JOHN VC

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MUD IN YOUR EYE - The mosque in Djenne, Mali, is the largest mud-brick building in the world. It is a city block in area and six stories high, with pyramidal mud minarets. The walls are topped with a sawtooth effect, like the back of a stegosaurus. Like every mud-brick building it needs constant attention. Every summer, after the spring rains have been at it, it has to be re-slathered. Four to six thousand people spend a month carrying mud from the river, mixing it with straw, climbing up the hundreds of poles that stick out of the sides of the building, and patting on more mud. It would be nice to get a closer look but unbelievers are not admitted onto the grounds, since some silly Italian ad agency used this holy place as a really fab backdrop for pictures of half-nekkid Eurotrash models faking sexual ecstasy over their wrist watches. You can, however, get up on adjacent rooftops for a small coin and do your disbelieving there, being careful not to step on the drying fish or the laundry. UNESCO offered to pay for some cement to mix with the mud, but the people of Djenne found that their annual mud party was great for civic togetherness so they politely declined. Mud houses are not low maintenance. We noticed collapsed houses all over town, ranging from a roofless square to a mere straw-tufted mound. Apparently, first you get old, or poor, in Djenne, and then your house falls on you.

CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR At the museum in Bamako, I was standing by an elephant skull on display, giving an impromptu lecture about proboscidean molars to some of our passengers, when an official in a white shirt and tie stopped and said, “Excuse me, sir, but that is a hippo.” There were two little hippo tusks lying on the bottom of the case but he meant the elephant skull. I said, excuse ME but I know what I am talking about, but the more I spluttered the firmer he got, insisting that everyone in Bamako used to see this hippo in the zoo and I should be ashamed of myself. We had dinner that night with the Museum director, a friend of Enid’s, and he admitted that in absence of a zoologist he and his staff had more or less decided among themselves that this big skull must surely be that of the recently deceased zoo hippo. Fortunately there was no label with the specimen (it was part of a temporary exhibit about hunting) and they could just change their story, no lasting harm done. As far as anyone in Bamako knew, it could have been a dinosaur.

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STICKY BOYS - The narrow peninsula of Cap Vert on which Dakar is built is the eroded relic of an ancient, half-submerged lava flow, and the little island of Goree out in the harbor, which was where the European slave dealers lived, looks to be a remnant of the central crater, with high cliffs of columnar basalt on one side that Gregory Peck climbed in “The Guns of Navarone”. On the ferry ride to see this Beverly Hills of bestiality, now a charming pastel-painted Mediterranean village of winding alleys and no cars, our guide warned us repeatedly to beware of “sticky boys who keep close to you.” Everyone groaned at the thought — our travel in Mali and especially the Dogon villages had been tortured by incredibly persistent teenagers, wearing pieces of American sports outfits, who hovered and pestered like flies, each one attaching himself to a selected tourist and refusing to be shaken off, whether by ignoring, pleading or raging. No matter how narrow the passageway, there was always the same earnest boy right at elbow, touching your arm, interrupting your conversations, insistently shoving badly made trinkets in your face, or doggedly repeating “just one little ting, bossman, sure you can give me one ting.” There is no way to escape, short of child abuse, and after half an hour of nonstop badgering of course you break down and hand over a pen or a coin or an empty film canister because there seems to be absolutely no other way to get rid of them. Guess what, they know that. Our local guide (a beautiful Fulani lady named Assetas) said that the tourist companies had tried and tried to get the village elders to restrain the boys lest people refuse to go there any more, bad for everyone, but that “there was too much democracy among the Dogon.” As it turned out the boys on Goree hardly knew how to be sticky at all, and were easily driven off by our violent pent-up reactions. They must have thought we were completely uncivilized.

WORK YOUR WAY UP - Traveling around Senegal with Mohammad (guide) and Pap (driver) on a little vacation after our tour group went home, we learned more about the Mourides, a fast-growing “Islamic brotherhood” founded by Sheikh Amahdu Bamba. The only known photo of the founding saint, who died in the 1920s, is an almost abstract design of chalk-white robe and turban against dark skin and black background. This has morphed into an iconic image that is seen absolutely everywhere, painted on shop windows, city walls, and the back of trucks. It’s against the strict rules of Islam to make an image of a person — ask the Taliban guys with the sledgehammers — but they would have to knock down half of Senegal to wipe out these depictions. His special message was that only by constant, uncomplaining, unremitting hard work could a person attain to Paradise. He came from a wealthy family with big farms and maybe he had his motives, but he did set an example, as we discovered when we decided to make a special detour to his holy city of Touba. Here, the faithful are busy improving on a gigantic marble-clad mosque that is already the largest in Africa outside of Cairo — the central minaret can be seen for 20 miles across the flat landscape. Across the road from the mosque is a big modern library. One wing is given over entirely to Amahdu Bamba books. Not about him, but — BY him. We peeked in three different windows to see rack on rack of volumes, stretching into the distance. We heard different estimates of the quantity, expressed not in words or pages but in TONS. Some figures were Islamic lucky numbers (like the number of Mohammed’s disciples) so we ignored those; most people gave it 14 tons of writings! He must have written a book a day. “Maybe he wrote in very big letters?” asked Enid. “Oh he was in exile for twenty years, he had a lot of time,” said Pap, who is a Mouride himself.

The most important person for Mourides besides Amadhu Bamba himself was a seriously mystical person called Sheikh Fall. He was a raving lunatic until Amahdu Bamba touched his head, which is said to have cured him. From that moment he never cut his hair — some say because Amahdu Bamba touched him there, others that he began to work so hard that he didn’t have time. He worked so hard that his clothes fell to rags, and he didn’t care if he got paid, or even if what he was doing was actually useful to anyone, so long as he was hard at it, which meant that he usually had no money and had to be fed by charity. In Senegal this behavior is considered holy, and soon Sheikh Fall built up a following, called the Baye Fall. These children of Allah go around in bizarre patchwork robes, begging alms and freely helping anyone who needs a hand, you have but to ask. One notable sign of a Baye Fall is the special big club they carry at all times, to indicate their dedication to hard work; of course, it may also be that a beggar with a club does better than an unarmed one. In Touba we were taken to a grand mortuary of Mouride saints. In the great hall, Sheikh Fall’s tomb stands out, sheathed in a huge folded plate of glittering copper donated by the Saudis. There is not much to see as a result, but over to one side is a rather plain-looking stump of wood sticking out of the marble floor, looking very out of place despite being waxed and polished to a high degree. “Sheikh Fall worked himself to death, to go straight to Paradise,” said Pap. “And this is the exact tree he was chopping when he died.”

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JOIN THE CLUB - Several days later we were headed back to Dakar from our visit to the far corner of Senegal where the termites build their mounds with umbrellas to keep off the rain and there are no tourist accommodations. We wound up in a mountain top village where Mohammad cooked us all a goat he brought back from the market, pore lil thing. We were passing through a small town, driving slowly because the Berbers were bringing in herds of rams from Mauretania for good Moslem fathers to slaughter personally in the kitchen for the Id al-Adha feast, like turkeys at Thanksgiving. Suddenly Pap slammed on the brakes. “There is a Baye Fall,” he said. “Do you want his clothes?” Enid had been asking if he could find her one of the patchwork robes for the Museum collection. The gentleman in question, a tall shy person with big aviator glasses, was not prepared to strip by the roadside, but he had another robe at home that he could sell. Home was on our way, 30 km down the road, so in he got next to Enid, introduced himself as Maged Fall, and away we went. (I know what you’re thinking, but it’s European country folk who don’t bathe.) It turned out that our passenger, who was delighted to catch a ride, was in fact the tithe collector for the Baye Fall community, and was doing his rounds. He smiled shyly and showed us his neatly lettered record book, with sums equal to two or three dollars next to each name. He asked if it would be possible to stop once when we came to the next village, and he would be done for the day. This place was having a big roadside market, with the most useless junk like old gear wheels, computer boards and bits of garden hose spread out as well as the usual vegetables, shoes and baskets. An evangelist had gathered a crowd (”Maybe you better not stand here any more,” cautioned Mohammed out of the side of his mouth. I thought he meant I might be attacked, but he was worried about pickpockets.) Suddenly there was a commotion, and I saw a ragged boy being dragged along the roadside by an old man in a fancy turban, surrounded by an angry crowd full of big husky men with sticks. The boy was trying frantically to break away and crying miserably. “He is a thief,” said Mohammed. “In Dakar they would kill him. Here they will beat him so that he remembers.” I felt sick. The boy was just Malcolm’s size. In the end, he was handed over to a bored looking cop, who shoved him into the back of a jeep. The crowd wandered off. We drove away.

At the Baye Fall’s house, on a shady side street, we were greeted in the yard by his mother, a lovely old lady half his size. He explained to her in Wolof that Enid was interested to show the people in New York about Amahdu Bamba, and that we wanted to have pictures of his room, all plastered with pictures of the saint and other holy men. What the ethnologists call an “imagery.” She gave us a proud smile. Inside his room (actually a separate little house, on one side of the yard) we were shown some of his special things, like his first club, that he had made while he was in religious training. He had been given a new club by his teacher, who had studied with Sheik Fall himself. We took photos with Enid’s digital camera, showing Maged and his mother previews of the pictures we would be sending them. On impulse, Maged said he wanted to send hjs old club to New York, to be on display. And then, looking over his shoulder, he passed over a roll of cloth. “He says,” translated Pap, “please don’t tell his mother.” So, in the end, what had begun as a roadside barter had turned into another sort of experience altogether. It’s often that way when I travel with Enid; I can see why anthropologists like their work.

SEE MORE MALI: From Timbuktu, to Dogon dancers, to life on the Niger River