“There is a lot of pressure on the planet to belong someplace,” says the author of “Walking with Abel.” A Conversation with Bill Tipper.
Look out for Anna Badkhen's new book, Fisherman's Blues: A West African Community at Sea, on sale March 2018
An intrepid journalist joins the planet’s largest group of nomads on an annual migration that, like them, has endured for centuries.
Anna Badkhen has forged a career chronicling life in extremis around the world, from war-torn Afghanistan to the border regions of the American Southwest. In Walking with Abel, she embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys—nomadic herders in Mali’s Sahel grasslands—as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. It’s a cycle that connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat—from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty—brilliantly resourceful and resilient, they’ve contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries.
Dubbed “Anna Ba” by the nomads, who embrace her as one of theirs, Badkhen narrates the Fulani’s journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani’s Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle. As they cross the Sahel, the savanna belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, they accompany themselves with Fulani music they download to their cell phones and tales of herders and hustlers, griots and holy men, infused with the myths the Fulani tell themselves to ground their past, make sense of their identity, and safeguard their—our—future.
Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah
Look out for Anna Badkhen's new book, Fisherman's Blues: A West African Community at Sea, on sale March 2018
An intrepid journalist joins the planet’s largest group of nomads on an annual migration that, like them, has endured for centuries.
Anna Badkhen has forged a career chronicling life in extremis around the world, from war-torn Afghanistan to the border regions of the American Southwest. In Walking with Abel, she embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys—nomadic herders in Mali’s Sahel grasslands—as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. It’s a cycle that connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat—from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty—brilliantly resourceful and resilient, they’ve contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries.
Dubbed “Anna Ba” by the nomads, who embrace her as one of theirs, Badkhen narrates the Fulani’s journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani’s Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle. As they cross the Sahel, the savanna belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, they accompany themselves with Fulani music they download to their cell phones and tales of herders and hustlers, griots and holy men, infused with the myths the Fulani tell themselves to ground their past, make sense of their identity, and safeguard their—our—future.
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Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah
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by Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen
Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah
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by Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen
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Overview
Look out for Anna Badkhen's new book, Fisherman's Blues: A West African Community at Sea, on sale March 2018
An intrepid journalist joins the planet’s largest group of nomads on an annual migration that, like them, has endured for centuries.
Anna Badkhen has forged a career chronicling life in extremis around the world, from war-torn Afghanistan to the border regions of the American Southwest. In Walking with Abel, she embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys—nomadic herders in Mali’s Sahel grasslands—as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. It’s a cycle that connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat—from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty—brilliantly resourceful and resilient, they’ve contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries.
Dubbed “Anna Ba” by the nomads, who embrace her as one of theirs, Badkhen narrates the Fulani’s journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani’s Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle. As they cross the Sahel, the savanna belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, they accompany themselves with Fulani music they download to their cell phones and tales of herders and hustlers, griots and holy men, infused with the myths the Fulani tell themselves to ground their past, make sense of their identity, and safeguard their—our—future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780399576010 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2016 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Anna Badkhen has written about wars on four continents, including the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Chechnya. Her reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She is the author, most recently, of The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village and Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. Badkhen lives in Philadelphia.
Read an Excerpt
Visit http://bit.ly/1AKu9Jy for a printable version of this map.
THE HOPING
If you set out on a journey pray that the road is long
—ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
You could hear them from miles away. They went tprrr! tprrr! and they went jet jet jet! and they went jot jot jot! and they went ay, shht, shht, oy, trrrrrr, ’uh, ’uh! Repeating with proprietary virtuosity the calls their ancestors had used to talk to their own herds since the dawn of time. As if they journeyed not simply across distance but across eras and dragged with them through the land grooved with prehistoric cow paths all the cattle and all the herders who had laid tracks here before. You could almost make out all of them in the low scarf of shifting laterite dust, cowboys and ghosts of cowboys driving true and phantom herds on an ageless migration that stretched forever.
The Fulani and their cows tramped along the edge of the bone-white savannah, restless slatribbed wayfarers weaving among slow cattle just as slatribbed. Nomads chasing rain in the oceanic tracts of the Sahel. The cowboys wore soiled blue robes that luffed in the wind like sails, and their gait flowed smooth and footsure. Each step stitched the waking earth with a sound smoothed by millennia of repetition, a sound of sorrow and hope and loss and desire: the sound of walking.
They whistled and laughed and hurled their clubbed staffs underhand at the cows that were too hesitant or too distracted or out of step and they called “Girl! Shht!” and “Die! Die, bitch!” to such cows, but never in anger. They filled the soundscape with the chink of hooves and staffs upon filaments of shale, with yips and ululations, with incessant banter about cows and women and pontifications about God and swagger about migrations past. They moved in tinny bubbles of bootleg music that rasped from the cellphones they dangled on lanyards from their necks. Some had strapped to their chests boomboxes they had decorated with small mirrors, like disco balls. Their music said go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, in the same iambic beat as the songs of the Kel Tamashek camel riders of the Sahara, the Turkoman goatherds of the Khorasan, the horsemen of the Kazakh steppes. Music made for walking and cowbells. Music made out of walking and cowbells.
Their herds fell together and drifted apart and even when the cattle drive swelled to many thousand head, the Fulani always knew which cows belonged to whom. They seared lines and dots and crosses into the hides of their cattle with sickle-shaped branding irons, but these hieroglyphics mostly were of no need to them because they recognized their livestock and the livestock of others from the serrated silhouette of the herd, from the way dust billowed in its wake, from the particular gait of the bulls. You learned such knowledge somehow.
“Those are Afo’s cows, Papa.”
“No they aren’t.”
“How can you tell?”
“That’s just how it is.”
“But how can you tell?”
“When I see cattle, I know.”
—
Oumarou Diakayaté squinted at the procession of cattle and cattle drivers filing into the sunrise. He had risen in the cool blue predawn from the wide reed pallet he shared with his wife, Fanta, their youngest son and daughter, and two small grandchildren, and washed from a small plastic kettle and prayed while most of the camp still slept. In the modest manner of his generation he had wrapped his indigo turban three times around his head and under the gray stubble on his narrow chin and across his thin mouth, in which a few teeth still remained, and dragged his millet-straw mat out of the cold shadows of the hut.
Then day crashed into the Sahel in a crescendo of birds. A rooster crowed once and right away clouds of tiny passerines in twilit shrub let loose a delirious trill. Starlings shrieked the world’s oldest birthsong: alive, alive, alive, alive. A kingfisher warbled. The sun hurtled upward red and elliptic from beyond the sparse scrublands, grazed the low umbrella crowns of acacias, slowed down, and hung glaring in the fierce African sky.
Oumarou sat attentive and quite like a bird himself in the canted light of that July morning, with his knees drawn and a blue-checkered fleece blanket wrapped shoulder to toe around his tall and rawboned frame, and watched the herds pass. By the time the sun rose a palm above the treeline, his family would roll up their mats, pilfer the best thatch and rope from their shelters, pile calabashes and gunnysacks of blankets and clothes onto donkey carts, and join the other pilgrims ambling off from the Sahel’s most coveted pasturage to allow farmers a turn with the land.
—
Oumarou’s dry-season grazing grounds lay in the fecund seasonal swamplands in the crook of the Niger’s bend, in central Mali. The Fulani called the region the bourgou. Bourgou was hippo grass, Echinochloa stagnina, the sweet perennial semiaquatic species of barnyard grass that grew on the plains from late summer till winter’s end, when the anastomosing stream of the Bani River flooded the Inner Niger Delta. Hippo grass shot its spongy blades up to nine feet out of the wetlands. Its rhizomes floated. It was a drifter, like the Fulani. Cows went wild for it.
The Diakayatés had arrived in the bourgou in January, after the rice harvest. Oumarou and his sons and nephews and grandnephews had raised their domed grass huts in a slightly swerving line of six beneath a few contorted thorn trees on a strip of dry land that bulged out of a fen so deep that the cows had to swim to return to camp from pasture. The thorn trees had fingered the soft wind of early winter with feathery peagreen leaves.
By July the island was a cowtrodden knuckle barely manifest on an enormous spent plateau. The fen was a foul sike, fragmented and not ankle-deep. All about, the oldest continental crust in the world lay bare, its brittle rusted skin ground to red talc by cattle and the dry harmattan winds of February and the cruel spring heat. The three thorn trees that flanked Oumarou’s hut had no more leaves, and in the dusty naked branches agama lizards with orange heads rotated their eyes and pressed up and up in a laborious Triassic mating dance. To the northeast, the millet fields of slash-and-burn farmers smoked white against dark gray rainclouds that refused to break. The rain was late.
Oumarou had not heard the planetary-scale metastory of the most recent global warming. He had not heard much about the planet at all. He had not even heard about Africa. He could not read, did not listen to the radio. He took bearings by other coordinates calibrated in other ways, brought into existence billions of years before the Earth itself. He sought counsel from the stars.
For centuries the Fulani had aligned the annual movement of their livestock from rainy-season to dry-season pasture and back again with the orderly procession across the sky of twenty-six sequential constellations. Each signified the advent of a windy season, of weeks of drizzle or days of downpour, of merciless heat or relentless malarial mosquitoes that danced in humid nights. But for decades now the weather had been chaotic, out of whack with the stars. The rainy season had been starting early or late or not arriving at all. Oumarou was searching for the promise of rain conveyed across millions of light-years, and he could not reconcile the cycle.
In this part of the Sahel, the first week of June was the brief season the Fulani called the Hoping, when people looked at the sky expecting rain any day. This year the Hoping had stretched into two excruciating weeks, then three, then four. Oumarou’s cows hung deflated humps to the side and let down little milk. Milk made up most of the old man’s diet. He was nauseous with hunger.
“Three things make a man live a long and healthy life,” he would repeat over a succession of disappointing dinners of bland millet-flour porridge with sauce of pounded fish bones. “Milk, honey, and the meat of a cow that has never been sick.” Honey was a rare treat in the bush. As for beef, that was a conjecture, a hypothesis. The Fulani very seldom ate meat, and when they did, it usually was goat or lamb. No Fulani would readily slaughter a healthy cow.
—
Oumarou freed an arm from his blanket and paced off the sky to the sun with a narrow hand. Half a palm’s width. A flock of birds burst out of a low shrub, chirped, circled, settled again. The uninterrupted horizon quivered with birdsong, lizards’ click-tongue, the whimper of goats, the hoof-falls and lowing of moving cows. Eternal sounds. Ephemeral sounds. Three more fingers and the cows would be gone. Time to pack.
Oumarou looked at Fanta, his wife, his fellow rambler, who now stood by his side listening to the faraway herds also.
“Ready?” he said.
Oumarou’s restlessness dated back to the Neolithic, to the time when a man first took a cow out to graze.
It was an outsize brown cow that stood six feet front hoof to shoulder and bore a pair of forward-pointing, inward-curved horns such as the ones that eventually would gore tigers and bears in the coliseums of Rome. The last of her undomesticated tribe, a female wild aurochs, would die of disease or old age or hunger or loneliness in the Jaktorów forest in Poland in 1627. Around 10,000 BC, ancient humans began to encourage the Bos primigenius to stay close. How? Maybe they used salt to entice the massive ruminants, as people did in the twenty-first century with the wild mithans of the Assam hills, with northern reindeer. Or maybe, like the Diakayatés did on cattle drives, they simply sweet-talked the aurochs into sticking around. “Ay, ay, girl!” One way or another, sometime in the early Holocene a colossal proto-cow felt trusting enough around people that she allowed herself to be milked. Milking would become like walking: essential, innate. It was why God gave man opposable thumbs.
In Africa, herders preceded farmers by some three thousand years. In Asia, pastoralism evolved after agriculture. Anthropologists disagree whether people domesticated cattle on these two continents independently or whether itinerant Asian traders brought the cow to Africa, though DNA studies indicate that all taurine cattle came from eighty female wild aurochs. In any event, during the Agricultural Revolution, Cain and Abel parted ways, and from then on, “the nomadic alternative,” as the writer-wanderer Bruce Chatwin called it, developed parallel to, and in symbiosis with, the settled culture.
Antecedent herders grazed their kine in the lush pastures of East Africa. Around 8000 BC, people at Nabta Playa, an interglacial oasis in the Nubian Desert, littered their primeval hearths with pottery and bones of ovicaprids and cattle. Ten thousand years from now, archaeologists of the future will scrape the same refuse from the midden of Oumarou’s campsite—cow bone and goat crania and cracked bowls, plus some empty glass vials of commercially manufactured vermicide.
Around 6000 BC, some bands of nomads hit the road. Perhaps, as sedentary farmers carved pasturage into millet and sorghum fields, they had run out of country. They drove before them lyre-horned zebu cows: much smaller than the wild aurochs, requiring little water, able to withstand high temperatures, docile, and partially resistant to rinderpest. The herders were tolerant to lactose and lived mostly on milk. Their limbs were stretched by protein. Their bones were strong enough to chase clouds. Like Hollywood cowboys, they hooved it west.
Today the unlettered Fulani in the bourgou without effort can trace the beginning of their passage to the very birthplace of mankind. I don’t know how they know. Western anthropologists, linguists, and ethnographers have puzzled over Fulani origins for more than a hundred years, measuring skulls, divining cadences of language. But ask a cowherd in Mali where his people came from, and he will reply: “Ethiopia.”
—
The nomads marched their cattle through a Neolithic Sahara. The land was lush, sodden with the subpluvial that had followed the last glaciation. Herds of hippopotamus and giraffe and ostrich and zebra grazed along mighty rivers. The rivers were full of fish. You can still see their dry courses from space.
Around 4000 BC they stopped at the Paleozoic obelisk forest of Tassili n’Ajjer, the Plateau of the Rivers, a migrants’ oasis in what today is Algeria. There, on sandstone, the nomads painted and engraved Bovidian odes to cattle. Herds on the run. At pasture. Humped. Unhumped. Longhorned. Piebald. One painting shows a person milking a cow as a calf stands by, probably to encourage the cow to let down her milk. Someone picked into a rock a cow weeping rock tears. What was the artist’s dolor? The beautiful stones of Tassili are silent.
By 2000 BC a great drought had returned. The desert—in Arabic sahra, the Sahara—pushed the herders south. Perhaps for the first time these land-use innovators had to adapt to climate change. They hooked down toward the westernmost edge of the region that Arab traders and conquerors later would call sahel, the shore: the savannah belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, linking the Sahara and the tropics roughly along the thirteenth parallel.
Trapped between the lethal tsetse forests of the south and the northern desert, Fulani cattle herders ambulated the semiarid grasslands of western Sahel. They plodded toward the Atlantic, into the coastal reaches of modern-day Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana. But just south of the town walls of modern Djenné, less than a day’s walk from the Diakayatés’ dry-season camp, one of the oldest known urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa, Djenné-Djenno, pokes its ruins out of the earth. Excavations at Djenné-Djenno have revealed bones of domesticated cattle and goats and sheep that date back to the beginning of the first millennium AD. Oumarou’s forefathers may have passed through already then.
The Fulani thrust inland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of them were Muslim. “Generally of a tolerant disposition,” the Nigerian scholar Akin L. Mabogunje wrote in his essay “The Land and Peoples of West Africa,” the Fulani were embraced “for the manure their cattle provided on the fields and for the milk and butter which could be exchanged for agricultural products.” That arrangement never has changed. When I met them, the Diakayatés lived on the millet and rice and fish Oumarou’s wife, Fanta, swapped for butter and buttermilk, and villagers welcomed his cow dung on their fields as long as it was not at the time of planting, during the rainy season, or at the time of harvest, right after. As the Fulani had been doing for thousands of years, the family notched and notched the routes of ancient transhumance deeper into the continent’s bone, driven by a neverending quest for pasturage, a near worship of cattle, and the belief that God created the Earth, all of it, for the cows.
In the early nineteenth century, a Fulani scholar, cleric, and trilingual poet named Uthman dan Fodio launched one of West Africa’s earliest jihads. Hurtling camelback and horseback, dan Fodio and his followers delivered Sufi Islam to the mostly animist rural savannah on the tips of their spears and broadswords. In the floodplains of the Inner Niger Delta, one of dan Fodio’s disciples, a Fulani orphan named Ahmad bin Muhammad Boubou bin Abi Bakr bin Sa’id al Fulani Lobbo, led an Islamic uprising and created the theocratic empire of Massina. Twenty-first-century Fulani remember and revere him by his preacher sobriquet, Sekou Amadou: Sheikh Muhammad.
Sekou Amadou made his first capital at the village of Senossa, a sparse oasis of low adobes and doum palms above a swale that separates the village from Djenné. Then he set out to purify what he saw as his subjects’ corrupt mores. He banned tobacco and alcohol, established purdah, set up social welfare for widows and orphans, and regularized land use, drawing up seasonal timetables that distributed pastures and rivers among Bozo fishermen, Songhai traders, Mandinka and Bambara farmers, and Fulani herders. He favored the cattlemen; the nomads thrived. Almost two hundred years later the amplitudes of Oumarou’s migration still abided by the transhumance schedules Sekou Amadou had drawn in 1818.
—
By the beginning of the twenty-first century an estimated thirty to forty million nomads roved the world, herding cattle, deer, goats, sheep, yak, camel, horses. Some twenty million of them were Fulani. Their ruinously swelling herds, confined by state borders, frontlines, and megalopolises that were recharting the Sahel, competed with expanding farmsteads for depleted and dwindling resources. Demographers in the West predicted that the next big extinction would be theirs. That in a hundred years, we all would be settled, and living in cities.
When I relayed this to Oumarou he was distressed. For more than seventy years, since the first year he could remember, he had spent the dry season on the narrow island right here, in the middle of the sweetgrass marsh an hour’s walk northwest of Senossa.
“How will we keep cows in the city?” he asked.
Nomad, vouac, nomas: a vagabond for pasture.
—
To enter such a culture. Not an imperiled life or a life enchanted but an altogether different method to life’s meaning, a divergent sense of the world. To tap into a slower knowledge that could come only from taking a very, very long walk with a people who have been walking always. To join a walk that spans seasons, years, a history; to synchronize my own pace with a meter fine-tuned over millennia. For years I had wanted to learn from such immutable movement. In January of 2013—a number meaningless to the nomads, who ignored man-drawn borders and man-defined time—I came to the bourgou to follow a Fulani family on a yearlong cycle of transhumance, to learn from their journey lessons of adaptation and survival. “Solvitur ambulando,” Diogenes promised: “It is solved by walking.”
Long walks in open spaces are like ujjayi breath for the mind. Human feet evolved to measure out steady steps on hot, dry, flat land, and the human brain evolved to absorb boundless geology at the speed of three miles an hour. The sheer volume of lucid air fills the mind, the distant skyline paces off a spirit level of peace. The expanse around you unburdens the space within.
To join the nomads I needed an introduction, a benediction, consent. I needed advisors. I went looking in the unpaved bezel of Djenné’s market square.
The town’s Sudanic skyline jabbed at the early-evening sky and in the faded air over the three soaring clay minarets of the Grande Mosquée swallows dashed among pale stars. Dust mixed with the potent scent of strong green gunpowder tea that was boiled and reboiled with sugar and sometimes mint and then poured, bubbling and syrupy, from great heights into small shotglasses sticky from hours of tea ceremonies previous. Women floated past in single-file columns and quarreled and chaffed and balanced on their heads trays of fresh Nile perch, calabashes of buttermilk, plastic bags of peanuts, baskets of smoked catfish, lozenges of sugared sesame, baguettes, papayas, hot peppers, laundry, water, the world.
A small boy on a bicycle dragged a donkey on a rope at a gallop. Teenagers strolled importantly between shops carrying redhot birds’ nests of wire braziers with lit coal for tea. Itinerants with goatskin bags and short broadswords in tooled leather scabbards shuffled through hot dust. Two young Fulani men walked arm in arm, their fingers clasped in huge silver rings. The broad brims of their spiked burgundy cowhide-and-canvas hats touched as they gossiped. Rimaibe girls, descendants of the slaves who once grew their Fulani masters’ millet and rice, who grew and spun and wove their cotton, unloaded from their heads tall stacks of firewood for the townswomen to cook the day’s dinner, then stood fanning themselves. They wore cotton pagnes printed with giddy M.C. Escher designs of fish and pineapples and flowers, and nylon soccer jerseys: Mali, Manchester, Liverpool, Barcelona, Brazil. Elders passed in lace boubous of incredible neon hues. The color screamed like some heat-induced delirium in the antique clay monochrome of the town. A three-legged goat pulled on the rope that tethered it to a thorn tree, bleated miserably, pulled again.
It was Sunday. Africa Cup of Nations blared from television sets propped on crates outside shops. South Africa was playing Morocco. Halftime news delivered dispatches of death from Mali’s north, where a latter-day jihad was converting traditional nomadic routes into the newest frontline of the global war on terror. Al Qaeda fanatics were chopping off hands in Gao, blowing up old Islamic shrines in Timbuktu. French troops had arrived in Mali a week earlier and now rumbled in armored personnel vehicles into the Sahara. Half a century after gaining independence from France, Malians gathered roadside to wave at her soldiers with blue-white-and-red tricolors.
—
Afo Bocoum sat under the thatched awning of a shabby mercantile on a long backless wooden bench varnished with years of sweat. Afo’s father had forsaken transhumance to serve as a translator for French colonists, and Afo had grown up in Djenné. A settled Fulani, a homesick Fulani. To satisfy his nomadic yearnings he rode his motorcycle twice daily to the pastures where hired cowboys herded his many hundreds of cows. He would lean the bike against a tree and talk to his cattle and feed them cottonseed by hand.
“Cattle,” he would say, in a mix of English and French, “c’est pas business, c’est l’amour.”
When he was home and there was electricity in the house, he watched nature channels in French. Discovery Channel France, National Geographic, Nat Geo Wild, Planète+. He sought out shows about herders.
“Texas! I’ve seen it on television. They have a lot of cowherds there. They ride horses. And they have hats like the Fulani, only bigger.”
Afo was a diawando, a member of a Fulani caste of mediators between the nomads, who despised and feared government in all its incomprehensible forms, and the officialdom, which considered the nomads arrogant, rich, and obsolete, and took advantage of their illiteracy by fleecing them recklessly: in the modern world, God seemed to favor Cain. A diawando advised his clients on all matters legal, formal, veterinary, and financial. The relationship was passed down from father to son and the loyalty between a diawando and the pastoralists was nonpareil. The Diakayatés were Afo’s clients and they worshipped him.
Afo picked at bad teeth with a match and considered my request.
“In this life you have to feel love for what you do. If you don’t feel love for what you’re doing you won’t do it well.”
He fell silent. Late January heat made everything lazy, moved listlessly through legs, slowed circulation. A small boy slouched by, swallowing hard some insult or injury, tears running down his pouting face. A teenager with wandering eyes came under the awning and drooled and stood fingering his green stone prayer beads. The gloaming softened all color. An old muezzin in a dusty blue boubou limped up to his post at the southeastern corner of the mosque wall, stopped, spat a sizable ball of phlegm over the rampart, put his bony hands to his ears. The mosque loudspeaker crackled like bursts of distant gunfire and the muezzin began his first summons to evening prayer. The quarter tones ricocheted gently off banco walls, spilled into the immense famished horizons beyond.
The French adventurer René Caillié, the first European to return from Timbuktu, stopped in Djenné in 1828. The massive mosque built of daub and wattle in the twelfth or thirteenth century, during Islam’s early and erratic years in the Niger Delta, stood mostly in ruins by then: Sekou Amadou had disapproved of its ostentatiousness and allowed it to fall into disrepair, while he built his own, smaller, simpler mosque a block away. The Grande Mosquée, Caillié wrote, was “rudely constructed, though very large. It is abandoned to thousands of swallows, which build their nests in it.” The modern mosque, the largest mudbrick building in the world, was a replica, built at the order of French colonists in 1907. The swallows remained.
I waited. Swallows chirred. At last Afo pronounced:
“Bon! Your work is good. We’ll go to the bush tomorrow.”
—
On the other end of the square two elders stopped me. Babourou Koïta, a diawando like Afo, held court each day next to a pharmacy in a chair made of bamboo and goatskin, while in the secrecy of his compound, cowboys in his employ raised gigantic interbreeds of zebus and Holsteins. In an identical chair next to Babourou sat his best friend, Ali the Griot.
A griot: a bard, an entertainer. An ambulatory madman spewing blessings and augury. An oracle for the powers that shaped the universe, as feared as the blacksmith who transforms the Earth’s elements. A hereditary oral chronicler of the land who alone knows all the secret iniquities and virtues of its gentry.
Griots dumbfounded the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta. “Each of them has got inside a costume made of feathers to look like a thrush with a wooden head made for it and a red beak as if it were the head of a bird. They stand before the sultan in that ridiculous attire and recite their poetry,” he wrote in the chronicle of his journey through the Malian kingdom. “It was mentioned to me that their poetry is a kind of preaching.” Ibn Battuta didn’t understand: you submitted to the griot and feared his judgment because how he pronounced you to be was how you would be. His words tweaked destiny. He was the keeper and twister of history who castigated and flattered and who from his praise and reprimands molded prophecies and delivered such news and advice as he saw fit so he could stoke or resolve conflicts, forge or disband unions, bestow or retract fame.
“In Africa, when an old man dies, it’s a library burning,” said Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Mali’s most renowned writer. When a griot died, histories of entire families and empires dissolved underfoot. The world lost gravity.
Modern griots no longer dressed in feathers. They were court jesters set loose in a new world, a world without kings. Some cut records and performed in front of African and European and American crowds. Most dispensed wisdoms at weddings, at political rallies, in public squares. They were ronin. Ali was one of those.
Ali had a two-packs-a-day habit and looked like my grandfather who had died when I was a girl. I told him that. He nodded and informed me he was broke. “That makes two of us,” I said. He giggled and nodded again. I told him my grandfather had been an orchestra conductor, an entertainer, and that my grandfather’s name—my name, badkhen—meant a fiddler, an irreverent jester-rhymer who ad-libbed at Jewish weddings. I came from a long line of Yiddish griots, I said. That wasn’t good enough. Ali stubbed out a Dunhill in the dust and motioned to Babourou for another and said that to walk in the Sahel I needed a different name, a Fulani name.
He looked at Babourou. Babourou looked at the sky, presumably for instruction.
“Bâ!” he said. “Your name will be Anna Bâ.”
Ali nodded once more. “Good name. Noble name. One of the oldest Fulani names.” And he grabbed my hand and yanked it up in the air and sang me my new ancient family history. It began in no remembered time with the arrival from a faraway desert of four Fulani progenitor families—the spiritual leaders the Diallos, the logisticians the Sows, the largest cattle owners the Bâs, their helpers the Barris—and it ended like this:
“Anna Bâ, Bâ the owner of cattle, Bâ the owner of white cattle, white is the color of milk, Bâ the owner of the color white. First came the Diallos the Sows the Bâs the Barris. Bâ is the owner of many animals, Bâ is the owner of butter, Bâ smells of butter, Bâ the sweetest-smelling Fulani. Bâ. Bâ. Bâ. Bâ.”
He did not let go of my hand the whole time.
The naming ceremony would be held the next day. I was to buy a sacrificial goat. On television screens around the square, South Africa and Morocco tied, two–two.
—
A friend hosted the ceremony at his bar, an eyesore of poured concrete on the outskirts of town. Its courtyard had a bandstand under a leaky cabana. It served Malian beer and lukewarm soft drinks and inside it had low benches upholstered with artificial leather and mirrored disco balls and a small television set tuned to a channel that showed Ivorian and Senegalese dancers in bikinis and hot pants grinding to hiphop. The bar owner was a settled Fulani wheeler-dealer who wore copious perfume, spoke seven or eight languages, including French, Spanish, and English, was afraid of cows, and went by the nickname Pygmée. “Peul moderne,” Afo called him: the modern Fulani. Out of respect for the Muslim sensibilities of my elder guests Pygmée turned off the television. His friend Allaye the Butcher had roasted a goat in town and delivered it to the bar in the evening and carved it in the yard.
My three godfathers, my three magi, arrived on three motorcycles in flowing robes. Afo wore a boubou white as an egret’s wing and had two helpings of roast goat and pronounced it very good. Babourou, in a handwoven mantle of black and turquoise wool embroidered with gold thread, told me that to be one hundred percent Fulani I needed a Fulani man, and that—this was a segue—he and the other elders would assist me in any manner possible. Ali the Griot promised that my new name would protect me from evil.
“Anna Bâ! Fulani Bâ! General de Gaulle! Bienvenue, bienvenue.” We toasted with orange Fanta.
I walked up to the flat roof. Effervescent dusk. White guineafowl perched in a eucalyptus grove. The town’s sole generator droned. In a thin web of orange streetlights Djenné’s oblique adobes crowded narrow and asymmetrical and surreal. The floodplains around the town reflected the mauve and blue and crimson of the dying sky and the town seemed suspended in air. Beyond spread the thorny and flat Sahelian wilderness that belonged to the cows and their cowboys. I would be joining them in the morning.
Then the generator quieted and the lights went out, the town disappeared, and a full moon rang into the sky like a bell.
Early the next day, Afo, Pygmée, and I sat in the freckled shade of a windtwisted thorn tree with Oumarou Diakayaté and Fanta and their many kin and watched cattle egrets float down from the sky into hippo grass thickets that scissored in the wind. The white birds parted the grass and puckered the fen’s glossy surface with their long legs. A low northbound warplane thundered overhead. A few days’ walk away from the camp the French air force was bombing the Sahara. In the fen terrified cattle jolted and tripped and bawled. On the other side of the thorn tree a cow calved quietly and licked the calf to life. The Diakayatés had been in the bourgou a week.
“This is Anna Bâ,” Afo said and the Diakayatés laughed. “Bâ? Anna Bâ? A Fulani? Good, good. Welcome, Anna Bâ.”
Oumarou asked me if I had any cows, and whether it had rained where I came from. Was America in France? Afo said it was on the other side of Mecca, which meant very far. One of Oumarou’s nephews said: “In your land don’t you also have a city that loves cattle, named Kentucky?”
I had no cows. But I, too, went on pendular journeys in the world’s margin lands. I grazed for stories, I explained. I herded words.
Oumarou laughed again and said I could tag along as far as I wished. The women laughed as well and said I would have to take turns pounding their millet. They showed with their arms—and down! and down! and down!—in case I didn’t understand.
One of Oumarou’s nieces said, “There are three ways to study, Anna Bâ: with your feet, with your eyes, and with your mind. Now I know you study with your feet because you have come here to live and walk with us.”
I had come to study, it was true. I also was pursuing something, a measure of healing. I was not on a pilgrimage—that would have been fatuous, a folly. But secretly I hoped that all the old pathways of my hosts somehow could triangulate into an inarticulable and uncharted solace, because just four months earlier, as I was readying, in cold autumn, to travel to West Africa, my beloved had left me.
We passed around a calabash with foamy buttermilk that Fanta had churned that morning. A communion, a nomad’s toast. From the northeast the harmattan blew minuscule particles of the Sahara. Sand granules. Tiny travelers. Each speck a capsule delivering to the Sahel echoes of drought, of war, of a space vast and arid and pitiless. The cow had licked her calf dry and clean and had eaten the afterbirth and the calf was trying to push away the ground with its new legs. Oumarou sent a grandnephew to take a look. It was a male calf, the boy reported. More likely to be sold in case of emergency: the females were valued for their milk. The old man said that he would name it Anna Bâ, in my honor, and everybody laughed some more.
Only Mama, his stepdaughter, was worried. She was thirty-two, and she lay on a mat feverish and curled up with a migraine and a bad sinus infection.
“You say you want to tell our story,” she said. “But we don’t know how the story ends.”
Besides, she said, how would I walk? I didn’t know how to carry water on my head.
Carrying water was woman’s work. Water for laundry and washing and cooking came mostly from the triangular hippo grass swamp west of the camp that each morning exploded in spalls of reflected sunlight.
“Aren’t you worried about drinking water from that marsh?”
“Oh no. Our cows drink from it, so we know it’s good. But who knows who put water in your plastic bottle? Aren’t you worried about drinking from it?”
But it was true, the women conceded, that well water was less cloudy. The closest well was about half a mile away. Two or three times a day the women would balance empty jerrycans and plastic pails on their heads and slowly flipflop to it.
The path to the well changed with the seasons from morass to mud to the hard corduroy of fossilized footsteps, as though each season the most recent itinerants recast out of oblivion the traces of the ancients. It linked Oumarou’s campsite to the two mostly parallel ruts that bore tracks of horsedrawn carts and pack donkeys and of feet bare and sandaled and the serpentine imprints of motorscooters and wobbly Chinese bicycles, and that meandered north deeper into the bourgou and south toward the sewage-sluiced snarl of the narrow daub alleys of Djenné.
Settled people lived along that unnamed road. Nearest the camp, each less than half a mile away, sat two hamlets, Doundéré and Dakabalal.
Doundéré, to the southwest, was an old outpost of compact adobes that crowded uphill toward a tiny steepled clay mosque. Doundéré’s elevation was a compression of cultural layers, of uncounted generations of mudbrick homes raised and crumbled and raised anew. Everyone knew it was very old but whether it was three hundred years old or a thousand no one could tell: years did not count, were not counted in these parts. Its residents were Bambara rice and millet farmers and rimaibe, former Fulani slaves who treated the nomads with a combination of respect and mistrust. Oumarou’s sons and grandnephews who were old enough for such things sometimes went to Doundéré to drink tea and prattle with other cowboys and for a few pennies to charge their cellphones, using a motorcycle battery one rimaibe family owned, and to buy cigarettes and small paper cubes of gunpowder green tea from China and counterfeit medicine. Married Diakayaté women avoided Doundéré. On some nights, after their parents had fallen asleep, teenage girls would sneak out to the village to flirt with young visiting cowboys in smoky rooms.
Dakabalal, to the northwest, was a haphazard cluster of homes that an extended family of Bozo fishermen had tossed upon a slight rise, in Oumarou’s lifetime. The Bozo traced their ancestry to capricious man-eating water spirits and amphibians and may have been seining and trapping the Niger and the Bani since the Stone Age; their name, bo so, was an epithet given them by the Bambara that, in Bambara, meant “bamboo hut,” for the riparian dwellings they would set up when they moored. Many remained transient, floating down rivers in redwood pirogues. They were nominally Muslim but they worshipped the river, did not wash for burial the people who had died by drowning, and considered drowned animals halal to eat. Dakabalal had no mosque. I once saw Dakabalal children play with a white egret the way children elsewhere would with a cat. The women in the village kept small and silent yellow dogs and smoked fish on large gridirons day and night, and around these gridirons toddlers played with tackle. The women were heavy from lifetimes of childbirth and they often sat in front of their grills like river goddesses, naked from the waist up, knees spraddled inside colorful pagnes, a small child on the breast.
Two or three miles north of Dakabalal lay Somena, a carefully swept arrangement of fifty or so tidy clay huts. Settled Fulani cattlemen had built it half a century earlier on a mound left by some previous village of some previous people no longer remembered. To the south, past Doundéré, on the way to the Massina Empire’s first capital at Senossa, tall mopped doum palms and mango trees in geometric bloom of dirty pink flanked the villages of Weraka and Wono. These villages were larger than Doundéré, and rimaibe and Bambara and settled Bozo lived and farmed behind their tall mudbrick walls, and during the dry season the Diakayaté women walked there to barter buttermilk for grain. Two fastpaced hours farther south lay Djenné, with its fabled mosque, its disorienting and overwhelming Monday market, its perfunctory district hospital, the only one around. Costly pharmacies, indifferent magistrates, extortionist gendarmerie.
This was the southern tip of the bourgou. In satellite images it looked like the big toe print of a southpointing green flat foot, the foot of a nomad.
Most winters each village was an island until the end of February. The swales filled with stagnant water in which small black herons slouched and cheery white-faced whistling ducks grazed on sodden leftovers of the grain harvest. By January scores of nomadic families set up camp on the low rises dry enough to sleep on, each campsite a neatly swept circle of mats, chicken, guinea hens, goats, sheep, cattle. To the black kites that wheeled over the fens in silent concentration they must have looked like salvages from a shipwrecked ark, their poultry like something to snatch up and eat. For centuries, slavers had shuttled the wetlands between the villages and camps in pirogues during the rainy season and kidnapped luckless children and young women to sell at the markets of Djenné, of Ségou, of Timbuktu. Some of their victims became rimaibe. Some were resold out and out toward the Atlantic coast and of those many ended up toiling on plantations in the West Indies, in the American South. For the most part the abductions ended when France colonized western Sahel, swapping one kind of bondage for another.
—
The well the Diakayaté women favored sat beside Dakabalal: a stack of concrete rings in a rectangular enclosure of poured concrete. Water laced with clay sloshed piss-yellow in the fourteen-foot drop. But on some days within the rings there quivered a blue disk of sky.
At the well the women would remove their sandals and leave them at the enclosure’s threshold as if they were entering a hut or a house, the house of water. They would pull up hand over hand a pail of rubber or goatskin on a yellow manila rope and drink from the pail and let the water run down their chins. Luxuriously, even decadently. They would fill their containers and sometimes they would strip out of their boubous and shirts and wash their shoulders and arms and breasts and laugh at water running down their spines to tickle under their calico pagnes and between their skinny legs. And sometimes, though the Fulani women considered themselves more worthy as a race because of their lighter skin tone and almost Semitic profiles, they would condescend to joke with the Bozo laundresses in Bozo or in Bambara and the laundresses would respond, and women’s laughter and the slapping of laundry would bounce off the concrete in playful echoes.
What People are Saying About This
Ben Fountain
Walking with Abel is a rare and extraordinary book. Anna Badkhen writes with so much precision and soul that practically every line delivers its own revelation. This intrepid writer has given us more than a window into an ancient, and possibly doomed, way of life; she digs down to the very core of what it means to be human. --Ben Fountain, author, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award
Paul Stoller
Sumptuously narrated, Badkhen's sojourn compels you to ponder the existential centers of life—love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, courage and fear. At the end of this riveting tale, the reader not only knows something about the fascinating particularities of Fulani being-in-the -world, but is also inspired by the indomitable resilience of the human spirit. --Paul Stoller, author of Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World
Wayne White
An amazing saga among the nomadic Fulani in the African Sahel. Badkhen's account is a wondrous tableau of survival in one of the planet's toughest environments, threaded with history, legend, and a wealth of stories. --Wayne White, Middle East Institute
From the Publisher
Praise for The World Is a Carpet
“A powerful, unsentimental study of life persisting in extreme conditions.” —The New York Observer
“Transporting … even in this harshest of environments, Badkhen is able to capture kinship, laughter, and merriment. . . . [She] weaves her own literary magic.” —The Christian Science Monitor
J. M. Ledgard
Lucid, generous, and rugged, Badkhen has written a magisterial book which speaks to us as a species in the early twenty-first century - where have we walked from and where are we walking. --J.M. Ledgard, author of Submergence
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Anna Badkhen
In books like The World Is a Carpet and Peace Meals: Candy Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories, Anna Badkhen has offered readers a ground's-eye view of lives rarely seen in full, embedding herself with families in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and other far-flung locales. For her astonishing new book, Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah, Badkhen lived among the nomadic Fulani, who migrate — along with the herds of cattle that define and sustain their culture — across the arid grasslands of Mali.
Taken in by a Fulani family, Badkhen experiences the world as our ancestors did, setting it down on the page with her own visionary inflection: "Human feet evolved to measure out steady steps on hot, dry, flat land, and the human brain evolved to absorb boundless geology at the speed of three miles an hour. The sheer volume of lucid air fills the mind, the distant skyline paces off a spirit level of peace. The expanse around you unburdens the space within."
Walking with Abel, however, chronicles not a solitary journey but the author's deep and revelatory immersion in the lives of the small family group who take her in and share food, shelter, community, and stories, accepting her as a companion on their perpetual journey. In her account of this extraordinary experience, she performs the small miracle of making us feel we have taken a few steps at her side. I had the chance to talk with Anna Badkhen recently about her time with the Fulani, and the challenge of translating such rich experience into a single story. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. — Bill Tipper The Barnes & Noble Review: This is a book that records your time in the Sahel with a family who are part of a larger group of nomadic people who make their living herding, moving cattle, as people in that region and people of their ancestry have done for thousands of years, or at least hundreds of years.
Anna Badkhen: This is a keyhole glance into one very particular way of life, by one very specific observer. I was thinking a lot about this when I was writing the book, and I think a lot about it in general. When we choose to describe something that we witness, how much of what we witness, we witness because of where our heart and mind is at this particular moment. Why do we notice the flight over cattle egret and not notice the . . . I don't know . . . something else. So what are the subconscious choices that we make to notice things and to witness certain things, and even to decide, "This is what I am going to do with my year," and not, say, go to Syria.
BNR: What was the path that brought you to this particular experience and this particular (for lack of a better word) project, the idea of going here and living among this group of people? How did that begin for you?
AB: I wanted to spend time in an open place where people walk. I wanted to know what it is like to experience the world at the speed of three miles an hour. I wanted to know what it is like to descend from hundreds of generations of people who have been experiencing the world this way. It's not just a philosophy. It's a certain way of dealing with the world when you are constantly leaving your loved ones, for example, and when you're constantly greeting your loved ones. Because the Fulani movement is in a circle, if you wish. It's not that they leave Ethiopia and never come back. They move in a relatively small . . . the amplitude of the migration is rather limited. So some move ten or twenty miles; some move fifty miles. But they will spend a month here, a month in the next place. Then, at the end of the natural cycle, of the annual cycle of the rainy season and dry season, they will return. So they will spend this time with an uncle, this time with a brother. . . . What is it like to do that? What is it like to be constantly leaving your loved ones? What is it like to be constantly returning to your loved ones? The next camp? What is the world like from that vantage point? And I wanted to know because I'm curious. I wanted to know what that's like.
BNR: Your curiosity has taken you to many other different places. You spent quite a lot of time visiting a village in Afghanistan for your previous book, The World Is a Carpet.
AB: Yes.
BNR: Did you have a particular connection to people that come from this region, or did you say, "This is where I want to go and these are people that I want to meet . . . "
AB: I was very curious about the landscape. I've never worked in the Sahel before. Well, I'd worked in the Horn of Africa, but I'd never worked in West Africa, and I was very curious about the land. I like to be surprised. I think our capacity for astonishment is something that is not valued in the West today. We're so jaded often; it's kind of embarrassing to not know.
BNR: So you want to put yourself in a situation in which astonishment and surprise and uncertainty are part of the inevitable.
AB: Yes, because I think it opens your heart a little bit more and opens your ability to learn a little bit more. If I walk down the same street every day, I have to force myself to pay attention to the street and notice things that are new. But if I am in a completely new street, I notice more, I think. At least I think that's how it is.
BNR: One thing likely to strike readers is the scope of your ability to attend to the world around you, to both the natural environment you're in and the interplay among the people you're with. Not just their way of life in some sort of ethnological sense, but really the way that this particular family is with one another, with you. The way you chronicle going to sleep at night, with a child perhaps leaning up against you, and feeling simultaneously surprised by this but also reassured or comforted.
AB: Yes.
BNR: There is an amazing layering of detail within a relatively compact narrative. I often asked myself, reading this: At every other moment were you scribbling notes around the corner? When you returned did you have this mass of notebook that you had to sort of extract these very distilled and kaleidoscopic kinds of observations from?
AB: Yes. I was scribbling notes all the time. My hosts were very patient with me, because I would say . . . I would disappear from a conversation because I would want to take notes. There was so much happening, and I wouldn't remember everything. So I took a lot of notes.
BNR: Was it a challenge to decide what to include and what to exclude?
AB: No. I include everything. In my notes.
BNR: I meant afterward, when you take those notes and then you're saying, "OK, how am I going to tell the story?"
AB: Well, that's the process of writing. I am just reading Valeria Luiselli's essays, and she writes that . . . I am going to misquote her: "Writing is the opposite of restoration. It's the scooping out of things." So the emptying. And writing can be very much a hollowing-out of things, the distillation.
My background is as a war correspondent. So the copious note taking and then the winnowing it down to a story is how I learned to write. I don't know what you choose. There is no method.
BNR: You just choose it.
AB: Well, it's a lot of work. It doesn't come naturally. It's not easy. It's hard work.
BNR: You mentioned that this experience leaves you more, in a sense, open, and there's a vulnerability there. I think any reader would be struck by, is the openness on both sides. The people you spend time with seem extraordinarily open with you, sharing their resources and their world with you. But then also sharing themselves.
AB: That generosity is amazing.
BNR: Were you expecting that, or were you surprised?
AB: I am always surprised. It's not new. This is how we are. But I am always surprised how we share and how generous we are with one another. I've been doing this, one way or another, as a journalist or as a writer of books or essays or whatever, for nineteen years, and every time I find it astonishing that I can walk into a stranger's life, and the stranger will tell me her story, or even let me into her story, or even let me stay in her story for a year!
The thing is that we're not done. I just missed a call this morning from Mali, from the young man who was working with as a translator and became a friend. We were talking. It's a relationship. It's not, I'm passing through, I am done with my notes — thanks, bye. We establish a tremendously close relationship that is priceless. Maybe because there is an understanding from the beginning that this is going to be a relationship for life, even if we never seen one another again this will be a very long-lasting and very profoundly life-changing relationship, that allows that kind of candor. So there is sharing. We share, both ways. I am candid with my hosts, too.
BNR: How was this relationship with this family arranged? How were you introduced to them?
AB: I was introduced by a middleman who . . . he belongs to a caste called diawando, and his job is to mediate between the Fulani. In the traditional sense, his job is to mediate between the nomads and the rest. The government, whichever government may be in power, the French colonists, whatever somebody else wants from the Fulani . . . the diawando is like a lawyer, like a personal adviser for a family. So I approached . . . I had a fixer/helper in Djenné, and with his help I approached the diawando and explained to him what my work was and what I was looking for. I don't know why he decided to help me, but he said, "Well, your work is good," and he introduced me to one of his client families. This means that his father was the diawando for the father of my hosts, and his father was the diawando for the grandfather... Etcetera, etcetera.
BNR: The relationship had been generational.
AB: It's generational, and sort of like . . . I guess country doctors maybe, where being a doctor is passed down from father to son, and the clients are the same because you're in a small village. Because the diawando decided that I was trustworthy and told my future hosts that I was trustworthy, they said OK. If I had just walked into their camp — I don't even know what their reaction would have been. But I had to have this very formal introduction. They laughed. They thought it was really funny. I think it was really funny, too. A white woman walks into a nomadic Fulani camp in the middle of nowhere in Sahel and says, "I want to stay with you for a year; do you mind?" So it was very funny, and we laughed a lot. I liked that, that we could laugh about me a lot.
BNR: There's a lot of laughter in this book. There's just the general laughter between people who like a joke, who like to laugh and talk with each other, but there's also a kind of ritualized teasing called . . .
AB: Sinakuya. The word sinakuya is a Bambara word for this relationship that exists in all of West Africa, and also in other parts of the world. I've read that it exists in Papua, New Guinea, for example. And it possibly existed in other societies in the past and just got worn out. Anthropologists call it either a jocular relationship or they call it a cousinage. I've spoken to a lot of historians, and West African historians who are from West Africa and of West Africa, and they agree that the English words don't really encompass what it really is.
It's a relationship that established a very rigid sets of ways in which different members of the same family or different members of the same society, different castes in the same society and different ethnic groups in the same region interact by throwing insults at one another and teasing one another. One of the reasons it exists, it is possible that it was established . . . Among different ethnic groups, for example, it could have been established as a ceasefire to war during which the two parties would agree and sign in blood their agreement that they are cousins. Hence the word cousinage. So they are cousins, and as cousins, they have to tease one another but they can't fight. So it's kind of a way to dilute tension.
A West African family is a very hierarchical family. So for example, if you're a grandfather, then you are near a deity. You basically can do absolutely no wrong. Well, how do you live in a family if there is a man who can do no wrong? That's unsustainable for a family of fifteen people, say, to have somebody who can be completely unassailable. So there is a jocular relationship that exists between the grandfather and the grandsons, and the grandfather and the granddaughter, in which the granddaughter is permitted to do absolutely anything to the grandfather. She can insult the grandfather. She can say, "Grandfather, you're full of shit," when the grandfather is acting high-handedly, and she will be forgiven. With the grandsons it's a little bit different, but there is also a lot of teasing, and very rough teasing.
BNR: There's a bit you describe where one of the grandsons is saying of the grandfather's wife . . .
AB: Yeah. "I am going to marry your wife."
BNR: "I am going to take her away."
AB: He sort of shoots back, "You couldn't handle her; she would never go with you." It also exists between people with different last names. For example, I was given a Fulani name to help ease my entrance into the Fulani community. I was given the family name Bâ. Bâs are cousins of Djellos, which is another old, old Fulani name. So when I see a Djello we're supposed to say crap to one another. Like, "you eat beans" is a famous one, because it's considered very un-Fulani to pass gas, and beans will help you pass gas. So to say, "You eat beans" is like "you old fart," and that's really insulting.
Or, all Fulani are cousins of blacksmiths, for example, which is another interesting . . . So this is an ethnic group versus a trade . . . So it's convoluted. You have to memorize all this.
If I'm a guest at somebody's house in a village, and it's a Fulani house, and an oldman walks in and says, "Fuck your mother" to everybody, just as a greeting, and everybody says, "I killed your sister, stuffed her head under my cow's tail." That's the response. You say, "What just happened? Are they going to fight?"
BNR: But it's because of this relationship between their families or . . . AB: Yes, and it can be really crude, just like that. "I killed your father." "I raped your sister."
BNR: The first response might be, "What's so funny about this?"
AB: Yeah, it's not funny, but it's supposed to create another way of conflict that's not real. It's fake conflict.
BNR: You talk about how it's one of the many boundaries that is there in the region, both physical and, in this case, social, that both divide and unite.
AB: Yes.
BNR: For this group of people who have to travel between and among so many other groups of and have herds that might graze together but they need to be separated at other times, this sort of knowledge of the myriad boundaries, and having conditions under which they must be crossed, seems very significant.
AB: Very important. A lot of early West African cities were not castles and not religious centers; they were market centers — and they still are, except now that's a little less significant. But on market day, people will come from all over, not just the country, but people will come from different countries. So it's a genuine market. People will travel from Côte D'Ivoire, people will come from Senegal — people will come from other countries. How do I feel safe traveling with my pineapples, my salt, my gold, whatever I am traveling with, to this distant place? What is my protection? Well, my protection is that there will be these rules of engagement that will set boundaries, protect me, and also allow me to interact with other people in a way that's forgivable.
BNR: Earlier you said you wanted to resist in this project our expectation as Westerners and as Americans that this is a "travel book," an excursion into the fascinatingly exotic, an encounter with "the Other." But I did wonder, reading this, to what extent the appeal and even the benefit of having an experience is being able to access human life as it is not, by and large, lived in a contemporary way by many people in our culture. You were in a place where one can still see monuments that are thousands of years old, and you experienced a way of life that connects to a very long string of similar experiences. Is it a form of exoticism to even sort of formulate it that way? Or is that the reality of what happens when you go to a place like this?
AB: I am the Other. I didn't grow up in the global south. I grew up on the 60th Parallel in the Far North, but I grew up in the developing world, in the Soviet Union. I guess I feel that I am a little bit in between worlds. It's not that I am coming from the global north to this place to see "these people." It's that I am returning to something that's to me very familiar, a lifestyle that while, on the surface, in its details, may be unfamiliar, in the substance is very familiar. Every summer I would spend three months hauling water in a place that had no running water. Very often, I would say, the apartment had no running water.
BNR: You grew up in Leningrad?
AB: Yes — so, a very poor and very unevenly infrastructured place. So it's not that I am seeking some kind of exotic knowledge.
BNR: How much of this is an experience of not just going to the Sahel in particular among these people, but seeing what it's like to live in a way that is connected to sort of deep human time?
AB: How I want this book to be interpreted is absolutely irrelevant. This is something I am learning and have to remind myself, that as an artist you have absolutely no control over what, as a reader, viewer, audience, you are going to get out of this book. I had friends read my work out loud to me, dear friends, people I love tremendously, and where they put the accents, what they notice, is not where I put the accents and what I notice. That is part of the artistic process of creating something and then sending it out.
If I wanted to preserve what I want this book to be, I wouldn't share it with anybody, because it's so specific. It's my very specific words and my very specific experiences.
By sharing it, by giving it away to the world, I am saying: What happens now with this book? What happens now for you when you are experiencing this book? What do you get out of it? Do you get out the exotic? Do you get out some deep sorrow? Do you get out an interesting new philosophy? Do you get out some kind of beauty? Do you get out something negative and unpleasant? Do you think it's a waste of your time and put it down after page 3? Can you get over the language? Can you get over the meter?
That's up to you. I have no control over it. I have surrendered it in the act of creating it. That's a very strange process, because it's so private and so alone, and such a quiet process, but then once it's shared it has another life, and that's actually when the real life begins. I want to think, of course, that the real life of the book was when I was creating it, but that's absolutely not true. The real life of a book, of a piece of anything artistic, creative, is once it is shared. That is when it begins its real life. When you pick it up and you find something that resonates with you, and you will say, "You wrote about this thing that resonated very deeply," and I will think, I did not say any such thing at all — but it's very interesting that's what you saw.
BNR: There is a sense as you read this book that this is a not straightforward but very affecting emotional journey, into grappling with . . . You allude in places, and sometimes more than allude, to elements of personal heartache that you are going into this situation carrying. So it's there like a musical note that keeps reappearing and underscoring your experience of these people and this landscape. It colors the whole book. It creates a sense of beautiful sadness that sometimes turns itself into other emotions throughout the book. I am curious how that sense of it maps to your experience? Is that what you wanted to put into the book?
AB: I didn't want to put that in the book. But when I started — before I sat down to write the book, but when I started to think about how I am going to be writing the book, I realized that my personal loss was . . . exactly, it colored . . . it colored what I saw during that year very much, because it was very fresh. I realized that it would have been dishonest. I am not a very big believer in confessionals. But I felt that I would be withholding to an extent that would be — well, not criminal, but dishonest, if I didn't tell the readers, "I am sad, and this is why." It's in my notes. Also, again, we talked earlier about Why do you pay attention to the flight of a cattle egret as opposed to, you know, a donkey, grazing in the shade of a tree? Well, I saw these things, and I believe that a lot of things that I saw and paid attention to were because of what was on my mind and in my heart at the moment. To pretend that it wasn't there would be omitting a very important piece of information that might lead to the book being misleading almost.
So I am saying, "The observer of this story is a sad person. Voilà." It's a personal sadness, and probably it affects what the author sees.
BNR: You mentioned that you were in touch with your translator.
AB: Mmm-hmm, and my host.
BNR: And your host. Are there people within that group you feel particularly closest to now, that you feel, I'm going to go on to stay close to them? Or is that a large number of people?
AB: A large number of people. I am in touch with the translator mainly because I studied Fulfulde there, and I did learn to speak it, and I spoke Fulfulde there when I was with the Diakayatés. But I don't speak it any more. So when we speak on the phone . . . They don't really have SIM cards, so I can only speak to them when he visits them or they come to town and visit him, and I will call them. But I can't really say anything beyond, "I miss you. I love you. How are you? Is everybody healthy? Everybody's healthy here." So these are very perfunctory conversations.
But I feel like we're close friends — we have a relationship. These relationships are hard to compare to anything, because the work is so intense, and so hard, and we're at each other's throats very often because it's tiring, and I get frustrated and he gets frustrated. We go into situations that are uncomfortable for him, uncomfortable for me. It's like we're war buddies. I have the same relationships with people with whom I've been to war. These very close friendships that are forged in such ways that are very different from friendships that I would forge in the United States with my neighbors, for example, because we've been through stuff. The hardest thing for me when I work in communities that live communally is the communality. I am a very solitary person, and I really like my privacy, and there is no privacy in the Sahel. You sleep in public. You eat in public. You shit in public. Everything is in public. You walk away to the bush, but it's flat. So when people see you squat, they just look away. You can be far, but everybody knows everything. Everything you do, you do in public.
There is a lot of respect toward personal space, there is a lot of respect toward privacy. Nobody will come and start accosting you with conversation if they see that you want to be left alone. But you're still left alone within three feet of everyone else. So that was the most challenging for me. That was very difficult, and emotionally very exhausting, to be in company all the time.
So toward the end of my work in the Sahel, the Fulani, with whom I spent most of the time, they lived in the bush, which means in the savannah, and I would walk to the nearest town, which sometimes took three or four hours — and alone. These walks through the bush by myself were my private time. I would do them every two three, four days and then return the next day. I would transcribe my notes when I would get to town, and bring a change of clothes. But the main purpose of these walks was so that I had my own time, think without talking, not have to maintain my dignity . . . [Laughs] Just walk and be by myself. So that's the biggest challenge.
BNR: There's a real endurance quality to that. When you focus on the idea that you have to go off for a six-hour round trip in order just to have some private time.
AB: Well, I am abnormal. We are a communal animal. Humans are communal. This lifestyle in which some of the people on the planet decide that they must live isolated from one another, that's very recent. That's not how evolutionarily we are designed to be. We are designed to live in groups. Fairly large groups, smaller subgroups, and you know, a handful of very close, sleeping six to a mat or six to a sleeping space is typical for humans. My needs are not typical for humans. I am an aberration in this need for six hours . . . Why would you want that, six hours of privacy. It's boring. Who are you going to talk to while you're walking? Who is going to give you company while you're walking by yourself?
It was challenging to explain that need to my hosts. But they were extremely generous with me, and this need is not just with the Fulani — I work in a place where people are still very communal, so it's a familiar need.
BNR: There is a theme that I think this book is so marvelously always coming back around to: How do we know where we are? That answer that comes up with the Fulani is: 'We are here now.'
AB: We're here now. Yeah — it was a gift for me, because I have always worked in places where people would ask me, 'Don't you miss home? How can you be here for so long? You have children; don't you miss your children?' Leaving me feeling guilty, but also reminding me of feeling that I am somehow deficient. The Fulani approach, 'We're here now,' alleviates that need to feel deficient. Because 'we don't have a home, so it's fine to just be in the present and be here.' But it's also an aspirational act and an asymptotic act, I think, to just be OK with being here now. Because there is a lot of pressure on the planet to belong someplace. So it's a good thing to keep in mind and remember, and know that it's OK for someone.
—October 6, 2015
From the B&N Reads Blog
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