He gives me advice on how to tell Fulani women. Swiftly raking the crowd, he picks out a strikingly tall woman in a dress and headscarf of busy matching patterns.
‘She is one.’
Pigmy points at her face.
‘You see the tattooing here, round her mouth and this here,’ he says, indicating a small mark below her right eye. ‘This shows the family she is from.’
I’m impressed by his diagnosis, until he rather spoils it by adding, ‘I know her. She is my sister’s cousin.’
After the two of them have exchanged a brief and apparently contentious piece of family gossip, we move on.
‘They are the most beautiful women in Africa,’ he enthuses, breaking off to draw my attention to someone who looks more gorgeous than any we’ve seen today.
‘She is not Fulani,’ he says dismissively, ‘she is Songhai.’
He comes up to a girl with a round face, doe-like eyes and large breasts.
‘She is Fulani,’ says Pigmy with a big smile. ‘This is Aya. My family wanted me to marry her.’
I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this. If Pigmy fancies them, they’re Fulani.
Making the most of the shade, we walk through a low building onto a factory floor of women at sewing machines, maybe forty or fifty of them, every one clacking away at full tilt to satisfy the crowd waiting to collect repaired clothes, re-stitched sheets, finished dresses, robes, headdresses. Then we’re out of this dark and tumultuously noisy room and into a light and tumultuously noisy square, at the far end of which, bathed in dusty sunlight, is the building I feel I know so well, the Grande Mosquee, the largest mud-built structure in Africa.
‘In the world,’ Pigmy corrects me.
To Western steel, glass and concrete tastes, the mud-walled mosque seems to obey none of the normal rules of construction. It’s organic, fairy-tale architecture, the ultimate winner of any beach building competition. Instead of the columns, capitals and cornices we’ve been brought up to think of as architectural basics, it features tall conical shapes reminiscent of termite mounds. Three 40-foot towers, each one crowned with an ostrich egg, face onto the square, linked by a wall of slim, pointed buttresses.
The mud walls are renewed every year in one great communal enterprise. Women carry the water to mix the mortar, which the men then carry and apply to the walls, using the projecting beams like scaffolding. During the work, anyone who needs refreshment is invited in and given tea by the old ladies of the town, but anyone seen to be avoiding work is hooted at by the women.
Pigmy waxes lyrical about the hundred pillars inside and the hundred windows in the roof, but when I ask if I can go and see them he is apologetic. Apparently, some Americans recently used the interior for a fashion shoot and so offended local sensibilities that non-Muslims are no longer allowed in.
We walk back together to Pigmy’s house, through quieter streets, where all the houses seem miniatures of the mosque, walls modelled with plaster laid over mud brick, one organic outer-skin, buttressed and rounded off. Outside one house, a group of children are mixing fresh mortar with their feet, imitating the tradition of the barey, the master masons of Djenne. The mortar looks grey and lifeless until it dries on the walls and soaks up the sunlight and turns a soft brown. At sunrise and sunset it is golden.
At Pigmy’s house I meet his wife of eight months. She sits in a doorway of the courtyard, having her ankles hennaed for the big day tomorrow. She’s placid and pretty, with an aura of quiet ease that contrasts sharply with Pigmy’s restless energy. I ask how they met. Apparently, she sold milkshakes in the market and Pigmy flirted with her (as I’d seen him do with cousins and sisters of friends that he encountered earlier today). Milkshakes, however, grew into true love. His parents were not keen, because she was a country girl and he was a relatively affluent city boy. Pigmy is strong-willed and insisted on marrying her, even though the price he paid for not having a wife found for him by the family was to forfeit gifts from his parents’ friends.
He speaks earnestly of her many virtues, but she says nothing, just turns her big brown eyes towards him. The woman who is preparing her feet for the henna is, by contrast, an older woman, with a canniness that reflects a much deeper knowledge of life. Occasionally she will break into Pigmy’s romantic banter with muttered asides that send him into fits of laughter. He turns to me.
‘She is like a griot,’ he explains. ‘She is free to say anything she wants.’
This sounds interesting.
‘Can you ask her to tell me the real story, Pigmy?’
He translates. She replies with a wicked smile. He rocks back with laughter.
‘She say, if she were English, she would tell you a lot of things, but she don’t speak English.’
He throws a sidelong glance at his adoring wife.
‘I think it’s good she don’t speak English.’
Day Forty-Three
DJENNE
Tabaski morning in Djenne. The dust is rising in the streets. Pigmy, resplendent in a billowing robe of crisp white cotton trimmed with silver and grey embroidery, is walking with me and many hundreds of others to hear the imam’s address and witness the ritual sacrifice that will be the signal for the day’s festivities to begin. I feel conspicuously dull in my chinos and Gap Oxford, for all around me people are in their traditional finery. Malians dress splendidly anyway, but today they pull the stops out. No two people in this vast throng seem to be dressed alike.
This celebration of the sparing of Abraham’s son from sacrifice is one of the most important days in the Muslim calendar. It’s not so much the sparing itself they celebrate, but Abraham’s act of obedience, his willingness to sacrifice his own son if that was what his God ordered him to do. Submission to the will of Allah is the cornerstone of Islam. It is what the word Islam means.
There are so many people expected at these special prayers that the mosque is too small to hold them, so the ceremony takes place in an open area at the edge of town. Getting there is like being in a football crowd on its way to the stadium. We’re swept along by a generally good-natured, expectant, ever-growing tide. It’s going to be a very hot day, and many are carrying prayer mats in one hand and big, colourful umbrellas in the other. At the site, worshippers assemble in long rows, those with the biggest umbrellas and the finest prayer mats in the front and the least privileged in an overspill yard with only strips of paper to kneel on.
Women are conspicuous by their absence. When I ask where they are Pigmy shifts a little uncomfortably.
‘The women will be at the back,’ he says vaguely.
The truth of which I can’t check, as the back of the crowd is now so far away.
Pigmy estimates today’s attendance at around 8000. All over the Arab world there will be similar gatherings, and by the end of the day several million sheep will have disappeared off the face of the earth.
The imam steps up to a microphone set up beneath the sort of garish orange umbrella you might find at a beach bar. A few feet away, tethered in the shade of a neem tree, is the beast he will soon slaughter. It paces about, bleating every now and then and eyeing the growing crowd nervously, like an actor on opening night.
At half past nine silence falls over this vast congregation and prayers begin. A light breeze stirs the young trees. The long rows of worshippers chant their prayers and kneel and rise, kneel and rise, in unison. I check my thermometer. It’s 35degC/95degF in the shade.