Walking with Abel (23 page)

Oumarou continued:

“When I was very young there were no farms between here and Senossa, only grass for cows, and very few people. Now, as you see, there are a lot of people, a lot of rice farms. The country is changing, so I do believe the people who say in a hundred years we will have to live in towns.” He paused. He slurped his
sombi
out of a scuffed purple plastic bowl.

“On the other hand, when my brothers and I were growing up we heard stories that the time would come when all of us would move to the town and the cows would just move on their own. So it is a very old story, Anna Bâ. And we are still here.”

T
he next day Sita Dangéré walked to Somena to farewell some friends and came back with a small black plastic bag full of laminated identity cards about the length of a thumb. The Diakayatés turned the cards in their hands, puzzled over them. They could not read what the cards said. They could not understand what the cards meant.

I read out loud.

“
RÉPUBLIQUE DU MALI. UN PEUPLE UN BUT UNE FOI.
” One people one goal one faith. The Diakayatés sniggered. Eh? How could they have the same goal as the Bozo, the same goal as the Bambara who were about to drive them out of the bourgou for a whole season?

“Go on.”

Below, the name of the bearer and of the bearer’s parents, the date and place of his or her birth. Profession: cattle herder. Domicile: Ouro Ali, the district to which Doundéré and Dakabalal belonged.

“Ouro Ali? What? Our domicile is the bush. We are nomads! The government is so stupid, it knows nothing. Go on.”

Fingerprint. Gender. Photo.

“Look at this!” Isiaka held up a card. “This doesn’t look like my wife at all! What does it say, Anna Bâ?”

“Mayrama Sankari. Born 1963. This means she’s fifty years old.”

“That’s not even my wife’s name. Her name is Fatoumata. And she can’t be fifty. How could they get both her name and her picture wrong? How would they even have her photo? My wife has never had a picture taken in her life!”

Bomel pointed at the corner of a card.

“What’s this, with different colors?”

“It’s the flag of Mali.”

“Mali?” said Oumarou. “I keep hearing people say Mali, Mali, Mali, but I don’t know what that means. I know that when I herd my cows and I end up in Burkina Faso I am no longer in Mali. I know Côte d’Ivoire is not in Mali. I know that here it is Mali. But tell me, what is Mali?”

“
Mali
is the Bambara word for ‘hippo’!” said Yaya. And so it was.

Sita Dangéré said:

“What do we do with these cards, Anna Bâ?”

“You use them to vote for president.” After a year of coup d’états, Mali was holding a presidential election in July. To ensure a turnout that would legitimize the next president, the interim government in Bamako had ordered that the cards be issued to everyone on the books, free of charge. Ousman did get his ID after all. But Sita Dangéré was displeased.

“Vote? Why do they want me to vote? If they need me to vote they have to give me something. They give me something and I’ll vote. But they aren’t giving me anything. The candidates only want us for the votes. When they become presidents they never come by to say hello. I don’t like that.”

“When’s the vote?” asked Oumarou.

“Toward the end of Ramadan.”

“Well, we’ll be far away by then.”

“God willing, we will.”

The Fulani were virtuoso escape artists. No government-issued laminated piece of plastic could contain their identity.

—

Oumarou laid out his plan. First he and the family would travel to Ballé, where Hassan was waiting with the herd. It was an easy place to live. There was a river for the cows to drink, and, after it rained some, grass. It was a four-hour walk from Djenné, where the women could sell their buttermilk. But after the rains began in earnest the cows would not be able to stay near Ballé because they would get stuck in the mud and drown, and, on top of that, there were many farms and many mosquitoes. Oumarou planned to stay near Ballé for two or three weeks. When it became very wet he and his family would move to Hayré and spend the rest of the rainy season there.

Hayré was at elevation and had no natural waterholes. The market was far away from the campsite. So was the well. But there were few farms the cows could trample and no mosquitoes and the women could trade buttermilk in nearby villages. The villagers in Hayré, the farming people called Bwa, were not Muslim. They were animists, fetishists. They ate dogs and donkeys. They ate pigs. Some even made fetishes out of humans. You could not go into their villages at night because they would kill you and eat you.

Amadou and Kajita listened to their grandfather with their mouths open, stupefied and enthralled by the outrageous and exciting horrors that lay ahead.

T
he family spent the last days in the bourgou in preparations for the move.

Ousman went to check on his father’s animals outside Ballé and returned with a report, in order of importance: A cow went mad and stopped allowing her calf to nurse. Another calf refused to let its mother go, which made it difficult to milk her. A bull gored a heifer and he and Hassan had to stitch a piece of a calabash into the cow’s belly to prevent the guts from spilling out. There had been no rain in Ballé and still no grass but some Fulani already had begun to arrive. Oumarou’s younger brother al Hajj Saadou was there and in good health,
al ham du lillah
, and looking forward to the reunion. Sita Dangéré’s son Allaye, the newlywed, had arrived in Ballé safely with Sita’s cattle.

Fanta walked to Weraka and Wono to shop for a hundred kilos of rice and fifty kilos of millet with which to feed the family during the early weeks of transhumance. She returned from her trip noshing on a small smoked fish she had found on the ground on her walk home, but otherwise empty-handed. Just like the nomads, the bourgou’s farmers had been studying the sky, and they clung to last year’s harvest because they were not sure there would be any this year. Eighty miles to the north, international relief agencies were distributing bags of sorghum and rice seeds, but there were no distributions of the kind around Djenné. Fanta found the farmers’ reasoning inadequate. “Black people are like cows,” she snapped. “They know nothing.” She told Ousman he would have to walk all the way to Senossa or Djenné to buy grain. Then she stretched out on a mat and rested her right arm across her eyes and fell asleep immediately. Oumarou looked at her with concern and disapproval at once.

“She tires quickly. I always tell her: As you get older you mustn’t work very hard and walk very far.”

“But you,” I said, “you yourself just hiked to Djenné and back in one day, and you’re older than her.”

“Because I know I can.”

I walked to Somena and bought a large honeycomb from an itinerant rimaibe tradeswoman and borrowed a lidded enamel pot from one of Fanta’s distant relatives who lived in the village to carry the honey to the camp. The land stretched in steamy pastures and diffracted in mirages and in the foreground grasshoppers clicked in and out of tall charred grass that flanked quadrate fields. The road was barely dampened by rain but milky puddles stood where the clay was hard and unabsorbing. There were snakes. The people I greeted in the village and along the road all asked the same question: “Has it rained where you are coming from?” “The same as here,” I told them, and we clicked our tongues in empathy and communal worry.

—

The day before departure Ousman’s father-in-law brought on his motorcycle Ousman’s wife, Bobo, and their two sons, and everyone at the camp wondered at baby Afo, how plump he was, how big. Afo Bocoum, too, stopped by to bid the Diakayatés farewell. Both men were dispatching their herds to the desert border with Mauritania with hired hands, and they sat on mats drinking tea with Oumarou and Sita Dangéré and fretting about the unpredictable world around them.

“The marabouts say the year will be good.”

“Yes, but the marabouts never say that any year will be bad.”

“Last year the rain began on the sixth of June,” said Afo. He was an intermediary between the ancient and the modern, and knew how to express time in both idioms with equal ease. “This is already the first of July and the rain still has not begun. We’re all worried.”

“Yes, and also we are very worried about the war. I’ve heard stories of rebels up north confiscating cattle from the Fulani.”

“Everybody is worried about the war and the rain.”

“It would be better to have guns.”

“Guns won’t help you if there is no rain.”

“If al Nashira comes and there isn’t a lot of rain on the first day, it means the year will be pretty dry,” said Bobo’s father, who had a beautiful salt-and-pepper beard and wore clean new clothes and spoke delicately, with the easy elegance of wealth. Al Nashira, Gamma Capricorni, a giant star whose Arabic name meant “the lucky one,” “the bearer of good tidings,” was beginning her thirteen-day tenure in the sky that Friday.

“Yes. God willing it will rain on that day.”

Two years earlier, a drought had pushed more than eighteen million people in the Sahel to the brink of starvation. Tens of thousands had famished to death. The Fulani in the bourgou had fared decently that year, considering. Some relatives had died but people died every year, such was God’s will. Bobo’s father had spent four hundred dollars—the price of an average bull—on cottonseed to feed his cattle. The men talked about whether they would have to buy cottonseed this year and how much the cottonseed would cost. The price kept going up. Then they talked about the first time they had ever had to buy cottonseed, during the drought of 1985. Bobo’s father said many of his cows had been so weak that year he’d had to pry open their mouths and palm the cottonseed onto their tongues to feed them. He had lost a hundred cows then. Ten had died in one day after a light rain, of hypothermia.

Oumarou, who had lost most of his herd during that drought, hundreds of cows, said nothing. Ousman had driven the last milch cow to Ballé two days earlier, and without milk the old man felt lightheaded, dizzy, untethered from the land that he had learned by heart and by feel but that was always changing. He stood up and shook Amadou out of his blanket and walked off to relieve himself. On the way he tripped on a stick Fanta kept by the hearth to use as a poker, or to throw at goats that ambled too close to her cooking, and it rattled on hard clay a lonesome warning, like a gong.

Above the men the sky churned with indecision. It contained distant stormcells and billowing low rainclouds and mare’s tails and high-pitched blue, like blown glass, and, to the west, a golden sun prying open a lidded blackness, and a few fingers above that the whitest whirl of nimbostratus. In the east a double rainbow arched. The Fulani name for a rainbow was the Road of Fatoumata Bintou ya Rasoul Allaye—the road of Fatima bint Mohammad, the beloved daughter of the Prophet, the mother of his only descendants. A road before the road seemed to be a good sign.

—

The women had begun to take things apart. Fanta packed the makings of future matting into a gunnysack. Bomel and Bobo, who walked around in a dress torn at the chest so that her right nipple showed, were fitting plastic and tin bowls into blue and black plastic bags. Hairatou pounded millet to mix with curds and hot pepper into the dry makings of
chobbal
for the family to take on their journey and dilute on the road with whatever water they could find. Then she turned a castiron cooking pot upside down, sprinkled it with sand, climbed on it in green plastic shoes, and shuffled, balancing, engrossed, hiking up her skirt to the knee, polishing away the soot.

Sita Dangéré had dismantled his wife’s kitchen shelter to fashion out of the reeds a cage for her chickens, and Sita Louchéré had pulled down the thatch to fortify his own hut against rain. Oumarou and Sita Dangéré would travel to Hayré together with their families, but Sita Louchéré and Isiaka and their kin would stay for a few more weeks and then travel north, to the Sahara, or west, toward a town called Sin, twenty-five miles away. The decision would be Isiaka’s, because he was older. I asked him if he had a preference.