After the prayers, a collection is taken and the impressive discipline of the worshippers breaks up. Some of the older men are helped away, the younger ones are allowed to move up to get a better view of the proceedings and everyone starts chattering, even though the imam is still delivering benedictions and demanding responses.
I hear Pigmy mutter ‘Enough benedictions’, but it’s another five minutes before the imam concludes the blessing and two of his assistants move forward and release the sheep from the tree.
This is accompanied by a great surge forward to the area where the sacrifice will take place, completely obscuring the view of Nigel and Basil, who have been at carefully chosen camera positions for an hour or more. Everyone is turning to each other and shaking hands and exchanging greetings. My hand is pumped as enthusiastically as anyone else’s.
‘Sambe, sambe. Amina,’ Pygmy teaches me to say. I presume it’s the equivalent of ‘Happy Tabaski’.
Somewhere in all this mass of humanity, the first sheep of the day dies in Djenne.
Pigmy now has to emulate the imam’s sacrifice and he is unusually preoccupied as we trudge back through the winding streets of the town. A cloud of dust raised by the feet of 8000 celebrants hangs thick and unavoidable in the hot and motionless air. By the time we reach his house I feel as if I’ve swallowed a small desert.
Pigmy makes a traditional round of the neighbours, briskly darting in and out of doorways exchanging greetings.
‘Sambe, sambe. Amina.’
Trickles of blood, running out of waste pipes and into the open drains that run down the centre of the streets, indicate that for some houses, the sacrifices have already begun. At Pigmy’s house, grand by Djenne standards, with upstairs rooms for relatives, we are welcomed by his father, who sits in half-darkness by the door, greeting everyone with a handshake and a broad smile. Through in the courtyard, Pigmy’s wife, together with his mother and aunts, all gorgeously attired, sit on upturned plastic buckets, slicing vegetables.
They remain profoundly unimpressed, as a knife is put into Pigmy’s quivering hand and he and the PS37.50 sheep make their fateful tryst in a corner of the yard. Pigmy, not yet an expert, is, thankfully, assisted by a butcher, who instructs him in the art of swift throat-cutting. The deed is done in accordance with the ancient law, and the sheep is lifted over a drain. The blood pumps from its neck and runs away beneath the wall and into the street.
Pigmy looks much relieved as the knife is taken from him. It’s carefully washed by the butchers, who immediately set to work skinning the carcass. With temperatures in Djenne creeping up to 40degC/104degF, their speed and skill is, as they say, of the essence.
Should you ever have to do this at home, here’s a hot tip from the professionals. Slit the skin around one leg, then blow through the incision until the skin inflates and breaks clear of the flesh beneath. It takes time and considerable lung-power, but if all goes well the hide should slip off like a banana skin.
Half an hour later the sheep is reduced to the sort of anonymous chunks we Westerners are more comfortable with and Pigmy’s majestic mother is dropping them one by one into the pot. All that remains of yesterday’s purchase is the head and a pile of feet stacked neatly in one corner of the yard.
Nothing, I’m told, is wasted. The head will be boiled for soup, which Pigmy raves about, and the testicles will be distributed to the young boys of the neighbourhood.
‘It helps to make them clever,’ explains Pigmy. A theory which, if proven, could change school dinner menus forever.
The festive meal, to which I’m invited, is a considerable anticlimax. It’s cooked beautifully but consumed rapidly and in silence, apart from a few laughs when I commit the dreadful faux pas of using my left, or washing, hand to scoop up the food. We squat or sit cross-legged round one large dish, men separate from the women, who eat in the corner where they cook. Family and friends arrive and dig in, as if they’ve been on hunger strike. I could do with a much more leisurely, discursive pace, if only because I still have great trouble rolling rice into balls with three fingers of one hand, then dipping this into the fresh bubbling stew without scalding myself.
I find my gaze straying over to the women. Pigmy’s mother, dressed in vibrant red like a pillar box, chews away on a huge bone whilst his wife, a freshly hennaed vision in lilac gown and hat, munches contentedly, and doesn’t catch my eye.
Then all at once it’s over, and the traditional three glasses of powerful mint tea are prepared.
‘Always drink after the meal, not before. It is too strong for the taste,’ counsels Pigmy.
Then fond farewells. They seem genuinely sorry to see us go, but I can’t help feeling there’ll be much more fun when the camera’s gone.
We work our way back to the campement along streets stained with blood and strewn with sheep’s feet, dodging across the cracked and broken remains of a covered French drainage system. It seems a shame that this attractive and ancient city, older than Timbuktu, once proud possessor of great libraries and over sixty Koranic schools, should have left such a system to rot.
From my conversations with Pigmy, the decline seems to have set in many years ago. In 1591 to be precise, when the glorious Songhai Empire, which succeeded the equally rich and civilised Mali Empire, unsuccessfully faced an invasion from Morocco. Though numerically superior, the Songhai army’s bows and arrows were of little use against Moroccan muskets. A dark age followed. The Empire collapsed, the gold trade passed out of their hands and the Touareg nomads moved in to control the trade routes.
The French tried to improve public services and more recently UNESCO has raised funds to preserve the old mud buildings, but Djenne, like Chinguetti in Mauritania, remains a casualty of history, a shadow of what it must once have been.
Still, Tabaski has brought the town to life. No longer confined to courtyards and back-rooms, the women who have prepared the feasts are now out on the streets, meeting, strolling and confidently flaunting their freshly plaited hair and freshly hennaed heels and exultantly extrovert outfits.
I borrow a mobylette and drive into the centre of town for one last look at the biggest mud building in the world. In front of the mosque, children are prodding charcoal fires on which they will cook the sheep’s head soup. A trio of schoolboys, giggling with delight, show me the ancient art of making whoopee cushions out of sheep’s scrotums.
We leave Djenne through the brick archway with its pointed oval battlements, down to the ferry where Brahmin cattle graze, seemingly oblivious to the white egrets on their heads. It’s sunset by the time we board the ferry and the flies are out.
Day Forty-Four
MOPTI TO DOGON COUNTRY
Whereas Djenne felt trapped by the river, Mopti, only 65 miles northeast, thrives on it. Its natural advantages are obvious. A hundred yards from the hotel’s Soudan-style mud portals, the Bani flows in close parallel with the wider and grander Niger. These two great rivers come together less than a mile away.
Not surprisingly, Mopti has become the riverine trading centre Djenne once was, and if we want a boat to take us to Timbuktu this is the place to find it.
But it’s the day after Tabaski, and this normally busy port seems to be suffering from a hangover. Not an alcohol hangover, obviously; more of a sheep hangover. As they used to be everywhere, in courtyards and on street corners, on lorries and boats and motorbikes, on the tops of buses and the back of pick-up trucks, their disappearance leaves a bit of a gap, physically and perhaps psychologically as well.
The normal babble of commerce is stilled and though the occasional pirogue slips out across the Bani, white sail raised to catch the breeze, Mopti seems gripped by torpor.