There are anxious faces. The group is heading towards a creek, where there is water and a place to spend the night, but as soon as the cattle smell the water they stampede forward and have to be restrained with shouts and sticks.
The donkeys have little option but to trudge doggedly through the bush, weighed down as they are with baskets, blankets, bedrolls, braziers, babies, cooking pots and goatskin water bags.
Standing out from the tall, dark Africans is a short, ruddy European. Her name is Celine, and she’s from Montauban in southwest France. For the last few weeks she’s been travelling with the Wodaabe. Doulla Makao, her friend, is one of the leaders of this group. He’s tall and slim and looks inconsolably sad, though I sense that much of this is down to sheer physical exhaustion. His manner is gentle and unhurried. He speaks English and French and has travelled to Europe. He seems an unlikely figure to be tramping across the bush, but when I suggest this he doesn’t seem to understand what I mean. These are his people, where else would he be?
His people consist of a group of families, his own and those of four or five blood relatives. Given that Doulla alone has three wives and, as he puts it, ‘another on the way’, as well as six children, the total adds up to that of a small village. They’re on their way to Cure Salee but have decided against setting up camp too close to Ingal, as there is a rumour that the water there is tainted. Water seems to be the only thing these people fight over.
‘Arabs control most of the wells,’ says Doulla, ‘and sometimes they don’t want anyone else to have them.’
I ask him what they fight with. Knives, guns?
He smiles, indeed almost laughs out loud at the thought.
‘No, no, with these,’ he says, raising his fists like a boxer.
The thought of this frail ascetic figure trading blows with anyone defies the imagination.
They are trying to raise money to buy a well of their own, which, as Doulla says, would change their lives. They could leave some of their people here throughout the summer, especially the old and infirm, and the children, who remain uneducated because they’re never in one place long enough.
They make camp close to a line of trees which rise above the scrubby bushes, denoting the presence of a water course. I ask Doulla how long they will stay here.
It depends on the amount of grazing land, he says.
‘When there’s enough, we stay for four to seven days.’
They have no huts or tents, but they do have impressively large beds, which the women raise up on four funnel-shaped supports, a foot or so off the ground. They spread them with rugs and kilims in vivid, showy colours. Sticks are cut and stuck in the ground at the corners of the bed and thin cotton cloth slung over them to create some privacy. The sun goes down over a huddle of four-posters, making the bush look like a bedding department.
We pitch our more modest collection of lightweight, bed-less tents on a patch of bare sand nearby.
Night falls. As we sit down to a bowl of soup and a plate of something and rice, the sound of celebrations carries across from the Wodaabe camp, and soon Doulla emerges from the gloom, along with Perri, the head of the well-buying association who, at all times of day or night, wears a huge pair of Austrian dark glasses.
Doulla invites me to join their dance. It is the Wodaabe way of welcoming us into their group. I’m pretty exhausted, and was looking forward to climbing into my tent and crashing out, but to refuse would clearly be a serious breach of etiquette.
I’m led into the centre of a circle of Wodaabe men, clapping and chanting responses and moving round in a slow, rhythmic shuffle. Then the circle closes in, moving tight around me. I can smell sweat and the sweet earth smell of their clothes, but the smiles and the sound of the voices are reassuring. It may look like a war dance, but it’s more like a ritual embrace, a binding together against a hostile world. Not for the first time, I sense that the Wodaabe are decent, tolerant people, inclined to peacefulness and probably easily exploited. Doulla translates their song for me:
‘Oh lovely girl with eyes like gazelle,
White teeth and face like the moon,
Which shines like the sun,
You are as beautiful as milk.’
They’re not the only ones out dancing tonight. Nigel has rigged up a powerful lamp to shoot the sequence and in its beam is a huge swarm of insects, turning, twisting, cavorting and careering around each other. Decide against sleeping under the stars.
Day Fifty-Five
NEAR INGAL
Because of the great heat of the day, the comparatively cool hours around dawn are valuable and much gets done. We are up at first light, just before six, but the Wodaabe women have been at work for an hour or more. The thorn bushes are hung with washing. The children are up and dressed and their mothers are out finding wood for the fire. After this they still have to prepare the food, milk the cows and fetch water from the creek.
As the bed forms the centrepiece of each family’s living area, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that the Wodaabe can’t marry until they can afford one of their own. If they had mortgages, young Wodaabe couples would put them down on a bed. Another much-respected sign of wealth and status is the number and quality of your calabashes, the hollowed-out pumpkins, often painted and decorated, which are indispensable for cooking and eating.
Breakfast, and indeed every other meal, consists basically of milk and millet. The long, repetitive process of pounding the millet, usually entrusted to the young girls, is already underway, producing the soft, thudding rhythm that is the heartbeat of so many West African communities. After an hour, sometimes longer, the millet is ready to be mixed with water into the unappetising grey paste that will provide their nourishment for the day.
Celine, who for one summer, at least, has left the lush farmlands of Aquitaine to live with the Wodaabe, tells me that on occasions there is not even enough millet to go round.
‘Sometimes they eat only milk.’
She has much admiration for their resilience and her insights into the character of the Wodaabe strike a chord with my own.
‘They will not ask anything about you, or take anything from you.’
They have, she says, a free and open attitude to relationships - which can cause problems - but they are not afraid to express shame and regret and accept that life requires patience and tolerance.
This stoic attitude doesn’t always do them much good. One of the women has had her fingers broken when a cow stepped on her hand. By the time Pete, who has been on the BBC medical course, gets to examine her, it’s clear that the wound is two or three days old and in imminent danger of turning gangrenous. He cleans and binds it as best he can, but it’s obvious she needs stronger antibiotics and possibly surgery. We offer to take her to a doctor in Ingal, but she shakes her head very definitely. She will wait until she can walk in with the others. Though she may lose her hand, there is no changing her mind.
Despite hard lives and harsh conditions, the Wodaabe are by no means grey or ground down. Celebration, dance and the pursuit of beauty are important parts of their everyday life and all three come together in the Gerewol, an extraordinary Fulani ritual that will be part of their Cure Salee celebrations. The young, unmarried men spend hours making themselves look beautiful, painting their faces red, highlighting their eyes with white lines and their lips with black powder. The effect is to make them look feminine and prematurely aged at the same time. The display is combined with a formal dance, at which these richly adorned men vie with each other for the favours of the young girls. The girls make the choice. It’s free and open, and whilst it does not have to end in marriage, it does have to end in a night together.