The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  We rode fast. Sometimes, launched by ruts in the track, we took to the air. Knobbed baobab branches stretched towards us and flowering gigilé bushes (Boscia Senegalensis, the plant that saved many people in the drought) hung clusters of marble-shaped fruits. Hornbills and desert sparrows nattered in the trees, whose trunks were shaken by the hooves of clambering goats. In a moment like a flash of lightning, a rusty red squirrel plunged across our track, seeking refuge in the coppery fastness of a combretum bush. All around us, the land was deceptively peaceful, dusty and dry and still. Like a torture victim, whose skin has been flayed and his tongue pulled out, so you can’t hear him screaming.

  ‘You see!’

  Beside a row of acacias, Boureima pulled to a stop with a huff of tender outrage. Inside this natural boundary, planted to mark the droving path, were patches of millet stalks.

  ‘They’ve been sowing their crops here even though it’s forbidden. This is the problem – people don’t respect the agreements!’

  Hamid Barri concurred. He was a gaunt-looking Fulani elder in the nearby village of Gorti, where we found him sitting on a millet-stalk mat. I presented a bag of cola nuts (the standard visitor’s offering) and he welcomed me with a beaker of milk. Hamid had a disturbing story to tell, for his son had been one of the conflict’s recent victims.

  ‘A couple of months ago,’ he narrated, ‘my son Suleiman was taking the goats to pasture. He went to a place called Peta, which isn’t far from here, but there was a Dogon farmer harvesting the millet. Well, Suleiman saw that a part of the field had already been harvested, so he and his younger brothers led the flock across it. The Dogon called out to him, “What are you doing here? Go away!” “There’s no problem,” said Suleiman, “you’ve already harvested this part.”

  ‘But the Dogon wouldn’t let him pass. He called out to his neighbours and they came along. There were three of them, armed with axes and sticks. They took hold of Suleiman and beat him. My other sons brought back the herd and Suleiman stumbled back into the village a little later. He was injured very badly and we had to take him to the health centre. Actually, we didn’t have enough money to pay for the medicine, but fortunately the Dogon boy’s father found out what his son had done and he came and offered his apologies and paid for the medicine.’

  During my stay in Gondo, I heard many similar stories: fights breaking out between Dogon and Fulani, ignited by the history of conflict and the fact that most of the manual work is done by teenage boys – not always natural peacemakers. The roots of this conflict are both impossibly ancient and surprisingly recent. Their antiquity was illustrated by the film director Cheik Oumar Sissoko, when he made a film called La Genèse in 1999, retelling the scriptural conflict between the sons of Isaac as a dust-rinsed, cattle-rustling battle between herders, hunters and farmers in the Malian bush. Past and present are fused in Sissoko’s vision, jammed together like Ibn Khaldun’s drops of water.

  Recorded history backs this stance. Disagreements over pasturing rights were a key incitement for some of the dramatic jihads that characterised the period before colonisation. ‘The problem with the agricultural communities’, writes the historian AA Batran, ‘always centred around the payment of taxes and fines for damages caused by Fulbe cattle on crops.’ So the jihad ‘offered the Fulbe freedom from the burden of taxes and fines, and security from Tuareg raids’. Seen in this light, Sekou Amadou’s conquest of the Niger Bend wasn’t simply an act of aggressive evangelism – it was an elaborate tax dodge. No wonder the nineteenth-century jihadists are so fondly recalled in Fulani culture. So much so that Sekou Amadou is regularly name-checked by jihadists trying to lure young Fulani into their ranks.fn1

  Yet there are other, recent factors stirring the conflict. Chief among these is the Malian government’s attitude to cultivation. Maintaining the agricultural prejudices and fixed boundaries of the colonialists, they have chipped away at customary rights, enshrining ‘the creed of private property’.fn2 Mali’s first president Modibo Keita believed pastoral nomadism was incompatible with effective resource management and made the settlement of nomads a state priority. This attitude is embedded in a legal system that favours the cultivator – the one who can mark the land with his presence, even if he is paying no more for its use than the herders who pass through it.

  One Friday, Boureima took me to the weekly market of Duma. It was the biggest barterfest on the plain, drawing traders from as far as Gao to take advantage of the cheaper prices. I met a Songhay merchant from Goundam who had come here because ‘the Fulani cattle give the richest milk’. Another, a trader from Djenné, belonged to a consortium that was hoping to buy some cows and sell them on for profit. But most of the traders were Fulani. They swirled among each other, rustling banknotes and resting on their goads, picking out the longest-eared sheep, the bulls with the biggest humps, the most magnificently horned of the moufflons and the billy goats with the biggest scrotums. Whereas sheep dominated the Atlas markets and goats reigned in Mauritania, here the cattle had the spotlight. As Mungo Park wrote in 1797, they ‘constitute the chief wealth of the Foulahs’.

  Near the market, in a sprawling house of mud brick and millet thatch, lived 78-year-old Mahmedu Ahmedu, a local celebrity. His inherited livelihood had kept him away from herding and enabled him to observe the conflicts from a position of detachment.

  ‘Oh no, our family never herds,’ he said.

  Peering through a dim, glassy eye, Ahmedu clasped his thickly veined hands around a cut-down goad that he used as a walking stick. He was sitting on a reed-covered bed in the yard outside his mud-brick house, shaded by a matting of millet stalks.

  ‘We are griots, we tell stories, we sing praises, we record the history. That is our role. I inherited it from my parents, and I’ve passed it down to my sons and my grandchildren.’

  Although the demands of a griot’s life – singing at weddings and religious feasts, travelling from one village to another to perform – kept him too busy to herd, he was still fully immersed in the herding culture.

  ‘When my songs are well received, the people present me with a cow. If they are very happy, they might even give me a bull. I tell you, my last performance, it was for the chief of a village called Nawooge for his son’s wedding, and he was so happy with my songs he gave me a 2-year-old bull and a 4-year-old cow at the end.’

  He smiled with the contentment of a man who knows he has lived a useful life. I suspect, if the whole day had been available, he could have enumerated the many cattle he had been awarded over the years. Yet he never amassed his own herd. Part of the wider community, and apart from it, he had become far more than just a wedding crooner.

  ‘We are guardians of the culture,’ he explained. ‘We can understand things that other people are unable to realise. We help the people to celebrate, but we also help to bring them together. And God be praised, I have been called to do this many times in my life.’

  ‘You mean to resolve disputes?’

  ‘That is a mild word!’ The griot laughed, shaking his head over his stick. ‘I speak of wars!’

  ‘Between Fulani and Dogon?’

  ‘Oh, no. Even before the problems with the Dogon, our lives were hard. Let me tell you a story. There is a village called Bana. They have a lake behind the village, but there is another village nearby called Bodoval. Well, many years ago, they were arguing over who had the right to the lake. They couldn’t reach an agreement, so they took up wooden stakes and fought each other in the field. By the time I heard about it, many people had been injured. I got on my horse and rode out to the lake. They were fighting hard, with axes in their hands and blood pouring from their mouths.

  ‘“My brothers,” I called out – I did this in song because that is my way to get people’s attention – “my brothers, you are sons of the same fathers and mothers, why are you fighting like this?” I played my kora and sang to them, and thank God they listened to my words and put down their stakes. They agreed to discuss the situation and we foun
d an agreement to share the lake between the villages. God be praised, this accord is still in place.’

  It had been a challenge to secure agreement when both sides were Fulani, united by culture, ancestry and language. So how much harder must it be when the only common ground was the land they were fighting over? Fulani and Dogon ‘always marry our own kind’, as Boureima put it. I certainly didn’t hear any examples of exogamy on the plain. When Dogon and Fulani fell into dispute, if the situation didn’t spiral immediately into violence, it went to arbitration, and that could prove costly for the guilty party – which was usually the herder.

  But what was the Dogon point of view? One afternoon, I wandered over to the other side of Djoungiani, feeling like a West Side Jet scurrying to a secret meeting with the Sharks. Brima Guindo, chief of the local Dogon community, was sitting in his yard, among piled millet wands and water bidons.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘our biggest problem is water. The rain only comes for a short period. It used to be three months of the year, but now we’re lucky if it’s one.’

  As for cattle, there were other creatures that caused more trouble to his crops. ‘Insects are a bigger problem and the birds are even worse. They eat the seed as soon as it’s sown, and the millet when it comes up. We have to harvest it all very quickly, to stop them from ruining it. I’m growing peanuts and black-eyed peas now, because the birds don’t eat them so they’re my safety net.’

  Listening to Guindo underlined how difficult farming life can be. In Africa, only gangsters and dictators get to walk the Mickey Mouse path. For the farmers, conflict with herders was only one obstacle among the dozens of others they had to deal with.

  ‘The problem with cattle is only a month or so, because in the rainy season the breeders are in the bush, so it’s only when the lakes dry up and they come back to the villages to use the wells. But actually, we welcome the cattle. We need them to fertilise the fields, and they need us for the millet, so we work together really. It’s only a few cases where there are problems.’

  As with many of the higher-ranking Fulani, Guindo was keen to downplay the tensions. But a little more chat brought the skirmishes to the surface: tortuous negotiations when Fulani herders couldn’t pay the reparations; Dogon farmers demanding justice for their crops.

  ‘We had a tough time persuading the Fulani to pay,’ he said of one recent incident. ‘Sometimes it can be decided without any problems, but in this case it was the farmer’s only livelihood. That’s the problem for our farmers. If there is a bad harvest like this year, they have to find a way to survive all the way through to the next year. They don’t have any cows to sell, so if their crops fail they have nothing.’

  We tend to think of rural life as more ‘simple’ than urban living. Yet time and again, I had learned how untrue that is: how complicated life can be when the margins of survival are so tight. Tomorrow would take us deep into the bush, and I wondered if life there might be closer to a pastoral idyll. It had been out of reach everywhere else I had visited … but when you’re travelling in strange parts, who’s to say paradise isn’t just around the corner?

  20

  A Short Walk in the Gondo Bush

  BRAIDED HAIR SWUNG FROM HER SCALP AND LIGHT CAUGHT ON THE RING of gold under her nose. Her cheeks were decorated with black stars, gouged into her skin like the decorative patterns on a woodcut. We sputtered towards her, teetering along the furrows of the stubble field, and she pulled herself up, tall and majestic and thin as a tent pole. She looked like some exotic princess off the cover of a pulp thriller. She raised a pestle, holding it over a wooden tub of millet husks. Then she buckled over, her black mouth tattoo crashing open with laughter.

  ‘You are the first white man she has met,’ said Boureima. ‘For her it is like something out of a story.’

  She was Aisha, Boureima’s oldest daughter. She had married the previous year, but was still living with her family until her 18th birthday, when her husband would come to collect her. Shy and spiky at the same time, she covered her mouth when she laughed, but rattled with chatter as much as anyone else. Like other Fulani women I met, she was always involved in some task, bustling between grain pounding, stalk stripping and food preparing. It was only around the evening fire that she was able to relax.

  Aisha’s laughter brought out the others: Boureima’s wife Buhaisah and three daughters-in-law. Two of them were breastfeeding, so their T-shirts were rolled up over their chests, the babies cradled in one arm while they carried millet stalks and calabashes in the other. Buhaisah came over, a wry smile flickering across her narrow face.

  ‘The toubob must eat!’ she announced, in a kindly, slightly husky voice. Wrists snapped, fingers pointed, and her daughters-in-law scurried about to fulfil her commands.

  I was guest of honour in a millet-stalk palace. I enjoyed it shamelessly. Slouching beside Boureima on a mat of knotted millet stalks, I sipped from a calabash of milk, while my host magically turned into a funfair ride. Running forward, leaping back, diving onto grandpa’s chest, the children filled the air with whoops and giggles – except when their eyes settled on the strange-looking toubob and they burst into tears.

  Meanwhile, Buhaisah’s orders had been obeyed. The calabash of milk was followed by a bowl of water and a lump of soap made from cow’s milk. Our hands were washed, our appetites whetted – it was time for a feast.

  ‘The toubob eats toh!’ Boureima declared. ‘Iniamo, allah berdujam! Eat and may God increase your strength!’

  Buhaisah stood above me, awaiting my response. I wish I could have satisfied her, I really do. But my God, it was hard! The metal bowl contained a dry green paste of pounded millet, with the consistency of plasticine. We dredged it in the hand, and moistened it in a bowl of sticky, dribbly sauce made from crushed baobab leaves. It had a fetid taste, which you could feel in your stomach for hours afterwards. I was grateful for the first, bitter glass of tea. I smiled weakly at Buhaisah – ‘gassi, good!’ – but the rest of my face let me down. After a stilted nod, she turned away.

  Behind the camp, there was a low pulse of steady groaning, the beat of hooves on dry earth. Through the smoke-yellow glare, we could see the approaching herd: 50 cattle, spanning the full spectrum of malnourishment. Some had thoracic humps drooping over their backs, others were bow kneed, pocked with tick bites, ribbed like radiators. In the middle of them, leaning against a 10-foot staff, his face half-hidden under a pointy red hat, was Boureima’s second son, Iman. He rounded up the piebald sheep and a straggle of brindled goats, then sank onto the mat to slake his thirst. Dust stained every inch of his shift, but his eyes were as bright as torches. He picked out lumps of toh and tossed them into the calabash, raising his knuckles on trails of milk, revitalising himself after a day in the furnace.

  ‘Djumiali, ladé ma na selé?’ I asked him, using one of the Fulfulde phrases Boureima had taught me. ‘Good afternoon, how was the herding?’

  ‘Gassi.’

  He was being polite. Outside of the rainy season, herding was never good. The goats and sheep had to eat from the trees and, apart from a few lacy patches of fonio grass, there was little for the cattle.

  ‘Look at how thin they are,’ said Boureima later. His older son Ayyub was squatting beside the largest of the milch cows, a calabash poised between his knees. ‘In the past, you were guaranteed two litres of milk every time you put your calabash down. Now, we’re happy if they give us a quarter of a litre.’

  Iman only had a moment to rest. There was still work to do and the sun was dropping to the horizon. Muffled in a pair of headphones, plugged into the tunes on his phone, Iman knelt beside a camel, which was tied to a cart at the side of the camp, and untied its braided grass hobble.

  ‘Where’s he off to now?’ I asked.

  ‘Where do you think? Come on.’ Boureima took me by the arm and nudged me onto the cart. ‘You can help us with the watering.’

  Like some infernal tyrant who has dealt with all the business of the court and
wants to get back to his harem, the Malian sun doesn’t hang around. After a day’s ruthless incineration, it beats a hasty exit – so the short journey to Tiogoro, the nearest village, was too far to outrace it. The animals made their way ahead of us, following the scent of earlier trips; while Boureima and I bounced on the cart, driven by a donkey with the camel juddering behind. Peering into the dark, I followed the spin of torchlight – a glimmer of wet cement and the warped flash of a forked prong. I could hear the well more easily than see it: the slurp of cows at the troughs, the crack of sticks on donkeys’ backs, the rattle of hawsers, the ringing of water dripping back into the bore.

  ‘Suleiman, get on the camel!’ called out Boureima.

  Wiping any trace of fear from his face, his youngest son clicked his teeth and leaped onto the camel’s back. Meanwhile, Iman was busy attaching a hook to the well pole, tying the waterskin and feeding out the hawser. Once everything was secure, Suleiman clucked a command, his bare legs vibrating against the camel’s ribs, spinning into the dark nearly 100 metres away, spelling out just how deep you have to go to draw water on the plain. Scooped-out logs provided troughs around the well and once Iman had filled them up, the cows jostled for a drink, rubbing at each other’s sides like rowdy punters in a West End bar.

  That first night I stuck with Boureima, who hurled out shouts and calls – ‘Iye! Ti Tig!’ – to keep the cows in line. On later visits I leaned over the coping with Iman to swing the skins over the toothed rim, or held the plastic filter cone over the bidons, or strode around with Ayyub, bearing bowls of salt under the snouts of the cattle. I had learned well drawing first under Ismail, Lamina’s garrulous cousin in the desert near Timbuktu; over the course of my journey, I had plenty of opportunity to learn more.