Walking with Abel (10 page)

I
n the paling hour before sunup Oumarou stood over me again until I sensed his presence and opened my eyes.

“Anna Bâ? Are you cold?” His eyes smiled in the medieval slit of his turban. He lifted his narrow palms to his breast and pressed them toward me in greeting, then pointed in silence to the plastic kettle he thoughtfully had placed by my mat. The last word before bedtime must be a prayer and the first word of the morning must be addressed to God and the name of God can be uttered only in cleanliness. I took the kettle and walked to a narrow marsh east of the camp and squatted there on hoof-flattened dewy grass facing away from the hut and fanned my skirts about. When I returned the rest of the family was awake and we exchanged proper salaams and Fanta asked me whether I had been warm during the night and ordered me to wrap myself in my night blanket and sit on the mat next to Oumarou while she brewed Lipton and Mama reheated last night’s millet
toh
.

I pulled out my notebook. It had been a cold night and it was still cold and Ousman and Hassan and Oumarou sat in their own blankets by the hut and watched me write, and rocked and nodded in encouragement whenever I looked up. The cows were still gone and a small flock of goats whined on their tethers, cried childlike calls of distress. Oumarou reached over and gently traced the callus on my left heel with his fingertips, felt the skin on my ankle, lightly pressed the top of my foot, circled my bunion. He didn’t say anything. I guessed he was gauging my foot’s worthiness for the transhumance. Then he withdrew his hand and hid it under his blanket again.

The sun blasted into the sky an hour after the morning prayer. A black kite dove for fish in a fen west of the camp and cattle egrets flaked into the hippo grass, rosewinged with dawn light. Starlings fell in and out of the acacia tree with earsplitting screeching. In the tree’s tussles hung a butter-colored quarter moon.

It was Monday. On the other side of the fen oxcarts and horsedrawn farm wagons and donkey carts trundled southward on the road on a pilgrimage to the weekly market in Djenné. Ousman and Salimata’s eldest son, Boucary, were preparing to walk to town.

Boucary came over and leaned on his staff by the calf rope and rested his right foot against the knee of his left. He had twisted a large cotton blanket printed with orange and purple flowers and wound it around his head like an outlandish sombrero de charro, its brims broader than the young man’s shoulders.

“Did you go with the cattle last night, Anna Bâ?”

“Yes, all night I walked.”

“How far did you go?”

“To France. To the other side of Mecca.”

“Oh, even I can’t go that far. But at least I’m young and strong. Oumarou here, he can’t herd cattle at night. He’s too old and he must stay with his wife so that she doesn’t run away with me.”

Oumarou scoffed at his grandnephew.

“Fanta won’t marry you because you’re poor. You have no animals of your own.”

“But I’m very handsome.”

“A poor man can’t be handsome.”

An exchange predetermined, almost rehearsed. Prescribed by the ancient laws of
sanankuya
, ritualized jocular relationships that linked kin, families, ethnic groups, and castes and created in West Africa a parallel social structure meant to forestall violence, defuse rage, prevent incest. Some said the origins of the Bambara word lay in the expression for “the easing of everything”; others that it came from the word for the crust at the bottom of a cereal pot: the sticking together, the joining.
Sanankuya
dictated that grandchildren and grandparents of the same gender tease one another, that grandfathers dote on granddaughters, and that grandmothers pretend to marry grandsons. It decreed vulgar jeering among cousins. Some Western ethnographers translated it as “cousinage” but it transcended family relations. It required that all Bâs and all Diallos deride one another as flatulent bean lovers, that all Fulani mock all blacksmiths and vice versa, and it pitted all Bozo against all Dogon in similarly slapstick exchanges of mutual ridicule. It demystified reverence. It mandated laughter. It created an obligation of mock disrespect, and through it, of solidarity. It was another boundary that parted and united the Sahel. At its inception lay unremembered ancestral blood pacts, vows terrible and terrifying issued to conciliate the horrific animosity that forever had suffused the volatile savannah, millennial attempts to bring to order an uncontrollable world.

Oumarou pushed down the turban from his mouth and drank milk out of a white enamel bowl painted with strawberries and red apples and blue grapes. Fruit and berries he never had seen in real life. Little Amadou stumbled out of the hut shy and chilled and half asleep and crawled under his grandfather’s fleece blanket and Oumarou patted him there, tucking in the boy’s spindly body, smoothing the blanket over him, gently picking bits of straw off the blanket with his long rough fingers. This grandson was too sleepy to tease, or too cherished. Then the old cowboy finished drinking the milk, set the empty bowl on the ground by his knees, pulled up the bottom loop of his turban to the bridge of his nose, and set to disparaging the ways of the young.

“Boucary and Ousman. They are a generation of food. They have to go to Djenné so they can buy snacks in the market. When they camp with the cows they always camp near a village so they can find food. Food food food! I am the generation of milk. When there’s plenty of milk you don’t have to have rice or millet or fish. When I was young and herded cattle I would go several months just drinking milk. That’s why I am stronger than them.”

Ousman smiled at his father’s diatribe and looked at me with his distant eyes and cocked his head a little and said nothing. It was true that when he arrived in town he intended to buy a small plastic baggie of egg noodles drenched in palm oil, possibly some deepfried dough that sweaty market women fished out of huge black castiron vats with slotted spoons. And yes, he would splurge on some roast goat if he had enough money. But mainly he was going to Djenné to inquire about obtaining something few Fulani nomads had and suddenly, in this country at war, many needed. An identity card.

T
he separatists had charged into northern Mali a year earlier. Stray guns for hire orphaned of land by partitions devised and executed by European colonists after World War II, orphaned of political support fifty years later by a civil war in Libya. Several hundred lordless warriors careening across the desert in looted pickup trucks chockfull of artillery and explosives and rifles they had plundered from the vast and abandoned caches of their slain former padrone, Muammar Qaddafi. They belonged to a nomadic nation of camel herders and raiders whose origin myth claimed European roots, claimed racial primacy, claimed exclusivity, claimed freedom. They came from different families and called themselves collectively Kel Tamashek, the speakers of Tamashek, or Imohag, Free People. In the fifth century
BC,
Herodotus described them as Garamantes, a standoffish race of men who kidnapped their future slaves on four-horse chariots. Look for their masculine likenesses in the massifs of Tassili n’Ajjer, next to the Bovidian art of the long-ago cowherds. In the twenty-first century the world knew them by their Arabic name, Tuareg: the Paths Taken.

Like the Fulani, the Tuareg often were light of skin and slight of build, wore indigo robes and turbans that concealed the faces of the men, did not require the veiling of the women, espoused Islam, considered themselves a race superior to black Africans, abided by a rigid social hierarchy, recognized no national borders, and bowed to no government. Unlike the Fulani, they had, throughout the twentieth century, fought repeatedly and unsuccessfully for the sovereignty colonial and postcolonial maps denied them. Their tormented statelessness had earned them yet one more nickname: the Kurds of Africa. Legends of their belligerence and valor were manifold. In the nineteen eighties, Qaddafi, at war with the world in the name of Islamic socialism, of which he was the prophet and the tyrant, recruited Tuareg men to be his mercenaries, always dangling before them the hope that one day he would endorse them in the fight for their own independence.

In 2012, Qaddafi was dead, Libya’s military training camps were defunct, and Malian government forces were busy fighting among themselves in three successive coups and countercoups in the smoggy hills of Bamako. The separatists crossed the Sahara, swept into the major cities of Mali’s desert north, and proclaimed the creation of an independent state they called Azawad: the Land of Transhumance.

The world did not recognize Azawad. But Islamist fundamentalists saw it as a convenient staging post for a jihad from which a new caliphate would rise in the Maghreb. They were mostly Arabs, but also Tuareg, Berber, Fulani. Within weeks they hijacked the rebellion. They flew the black flags of al Qaeda over Timbuktu. They axed down centuries-old shrines and they flogged, amputated, jailed, stoned, beheaded, raped. They reproduced in the Malian Sahara a tragedy familiar from the abattoirs of Iraq, of North Caucasus, of Somalia.

The world’s reaction was no less familiar. In January of 2013, the week before I met the Diakayatés, France sent its forces to the desert. By March, small outfits of guerrillas and religious fanatics were fighting a war of attrition against French, Malian, and United Nations troops backed by the United States. Airplanes shelled dunes and dry pastures of scant grass. Suicide bombings tore limb from limb in Timbuktu, in Gao.

Ethnic cleansing marched side by side with the intervention. Reports of summary executions by Malian troops drifted down to the bourgou. Stories of killed nomads. Of men and cattle disappearing. Of fathers and husbands and sons gone missing, then found mutilated in shallow pits. Sand sopped up blood. A practiced task: in another March, in 1591, a Moroccan force of six cannons and four thousand mercenary cavalrymen and musketeers led by the Spanish-born eunuch Judar Pasha had slaughtered in these wastelands the army of forty thousand Songhai warriors. The Songhai had armed themselves with saber, bow, and spear and drove before them herds of cattle. The cows turned out to be gun-shy. They turned and stampeded the Songhai; the Moroccan arquebuses finished the job. This was the Battle of Tondibi, thirty-five miles north of Gao. From there the Moroccans trooped on west to sack and burn first Timbuktu, then Djenné, and the Songhai Empire was no more.

—

The fighting for Azawad came within forty miles of the bourgou’s northern tip. In the rest of the country, Mali’s temporary government declared a state of emergency. Checkpoints were everywhere. All nomads were suspect and nomads without documents doubly so. Sometimes gendarmes turned away undocumented cowboys at Djenné’s gates. Sometimes they detained them until their identity could be verified, vouched by a
diawando
, or else vouchsafed by a bribe. Fulani herders south of the Niger worried that sedentary peoples angry at the Tuareg would turn on them.

War was the oldest form of human exchange apart from love, as old as humankind itself. But this was a modern, internationalized war, a metastasis of some alien manner of bloodshed the nomads could not grasp fully. It warped time and thrust modernity at the cowherds, threatened to reorganize their lives in ways they could not foresee because fighting of such proportions had no precedent in their teachings, in their oral histories. To protect himself from a government that offered him and his kind no protection in return, Ousman decided to formalize his relationship with the state and reassert his identity in a modern language the state would understand. Documents. Papers. Laminated, stamped, with photographs. He never would be able to read them, but that did not matter. After all, the Fulani were masters of perseverance. They refused to assimilate, but they never ceased to adapt.

At one point Ousman had a voter registration card. It was a strip of paper about two fingers wide, and it had something written on it in ballpoint pen. But the previous summer when he was swimming across the Bani with his father’s cattle, the river tore off his shoulder the goatskin bag in which he had kept the paper and carried it away. Now the only form of identification among the Diakayatés was a single frayed cardboard booklet from the tax authorities that listed the names of Oumarou and some of his family members, though not all, and a few of them long dead. The booklet put Oumarou’s age at seventy-six. “Suits me,” the old man said. “Means I don’t have to pay taxes.” He himself did not know his age. Like his, most dates of birth in the booklet were arbitrary. No nomad births in the bush were registered, and no deaths. The Fulani passed through the land, shaping and reshaping it, and that was all the account there was of their passing and that was all the account that mattered.