Djenne Gossip

Today was full of necessary stuff, such as a visit to the bank. That is always a marathon on a Monday, the market day in Djenne, when the village populations for miles around arrive as they have for a thousand years maybe to peddle their country produce in front of the Great Mosque and to have their great weekly gossip. 

Only the location for this has changed...but more of this anon.

 As I waited for my turn at the bank I overheard a conversation between three young men next to me, who were speaking French. I assumed they were school teachers, since in my experience they are the only ones that speak French to each other. I was right.  I was intrigued by their conversation which had turned to the question of the insecurity in the region. I now barged into the conversation uninvited but found them friendly and willing to discuss the situation. One of them, Mohammed Maiga, a Songhai from Gao, had been evacuated to Mopti during the Islamist invasion of 2012 to finish his studies there and had graduated as a teacher and found a job in the village of Gania not far from Djenne in 2013.  Two weeks ago his village was threatened by the Front de Liberation de Macina, the terrorist organisation which operates in central Mali. The Maire announced that he had had SMS messages which warned him that if he didn’t close the school down they would come and burn it down. The Maire decided to bow to the request and the school has now shut until further notice. Maiga’s friend and collegue, Sylla Diallo, a Fulani from the village of Senossa, was working as a teacher in the village of Taga in March when the Jihadists arrived and burned down the school. He has now taken up a new post in the village of Madiama, one of the few operational schools in the countryside around this area. In the Commune Rurale de Mounia there are seventeen schools, of which only four are operational. So what should be done? I asked if they thought it was OK to just acquiesce and do whatever the terrorists asked. ‘well, what can we do when we have no police or army in these places?’ they asked. These villages now lack any state presence apart from the school teachers, the last civil servants to brave living there. One can hardly expect a young school teacher from another part of the country to put up any serious defiance in the face of the continual threat from these groups, and therefore the creeping menace gains force.  The villages, abandoned by the state, the school system, law and all semblance of a functioning society, become a fertile breeding ground for extremist radicalization.

                                                                               

I went on to greet M. Baby, the Prefect of Djenne, and his story was also one of frustration at the lack of man power to patrol and control the area. There may be a slight glimmer of hope, said Cisse, the Djenne tax official and Keita’s great friend. He pointed to an initiative by the HCI: the Haute Conseil Islamic, a powerful Muslim country-wide organization led by a certain M. Dicko with Wahabist sympathies. This group held a large meeting in Mopti a month ago and called for dialogue with the extremist group. ‘What do they want? Is there a way of solving this impasse and stopping the violence?’ They called for local leaders and dignitaries to get involved in this dialogue. This is something positive of course, a step in the right direction, but I can’t help thinking that what the HCI want and what the Islamists want is perhaps not so far removed from each other...? Sharia law? Arabic taught to the exclusion of French in all schools? Hmm...

 Maman now told me something interesting. There is a Fulani in Senossa with a reputation for involvement with the terrorist Macina group. Maman has had some dealings with him in connection with his incipient chicken venture- the man sells chickens for breeding. This Fulani was making inquiries about me the other day. ‘Your Patronne’, he asked, ‘she is involved with Kitabs isn’t she? He knew that I am involved with the manuscript library. That was something positive to him because it involved a promotion of Arabic and Islam. In Maman’s opinion and that of Cisse, that means that I am safe and not seen as a target, although these groups might know when I am around.  ‘Yes, but what about the manuscripts that were destroyed by the Jihadists in Timbuktu, why did that happen then?’ I objected, not feeling convinced. That was an act of random, spiteful destruction just before fleeing Timbuktu before the advancing French and Malian forces was their opinion. Hmm...possibly. I had been nursing the belief that much of the material found in the manuscript libraries was seen as unorthodox Islam by the Jihadists. Nestling amongst the respectable Korans, the Hadiths and the Islamic jurisprudence there lies a very large amount of esoteric material, with strong ties  to the occult and to earlier animist traditions.  But who knows... perhaps there are Jihadists and Jihadists? 

Maman drove me back to my house on his motorcycle. And now we passed the new, provisional Monday market of Djenne which spreads out on the waste land right in front of my house and land, and my old hotel on one side and the school opposite. The reason for the repositioning of the time honoured Djenne Monday market is a scheme by the Aga Khan Foundation to pave over the large empty space in front of the Mosque. Now, call me old fashioned but I find this quite a hair- brained idea. With paving stones, where will the poles go in that support the sun shades that stretches all over the market place? And forgive me, but there have been umpteen schemes and projects in Djenne trying to deal with the evacuation of water, and what happens? The open cement drains are simply buried in mud over the space of a couple of years’ Crepissages  and then forgotten about! During the Crepissage of the Great Mosque, tonnes of mud are deposited in front ot it, then used, but I can’t really imagine that anyone is going to start scrubbing the pavement clean... little by little the mud will invade again, like it always has, and in ten years the Aga Khan’s paving stones will be but a buried memory.