Being a Baobab

When I was in Bamako I met up with Mamane, one of the longest serving employees of Hotel Djenne Djenno. We met at the Sleeping Camel, here under the fresco depicting Thomas Sankara, the Che Guevara of West Africa, still a huge hero here.

Mamane has not been able to find any work- in Djenne there is nothing, and he is one of the many who has come to the capital to look for employment. I have asked if there is something for him here at the Camel, but there is no opportunity quite yet, so we have been looking at websites and I have been advising  him how to put a letter of application together.

At the end I decided to call Madou, the IT specialist from Djenne who is in Bamako at the moment. He is smart and knowledgeable and he will continue to help him, and Dembele too once he gets back to Djenne. When Mamane left, he said something to me, which I take to be a lovely compliment. He said: ‘You are still our Baobab!’

The Timbuktu trip was, as always, a complicated and intense time, since we only ever have one day in which to accomplish everything. This time that involved the formal end of the British Library’s two year project, and the beginning of Phase two. I did not know until a couple of days earlier that Father Columba, who came with me this time (with Dima Bondarev of the University of Hamburg), had decided to continue the project through his organization the HMML (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Minnesota), and I thought this trip may possibly be my last to my beloved Mali... 

But Columba  offered me to continue as project manager, only this time I work for them instead of the BL. I could not refuse, of course, and accepted happily  because  it will bring me back to Mali, and however much I complain about it, I still enjoy it hugely. Every time I go to Timbuktu it is an adventure, and for some reason the trips we do together always seem filled to the brim with extraordinary adventures. 

                                                                            

This time we were regaled by Boucar Tandina, the guardian at the Essayouti library who played for us at the end of our visit for the ELIT Project ‘family photograph’ which takes place every time I come.

The flight back was  unforgettable. 

As we boarded our little plane in Timbuktu a pretty young Kenyan girl who looked about fifteen said breezily: ‘I am your Co-pilot on today’s flight. There will be a little bit of turbulence , but nothing to worry about.’ ‘A little bit’ was certainly the understatement of the decade. After about half an hour we entered what I would like to describe as some sort of Biblical deluge with a hurricane thrown in for good measure and  the tiny  plane was thrown violently up and down, backwards and forwards, seemingly rudderless and abandoned to the elements like a ship wreck or a tiny snowflake in a snow storm. I held onto Father Columba and Dmitry and squeezed their hands in a relentless iron grip. 

Father Columba is the coolest and calmest person I know ( he was sending ‘thank you for dinner’ emails and working away quietly in Timbuktu while the machine gun fire was deafening all around our hotel during the attack on the UN head quarters in August 2017: see blog) but even he admitted to ‘feeling rather queasy’ during this ordeal...the picture below is of Jeremy Bristow when the storm had calmed down a little. Jeremy is a fun English documentary film maker who was with us this time, 

 Very glad to arrive at  Bamako airport.