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.

Northward

The dry Mali December landscape opened  itself to me like a well-thumbed favourite book as I sped northwards in the hired Mercedes with Ga from Djenne at the wheel. How many times have I travelled this road? I tried to calculate. It must be hundreds by now. I know every twist and turn. I know every roadside market and I know all the produce that changes through the seasons. Now the water melons are piled up in great abundance and the delicious small Pommes de Sahel are offered in plastic bags by the enthusiastic village women who rush up to the car and fall over themselves hoping for a sale. Soon it will be the season for the custard apple, the wondrous creamy fruit I call the fruit of paradise. And there are always the roasted peanuts of course. 

The harvest of the millet was mainly over and the cattle had begun grazing the remaining stubble in the fields. But here and there a lone farmer still tended his remaining crop, watched over by a baobab. Those marvellous trees! If only they spoke our language. Just imagine what they would say. .. these below  look quite annoyed. Perhaps they are outraged at what Mali has become, like everyone else. The parallels drawn between Afghanistan and Mali are becoming frequent, as the way forward seems to be endlessly forking into swampy terrain and  losing itself. 

The familiarity of my land and my house in Djenne feels like home, even now.  Maman was there to greet me and so was Papa to give me food and make me almost forget that my life here is over. I sat on the roof of my mud house and looked towards the west and the Mosque (just visible to the right below) where the boys played football in the setting sun like they always have. 

 And when the sun had disappeared below the dusty horizon I turned around towards the east and saw the great full moon rise over the turrets which were once my hotel. 

Alhamdulillah!

Not broken. Only badly sprained. Will be on crutches for a week or so, but leaving for Djenne as planned on Saturday!

So Cross....

This time honoured room at the Swedish Residence, which has been the scene of numerous health crises, both Keita's and mine, is once more the stage of another calamity.
I tend to have my head in the clouds, so I am not going to accuse the two young boys who ran into me this lunchtime with their Djakarta, the omnipresent scooter of Mali. I may well be at fault, having perhaps  stepped into the road without due attention...Anyway. there was an almighty smash that sent me flying and I landed on my back, spead-eagled on the road in front of Amandine's in Badalabougou.
Kind passers by pulled my dress down, supported me as I tried to stand up, and in due course I found enough presence of mind to wriggle my toes and try and find out if I had anything broken. It seemed that I did not, at least at first.
So a kind stranger gave me lift back  to Eva's, where I have spent the afternoon resting and indulging in self pity, while  the pain my foot has steadily increased. I can't stand on it. Dear Eva came to commiserate, to plunge my foot into a bucket of ice water and to comfort me with good white wine. Her new chef brought us great dinner in my room.
I am extremely cross. Now, what is THIS supposed to Mean? I do not have the time for this disaster.

Tomorrow my dear friend Karen will pick me up to take me to have the foot ex- rayed to see if it is broken.
I am totally intending to go on to Djenne and Timbuktu, even if it will have to be on crutches, goddammit... Just try and stop me!

The Meaning of Things.

Happy to be back in Mali again. To stay with Eva at the lovely Swedish  residence feels like coming home: so many important events have unfolded here over the last few years. Bamako is pleasant now, neither sweltering hot, nor has the cool period started. I swim in the pool every day and spend most of my time wrestling with administrative details, trying to organize the upcoming  trip to Djenne and Timbuktu.

Today I met Berit, the charming wife of the new Norwegian ambassador to Mali. She has been 
reading this journal, and also the old one Djenne Djenno, and she wanted to meet me so she kindly invited me for lunch in Bamako today. Between starter and main course the conversation took a   philosophical turn...

I have always been an inveterate searcher for the Meaning of Things, with a feeling that  the events that pass by us, or involve us are somehow invested with Meanings that we are supposed to discover, decipher and use as material to form our life.

Berit was not of the opinion that there are Meanings to what happens. ‘Shit Happens’, she accurately pronounced. Yes, I know.  All that happens is  not positive and rosy and all cannot  be construed to be working for our good. I know that I could not even begin this conversation with someone whose son had just died in a car accident. She said that she was not a believer. But I don’t think one needs to be religious to believe that there is a sort of mysterious pattern and purpose to what happens to us.  

“ I don’t mean that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds in some sort of optimistic and delusionary vision of reality”, I said.  Berit probably  meant that to think there is a pattern and a Meaning to things entails a fatalistic passivity: that one is off the hook and one can sit down and wait for it all to happen, like some spectator at a show. One is not  responsible. The events are simply unfolding. But that is not what I mean.

I think of the river again. The river flows by us, fast sometimes and slower sometimes. It is filled with flotsam. All of it Means something, in eternal and infinite combinations. Some of it is meant for us, some of it has nothing to do with us, but is meant for others. We have to try and decipher what belongs to us, and make something out of it. To let it all float by without grasping hold of any of it is to waste it. We will  make mistakes and misunderstand...it is a risky business. But to believe in Meanings and Reasons is not a passive thing, sitting down waiting for things to happen, it is to use the flotsam from the river as it is floating by, and having a hand in shaping one’s destiny.
The action of writing a journal for the last eleven years has has not only recorded events, it has helped to shape my life, because in the choosing of what is recorded and what is discarded one builds structures from all this fast flowing flotsam and continually attempt to grasp and even shape  the Meaning of Things...

Berit works for a human rights organization in Norway. She has taken some time off now to enjoy Mali.  I think in the end we agreed that it is our response and our reactions to what happens to us that is the important ingredient in  the Meaning of Things. In that we form our destiny. And there must be plenty of movement , hope and creative possibilities  in that.

This reminds me of something lovely I read the other day:

Without hope there can be no endeavour…it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded ; for hope itself is happiness and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction. Samuel Johnson on DonQuixote, The Rambler, (1750)

An auspicious lunchtime conversation with a new friend. I am sure it means something...

The Approach of the Journey

This picture greeted me when I dipped into Facebook, somewhat guiltily, just now. I am riding my Yamaha DT from my hotel into Djenne.The picture  was put up by  my cousin Elisabet, a film maker, who is making a documentary about my little mud hotel Djenne Djenno amongst other things. She and her French camera man Henri was with me on the very last evening before closing the hotel, here with Baba, my manager/waiter who worked at the hotel for the whole 11 years. Elisabet is giving a screening of the film as 'work in progress' next week in a Swedish cinema.

 I am supposed to be concentrating on Auckland Castle floor coverings but find my mind wandering.

It hovers over Mali...  Always before leaving I find that a part of me travels before the rest somehow. Now half of me is already there, at the festival of Maoulod in Djenne, when the air reverberates  with the sound of the rythmic, melodious and joyous chanting from fifty  Koran schools, announcing the birth of the Prophet Mohammad. This festival is the best time of the year in Djenne.
I will never forget when I first arrived in 2006- I slept on a roof top and was lulled to sleep by the chanting which continues until sun rise...

I will also go to Timbuktu. This time I will travel down the Niger river from Mopti,  recreating the  river journey I did when I was a teenager.  More of this soon...

Joy.

Something has happened which has made me feel like skipping over little houses, but since I have never talked about this before, not wanting to drag tedious health matters in to contaminate this journal, it will seem of little consequence to anyone who  may look in. But not to me…

For the last few years I have had a problem with my lower spine which has given me a limp and which has become increasingly painful. The last few years have been so overshadowed by Keita’s much worse health problems that whatever was wrong with me seemed unworthy of attention and was more or less ignored.

 I had more or less resigned myself to being confined to a wheel chair within a not too distant future, because at the fleeting consultation I had about it a long time ago  I had been told that nothing could be done and that it would get worse.  Dear Jeremiah, always practical, had tried to comfort me, unsuccessfully, by telling me that it would be perfectly fine: all I would have to do would be to sell my third floor flat and buy one with handicapped access  on  the ground floor, then the NHS would give me not only a wheelchair, but I would be nipping around Ladbroke Grove in one of those electric three wheelers, so what was I complaining about ? It would be quite OK. I can’t say I was convinced, ( I used to ride a Moto Guzzi LeMans Mark2, after all...) but nevertheless, what was there to do, except try and grin and bear it with as much grace as I could muster? I have had a great life…and there would always remain the possibility of the Hurtigrutten, or cruising down the fjords of Norway…so indeed, who was I to complain ?

That was until this week when I met a specialist who told me that whatever prognosis I had been given in the past was completely mistaken! There was nothing terribly wrong with me that a fairly minor operation won’t take care of, and there is even no reason why I shouldn’t ride again ! and I thought that was all over…

The picture seems appropriate as a token of thankfulness: it is from a prayerbook in Djenne, and the picture will appear in an article about the Djenne Manuscript Library written by Anthony Sattin in the upcoming February- March issue of the Christie’s Magazine. The pink colour is painted with ‘Dableni’ the juice of the hibiscus flower.