Whoever has a shilling goes to the bar. The bars are numerous — in the back streets, at intersections, in the squares. Sometimes these are humble places, with walls cobbled together from corrugated iron, and calico curtains instead of doors. Even so, we are meant to feel as if we have entered an amusement park, found ourselves at a carnival. Music is coming from the old radio, a red lightbulb dangles from the ceiling. Glossy photographs of film actresses cut out from magazines adorn the walls. Behind the counter stands the usually fat, powerfully built madame: the proprietress. She sells the only thing available in the bar: a home-brewed beer. The beers can be various — banana, corn, pineapple, palm. Generally, each of these women specializes in one kind. A glass of such a beverage has three merits: (a) it contains alcohol, (b) being a liquid, it quenches thirst, and (c) because the solution at the bottom of the glass is thick and dense, it constitutes for the hungry an ersatz nourishment. Therefore, if someone has earned only a shilling in the course of a day, he will most probably spend it in a bar.
It is rare for someone to settle for long in my alleyway. The people who pass through here are the city’s eternal nomads, wanderers along the chaotic and dusty labyrinth of its streets. They move away quickly and vanish without a trace, because they never really had anything. They go, either tempted by the mirage of employment, or frightened by an epidemic that has suddenly broken out nearby, or evicted by the owners of the clay huts and verandas, whom they were unable to pay for the space they occupied. Everything in their life is temporary, fluid, and frail. It exists and it doesn’t exist. Even if it does exist — then for how long? This eternal uncertainty causes my neighbors to live in a perpetual state of alert, of unabating fear. They fled the poverty of the countryside and made their way to the city in the hope that life would be better for them here. Those who succeeded in tracking down a cousin could count on some support, some help getting started. But many of these former peasants did not find any of their relations, or any fellow tribesmen. Often, they didn’t even understand the language being spoken in the streets, didn’t know how to ask about anything. Still, the force of the city absorbed them, its life became their only world, and by the next day already they were unable to extricate themselves from it.
They started to build a roof over their heads, some little corner, a nook of their own. Because these arrivals had no money — having come here to make some from traditional villages where money is not commonly used — they could look for a place only in the slum neighborhoods. It is an extraordinary sight, the construction of such a neighborhood. Most often, the municipal authorities designate the worst land for this purpose: marshes, quagmires, or barren desert sands. Someone erects the first shack there. Next to it, someone else puts up another one. And then another. Thus, spontaneously, a street is formed. Nearby, another street is advancing. Eventually they will meet, and create an intersection. Now both streets will start to spread, divide, branch out. And a neighborhood will come into being. But first, people collect building material. It is impossible to figure out where they get it. Do they dig it out of the earth? Do they pull it down from the clouds? The one thing is certain: this penniless throng is not buying anything. On their heads, on their backs, under their arms, they bring pieces of corrugated iron, boards, plywood, plastic, cardboard, metal automobile parts, crates, and all this they assemble, erect, nail, and glue into something halfway between a cabin and a lean-to, whose walls configure themselves into an improvised, colorful collage. Because the floor of the hut often consists of swampy ground, or sharp rocks, they line it with elephant grass, banana leaves, raffia, or rice straw, so as to have somewhere to sleep. These neighborhoods, these monstrous African papier-mâché creations, are made up of everything and anything, and it is they, and not Manhattan or the Parisian La Défence, that represent the highest achievement of human imagination, ingenuity, and fantasy. An entire city erected without a single brick, metal rod, or square meter of glass!
Like many other elemental “happenings,” the slum neighborhoods have a short life span. It suffices that they spread too far, or that the city decides to build something on the same site. I once witnessed a slum extermination, not far from my alleyway. The shacks had reached down to the shore of the island. The military government deemed this unacceptable. Trucks carrying policemen arrived in the morning. A crowd gathered instantly. The police started to move on the settlement, driving out the inhabitants. A cry went up; there was turmoil. At this the bulldozers materialized, enormous bright-yellow Caterpillars. A moment later, clouds of dust and debris gusted upward as the machines advanced, demolishing street after street and leaving in their wake trampled, bare earth. That day, the alley filled up with refugees. It was crowded and noisy for a while, and even more stifling.
One day I had a visitor. He was a middle-aged man in a white djellabah. His name was Suleiman, and he hailed from Northern Nigeria. He had once worked for my Italian landlord as a night watchman. He knew the street and the entire surrounding neighborhood. He acted shy and didn’t want to sit in my presence. He asked if I didn’t need a night watchman, for he had just lost his job. I said I didn’t, but he made a good impression on me and I gave him five pounds. A few days later he came again. This time he sat down. I made him some tea, and we started to talk. I told him about how I was being continually robbed. Suleiman considered this to be something completely normal. Theft is a method — admittedly unpleasant — of lessening inequality. It is good that they rob me, he declared. It can even be seen as a friendly gesture on the part of the perpetrators — their way of letting me know that I am useful, and, therefore, that they accept me. Basically, I can feel safe. Have I ever felt threatened here? No, I had to admit. Well, there you go! I will be safe here as long as I let myself be freely robbed. The moment I inform the police, and they start to pursue the thieves, is the moment I would be advised to move away.
He came again a week later. I gave him tea. He drank, and then said in a mysterious tone that he would take me to the Jankara Market, where we would make an appropriate purchase. Jankara Market is where witch doctors, herbalists, fortune tellers, and exorcists sell all manner of amulets, talismans, divining rods, and magical medicines. Suleiman walked from table to table, looking, asking. Finally, he indicated that I should buy a bunch of white rooster feathers from a certain woman. They were expensive, but I didn’t resist. We returned to the alley. Suleiman arranged the feathers, tied them together with a piece of thread, and hung them from the top of my door frame.
From that moment on, nothing ever disappeared from my apartment.
Salim
In the darkness, I suddenly spotted two glaring lights. They were far away and moved about violently, as if they were the eyes of a wild animal thrashing about in its cage. I was sitting on a stone at the edge of the Ouadane oasis, in the Sahara, northeast of Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital. For an entire week now I had been trying to leave this place — to no avail. It is difficult to get to Ouadane, but even more difficult to depart. No marked or paved road leads to it, and there is no scheduled transport. Every few days — sometimes weeks — a truck will pass, and if the driver agrees to take you with him, you go; if not, you simply stay, waiting who knows how long for the next opportunity.