We reached Bamako at four in the morning. The station was full of people, a dense crowd stood on the platform. A band of feverish boys burst into our compartment: Madame’s crew, come to carry her purchases. I walked out of the compartment. Suddenly, I heard a man shouting. Pushing my way in that direction, I came upon a Frenchman in a torn shirt sitting on the platform, moaning and cursing. He had been robbed of everything the second he stepped off the train. All he had left was the handle of his suitcase, and now, brandishing this scrap of leather, he was shaking his fist at the world.
Salt and Gold
In Bamako I live in a guest house called the Centre d’Acceuil, run by Spanish nuns. The rooms are cheap — a bed, mosquito netting. The bad thing about the Centre d’Acceuil is that although there are ten rooms for rent, there is only one shower. Moreover, it is constantly occupied these days by a young Norwegian, who came here not realizing just how hot it gets in Bamako. The African interior is always white-hot. It is a plateau relentlessly bombarded by the rays of the sun, which appears to be suspended directly above the earth here: make one careless gesture, it seems, try leaving the shade, and you will go up in flames. For newcomers from Europe, there is also a psychological factor at work: they know they are in the depths of hell, far from the sea, from lands with a gentler climate, and this feeling of distance, of exile, of imprisonment, makes life here even harder for them to bear. The Norwegian, after several suffocating, sweltering days, decided to leave everything and return home. But he had to wait for the plane. And the only way he could survive until then, he concluded, was by never coming out from under the shower.
There is no question: the temperatures here during the dry season are overwhelming. The street where I live is dead still from early morning. People slump motionlessly against walls, in passageways, beneath entrance gates. They sprawl in the shade of eucalyptus and mimosa trees, beneath a great, spreading mango and a tall, flaming amaranthine bougainvillea. They sit on a long bench in front of the bar run by a Mauritanian, and on empty crates in front of the corner grocery shop. Despite having observed them all at length on several occasions, I have been unable to determine what exactly it is that they are doing. Perhaps that’s because they are not doing anything. They don’t even talk. They resemble people sitting for hours in a doctor’s waiting room. Although this is perhaps not the best comparison, because in the end the doctor will arrive. Here no one arrives. No one arrives, no one leaves. The air trembles, undulates, stirs restlessly, like over a kettle of boiling water.
One day a fellow countryman from Valencia, Jorge Esteban, arrived to stay with the sisters. He had a travel agency back home and was driving around West Africa collecting materials for a tourist brochure. Jorge was a cheerful, merry, energetic man, naturally convivial. He felt at home everywhere, at ease with everyone. He spent only one day with us. He paid no heed to the scorching sun; the heat only seemed to energize him. He unpacked a bag full of cameras, lenses, filters, rolls of film, and began walking around the street, chatting with people, joking, making various sorts of promises. That done, he placed his Canon on a tripod, took out a loud referee’s whistle, and blew it. I was looking out the window and couldn’t believe my eyes. Instantly, the street filled with people. In a matter of seconds they formed a large circle and began to dance. I don’t know where the children came from. They had empty cans, which they beat rhythmically. Everyone was keeping the rhythm, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. People woke up, the blood flowed again through their veins, they became animated. Their pleasure in this dance, their happiness in finding themselves alive again, was palpable. Something started to happen in this street, around them, within them. The walls of the houses moved, the shadows stirred. More and more people joined the ring of dancers, which grew, swelled, and accelerated. The crowd of onlookers was also dancing, the whole street, everyone. Colorful bou-bous, white djellabahs, blue turbans, all were swaying. There is no asphalt or pavement here, so billows of dust soon began to rise above the dancers, dark, thick, hot, choking, and these clouds, just like ones from a raging fire, drew more people still from the surrounding areas. Before long the entire neighborhood was shimmying, shaking, partying — right in the middle of the worst, most debilitating and unbearable noontime heat.
Partying? No, this was something different, something bigger, something loftier and more important. You had only to look at the faces of the dancers. They were attentive, listening intently to the loud rhythm the children beat on their tin cans, concentrating, so that the sliding of their feet, the swaying of their hips, the turns of their arms, and the bobbing of their heads corresponded to it. And they looked determined, decisive, alive to the significance of this moment in which they were able to express themselves, participate, prove their presence. Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and important. They existed. They created.
All the while, Jorge was photographing. He needed pictures in which the street of an African town makes merry and dances, beckons and invites. Finally, he grew weary, stopped shooting, and with a gesture of his hand thanked the dancers. They stopped, adjusted their clothing, wiped off sweat. They talked, exchanged comments, laughed. Then they started to disperse, seek out the shade, vanish inside houses. Once again the street reverted to a still, scorching emptiness.
I was in Bamako because I wanted to see the war with the Tuareg. The Tuareg are eternal wanderers. But can one really call them that? A wanderer is someone who roams the world searching for a place to call his own, a home, a country. The Tuareg has his home and his country, in which he has lived for a thousand years: the interior of the Sahara. His home is just different from ours. It has no walls or roof, no doors or windows. There are no fences or walls, nothing that limits or confines. The Tuareg despises whatever hems him in, strives to demolish every partition, destroy every barrier. His country is immeasurable — thousands upon thousands of kilometers of burning sand and rocks, an immense, treacherous, barren expanse, which everyone fears and tries to bypass. Its border is where the Sahara and the Sahel end and the green fields, villages, and houses of the sedentary societies hostile to the Tuareg begin.
Wars have been waged between them for centuries. For often the drought in the Sahara is so severe that all the wells vanish, and then the Tuareg must wander with their camels beyond the desert, to the green regions, toward the Niger River and Lake Chad, to water and feed their herds and also to find a little something to eat.
The sedentary Bantu peasants treat these visits as invasions, raids, acts of aggression, hecatombs. The hatred between them and the Tuareg is fierce, because the latter not only burn villages and steal livestock but also enslave the villagers. The Tuareg, who are light-skinned Berbers, consider the black Africans a low and abject race of wretched subhumans. These, in turn, hold the Tuareg to be bandits, parasites, and terrorists, and wish that the sands of the Sahara would swallow them up once and for all. The Bantu have fought off two colonialisms in this part of Africa: the external French one and the intra-African colonialism practiced by the Tuareg, which has existed here for centuries.
The two societies, the settled, agricultural Bantu people and the restless, fleet Tuareg, have always had divergent philosophies. The source of strength, of life, for the Bantu is the land — the domain of the ancestors. The Bantu bury their dead in their fields, often in close proximity to their houses, and even beneath the floors of the huts in which they live. In this way, the one who has died continues symbolically to participate in the existence of the living, watches over them, advises, intervenes, blesses, or metes out punishments. The tribal, familial land is not only a source of livelihood, but also a sacred thing, the place from which man sprung and to which he will return.