‘I am happy in my pocket,’ he says beadily, demonstrating a shrewd feel for First-World guilt.
‘This is Africa. You must give me something. We are many.’
A beggar approaches, holding his tin with the stump of a severed arm. Mr Yatarra ignores him.
Watching people coming and going, I’m impressed once again by how much in Africa travels by head. A woman strides by, carrying a riot of carrots that seem to sprout from her like orange dreadlocks, another bears two large clay pots, each at least a foot across, one on top of the other and both on top of her head. A very lean, tall man in a ‘Giggs 11’ T-shirt, a pile of sports bags on his head, reluctantly breaks step to avoid an older man, head bent beneath the weight of two double mattresses.
In an attempt to make sense of such an exhilarating but unfamiliar world, I hope to meet up with Toumani Diabate, one of a group of local poets and musicians which is building a growing following for Malian music in Europe and America, and whose album, Djelika, I’ve been listening to constantly for the last three months.
Everyone seems to know Toumani. As soon as I mention his name Mr Yatarra nods and points out the way to his house.
‘Another coffee?’
‘Not right now, thanks.’
It turns out that Toumani has seven houses and no-one is quite sure which one he’s in. We’re told to await him at the most likely, a tall rambling complex off a baked-earth street. It’s a modest enough area, but lines of broken glass and razor wire on top of the 15-foot walls of the courtyard are a bit of a giveaway. The rock star-style elusiveness and eventual arrival in dazzling white opentopped Mercedes lead me to suspect ego trouble. I could not have been more wrong.
Toumani is, I would guess, around forty. He wears a wide white robe, like a Pierrot at the circus, and walks awkwardly, the result of childhood polio. But he’s co-operation personified, happy to climb to the top of his three-storey house, where the light is better for our filming, to give me a masterclass in the kora and an insider’s view of the problems and pleasures of living in Mali.
He talks softly and seriously. I learn about the griots, the poets and musicians of which he is one, who can trace themselves back to the Malian Empire of the thirteenth century, when they were employed to sing the praises of their leaders and in turn became the keepers of the oral tradition. Which is how he learnt to play the kora, a Mandinke instrument played in Guinea and Benin before being introduced to Mali.
‘I come from seventy-one generations of kora players,’ he says matter-of-factly.
The kora has twenty-one strings and a long neck rising from a cowhide-covered base.
‘Is it made by your family?’
‘Of course. This is my family history. It’s not like a piano or a guitar that we have to go to the shop to buy.’
Toumani’s father, Sidiki Diabate, was, he says, king of the kora, but his son took it in a very different direction.
‘I was listening to James Brown’s music, to Otis Redding’s, to Jimi Hendrix, to Salif Keita (the most famous of all Malian musicians), to jazz from Guinea. And I said, I have to open a new door for the kora. Everybody can join the kora music now, not only listen to it, but to come and play with the kora.’
And they have. Toumani mentions Peter Gabriel, Taj Mahal and the Spanish flamenco group Ketama amongst those he has worked with.
Toumani’s gentle manner disguises a prodigious energy. He travels the world, then comes back to Bamako to teach (there is an American student with him today), write and record new material, both for himself and for the young Malian musicians he encourages. He becomes most animated as he talks about his latest discoveries, two rappers who call themselves called Les Escrocs, The Crooks. Though American in style, Toumani encourages them to write lyrics that are positive rather than aggressive. So, their first single, which he has produced, is an attempt to spread the message that kids should get an education. This is something that weighs heavily on Toumani.
‘If you don’t go to school, the poor will always be poor and the rich will always be rich. A country with young people who don’t go to school is like a car without an engine.’
He is not hopeful of rapid change, but he is proud of his country. Mali, he says, may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but in its culture and the hospitality of its people it’s one of the richest.
Then he plays the kora for me. It’s set in a frame support in front of him. He plays, legs astride the base, using only the thumb and forefinger of both hands. A magical sound comes out, midway between that of a harp and a lute. A complex of themes so skilfully interwoven that the music seems to be carrying you effortlessly through a labyrinth of stories and memories. It’s soothing and strong at the same time, and hits heart and head with equal power.
Day Forty-One
BAMAKO TO DJENNE
Rested and refreshed beside the banks of the Niger, it’s now time to follow the river up into the Sahara. Rivers and Sahara sound a distinct contradiction in terms and it’s not surprising that the Niger has always fascinated writers and travellers. For a long time it was one of the great geographical riddles. Herodotus and Pliny believed it was joined to the Nile, possibly flowing underground through central Africa. The Romans added little information, as they baulked at crossing the Sahara, and for almost 1500 years the generally accepted authority for the river’s course was the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy, whose map, drawn up in the first century AD, showed the Niger flowing from central Africa westwards into the Atlantic. This was confirmed by a twelfth-century scholar, al-Idrisi, from Ceuta, who called it ‘the Nile of the Negroes’.
The problem is that neither of these learned gentlemen had ever seen the river. Nor was it easy for travellers from Europe or Islamic North Africa to check their assumptions. The Sahara was a formidable barrier and the Atlantic was much feared. The currents took sailors south, but they had no means of navigating their way back. Cape Bojador, on the coast of what is now Western Sahara, was considered the safe southern sailing limit. Beyond that was terra incognita and a sea full of dragons and sea monsters.
Arab traders were eventually lured across the forbidding Sahara Desert by the promise of gold in the lands to the south. So successful were they, that by the end of the Middle Ages two-thirds of all the world’s gold came from West Africa. This created an Islamic cultural and commercial hegemony from which Christians were largely excluded. Leo Africanus, an Arab from Fez, who converted to Catholicism and worked for the Pope, became the first to give an eyewitness account of the mysterious River Niger. Published in Italian in 1600, Africanus’ book described sailing the Niger from Timbuktu to Guinea, which makes it scarcely believable that he should have confirmed the conventional error that the river flowed west. But he did. The only one who dared to suggest the Niger flowed east was the man from Tangier, Ibn Battuta. But no-one had listened to him.
The expedition that finally solved the riddle was inspired not so much by religion or commerce as scientific curiosity. The African Association, founded in London in 1788, charged the young Scotsman Mungo Park with the task of discovering, once and for all, ‘the rise, the course, and the termination of the Niger’.
Park and his expedition started inland from Gambia in June 1795. After extraordinary misadventures, terrible hardships and considerable dangers, they reached the town of Segou over a year later.