Mid-afternoon, 204 years later, I’ve reached Segou, after a four-hour drive from Bamako, and I’m standing on a soft sand beach with a copy of Mungo Park’s journal, Travels into the Interior of Africa, open at his entry for 20 July 1796.
‘As I was anxiously looking around for the river, one of them called out, geo affili (see the water), and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission - the long-sought-for, majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.’
With this single observation, Mungo Park saw off 2000 years of error. It was one of the great geographical discoveries. Encouraged, Park set himself the greater task of tracing the course of the entire river. He was brave, but also obtuse and severely inept at man management, and ten years later he died in a hail of spears and arrows as his boat raced through a gorge at Jebba, in what is now Nigeria. He never succeeded in following the river to the sea.
Looking out now across a broad, placid, unexpectedly blue stream, with kingfishers hovering and sweeping down into the reed-beds, it’s hard to believe that this river could have been the cause of so much pain and grief before the riddle of its course was finally solved, forty years after Mungo Park stood here. We now know it to be the third longest river in Africa, flowing for 2600 miles from the mountain rainforests of Guinea, making a long slow horseshoe bend through the Sahara, then turning south to reach the sea in a wide marshy delta near Port Harcourt in Nigeria.
Segou is one of a string of towns sustained by the Niger, and despite having busy streets and one or two company headquarters, its mood seems to reflect the pace of the river, calm and pleasantly unruffled. Lorries rumble ponderously up from the riverbank, laden with freshly made mud bricks that have been hardening in the sun. Out on the stream, fishermen in pirogues as slender as driftwood pole themselves in and out of a lazy current, so sluggish that, to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to tell which way it was flowing. A sandy road has become a temporary football pitch and misdirected passes bounce off cars without anybody seeming to care very much.
Between the high walls of old colonial villas, a track leads through to a riverside street, on which is a haven called L’Auberge. A small terrace with white tables and red chairs leads into a cool dark room with a long polished wood bar, which doubles as reception. The only occupant is a tall, ascetic, white man with an untended beard and a backpack that rises above his head like some portable throne. The walls are decorated with masks, drums, necklaces of cowrie shells and some richly carved wooden doors, which, I’m told, are made by the Dogon people who live, almost hidden away, in the mountains north and east of the river. The special of the day is chalked up on a board. Rabbit with baked apple. The prospect of anything without chicken in it reduces me to near-slobbering hysteria.
The owner appears from behind the bar. He’s soft-spoken and welcoming and his name is Abi Haila. He’s Lebanese. His countrymen, he says, are like the Irish, scattered all over the world. His father’s family came here in 1914 on a boat full of emigrants, who got off in Dakar thinking it was Brazil, or so he says. Anyway they stayed and prospered and now run a number of hotels and businesses. This appealing, hospitable, unpretentious place seems a tempting alternative to the drive to Djenne, but it’s fatal to blur the distinction between holiday and filming, and after a couple of chilled Castel beers it’s back to the schedule.
We eat on the move. Goat roasted at a stall on the outskirts of Segou and served in brown paper. Once past the aromatic taste of the charcoal, it’s a long, long chew. I’m still finding bits of it in my teeth when we turn off the main road and into Djenne five hours later. The overhead lights of a gas station illuminate an enigmatic scene; a donkey and cart drawn up beside a petrol pump.
Djenne is surrounded by the waters of the Bani river for most of the year, and even now, when the river is low, we have to wait for a ferry to take us across. Alongside us is a pick-up, whose cargo seems to defy all the laws of physics. Boxes, bags, plastic sacks, rolls of carpet and car tyres rise above it, layer perched on swaying layer, and on top of it all are a half dozen trussed sheep.
Day Forty-Two
DJENNE
Of all the cities on the edge of the Sahara Djenne is the one I’m most excited about. Ever since I first saw pictures of the mud-made Great Mosque with its distinctive conical towers, pierced by wooden beams which jut out of the walls as if the building were undergoing acupuncture, I’ve had it marked down as somewhere unique and exotic.
Obviously others have too, for my night’s sleep at the tourist campement is constantly interrupted by sounds of flushing, washing, coughing, farting and footsteps. This journey has been so far off the beaten track that I’d forgotten about tour groups. These are the first we’ve come across since Marrakesh. One group is British. I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but when I’m asked if I’ve ever been to Stoke-on-Trent all my romantic illusions of desert travel begin to wilt.
Watch brilliantly coloured geckoes darting about the garden until our guide arrives. He’s an energetic, eloquent, persuasive local man called Amadou Cisse but known to all as Pigmy, because by Malian standards he is compact. I instinctively feel I shall be all right with Pigmy. He’s steeped in local life and has a twitchily restless urge to show me the town. He wears a loose brown robe, one of the wide-brimmed, triangular Fulani hats with a bobble on top that remind me of Moroccan tagines, dark glasses and a big silver Rolex. It’s going to be hot he says (what’s new?), so we should get out early. It’s also market day, so the town will be full, and what’s more, it’s the market day before the festival of Tabaski, so it will be full of sheep. As head of a household he is expected to make a sacrifice and a decent-looking ram is top of his shopping list. We launch into the crowd, most of whom Pigmy seems to know intimately. Barely breaking his stride, he networks his way forward, grabbing hands, kissing cheeks (of men only) and tossing tantalising morsels of information over his shoulder.
‘That’s my cousin, he’s crazy! … Her brother knows my sister … He is my friend, he owes me money.’
There is no sheep shop as such. Pigmy merely pushes through until he finds a man standing on a corner with a few animals around him. He is a lot older than Pigmy with a pinched face, shrewd moustache and white skullcap. After handshakes and banter he indicates his best beast and Pigmy squats down and begins to feel around.
‘It should be a really good and complete sheep, you see.’ His voice drifts up from somewhere down by its backside. ‘Not with one eye or one leg.’ He examines its balls closely. ‘Should be like a very nice sheep.’
Pigmy straightens up and turns to the sheep merchant, pointing out a tiny contusion on its nose. ‘You have some problem here.’ He shakes his head and ostentatiously starts to look elsewhere.
The sheep seller knows that with less than twenty-four hours to go before Tabaski he may well get left with surplus animals. Numbers are discussed. Pigmy haggles him down from 40,000 to 37,500 francs, about PS37.50. A lot of money, but as Pigmy says it is an important festival and a man in his position is expected to buy the best he can. Two boys are summonsed and sent to deliver the beast to Pigmy’s house. We plough on into the crowd.
Many of these people are not from Djenne, but from surrounding villages, too small to have markets of their own. The men fish and herd the animals, the women prepare them for market, making yoghurt, smoking fish. He shows me the different sections of the market: the Bambara people with their millet and rice, the Fulani with their milk and butter, and the smoked and cured produce of the Niger fishermen, disconcertingly called Bozos.