Aldo Leopold, an influential ecologist and one of the first prophets of the environmental movement, wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” People sensitive to environmental issues usually find themselves in a richly textured world that is being ripped apart at every stitch and seam. Those with a global education bear the same burden. If you travel out past the relatively secure bubble of the first world, or read about what lies beyond, you see that the rich world of Thai food, salsa music and yoga is also a world of wounds. While violence and poverty circle the globe, one of the most wounded places on the planet is Africa. By some measures, Africa is not the poorest region in the world—East Asia gets that distinction. But Africa gains its reputation from its disturbing mix of poverty, violence, corruption, tribalism and lack of development. The images we see and the stories we hear tumble from this mix: stacks of dismembered bodies in Rwanda, gun-toting children in Sierra Leone, empty eyes and distended stomachs in Darfur, the ancient glacier on Kilimanjaro receding. I have been living in West Africa, the most consistently poor and underdeveloped part of the continent, for a year now. I have seen the wounds: Next to a friend’s compound lives a former soldier who was traumatized after killing people during an attempted coup in the 1980’s. He now walks around the village, limping and babbling. One of my language teachers once prefaced a conversation by saying “I have seen many bitter things in my life…” Her baby girl had died of malaria, then her husband took a second wife after she failed to conceive another child. I’ve loaned the equivalent of $15 to a friend so he could sit for his grade 10 exit exams. I’ve also felt the pulse of West Africa. Sitting on my porch at night I hear the clamor from a distant circumcision ceremony, the three drummers mixing their beats into a flurry that is muffled only slightly by the rows of concrete houses. Once at a program, I was sitting behind the drummers when, unexpectedly, the dancing Konkorong grabbed my arm and pulled me from my seat into the yard. Konkorongs are the local version of the “masked spirit” that was once central to cultures across West Africa. The spirit, dressed in shredded strips of red bark from head to toe, thrust me into the circle of dancers, laughing behind his veil of woody dreadlocks. Last week I held my own dance party: while I drummed on the stomach of my young friend Sophinda, three-year old Sibo danced on a prayer mat in the light of my headlamp, kicking up dust with her bare feet next to the spot where her mother Baana was just praying. Recently, I even began some first, tentative drum lessons with my rasta friend at the craft market. I can’t say I’ve found the beat yet. They are strange rhythms. I am as lost by the music’s triple-time pace as I am by Africa’s poverty and corruption. But, like a time-lapse photo of a busy, multi-colored market, I can see the paths being traced out by all these moving bodies. I see both the ragged lines of post-colonial countries trying to find their feet as they are shoved by the modern world, as well as the ecstatic dance lines of a continent on the move: dancing, driving, discovering its latent potential, its new global context. It’s the mixed rhythms of rain on the roofs of village huts, two beats entwined: the traditional thwap of the drops on thatch, and the modern snap of rain on tin. It’s the clink of Muslim prayer beads outside an international telecenter, the breath-like ebb and flow of a communal blessing sung in Arabic after committee meetings, the rev and jury-rigged rat-tat-tat of bush taxis queuing up in the car park, preparing for the long trek from The Gambia, the “smiling coast,” to Senegal, Guinea, or beyond. Africa is in no way a hermetically-sealed heart of darkness; it is millions of beating human hearts. While there is the slow and silent accrual of layers of plaque-like corruption, the disturbing murmurs of war, the arresting heart attacks of riots, there’s also rhythm, a vivacious beat apparent in the ebb and flow of humans suffering, striving, laughing, and loving beneath the mass of poverty, violence, and oppression. It’s a dynamic that is simultaneously dragged down and lifted buoyantly up by tradition, sent careening into disaster or connected to endless possibilities across the world by modernization. Here are some of the modern rhythms, and the ancient songs, as seen by a toubab — the African iteration of a Gringo — learning to drum and trying to dance.
* * *
As I write this, one of my favorite beats jams slowly above my head. The tap of rain on corrugate, back-beating the punctuated, rapping dialogue of the children calling out and laughing in the neighboring compound. In the row house across from mine I hear the high-hat clink-clink of spoons on enamel basins as my landlord’s family sits on their haunches around the food bowel for dinner: a communal basin of rice topped with cassava from the backyard garden, onions and potatoes imported from Senegal, and seasoned with MSG-laden “Jumbo.” The single bulb in the middle of the corrugate ceiling of my “parlor” casts a shadow across my laptop as I hang my body out the door into the cool breeze pushed by millions of raindrops—kamikaze drummers whose entire existence is for two beats: the tap on the roof and the sliding plop into the puddle under the eaves. There’s an occasional solo when the wind shifts or picks up, a flurry of beats against the side of the house, and the sighs – or laughter – as my host family shifts themselves further under the eaves. They’ll soon move inside, the house finally cooled by the rain, to watch Oprah or CNN on satellite. I’ll lock my doors soon, then wend my way through the puddles of the back streets to the raised black-topped highway. From there I’ll navigate beneath the unlit street lamps and persistent rain by the light of night-running bush taxis to my friends’ compound. I pass a few fluorescent-lit shops, the carcass of a taxi, one of the urban cassava farms. My friends are teachers and students and we have similar schedules that put our lunchtime at around 3:00. We therefore eat dinner well after dark. Seven or so of us share three basins of food in the un-lit compound, hunched over on broken chairs under the protective corrugate eaves. We eat with spoons in our right hands, flashlights in our left. Our spoons click in playful duels over cassava and spicy sweet potato. I live in a college town – the only college town in The Gambia, a tiny country of 1.4 million people. My mealtime routine is repeated by others around Brikama, students and immigrants from the provinces all finding thin paths through muddy streets and alleys, toting cloth-wrapped basins hired from a family. Crossing each others paths, we traverse mud and darkness each night to share dinner with classmates and friends. The rain will end in October just as the first school term begins, replacing the persistent humidity and puddles with blistering days and cool, 70-degree nights. It’s a two-toned rhythm of the seasons: a cycle of planting and school, humidity and heat.
* * *
For those of us living in the urbanized areas of The Gambia, – secondary school and university students, teachers, security guards, airline staff, NGO workers – travel back and forth between the commercial centers and the equivalent of the suburbs is often a way of life. Every afternoon as I “drop” from work I see the evening shift of security guards for the two main companies, Wakenhut and Uncle Sam’s, line up on the highway, bumming rides in cars or paying the 10 Dalasi fare (about 30 cents) to take them 15 miles to Banjul, the capitol, or Fajara, the commercial center, and Kanifang, the relatively up-scale ex-patriot, NGO and tourist neighborhood. The taxis and vans are privately owned, but we call it “public transport.” With no seatbelts, sketchy brakes, packed seats, crying babies, and occasional fistfights, “public transport” is a bland euphemism for “toubab character development.” For residents, it’s at worst a back-breaking inconvenience, and at best a means for remaining connected in an increasingly fragmented society. Many of my friends commute somewhere everyday. Keeba, who is descended from the historical leaders of the region around Brikama, the Bojangs, travels to his job as an airport security man. Ablie Senghor, who was born on the North Bank of the River Gambia, commutes everyday from Brikama to teach English at a secondary school. Alagi, who is from a small Wolof village call Niora two-thirds of the way up the country, takes a car to Kanifang every night to work as a private security guard. My co-workers at NARI, the National Agricultural Research Institute, most of them born up-country, commute every day from the population center in Serekunda to Brikama. Many of them travel regularly back to their villages on weekends. A trip up country usually requires a ride on a gele gele, a cracker-tin shaped European vehicle retrofitted with a top rack, gutted and refitted with additional seating, mercilessly reupholstered with minimally-padded benches, and then lengthened with a platform above the rear bumper for the apprentice to stand on and a ladder for him to clutch while he hangs off the back. When I walk to the car park for excursions to the provinces, I imagine my flip-flops applauding my courage. Each step brings a round of sharp but subdued golf claps – flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop. At the car park, you can pick your brand of vehicle – size, shape, color, potential for break down – but the product is essentially the same: bodies packed in an overlapping fashion, elbow on thigh, your back pressed against another’s side. The sardine comparison is staid but appropriate: the sticky-slimy sweatiness; the mysterious, muddy ooze between my toe and the binding of my flip-flop (now silent; no applause), and the smell of twenty-some odd humans + diesel + sour milk (tastes good; not so good when it spills on your leg) + sheep (thankfully lashed to the top). An old grandma usually sidles up next me, and though I feign indifference, I know this old women and I are going to be locked in silent and enduring conflict for the next four hours. I can manage to read on and off for most of the trip, though when the roads get bad not far outside of town, every word gets parsed by a pothole’s punch to the suspension system. My reading material, which is often about international boundaries and conflict, soon defines my own boundaries. Eight and a half by eleven inches, to be precise. Slowly, slowly, the vice grips are tightened. One journey upcountry I realized that what I was about to go through was formative and, frankly, funny. I fished a pen out of my bag and began to take notes inside the Newsweek I was reading. Here are some of the annotated gele gele transcripts. “Not far up the road, even before the pavement gives up and lets the wash-boarded dirt road have its way with us, I’m reminded of the story told by a friend, Eileen Sun, of her experience donating bone marrow. It was for a noble cause, a cancer study I think, and there was a check waiting for her at the receptionist’s desk. Likewise I am on a mission to Africa, here to help, and also knowing I get a small but handy check in hard currency when I’m done. The process of getting your marrow removed involves a very large needle, a very exposed position, and a painful jabbing into your pelvis. There are two blunt needles in my case, one, the flat thrust of my body weight upon my right haunch, the other, the metal flange below the window, grinding into the top of my left hip. My body is wrapped around this metal protuberance, my spine curved, my head against the window. I’ll have to be screened for scoliosis when I’m done with this little jaunt up-country. My favorite people in The Gambia are normally the old ladies. They always greet with big smiles, laugh but don’t condescend, and rarely ask to go to America. But sitting inside a gele-gele is like being inside a foreign embassy – it’s a different country, different rules. I’ve seen old women push, pull and cuss during the frantic rush to get onto transport at busy car parks. Here in the gele gele it’s a more subtle plot, as my bench mates use small shifts in body position when we take corners to take more of my space. It’s a sick sort of land grab. None of us are comfortable on this welded bench, but soon I have the least room of all. As my knees get pushed in, the corners of my magazine curl under, and I lose what I thought was my inalienable right: right to read.”
* * *
Despite the absurd discomfort of these trips, people take them all the time. Gambians practically commute from the urban areas back home to the provinces for holidays, naming ceremonies, circumcision rites, and funerals. My coworker Yankuba Sanneh will head two-thirds of the way up the country—an eight hour trip—for a long weekend to see his wife. An eight-hour drive in the U.S. will get you from Seattle to Boise, about 500 miles. In The Gambia, it will get you in the neighborhood of 150 miles and requires a bone marrow donation. Though many people migrate to the urban areas in Kombo, or beyond, the provinces are still central to people’s lives and identities. Family, history, holidays, and providing remittances back home are all values central to the culture here. When you begin to emigrate away from the village, these values require return trips, and a slow, circular migration from village to town. My friends who are secondary school students return during the rainy season to work on the farm. One of them, Saidou Baa traveled south to Guinea Bissau to work on his family’s cashew plantation. This strong identity of place, family, and tradition is apparent on many levels. One of the daily expressions of place identity is apparent is in how people from different parts of the country joke with each other. Every province has a “joking relationship” with another province, often one across the river. The African name I’ve been given is Ensa Darboe, and I spent time in the province of Kiang, so I am known as a Kiangka. Almost every day at work, one of the drivers, Bolong, yells: “Eh, Kiang mang beteyaa. Liyo te jee. Kiangkoolu be domoroo baa!,” which means “Kiang is no good. There is no honey there. The people of Kiang are always eating—they eat too much!” Bolong is from Baidibou, across the river from Kiang, so I always yell back “Wo maankee toñaa ti. Yaa long ko Baidibou mang beteyaa!” — “That’s not true. You know that baidibou is no good!” Even if you were born in Kombo, you would still claim your family’s traditional home. My friend Ebrimmah Jammeh was born and has spent his entire life here in Kombo. But he always claims Jara, the destination of the same character-building ride up country that I described, as his home. I always kid him about this. “Ebrimmah, you’re not from Jara, you’re a Kombo boy.” “Eh, Ensa, but nobody says they are a Kombanka. Only if both your mother and your father were born here. It’s about culture. Me, I like my culture.” He always smiles broadly when he says this, and I know he means it, even if the cost of enjoying his culture is a four-hour ride to one of the backwaters of the country. Despite the migration to the coast and the fragmentation of the country—the whole continent in fact—the cultural roots remain deep. People chat about traveling to America all the time, but they do it in their native language. I was once in a meeting to discuss research agendas at NARI. The director of research, Doctor Manneh, started to tell a simple joke in English, and switched to Mandinka, his native tongue, to finish it. I felt it was significant that a man who did his PhD on rice genetics in The Netherlands, where my ancestors happened to have come from, still expresses himself in Mandinka when he wants to make people laugh, even with an off-hand remark. Mandinka is part of a relatively small language group. In a world being integrated by global travel and the ubiquity of English, probably less than 3 million people could understand his joke.
* * *
Africa is not just moving internally. It’s spreading out. The first Africans were scattered at gunpoint in the black bellies of slaving ships. Today, some migrate north across the Sahara and tempt the sea willingly to cross to Spain. Most who join the African diaspora do so by finding schooling in America or the UK, a friend or lover to take them to Sweden, or work in mineral-rich Guinea or Sierra Leone. America, however, is always El Dorado. Everyone knows someone who is an immigrant — some legal, some illegal — to America. Seattle, where I went to school, is full of Brikama’s brothers, cousins, and friends. My host sister’s husband lives just south of Seattle. The most popular Mandinka singer, Jaliba Kuyateh even has a song about Seattle. Apparently, he makes regular trips to play for the Gambian community there. He lives just down the street from me in Kombo, but if I don’t catch one of his shows here at Jokors, the club within earshot of my house, I know that I’ll get to see him back in my hometown. Jaliba plays traditional and modern renditions of Mandinka songs and beats. The most popular musicians, however, are the Senegalese pop musicians. The most popular song in The Gambia since I arrived is “Partir” by Pape Diouf, a fresh-faced star who has captured the spirit of Gambian youth. Partir is the French verb meaning to go, and the character in the song sings in Wollof about the choice he’s made: he loves a woman, but he has a visa. He will leave for work. “Bilii, Mangee dem,” he sings – “I swear, I’m going.” The song is ubiquitous. It blares in cabs steered by dread-headed rastas, from salons and bars in Brikama, from the lungs of twelve year old girls dancing in their compound yard. AM, FM, CD, tape, CD car-battery powered radio, car tape deck, walkman. The lilting dut dutty dut dutty dut dutty dut of the talking drum solo is unmistakable, the sentiments of its lyrics seemingly universal. I don’t understand much of the song. I’ve learned Wolof enough from my food-basin-mates that I can hear “spare me a visa,” “work,” and “I’m going.” Its theme is summed up in a punchy bridge following the drum solo. I can’t translate it properly, but I’m told that in one section, Diouf sings, “will you come, or will I come.” Love will either bring him back to Africa, or will bring her to the West, but now, it is time to go abroad. Some days you don’t see the poverty here in Africa. There are all the trappings of America: t-shirts, pad locks, hip-hop posters, cars with track lighting, people going to jobs, suits, ties, base ball caps, Nike logos. Many of these ornamental similarities, however, point toward one of the key differences between Africa and America: in America everyone isn’t obsessed with moving away. Sure, we have plenty of songs about moving: “Cowboy take me away” by the Dixie Chicks, “On the road again” by Willie Nelson, “just a name on a map / sounds like heaven to me” in “Sparkle and Fade” by the rock band Everclear. Americans—probably all humans—want to move, to travel, to escape whatever ails or haunts them: repression, boredom, abuse, angst. But in America there isn’t a collective fixation on another place to which seemingly everyone, naively or cognizantly, wants to go. Most Gambians bow five days to the east towards Mecca, but then turn around and cast their dreams out west beyond the setting sun, across the baa — the giant river — towards America. Mecca is their spiritual and cultural compass. America captures their imagination.
* * *
My friend Baana sometimes asks me to take her to America. She’s the third-world equivalent of a homemaker, taking care of her four children and making money on the side by cooking food for others, including my group of basin-mates, washing clothes, and hauling firewood. Baana’s entire family lives in a two room mud-brick house smaller than mine, with her husband Omar’s tools stashed in the tiny covered back “yard” next to the hole in the concrete that serves as a urinal and shower drain. In Mandinaka she often asks me, “Ensa, you’ll take me to America, right?” “God willing, Baana.” “America is sweet, right?” “America is very sweet. Money is there. Work is plentiful. It’s very good.” “You’ll take Siboo too, right.” “Yes, of course. And Sophinda and Mama and Omar.” “Omar? Well, I guess he can go too.” She says something about doing housework there to make money, though I only really pick up the words for sweeping, fitaroo, and money, kodoo. Sometimes she yells to Rugi, one of the neighbors, Eh, Rugi, Ensa be n samaba America le. – Ensa will take us to America. “They are building many houses in America,” I tell her. “Good, Omar is a mason.”
* * *
I once visited my boss’ home village. We stopped at a shop to chat with some people in the middle of his town, a tight maze of compounds surrounded by ancient baobab trees. I was hardly out of the car when a nicely dressed woman with a small baby walked up and greeted me. “Asaalam alekum.” I responded with the traditional Muslim greeting, “Maleekum saalam.” – Peace also be with you. “Kaiyra be,” she asked – Are you at peace? “Kaiyra dorang.” – Peace only. “I bota minto le?” – Where are you from? “Saaying, M be sabatiring Brikama Nymbai, bari M bota America le. Seattle Saatee.” – Now I’m living in Brikama Nymbai, but I’m from America, the city of Seattle. She responded by handing me her child. I am offered children all the time. This was first time I had no chance to refuse. I held the child for a bit, looking into the glossy, un-focusing eyes. I come from a large extended family, but I’ve never spent so much time around small children, and I’ve never thought so much about their heritage, or their future. This child does have many possibilities; my boss was once a small child wrapped to his mothers back in this same village. Now he has a master’s degree from England and collaborates with scientists internationally. My friends—teachers, agriculture researchers, shop owners—are all from towns as small and poor as this child’s home. But the quicker and more assured route for this mother to secure a future for this child is to hope that some toubab will take him to America.
* * *
Despite the cost, distance, reluctance of toubab couriers, and other obstacles, some people do get to “toubabaduu”—the place of the toubabs. A friend of mine recently received a visa to visit his wife in the UK. She’s studying business, and he’s traveling on a visitor’s visa. He has a certain window of time when he is allowed to travel to the country, and a certain number of months he can stay there. He has no intention of coming back. At the graduation ceremony I attended at The Gambia College, the principal meticulously listed the various developments in human resource since that year. Everyone laughed the two times he mentioned staff who had traveled to the US or UK for studies but “have unfortunately not yet returned…” My friend Haali Touray learned recently that he would be issued a visa to study in New York. He is from the provinces, the poor, environmentally-degraded north bank of the Central River Division. He lived around the country as he pursued his high school diploma, and then his successive series of teaching credentials. After nine years as a teacher, and a year of applying, waiting, and preparing, the door was opened for the next leg of Haali’s academic journey. After a ten-minute interview with the stern visa agent at the embassy, he was told that his passport would be retained by the Embassy; he could retrieve it and his visa tomorrow. Haali told me about the visa process one night after dinner. Gambians are very reserved when sharing personal details, so Haali waited until everyone had gone to bed, then, as I got up to leave he said, “Nathan, wait, I would like to chat.” He described the interview to me, and his plans for travel and study to the U.S. The visa interview sounds a lot like having your license application processed at the DMV. Applicants wait seated against a wall, your name is called, and you go to the front, every eye in the room on you. The visa agent, from behind a plastic screen like a bank teller, asks for your documents, grills you on why you want to go to America, what you want to study, how that will benefit the Gambia – “when you return.” She scrutinizes your papers and your answers with a cool indifference, and occasionally with hostility. Thousands of people apply for a visa to the US; why should she give one to you? Haali was preceded by eight other applicants that day. Most of the interviews lasted only about two minutes; all walked away with their passports, the badge of a denied applicant. Haali stood his ground for 10 minutes, justifying why he wanted to study special education, deftly explaining how he’d lost his high school transcripts, and waiting in silence while the women read his letter of recommendation. I can picture my friend, tall and confident, in his broad-collared white dress shirt that is criss-crossed by blue and silver lines and his black belt with all the rivets in it that looks like it’s more appropriate for punk rockers, but which is a popular style here. Haali waited nine years since finishing his first certificate in education, and now, in just over nine minutes the door was opened for him to go to America. If he has the opportunity to work in America, he will not come home. Haali’s older brother made a different kind of bid to get out of Africa. Last I heard, after Haali spoke with him, he was in Mali. No new information has been shared recently, and I never asked. I remember hearing not long ago on the BBC World Service that several Africans died crossing over to Spain. Recently a friend told me a bit more of the story. As he folded, filled, licked and sealed by candlelight the cigarettes he sells in his shop, Abdou explained how Haali’s brother is somewhere in Mauritania right now. He failed to cross the Sahara and ran out of money. He sold everything he owned before he traveled, and Haali has been money-gramming him cash. His family is having trouble farming because he sold their horse and some tools. He’s probably ashamed to come home. Crossing from Africa to Europe is not like wading the Rio Grande to get into America. It’s more like escaping from Cuba or Haiti, but first crossing a desert. There’s a sizeable Gambian community in Spain, though; up to 40,000; some legal, some illegal. Spanish tourists are frequent guests to the craft market during the rainy season, and I’m sure some boys make good enough friends, or lovers, to hitch a legitimate ride north. For others, the alternate option is to face the unforgiving desert and the ephemeral waves of the Mediterranean. The reason so many people want to move west is obvious: people are really poor here. Banaa’s husband Omar told me yesterday how much money he makes: between 100 and 150 dalasis a day. He was reading a copy of BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, slowly reading the names on a map of Africa at the back of the Magazine. He’s from Guinea Bissau and can speak and read Portuguese. Off handedly he turns to me and says, “Ensa, Dokuwo te Africa.” Work is not in Africa. “Haa, te jang.” Yes, its not here. “A be America le, bang?” It’s in America, right? “Haadee, a be jee. A siyaata le jee.” Yes, its there. It’s plentiful there. “Mmang kodoo soto. Mmu masango ti, aning nna salaryo be 100 fo 150 Dalasis lungo-lung.” I don’t have any money. I’m a mason, and my salary is only 100 to 150 Dalasi everyday. Echoing myself in conversations with Banaa, I reply. “Ha, masango dokuwo be America le. A siyaate le jee.” Yes, Mason work is in America. It’s plentiful there. One hundred and fifty dalasis is a relatively good, steady income, but works out to less than $5 a day for a father of four. Much of the money that comes into The Gambia in amounts that could make a difference in people’s lives rides in on Western Union, NGOs or the UN. If Omar worked as a construction laborer in the U.S., he could send home to Africa what he makes before lunch one day of the month and double many families’ monthly income. People here know where the money is, where education is, where the new cars come from, where people stopped living in houses build from mud a long time ago. What I always wonder about is: What does it mean when so many people are fixated on moving away? What does it say about the social psychology of a place when everyone wants to move to the West, and in lieu of that, at least dress like a rapper, try to bend it like David Beckham on the soccer field, and watch Arnold Schwarzenegger (known locally simply as “Commando”) movies when there is enough gas for the generator? One of the most important things I’ve come to appreciate about Africa is not just its culture, but its psychological and sociological landscape. This terrain is dominated by religious and cultural priorities, and is shaped by traditional ways of thinking and socializing. Islam, tradition, family — these are the pillars Africans orient themselves by each day. For devote Muslims, they do it explicitly five times a day when they pray. Despite the influence of these monoliths, there is also another feature on this landscape, prominent and shaped like America. We’ll know Africa has begun to find it own feet not just when the violence ends and “development” has occurred, but when unseen landscape changes and a far away place does not rule the imagination of a continent.
* * *
The rain has stopped. Now there’s the steady high-pitched rasp of the crickets, with the occasional distant gulp of a frog. It’s the African nocturnal beat-box, a night rhythm of bat wings in mango trees, toads splashing in the fresh puddles, and creaking corrugate eaves.
* * *
Here’s a homework assignment. Don’t worry; I’ll talk you through it. Find a map of Africa, one with the rivers on it. First check out the Nile and the Congo. The Nile is the longest river in the world, the Congo is broad and languid like the Amazon. Now move to West Africa and check out the Niger River. Hint: it doesn’t start or end in Niger (Niger is landlocked, precluding the later). Try Nigeria. Now follow it back up into to where it just touches Benin, and then cuts the corner of Niger. But watch out – the river is going to hang a sharp left just south of the Sahara and cut across the entire sub-region. Neither as long as the continent-crossing Nile or as thick-set from the largesse of the equator’s rains as the Congo, the Niger puts itself on the map by its unique, nonsensical flow. After cutting through the southwestern corner of Niger, it flows the entire length of Mali, and then drops down a little into forested Guinea. A good map will have Labe on it, which is not too far from the headwaters – and the coast. There is perhaps a lesson learned in this itinerant river. It’s a metaphor for travel, and maybe for life, development, and culture, in Africa. The river cuts across borders, wends through inland swamps, and skirts the world’s largest dessert, finally depositing itself 2,500 miles later on the other end of the sub region. It’s born in Islamic Guinea, with its forests and Fulani herdsmen, and terminates in oil-slick and Christian southern Nigeria. At its headwaters, the Fulani people speak a dialect of Pulaar called “Pulafuta” that is unique to that region. The dialects of Pulaar change along its length, as do other language groups: Bambara, Djerma, Hausa, and many others. It wends its way through three worldviews, Islam, animism, and Christianity, countless tribes, and three of the poorest countries in the sub-region. It finally reaches in the ocean after passing through English-speaking Nigeria, one of the wealthiest but most corrupt and divided countries on the continent. This is Africa’s past, present, and future.
* * *
Haali is in Dakar right now, probably in a mosquito-filled hostel waiting for his flight; I’m listening to the day’s last, ring prayer call, “Alaahaaa-akbaaru!”, children laughing in the next compound over, and the American movie my family is watching. The mosquitoes are unusually belligerent today. I put on a shirt I bought from Walmart. I’ve just returned from a drum lesson at the craft market. I recently bought a Djembe, the popular Guinean drum that every college kid seemed to be banging on when I was at school. A good imported one in America will cost $250. Mine, custom made, was $25. My usual teacher was at a soccer match. Not wishing to disturb folks, I tapped casually on my drum, limp renditions of an ancient beat taught to me by a dread-headed rasta. Another drummer came over and chatted. He was a Wolof from Senegal whose family are traditionally drummers. He now drums in bands and leads a dance group of young girls for the city council. He took the drum from me to look at the carving, and began to show me a few beats, explaining how they fit together. I grabbed a guitar sitting in the corner and tried to mimic him, tapping lightly on the back side. Traditional Wolof and Mandinka drumming is usually done with at least three drummers – bass, middle, and solo. “This is the bass,” he’d say: pump-tat-tat-tat pump-pump-tat-tat-tat, his hands smacking the center of the drum for each “pump.” “This is the solo”: tat-tat-tity-tity-tat tat-tat-tity-tity-tat, a tight, ringing voice brought out by playing with the heals of your hands on the edge of the drum. These drums are amazing: they truly talk. A djembe has at least five sounds in it, woven into a frenetic language with more depth than an entire rock and roll drum set. Each sound has a name, as does each set of beats: the name of a king. The drummers and the beats speak a language, praise to the kings and warriors who built the kingdoms of the past. I’m slowly learning to drum, replacing the linear, back and forth motion of my American guitar playing with the multidimensionality of the drum – pump, tit, tat, thwap, thump, crack! As I tap away, trying to unravel the beat, Haali sits in the airport in Dakar, waiting to travel. Africa is on the move. I give Haali my prayers that his, and his continent’s path will flow towards development, towards fertility. I hope I have the patience to keep tapping away, trying to find the rhythm, trying to find the beat.
* * *
Afterward I did the hero’s share of editing on this essay one Friday evening in late September under the mantel of heavy clouds and the first wave of what would be the five heaviest days of rain this season. After finishing my writing, I went for dinner with friends. On my way home I stopped the adjacent compound and accepted the invitation to brew the ultra-sweet green tea called atayaa that everyone is addicted to here. It can take up to an hour to brew each of the three rounds of the tea, so I settled in for chatting, laughing, and the inevitable teasing. I talked in Mandinka with a man with whom I’m well acquainted but whose name I forget. His wife, Howa, and three year old daughter, Kaati, and I shared a loaf of bread and the first two rounds of tea. Between “firsts” and “seconds” Omar came over. He told us Baana was in labor. Between seconds and thirds he returned – Baana had given birth. A baby boy. Their first after three girls. Everyone joked they’d name him after me. “What,” I adked, “Ensandingo?” – “little Ensa.” There was surprisingly little fanfare, and Omar chatted with us while we continued to brew tea. Then, dressed as if they were heading to a program, several of the people who lived in the same compound emerged from their room, and two of them hobbled out of the compound, followed by several others, who waited and waved at the gate. A little interpretation by Howa revealed they were off to the hospital. One of the women had malaria. They returned before we finished brewing thirds, shuffled back inside, went to sleep. I soon returned to my house, deferring “thirds” to another night. I got sick the next day and spent Sunday and Monday on my bed or in my backyard bathroom. I finally got to see Baana and her baby tonight, Tuesday. In the candlelight while I held the little boy and I asked Baana how the child was. “A bambanta le bang?” Is he strong? “Hadee” She smiled and nodded. “A ka sinoo bakee le bang?” He sleeps a lot, right? “Haa” “I fisiyaata le.” Are you well? “Haa, N fisiyaata le.” We chatted some more, then she interrupted the me, pointing toward the neighboring compound “Wo muso, jana, a faata le.” – The woman, over there, she died. It was one of her friends. I was stunned, my mouth, I’m sure, casting a gaping shadow in the orange light. The woman, she said, had returned to the hospital again Sunday and died there. She had not been sick for long, only a few days. The room, shared by Omar, Baana, Mama, Sophina, Sibo, and now a new baby boy, was stuffy. It swirled in a mix of shadow and flame, incense and sweat. I thought that this woman, whom I’d known for months but whose name I couldn’t remember, had just passed away. A banta le polite people will say — “She is finished.” “Kicked the bucket” my less tactful friends will comment. Could I have given her money? Her child is only one year old…While I was sick on my bed, next to my Peace Corps chest of medicine, she died of probably a preventable disease. Remorse and grief were and still are strangely absent. There is only the shock of finally having someone who was part of your community die. She was always tired looking, always haggard, but always smiled. Looking back, I see that underneath the eaves of the house, while Howa, her husband, Kaati and I drank tea together, the light tap of rain was playing a slow, percussive, but pianissimo blues. I see now that my friends and I sat on opposite points in the middle of the great circle, the turning of the Asian yin yang in and African setting. His friend was dying, my friend was giving birth. Death flowed one way, life flowed the other, a passage around the circle. We sat crouched over these opposing flows, our kettle, sugar, and tea leaves in the middle, chatting casually. We did not recognizing the tune played by the rain that night, the twisting currents around us. Sometimes it feels this life and death mixture spins us around like those sick cups at Disneyland, spins us until we want to throw up, check out, fall off. I can’t stand that feeling; I hate merry go-rounds. I had mild altitude sickness once while climbing Mount Rainier. For 5,000 feet of climbing, my stomach twisted like I was in one of those fiendish cups. At 13,000 feet, only about 1,500 below the summit, we stopped to evaluate our route, and I fell down on my foam mat, staring off into the nothingness of the approaching white out. Mountain climbers are a strange breed, never quite learning from their own experience. We turned around because a giant crevasse blocked our route, and we descended dejected, sick, and sleepless. Yet we began planning our next ascent up a different route before we even reached base camp. There is no legitimate comparison between the conscious acceptance of risk and discomfort on the ridge of a mountain, with retreat always an option, and the razors edge that the poor people of Africa must traverse. But the mentality of mountain climbers seems to be an analog of the strength poor people have, of their ability to live and love and pray and brew green tea in the middle of a swirl of painful birth and abrupt death. The people of Africa, all people in all places, for that matter, are amazingly strong. We see the swell of AIDS, the wraiths of war, the cracked land and bodies bent by famine. But we do not see Africans giving up. We do not see them set down their tools; we do not see them abandon their land or their hope. This is why a drum beat named after a long-dead king can survive, first Islamitization by the Arabs, then the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the Europeans, then colonization under the British, then poverty while the rest of the modern world flourishes. It survives, or changes — into the blues, gospel, rap. This is why they can sing. This is why they can dance. There are many people recording the story of Africa while it changes. Though The Gambia naturally has fewer storytellers because of its small population, they still have a strong voice. Dr. Lenrie Peters, Gambia’s most distinguished poet, I believe provides some final insight into the strength, and spirit, of a continent that will continue to move, and dance, no matter how heavy the burden it must carry: But I will not mourn the sadness. I will go dead-leaf gathering for the fire in a slice of sunlight to fill my lungs with the odours of decay and my eyes with mellowed rainbow colors … Then I will love Yes love; extravagantly under the flutter of dying leaves and in a shadow of mist in wonder; for autumn is wonder and wonder is hope