Bandiagara, but the
signboards for European NGOs and micro-financing consortia underlined the challenges in this tricksy region.

  Known as Pays de Dogon, this is a plateau of hand-tilled rice fields and onion farms, where produce clusters in panniers woven from the stubble. The Dogon are a fascinating people, traditionally animist, whose creation myth conceives the universe from an exploded grain of fonio. Now mostly Islamised, they retain their heritage in zoomorphic masks, intricately carved statuary and a matrix of customs that has drawn anthropologists for decades. I was hoping to meet some of them, but it was their neighbours who had lured me here: the nomadic herders who roam the bone-dry plains below their cliffs.

  I had come across Fulani before, selling calabashes of milk in the market of Djenné, herding cattle with dewlaps as droopy as Italian gangsters’. Of all the nomadic communities I visited, they come closest to the literal definition of nomadism: ‘roaming’ with their herds; ‘beginning people’, entangled in the murky roots of Africa’s earliest tribes.

  Spanning the breadth of Africa, hedged by the pastureless dunes of the Sahara and the tse-tse flies in the forests of the south, the Fulani number around 30 million, the world’s largest traditionally nomadic ethnic group. In Mali alone, they account for 17 per cent of the population, although the majority have sedentarised. Easy to identify – by the men’s wide-brimmed hats, made from woven palm reeds and dyed goatskin, or the women’s braided hair and mouth tattoos – they have been mesmerising explorers and anthropologists for centuries (although not all their visitors gave happy reports of them – Fulani bandits seized Mungo Park in 1796 and ‘stripped me quite naked’, while Heinrich Barth in the 1850s accused them of ‘destroying the little commerce still existing in these unfortunate regions’).

  Like Africa’s other nomads, the Fulani have been battered by the myriad crises of the last century – war, drought, famine, desertification. Many have lost their herds and been forced to make do in the towns and cities. For those who stick with it, their lives continue to harden, like the hide of a dead cow left to rot in the sun. Where once they roamed the plains unchecked, now they have the full apparatus of the modern African state against them: development projects, farmland expansion, land sales. This has led to violent conflicts all over their range, from massacres on the Jos plateau of Nigeria to entanglements with sinister groups like Boko Haram, or police crackdowns on cross-border roaming in Guinea and Ghana.