“They also brought missionaries who brought doctors, health programs, and vaccinations,” Don said.
The car was quiet a moment. No one could argue against health programs.
Toubacou
, Fulfuldé for “doctor,” had been a revered word until it eventually came to mean “white person.”
“But remember Jomo Kenyatta,” Adiza said. She waited, smiling, until everyone in the car except Hamidou turned to look at her. She adjusted a cornrow of hair twisted up in thin black wire. “‘When the missionaries came, the Africans had the land and the Christians had the bible. They taught us to pray, and our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land, and we had the bible.’” Adiza smiled. “That’s what Jomo Kenyatta said.”
“Jomo Kenyatta.” Djelal nodded.
Hamidou slowed the truck as we passed through a small village. At the base of a nearby hill, a man hacked at an acacia bush with a machete. Several women and girls walked a footpath carrying large bunches of sticks on their heads. This was how it had happened. Health improved, fewer children died, and the population grew. More people chopped down more trees for houses and cooking. More animals ate the vegetation.
“When we got independence, many of the French stayed. But we governed ourselves.” Djelal smiled for the first time that day. “For years after, we produced enough food to feed the people and export what was left over.” His smile fell back into its usual upside down position. “But the balance had been broken.” He spit out the window. “Then came the Great Drought.”
Hamidou nodded at the windshield. “Gueno.”
“Who’s Gueno?” I said.
“In the beginning, the sun was the eye of Gueno. Gueno created the mountains, but they were too soft, so Gueno removed the sun from his eye socket and created a one-eyed king. This king hardened the mountains with his gaze.” Hamidou was my walking reference for everything that meant Fulani.
“The rain stopped for ten years,” Nassuru said, as if describing a nightmare. “I was a small boy when the first rainy season did not come.”
The land, stripped of its trees and shrubs, dried up under the relentless gaze of Gueno’s eye. Larger and larger circles of deforested land spread around the villages like ripples in a pond.
“Crops were gone. Cattle herds were gone.” Djelal shook his head. “Tuareg and Fulani were begging in the streets of Ouaga.”
A sigh settled into the car. Out the window, rust-colored water filled the riverbeds. At least the rain had returned. We passed a line of women balancing bunches of sticks and wide branches on their heads. A short woman carried a tree branch as big around as a trunk. The branch was so long it stretched about five feet in front and behind her, bouncing as she walked. Hamidou slowed for a herd of goats that tore grass out by the roots on both sides of the road. The rains had returned, but none of the vegetation survived long enough to reforest the land.
Everybody was killing the land and, in the process, slowly killing themselves. People had tipped the balance and turned a once fertile area into a harsh, forbidding place. The inertia of it all, the sheer magnitude of the task was so heavy, so overwhelming, I wanted to lie down, close my eyes, and wake up in a place where hope still promised possibility.
Wagadu is sometimes invisible because the indomitability of men has overtired her, so that she sleeps.
The truck splashed and slipped through mud and potholes, squeaking on its springs; a battered, rusted old geezer of a truck. It wasn’t the years. It wasn’t even the mileage. It was the place. I rubbed a patch of dry sky on my arm. If I stayed here long enough, I’d end up looking like the truck.
We drove over a small rise and the first huts of Sambonaye came into view. Entering the eastern edge of town, we passed a few houses and stopped at the top of a hill.
Sambonaye clustered at the edge of the plain and spilled down a gentle hillside. A dirt road divided the town into two even sides. The hill ended in a valley where fields of millet fanned out to one side. On the other, cattle grazed on new grass. The millet looked like corn, but was planted randomly rather than in rows. Here, as at home, knee high by the fourth of July was a good sign.
Fati, Adiza, and I exited the truck and walked down the hill to a patch quilt of small gardens where women hand watered leafy rows of beans, groundnuts, and lettuce from tin buckets. As the women dipped and poured, the sharp/sweet scent of plant and soil reminded me of irrigation sprinklers spewing hundreds of gallons of water over summer fields of corn, wheat, and alfalfa. Here, each portion of precious water was carefully trickled onto the base of each plant. Part of me wished they were trees. But people can’t eat trees; they can only burn them.
FDC had loaned seeds to the women in early June. The young plants were a wonderful sight—tangible evidence that our project was making a difference. Hopefully, the women would grow enough food to supplement their families’ diets, keep enough seed for next years’ gardens, and reimburse FDC the original seed loans.
Adiza and I followed Fati back into the village until we came to an open area where several women waited in the shade of a large neem tree. One woman went off to spread word of our arrival. After about fifteen minutes, a large group of women had gathered, everyone chattering. Some held babies, others arrived with small children in tow. They were as noisy as a cottonwood tree full of ricebirds. A very old woman with black braids curling along both sides of her long face shook our hands. Her name was Emma. Adiza spread a large reed mat in the shade and we sat facing the women.
Emma welcomed us in Fulfuldé, the group quieted, and Fati began the meeting. The women sat like folded Popsicle sticks, their legs straight out, their toes pointing upward. The soles of their feet, beige against their black skin, were thick, cracked, and callused. Thick brass bracelets encircled their upper arms that were smooth and muscular from hours of lifting and thrusting the heavy wooden pestles used to pound millet every day. They wore
pagnes
, some bright with color, others faded to the same beige as the houses. Babies suckled breasts while the older children listened, moving their eyes from one speaker to the next. One older woman spoke to Fati, slapping one palm with the other and ending with her palm outstretched.
Fati sighed and turned to Adiza and me. “She wants to know if we brought the
cadeaus
.”
“It’s the nuns,” Adiza said. “Since the drought, they’ve been distributing gifts of oil and milk powder to the women in the villages. Now, the women don’t want to come to a meeting unless we bring them their
cadeaus
.” The French word for “gift,”
cadeau
had come to mean handouts.
“But now that they’re growing peanuts,” I said, “can’t they make their own oil?”
“The Fulani have only recently started to use oil.” Fati explained that traditionally, the Fulani made butter from the milk of their cows. But since the drought, milk production had been too insufficient to make butter. “Now, they get their oil from relief agencies or go to the market in Dori to buy it.”
“Why not learn to make their own?” I asked.
Fati and Adiza exchanged a glance and Fati translated my question.
Several older women shook their heads.
“They say oil production is done by the lower classes, the Rimaybé and the Mossi.” Adiza lifted her shoulders as if to say, “How can we change their culture?”
Fati talked in Fulfuldé for several minutes, explaining that now that the Great Drought was over, FDC wanted to work with the women so that they would not have to rely on relief agencies for their food. She cited the seed loans and the new gardens as an example.
Several of the older women clicked their tongues and sucked air through their teeth to show disappointment. Amidst the buzz of voices, a few got up and left. The younger women stayed.
Fati spoke again, her sentence ending with an upward lift of her voice. She asked the question we were asking in all the villages. What, then, was their greatest need?
All the women began talking at once, their hands and faces an explosion of movement like a cloud of birds suddenly lifting off a branch and quickly resettling among the leaves.
Adiza translated, “They’re complaining of having to walk miles out into the bush to find enough wood for their cook-fires.”
Fati asked if they would be willing to try a new kind of smokeless mud stove that would burn fuel more efficiently than the traditional three-rock method. Using less wood would mean fewer trips on foot in search of wood and cow dung, and in the long run, less deforestation.
Emma spoke to the women and an excited discussion ensued. I couldn’t understand, but the rapid, clipped sounds brought the language to life the way staccatos and a fast tempo enlivened a Mozart sonata. The discussion went on for a while and I entered my zone, a kind of daydream to pass the time. The memory in my fingertips touched the cool ivory of piano keys, and a Mozart sonata sang in my head—the one for four hands I had played with Aunt Florence.
Emma raised her finger for silence, and I saw Aunt Ethel rounding us all up from her back yard to come in for supper. Emma had the same weathered skin of Ethel and Florence, yet, like them, seemed ageless. The spark of humor that gave Aunt Ethel an air of perpetual youth also gleamed in the black irises of Emma’s eyes. My aunts’ familiar expressions suddenly appeared here and there on the animated faces of the village women. Their melodious blend of chatter and laughter transported me to the table beneath Aunt Nonnie’s kitchen window, the crabapple tree outside green and bushy from the long days of summer. My aunts all sat in a circle, shelling garden peas, talking about their children and their lives. I smelled freshly perked coffee and just-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls. I wished I could be there with them, just for a moment.
What would they think of these Fulani women? My aunts had grown up in a church that claimed all black people were descendants of Cain. If they were actually here among them, would they believe these women so cursed? I wanted my aunts to be there, to see into the hearts of these women of the Sahel, their sisters.
But an image came—my father shaking his head at all this wasted time among people who weren’t my own kind. The air pocket that buffeted my heart deflated. It was a place full of black people. My aunts would never come here. They lived in their Idaho valley, insulated from the rest of the world by miles of farmland and volumes of the Book of Mormon. The Sahel wasn’t the only place that had lost its goddess.
Sleep came to Wagadu for the first time through vanity, for the second time through falsehood, for the third time through greed, and for the fourth time through dissension.
Noon approached, the temperature rose, and the shadow of the neem tree shrank away to the tight space directly below the branches. The women agreed to make the required amount of mud bricks and find two village masons who would learn to build the stoves. On our next trip, we would train the masons, build several prototype stoves, and demonstrate how to use them.
Because it was
Ramadan
, we skipped our usual village lunch of macaroni and canned fish and headed back to Dori.
“What can we do about this
cadeau
problem?” I asked.
“It’s the reason the women haven’t reimbursed us in the past,” Adiza said.
“That, and the fact that their husbands want them to sell the extra seed, then won’t let them keep any of the money.” Fati leaned across Nassuru and spit out the window.
“Why won’t they let them keep the money?”
“There are six things a Fulani does not trust,” Nassuru said. “One of them is a woman.”
Hamidou, Nassuru, and Djelal all laughed. Fati and Adiza both sucked air through their teeth and looked out the windows.
Hamidou slowed as we approached a wash filled to its brim with water. He stopped the truck. Water surged over the cement culvert we normally used as a bridge.
“Another is a river,” Nassuru said and bent to untie his shoes.
Never mind he was a prince, it fell to Nassuru, being the youngest male in the truck, to take off his shoes, roll up his pants, and get out. Stepping carefully, he poked a long stick into the water in front of him to find the edge of the culvert. Following slowly behind, Hamidou steered the truck across. Water swished around us, seeping through the bottom cracks of the doors. We reached the other side, and Nassuru got back into the car.
Fati was still frowning.
“So,” I kept my eye on Fati, “a woman and a river. What else?”
“A knife, a string, and darkness.” Nassuru put his shoes on. “We name a snake ‘string’ so as not to call him to us.”
“A prince cannot be trusted,” Fati said, “like all men in power, like husbands.”
“A knife can cut leather, but can also cut the skin.” Hamidou directed his explanation at the windshield. “Darkness comes swiftly and plays tricks on the eyes, a river floods, and women…”
Even Don laughed this time, the traitor.
“Why not women?” I said. “Even Muhammad asked his wives for advice.”
“Women are like a river and darkness,” Fati said. “Men are afraid of them.” Fati and Adiza both spit out the window.
Two stops to dig the wheels out of the mud and three hours later, we drove into Dori very hungry and very cranky.
That evening, I walked toward the central square to join Luanne and Don at the Militaire Bar. The sun straddled the western hills, and a half-moon looked down from high in the sky. The market was alive with the hum of preparations. Soon, when the sun set, the daily fast would end and everyone would eat.
Kerosene lamps and open fires dotted the central square. Off-duty soldiers stationed in Dori’s small military outpost strolled toward the Militaire Bar. Shopkeepers and civilian men in long robes conducted their evening business, talking in groups and walking arm in arm. Bands of small boys ran about, pushing long sticks connected to toy cars of wire with rubber wheels that wobbled over the sand. The sky turned from orange to indigo.
Laughter spilled from inside the Militaire Bar, a small building on the eastern edge of the square. Nearby, a large beehive-shaped oven and two open fire pits steamed with the aromas of fresh bread and roasted meat. My mouth watered.