Walking with Abel (11 page)

O
usman and Boucary and two of Boucary’s friends from the Fulani village of Somena set out for Djenné when the sun was two palms above the east and already hot. Ten fastpaced miles across the fallow rice and millet fields on fast and practiced feet. The men carried their clubbed canes on their necks and rested their wrists on the ends of the canes, and Boucary also carried a black leatherette messenger bag with broken zippers. The men chattered nonstop and so rapidly that I understood very little of what they said. Something about cattle. Something about grass. Flycatchers and egrets sailed shadow-first to pick dainties out of fresh dung. A hoopoe flushed out of the reeds beside a drying marsh and flew off. Sufis in Central and South Asia believed the hoopoe to possess a level of enlightenment unattainable to humans, a sacred knowledge. Ousman and his fellow travelers paid this one no notice.

They passed a laundress bent over her wash outside a homestead, naked from the waist up. They passed and then were passed by and at last fell a few paces behind an oxcart in which several Bambara women and a man and some children lurched in time with the wobbly wheels. Chickens clucked in a cage of twigs and rope. One of the women carried in her lap a boombox that played a cassette recording of Bambara music and for a time the cowboys walked to the beat of kora thumb harps and djembe drums and the soku violin made out of a gourd strung with lizard skin and a single horsehair, until they hooked east across a harvested rice field and the cart kept bumbling south down the rutted road.

Before the first afternoon prayer the men arrived at the bridge over the Bani’s torpid arm that seeped past Djenné’s northern gate. A Bozo horsecart driver called out to Boucary from the shade of a tamarind tree, “Hey, Fulani, is this your white woman?” And Boucary said yes, she indeed is with us, she is our Fulani white woman named Anna from the family of Bâ, and all the men laughed and I waved and laughed back.

Each Monday cart drivers from the bourgou dropped off their passengers on this grassless hillock next to the town’s sole walled cemetery. They waited until the market closed, then they took their customers back to the hinterlands. All day local girls and women coursed among the drivers with coolers full of little plastic bags of homemade golden ginger beer and sweet carmine hibiscus tea and milky baobab juice, all frozen into heart-size nuggets of multicolored ice, and with trays of deepfried dough and spicy balls of peanut paste and cigarettes and oily boiled noodles. Kept the men fed, kept them company by cemetery walls.

Women were not allowed inside the cemetery. The Djennénke said such visits would upset them. But all about under the huckstresses’ feet and the feet of the off-duty drivers and the hooves of the draft animals and the wheels of the carts and under the stubbed-out cigarettes and the discarded greasy plastic bags and windblown fishbones and vegetable peels and rotting carcasses of livestock the dead lay in full view.

Human skeletons were everywhere. Inlaid into the laterite topsoil of the hillock. The bones eroded or weathered out of the earth’s matrix like macabre filigree, like grotesque cameos in barely raised relief. These dead were not buried on their sides with their heads pointing toward Mecca the way Islam prescribed but were strewn facedown and in fetal position and with arms and legs akimbo and their naked skulls in all directions as if they had been left to lie where death had struck them. Some of their crania were bashed in or missing. There were femurs resting completely ownerless and hand bones severed from the radii and ulnae but otherwise peculiarly intact, the trapezoids and the lunates still in place, as if they had set off on their own, scratching toward water or toward higher ground or toward some fragmentary salvation.

Who were these people? When did they live? How did they die? Had they been buried reverentially in clay jars in the pre-Muslim long ago, jars that then crumbled away with age and wind and flood and vandalism, regurgitating the bones into the light? Or had they been dumped into shallow mass graves that had eroded over time—and during which disaster that had left the undertakers no time to mourn? Or had they been so reviled, disgraced themselves so much among the living, that they had been left to rot and feed the hyenas and the vultures? Did they perish here all at once—struck down by what?—or one by one, shunned and shivering lepers driven beyond Djenné’s mote by the fearful townspeople, wasting away in slow agony while the town kept living, slapping laundry, trading in slaves and salt, stewing fish for dinner?

No one could tell me. In
Ta’rıkh al Sudan
the Songhai Empire’s chronicler al Sa’adi claimed that Djenné had withstood ninety-nine attacks and yielded to only one, led by Sunni ’Ali, the first Songhai king, who had starved the town into surrender in the late fifteenth century after a siege that lasted seven years, seven months, and seven days. But
Ta’rıkh al Sudan
documented this land’s history until only 1613. So many had fallen here since. During the Fulani and Tuareg insurgency against Moroccan rule in the seventeenth century. During the pitched battles against the Bambara of Ségou who pillaged the town and enslaved its women in the eighteenth. During Seikou Amadou’s jihad of 1818, the Toucouleur jihad that defeated Seikou Amadou’s empire in 1862, the French conquest of 1893. The Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem summed up his country’s history in his parabolic book
The Duty of Violence
: “The crowned rulers, forcing life down the throats of their subjects like the boa gagging on an antelope, rolled from obscure dynasties into those with more sibylline genealogies—each infamy more vicious than the one before.”

—

I asked and asked the elders of Djenné about the dead outside the cemetery walls. No one seemed to know who they had been. I asked learned men, but their expertise lay elsewhere: in the overgrazing of the bourgou’s dwindling pastures, in the feckless abuse of water resources, in keeping the town generator running at least six hours a day. I asked the griots. They repeated my name back to me. “Bâ. Bâ. Bâ.” We have invented over time so many ways to maim one another, to abandon one another in our finality, but what griots serenaded was life, not death. They had no use for skeletons.

I asked Oumar Tall, a direct descendant of al Hajj Oumar Tall, the Tijaniyya Sufi scholar who had led the Toucouleur jihad. Al Hajj had fought throughout the bourgou against the Massina Empire with bows and arrows daubed with snake venom, with spears and clubs, with broadswords and European firearms; in the three final battles alone seventy thousand men had died. Their bones had laid the foundations of the Toucouleur Caliphate that at its apex reached from Timbuktu to present-day Guinea. They underlay the routes of Fulani transhumance.

My Oumar Tall was the principal of the public primary school that stood on the spot where Sekou Amadou, having spurned the ancient Grande Mosquée as too ornate, had built his own truculent mosque. After al Hajj Oumar Tall’s forces had conquered Djenné, the Toucouleur began the demolition of the sheikh’s house of prayer. When the French seized Djenné in a battle that killed five hundred and ten Toucouleur soldiers, they dismantled what remained. The French set store in knowledge. After shipping to museums in Paris, for purposes of scientific inquest, the cadavers of some of the Toucouleur soldiers his troops had killed, invading French general Louis Archinard ordered that Sekou Amadou’s dilapidated mosque be remodeled into a school. He also, in a bout of orientalist sentimentality or to mollify his new African subjects, ordered for the old Grande Mosquée to be rebuilt. The construction clay for both projects was scooped out of the Bani’s floodlands—themselves a composition of so many misremembered dead. A hundred years later the school bore the name of Sory Ibrahim Thiocary, a university student tortured and killed for political dissent by the junta of Mali’s second postcolonial president, Moussa Traoré.

Conceived in violence, begotten in violence, baptized in violence. The school’s orderly walls of fired bricks may as well have been mortared with blood. Somehow—how? how?—the coagulated ignominy of its existence managed to accommodate shabby plywood desks, cloudy blackboards, acacia trees, a water pump, and a thousand prattling children. Many of the children were sickly. Each year five or six died of malaria, of tuberculosis, of hunger, usually the littlest ones.

Principal Tall was a tall and youthful man with the authoritative paunch of the well-to-do. We had dinner at Pygmée’s bar one night, fried perch and french fries and baobab juice under the stars. Fish and chips with the blood prince. He told me of battles and skirmishes that had besmirched the bourgou in the nineteenth century, stories he’d heard from his mentors and grandparents who were no longer alive. The stories sounded fablelike, apocryphal. He ended each with the words: “There were many dead.” He did not know whose skeletons lay outside the cemetery walls.

“Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields, / those still remembered, / and those long forgotten,” wrote Wisława Szymborska. The whole world was an ossuary. Tamarinds by the cemetery of Djenné contorted their baroque trunks over generations of all the dead and told no stories.

T
he enormous square before the Grande Mosquée was not large enough for the Monday trade. This was, in al Sa’adi’s words, “one of the greatest Muslim markets,” and it clogged the square and all the alleys around the mosque and by the mayor’s office and in front of the prison and the gendarmerie and adjacent to Oumar Tall’s school and tapered out barely a block away from the north gate where the powdered clay kicked up by tens of thousands of feet continued to tongue northward in orange swirls, twisting free of the streets and mixing with the exuberant discord of hundreds of pop tunes and suras and prayers and folksongs and billowing together dust and sound over the earthen bridge outside the gate like something escaped from a freakish foundry. The cowboys kept pace and entered this bedlam holding hands and head-on, the way men enter a stampede.

They threaded their narrow bodies between toppling wagons loaded with calabashes from Blâ and sky-high pyramids of bagged rice from Ségou and women spraddle-kneed on tarps among cornucopias of Ivorian pineapple and cabbage that grew right here on the Bani and girls peddling beaded bracelets that spelled
SOURVENI DEJENNE
and
LOVE
and women in brocade dresses on motorscooters and severe boys with pushcarts twice their size and pharma fraudsters promising larger buttocks and perkier breasts and paler skin and cure from malaria and migraine. They wove around false prophets hawking salvation under flights of mosque swallows, and tramps who grabbed at sleeves with silent fingers. “Reduced to mendicity by old age, blindness, or other infirmities,” René Caillié wrote almost two hundred years before of the beggars by the Grande Mosquée. How old the hands of Djenné’s alms-seekers?

They pushed past matrons in heavy golden hoop earrings who had strapped babies to their backs with embroidered cloth. Girls bargaining over basketfuls of smoked catfish curled head-to-tail into elegant teardrops. Slender young women carrying dull jewels of gum arabic on pewter trays. Tinsmiths. Pop-up tanneries. They stopped abruptly and oblivious to the exasperated crowd—“Eh, Fulani, get a move on!” “Eh? Bush clod!” “Goddamn cowherds!”—to greet other cowboys they had not seen since their last visit to the market and to flirt in passing with coy Fulani women swaying under calabashes of sour milk, and under the flapping tarps of the fabric rows they paused to finger and squint at bolts of indigo and iceblue and cobalt, because blue was the color Fulani men preferred for their boubous. They squeezed past onion traders and the women who spooned tomato paste out of one-liter cans into small plastic sachets to sell for ten cents apiece and legume traders who rattled scoopfuls of wormy local beans into calabashes, and past a teenage girl who was dunking Fulani shoes in a bucketful of suds, rubbing entire crops of shoes strung together in the soap, then tossing them onto a tarp where they would remain clean of dust for the next two minutes. They bought tiny plastic bags of frozen ginger beer spiced with chili flakes and bit off the polyethylene corners and sucked out the sugary slush. They inquired from the bootleggers about new recordings by particular Fulani griots from Burkina Faso and Mopti. After an hour or so at the market, when his eyes stung from the dust and his head throbbed with the overwhelming volume of the city and the olfactory cacophony of freshly cut mint and the sour nag of shea butter and the sweet piney rot of mangoes and the metallic reek of fresh fish, Ousman strode into a photographer’s shop to the north of the mosque.