Bamoye

Death is too close in Mali. And when someone dies, everyone throws their hands up in the air and resigns themself to ‘C’est la vie! C’est la volonte d’Allah!’

Tonight, at the Hotel Campement in Djenne,  as I was eating the ‘spahetti vegetarien’ that Papa had brought me (not quite like the old days, I have to say, he’d used Chinese noodles!)  Boubakar my old gardener whom I had just seen, phoned me to say that Bamoye had just died.

 Now that did rock me a bit... 

Bamoye was a great friend of Keita’s. He was a welder and a blacksmith. In the very early days I had commissioned him to make  some chairs copying the famous bent metal chairs of Mies van der Rohe. He did one beautiful sample, and then when I agreed to let him do 16 of them, he handed the job over to his apprentices who made a dog’s dinner of it. I was furious. Bamoye was also a music lover, and a guitarist. We had one deeply bonding characteristic: we both loved the music of Kar-kar, or Boubakar Traore, and we both cried when exposed to it. One night before we fell out he had stayed up all night at the hotel, playing guitar with an American tourist. This tourist was so thrilled with this experience that he presented Bamoye with his guitar as the sun rose. This became Bamoye’s most treasured possession, and when we fell out over the chairs he wrote me a song called ‘Sophie, ya fama’ which means ‘Sophie, forgive me’ in Bambara. He came to the hotel and played it for me, and I melted, of course.

Some time passed, and Bamoye had to travel for a few days. He told his wife no one was allowed to touch his guitar. When he came back from his journey the guitar was gone- his wife had let Bamoye’s  friend borrow it after all. When Bamoye found it, it was destroyed. This caused a marital crisis, and Bamoye threw his wife out and was going to divorce her. Le tout Djenne got involved, and everyone had an opinion about it. My Keita felt that he couldn’t divorce his wife for the sake of a guitar, but Birgit disagreed. ‘It was the most precious belonging he had, so why couldn’t he divorce her for not looking after it?’ she felt. I was undecided and wavering. In the end he gloomily let her stay.

At Christmas that year Boubakar the gardener, who always played the part of Father Christmas at the hotel, presented Bamoye with a large guitar shaped parcel. It was the hotel guitar... one I had brought out from England when Keita thought he would like to learn to play- this never came to pass. Of course Bamoye was delighted and played Sophie ya Fama again.

And now, this afternoon  he is gone, apparently taken by diabetes.Below is a picture of how Djenne says farewell. The body is laid out on the place in front of the mosque and the people stand praying the mortuary prayers, all turned in the direction of Mekka.

Allah Ka Hine ala.