‘Publicly they live a very separate life, but in private they’re very attentive to each other.’
She thinks the image of the marginalised, oppressed African woman is wrong.
‘They’re very strong, very proud of who they are.’
Then how does she account for the continuing practice of female circumcision?
‘What is sexual pleasure here and in Europe is quite different. We have a tendency of thinking that sexual pleasure is impossible for a woman that has been circumcised. I don’t share that opinion.’
The waves are hitting hard now, rocking the boat and slapping at the hull as they ripple beneath us.
Kristin is adamant that Western solutions cannot be applied to African relationships. ‘What men find attractive in Africa doesn’t necessarily correspond to what is attracting a man in Europe. You know, in Europe a woman should be skinny, but here a woman should be fat. And the women are very concerned how to be attractive and how to attract a man …’
At this vital moment we’re suddenly thrown forward. With a shuddering rumble the Pagou Manpagu lurches to a halt. We’ve run aground. Kristin seems unperturbed.
‘Isn’t it serious?’
She shakes her head. ‘I travel the river a lot.’
At that moment the pilot grabs his pole and leaps into the river, which seems a suicidal thing to do, until I see him stride off into the middle of the Niger with the water barely above his knees. He’s joined by others, until the whole river is full of men walking about. After much discussion they assemble at the back and push, but to no avail. The Pagou Manpagu is stuck fast.
As darkness falls we’re all taken off in a small boat and put ashore on a wide sandy beach not far from the town of Konna. Kristin has had enough by now and decides to carry on by road. The rest of us make camp as best we can and settle down to another night under the stars. The good news is that we don’t have to sleep on board the Pagou Manpagu. The bad news is that after this positively Homeric journey we have advanced precisely thirty-four and a half miles towards Timbuktu.
Day Forty-Nine
ON THE NIGER
Out of the tent just after six. We are in a very bleak spot, a flat coverless expanse of mud and sand with a cordon of local Bozos, or possibly Bobos, already gathered and regarding us with unemotional interest.
Flat, coverless expanses present problems for the morning toilet. A nonchalant reconnaissance turns into a quarter of a mile hike, before I find anything resembling a dip in the ground.
Back at the camp I find a bowl of warm water outside the tent and coffee, tea, bread and fruit laid out on a table. Our little knot of spectators - old women, children, a couple of lean and mean dogs and an old man with prayer beads - waits patiently. They are not trying to sell us anything, for they have nothing to sell. They’re waiting for anything we don’t want. Mineral water bottles and film cartons are popular. Nigel donates a pair of his shorts, which, after a day in the bowels of the Pagou Manpagu, look beyond redemption to me, but are eagerly accepted.
Most of us are now convinced that the boat we were on yesterday was actually for carrying goods rather than people, which would account for the lack of most of the basics, including a deck.
Our spirits are immeasurably lifted, therefore, by the news that the crew of the Pagou Manpagu are refusing to take their boat any higher up the river, and if we want to get to Timbuktu we shall have to make alternative plans. With a huge sigh of relief we transfer to a local pirogue. It’s 25 feet long, with a curved rattan canopy offering protection from the sun, and an upright rattan screen marked ‘WC’ offering privacy and a hole in the stern. The boat is lighter and much more agile than the pinasse and its shallow draught should see us safely over the sandbanks. And it has that rare and almost unimaginable luxury, seats.
The surface of the river is a mill pond this morning. A stand of tamarind trees is reflected serenely in the water. A line of cows, silhouetted against the eastern horizon, and the occasional sight of low, wood-hulled barges under sail add to the cosy impression that this corner of the Niger could be a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape.
As the day wears on, the alternation of trees, pasture and small fishing villages on one side of the river and exposed and featureless stretches of sand on the other becomes relentlessly monotonous. Occasionally, there will be something to divert the attention; the plunge of a kingfisher or a shiny orange-eyed hippo head breaking the surface, spluttering indignantly. ‘Dear Sir, I wish to complain in the strongest possible terms …’
We put ashore every now and then at sad, impoverished little villages, where flies gather round the running noses of little children and their mothers’ eyes look blankly back at us.
Then the river course widens out into a series of small lakes and there is nothing to see but water and sky. To keep moving is essential, not just to get us there, but also because it is the only way to alleviate the great heat of the day in this vast and shelterless landscape.
Day Fify-One
TIMBUKTU
In 1806, Mungo Park, ten years after becoming the first white man to see the River Niger, was within a whisker of adding to his reputation by reaching the legendary, remote and fabulous city of Timbuktu.
Unfortunately, the tranquil approach we’re making tonight is markedly different from the conditions in which he came here. Everything had gone wrong for Park on his second visit to Africa, and Sanche de Gramont, in The Strong Brown God, sums up his problem succinctly: ‘He was taking a makeshift boat pieced together from two rotten Bambara canoes down an uncharted river whose banks were occupied by Christian-hating Tuaregs and rapacious blacks.’
Not surprisingly, Park didn’t stop to look around, and it was another twenty years before a fellow Scot, Alexander Gordon Laing, approaching from the desert to the north, became the first European to reach Timbuktu for nearly 300 years.
Neither survived to tell their tales.
Timbuktu remains well off any beaten track. There is an airstrip from which tourists are flown in and out, but it remains a city at the end of the road, centre of an administrative region but not much else. Yet its appeal remains almost as potent as it was for Laing and those who risked their lives to follow him. To the almost certain puzzlement of the locals, Westerners remain drawn to Timbuktu like moths to a candle. No other city remains as synonymous with the fabulous, the lonely and the remote. Timbuktu, la mysterieuse, they call it in the tourist brochures - a Holy Grail for the adventurous traveller.
It’s hard to remain unexcited as we glide slowly into the little inlet at Kabara, the port for Timbuktu itself.
Our arrival coincides with one of the very finest African sunsets, perhaps the best I’ve witnessed on this journey. In a huge sky, day and night are for a moment perfectly balanced. The sun going down on one side, as a full moon rises on the other. Colours change slowly and majestically. Light blue becomes pink-tinged grey and minutes later, as we grate against the gravel bank, half the sky is lemon and the other half is violet.
A hippo burps in the distance and above us a stream of bats swerves out across the sky. This is why I leave home. Moonlight bathes the groves of trees beside the good metalled road that runs the 14 miles from Kabara into Timbuktu. At the city limits the tarmac gives out and leaves us to the sand. I crane my head around to see if I can see anything fabulous, but all I see is a roundabout with a lumpy concrete monument and battered sign welcoming us to ‘Timbuktu, City of Three Hundred and Thirty-Three Saints’.