Water rising still...

Maman sent me this picture this morning: it shows the entrance to the former Hotel Djenne Djenno where the wall has collapsed because of the high water.
Behind it is possible to glimpse  my land with the Malimali bogolan studio which is still OK.

Dembele and Maman are still painting: here is our Labyrinth Bogolan which I just put up on Etsy, where we have been selling our fabric: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/MaliMaliStudio

And  still the water is rising says Maman...

Rosa Bouglione - a must-share obituary from the Times this morning

Rosa Bouglione obituary

Queen of the French circus whose troupe travelled with 30 horses, 12 elephants, ten lions, six tigers and a polar bear

October 26 2018, 12:01am, The Times

At the centre of Rosa Bouglione’s apartment in Paris lay one of her most beloved possessions: a leopard-skin rug with head still attached. “That’s Mickey,” she would say to visitors. “He died of old age. We had him a long time.”

With her sparkling diamonds, a dash of red lipstick and her once-dark hair swept up in an elegant bun, Bouglione was the matriarch of five generations of a famous French circus family. She once hosted Maria Callas, the soprano, on stage at the theatre the family ran — the enormous Cirque d’Hiver (Winter Circus), which had several thousand seats. However, as Callas got too close to Bouglione’s husband, Joseph, she was almost crushed by an elephant. “The elephant practically knocked her over,” she recalled. “He was jealous.”

Bouglione was regularly sought out to talk about her adventures around the world with her husband and their circus. They toured constantly. On one trip to Brazil, during which they were accompanied by 30 horses, ten lions, six tigers and a polar bear, there was a storm at sea and the captain almost resorted to having the 12 elephants thrown overboard. “That was an adventure,” she said.

On another occasion she had to smuggle a baby gorilla into her hotel room in a hat box. “Gosh. Madame’s hats are pretty heavy,” she recalled the doorman saying . The gorilla went on to make hammocks out of the hotel curtains and developed a taste for wine, but was undetected by staff for a month. Bouglione also had a bad-tempered parrot, Coco, who lived to the age of 45 and spoke in a stream of foul language.

Often nicknamed “the undisputed queen of the circus”, Bouglione still went to matinees even after she had retired from running performances. “The shows got bigger and the children got bigger but I got smaller,” she said.

She was born Rosalie van Been in the back of a horse-drawn caravan in Belgium in 1910. Her father, Jules, was an animal trainer with the family outfit, Ménagerie van Been, and toured Europe with his wife, Gina (née Penetenti), and their snakes, bears and lions. In her teens Rosa performed the snake dance while her father controlled the lions. Aged 17, she fell in love with Joseph Bouglione, who had grown up training big cats. They married in a lion’s cage. The pastor chose to stay outside.

They spent their honeymoon working with the Wild West show, which had been set up by the bison hunter turned showman Buffalo Bill Cody. In 1934 they returned to France to run the Cirque d’Hiver, which Joseph bought with his three brothers. They lived at the circus and had seven children: Odette, Josette, Firmin, Emilien, Sandrine, Sampion and Joseph. They all joined the troupe. And all except Sandrine survive her.

During the Second World War the cirque was allowed to continue under Nazi occupation and the family hid their Romany origins behind their Italian name. Yet over the years Bouglione recalled that they faced disapproval for their gipsy roots. “People said we’d steal children.” she said, “but we never did. We had our own children, we didn’t need to steal children.”

In the 1950s Bouglione began to organise acts rather than perform in them. The circus hosted live television specials with singers such as Josephine Baker and Callas alongside acrobats and animals. In 2011 Bouglione published her memoirs, Un mariage dans la cage aux lions: la grande saga du cirque Bouglione (A wedding in the lions’ cage: the great saga of the Bouglione circus). In interviews she would call on her son Emilien, who was by then in his eighties, as her “memory aid”.

She put her longevity down to hard work, to sleeping very little and to deadly animals. “I’ve always, always been with lions, with panthers, with wolves, with hyenas,” she said. “I was never scared.” Her funeral took place in the Cirque d’Hiver. With 55 descendants, she often said that “as long as there are children, there will be circus”.

Rosa Bouglione, circus matriarch, was born on December 21, 1910. She died on August 26, 2018, aged 107

Timbuktu and the River

Having left Djenne in a canoe I was able to take advantage of a more sophisticated means of transport from Mopti as I boarded the little UNHAS (United Nations Humanitarian Air Service) plane to Timbuktu. The plains of the Niger delta stretched out beneath us green and watery all the way to Timbuktu- an unusual spectacle. Normally the palette is increasingly  the ochre of the desert with the Niger snaking its way northward in a network of silvery tracks that lose themselves into the sands more often than not, making the progress of the river something of a miracle.
                                                                       

I was thrilled to see that the legendary airport of Timbuktu where every tourist took pictures in happier times  had been repaired and once more made functional after the Jihadist attack some months ago.                                                     

This time I was met by two young Swedish soldiers in a little jeep who whisked me off to Camp Nobel where I was initiated in all safety procedures and given my very nice little room in the guest  tent.                                                                                 

 I had of course been here before , on that ill fated trip in August 2017 when we were rescued by the Swedish UN forces and taken here after the attack on the UN head quarter in town, just next to the hotel where we were staying.  I had been made to understand that it was no longer considered to be safe to stay at the Auberge du Desert, my normal Timbuktu abode. Jessica, the new Swedish Ambassador had kindly pulled her weight on my behalf and been able to arrange my stay at the Camp Nobel: a marvellously well run place full of beautiful blonde, extremely athletic young  people- my own people of course, but with that extra politeness and correctness which comes with being part of the military. The Force Commander of all the UN troops in Mali is a Swede this year- General Gyllensporre. Unfortunately I did not meet him...

Timbuktu is always a struggle... and not always  because of the Jihadists. The Timbuktu staff are very demanding and bossy in comparison with the Djenne staff, who were just so grateful to have a job that they rarely complained about anything. But here I am always faced with a mini up-rising, and it has been about the same problem for close to a year now. It is a question of MILK. For some reason the staff feel that the work with manuscripts produces dust which can be unhealthy, and the traditional means of combating this is through drinking milk. When I was first faced with this in December last year, I shrugged my shoulders, smiled and said that sure, they could buy some milk, thinking that it would be a negligible amount in the budget and could be lost somehow. But in July this year the MILK budget had ballooned into over £200 per month, so I put my foot down. No more milk I said, until I had checked with London. And when I came back, I told them the truth, which is that nowhere in the world in the hundreds of digitization projects run by both EAP and theHMML- the Minnesota Benedictines- is there any budget for the purchase of milk. Therefore it would have to stop, although I was able to increase their tea, coffee and sugar budget with nearly fifty per cent, and said that if they wanted to buy milk with that it would be their business. I now had a mutiny on my hands. I told them that I only have a precious two days with them and could we please get on to other subjects of a more pressing nature? Or talk about something interesting, like what treasures they might have discovered in the manuscripts? Well, it was, as I said, something of a struggle, but in the end we managed to patch things up enough for a family photograph of all the team:
                                                                         

I chose to return south on the river once more- last December I had travelled north with the  river vessel Modibo Keita, and here we are leaving the port of Kabara last week:
                                                                               

I was in distinguished company: the Timbuktu historian and Eminence Grise Salem Ould ElHadje travelled south too and he told me tales of old Mali as we gazed  at the river’s shore where ancient  villages with  magnificent mud mosques, entirely untouched by time, sped by.
                                                                       

                                                                                

Other fellow passengers were a friendly and interesting lot as usual, among whom was Hawa, a primary school teacher from Timbuktu and Cheik Mohammed Ag Abdarrachman,  a Tuareg land and cattle owner . The water stood so high that I feared for some of the villages- and Hawa told me that indeed, there had been certain areas that had to be evacuated- such as a large part of the town of Dire, where many houses had collapsed. And still the water is rising... A year of extremes it seems. Before the rains this year, the drought had been so severe that thousands of cattle had perished: Cheick Mohammed had lost over a hundred head of cattle...
                                                                               

We talked of the security situation in Timbuktu of course. The Swedes would be happy to hear that my fellow passengers from Timbuktu  thought that if it had not been for them - and the other UN troops, Timbuktu would have been over run by Jihadists a long time ago.
They also thought little of the MOC- the camp in Timbuktu where representatives of those armed groups that were previously  separatist  but have signed the peace accord such as the MNLA (now CMA) are lodged together with representatives of the  government friendly militia Gatia. They are supposed to be keeping the peace in Timbuktu and patrolling the town but this seems to be a failure, according to Hawa and Cheik Mohammed. The unrest in Timbuktu is only escalating, but seemingly at the moment in waves of ordinary  banditism, such as car thefts and petty crime.

In the morning, before arrival in Mopti  the preferred Malian breakfast was served: Mayonnaise sandwiches.  It is quite amazing how delicious they can be...
                                                                           

Djenne

This journey is difficult. There is no doubt about it.  Nothing is gained without engaging in gargantuan struggles: just to be able to get on a flight north involves having to fight my way through bureaucratic rats nests...and just to get to Djenne is fraught with geographical near impossibilities since the water stands higher than at any point since the beginning of my acquaintance with this city in 2005. Here is my house, bogolan studio and land which has become an island. We spent years building up the level of the land, and now it pays off...

 Those who were born here in the sixties say they have never seen the water this high.  To arrive in Djenne one has to board a canoe for the last bit of the journey. The one good thing about this otherwise problematic situation is that the Jihadists and the Dozo ( traditional hunter)  militias have taken a holiday it seems. I suppose it is difficult to cause too many problems if one has to engage a canoe in order to cause havoc...

I went to see Imam Yelpha today just before leaving Djenne. He seems to have taken up some sort of mediator role in the current struggles in and around the town. He told me that on Thursday he is hosting a meeting  in Djenne between the commanders of all the Dozo Militia who are now encamped around Djenne in 24 camps in the bush. He says there are at least 5000 mobilized Dozo militia. This seems like an exaggeration to me but who knows? He wants to talk peace with them and with some leaders of the ‘Jihadists’. He is not intending to invite any  Malian state representatives like the Prefect or the remaining Djenne Gendarmerie. 
 It seems as if Djenne and its alentours  is reverting totally to traditional leadership. In addition, there is no UN presence here at all- they are all encamped in and  around Mopti, some hour and a half's journey north.  
 ‘And what will you say to the Jihadists’? I asked.  ‘That we want peace’, said Yelpha. ‘But if there is any more trouble we will kill them’, he added, ominously...
I left him and said I would pray that Allah would help him to bring peace.

I also had a nostalgic get together with Maman and Baba last night- my best and most faithful employees at Hotel Djenne Djenno. We spent quite some time analyzing the recent Football World Cup.

 Maman is still working for me but I am trying to find a place for him to study something sensible that is likely to give him a secure employment like plumbing. Baba has started a small business selling matches, petrol by the litre, washing powder and cigarettes etc. by the side of the road at his house.  He was the smartest of all my employees- he will get somewhere although the beginning is humble. There have been a constant flow of people passing by hoping to gain a little crumb from me. It is difficult... it is not as if I am earning a lot of money...but I gave Boubakar my old gardener (and perennial Father Christmas at Hotel Djenne Djenno) enough to buy a sack of rice. His gratefulness made my day, but at the same time made me feel quite alarmed at the extreme precariousness of his position, which is the same as many others are facing here. I asked him: ‘How do you eat then, if you have nothing?’ (He has seven mouths to feed!) He said that they don’t normally eat anything in the mornings, but sometimes they have something for lunch, and then they try not to eat everything but to keep something for the evening too. It is quite heart breaking.

Today I left for  Mopti and tomorrow further northward...

                                                                                

In Bamako

Well, Scandinavian diplomats have certainly been extremely kind to me  every time I have visited Bamako. It started with dear Anne Maria, second in command at the Danish Embassy  around 2010- 2014 or so- I often stayed with her in her lovely  house in Cite du Niger. Then came the whole five years with Eva at the Swedish Residence, which became the anchor and the scene of so many important events in my life here in Mali. Eva has now left Mali but we are in touch of course and will see each other at her flat in Palma, Mallorca in November inchallah.

And now the ultra glamourous Norwegian couple Ambassador Ole and his wife Berit, above wearing the costume of the Hardanger region of Norway for the 17^th of May Norwegian  National Day celebrations in Bamako.  Berit has appeared already in this journal: See post 'The Meaning of Things' from November 21st last year.
 I was kindly invited to stay here at the stunning Norwegian Residence for my Bamako visit this time. My Norwegian is improving daily. Or, I should say, my comprehension of the Norwegian language. Normally Swedes and Norwegians understand each other quite well, but since I left Sweden so early - I was only seventeen- I have not been used to even speaking my own language, let alone hearing much Norwegian...but   while Berit has nothing against speaking English with me, Ole refuses on principle to speak English to a Swede, and of course he is quite right. So I am learning.
There are many ‘faux amis’ as the French call them- that is to say words which ought to mean a certain thing, but mean something totally different. The word ‘roligt’ for instance means ‘fun’ in Swedish but ‘calm’ in Norwegian.

My brother Anders, who used to work in Norway,  had told me lies about the Norwegian language and I had tried several times to find out from Norwegians I met  if it was really true that the word banana was guleboj  (Yellow Bend) in Norwegian, or the word for ‘shark’ was really   kampetorsk,  or ‘Great Warrior Cod’. These questions always ended up in a cold shoulder response: obviously the Norwegian in question thought I was making fun of them- but I really did want to know! And now, finally, I know that it was all nonsense, and Berit told me, without getting angry,  that banana is quite sensibly called banan in Norwegian!

But apart from such linguistic discoveries I am very much enjoying their company- tonight there was a glittering dinner party for some very interesting Malians and people from the neighboring countries. Below my hosts are inspecting the table before the arrival:
 

                                                             
and here the first guest, the Ghanaian ambassador, writes in the guest book...

                                                                                   
 I am also preparing for my trip north- about which it is best not to be too specific until later when I am safely back...

I am travelling around town in taxis  and the sights of Bamako are overwhelming as always: the exotic in a wild mixture with abject and depressing povery, and everyday struggles to survive on every street corner in  kaleidoscope visions with vibrant colours infused with laughter and  joie de vivre inspite of it all...