Walking with Abel (19 page)

Did the cows know this route from men, or did the Diakayatés learn it from the animals? For as long as Oumarou could remember—seven decades of transhumance—his father’s cattle always grazed in the same place during the dry season. Herding cows during the dry months never had been a matter of taking them to pasture. Rather, it was a matter of trying not to tamper with the course they had inherited from all the cows that had walked here before.

That fall, during the Diakayatés’ slowpaced return from rainy season pasturage, Ousman’s little brother Hassan would doze off on nightherd at a campsite by the Bani River and the cows would run off at a trot toward Doundéré, a day’s walk away. The boy would spend the morning looking for them, and ultimately would find them a quarter of the way to the bourgou, in cattle pens of thornbrush and daub beside a village of rimaibe millet farmers. The villagers, alarmed for their unharvested grain, would demand a five-dollar ransom for the animals’ release, and Hassan would have to trudge two hours back to his father’s camp, report to him the price, return with the money, and drive the herd back again.

“When my father sees me he will beat me,” the boy lamented along the way.

But Oumarou said only: “It’s the cows. They knew the rainy season was over and they were impatient. They were craving some sweetgrass.”

A Fulani anthropologist in Bamako told me: “Old cows know the way. When an old cow wakes up she starts going where she knows.” His name was Abdoul Aziz Diallo and he ran, from a small office on the second floor of an apartment building, a pan-African association that worked to preserve Fulani culture and heritage. Most of what he said sounded like proverbs. Then again, a lot of things people said in the Sahel sounded that way. Precise, workmanlike tags, born of living in a frugal and unforgiving landscape.

—

“The Fulani are losing old knowledge. Before they would get sick a lot, they’d die a lot. At night they used to only drink milk. No tea or food. No tobacco. There were many different wild animals in the bush that would attack humans and there were no flashlights. Life was harder. Today there are roads, villages, telephones, cars, motorcycles. Now they are learning in schools. But they are forgetting the traditional ways!”

So lamented my godfather Babourou Koïta from his perch in Djenné’s market square. Babourou and Ali the Griot and three or four other Fulani elders from the town sat swapping newspapers that had arrived by bus from Bamako the night before.
Maliba Info
,
Le Zénith-Balé
,
Info-Matin
,
La N’velle Patrie
. They smoked one another’s cigarettes and shook their heads and swore at the news. The provisional government in Bamako insisted on a presidential election in the summer. Chad deployed troops to northern Mali. Secessionist Tuareg factions in the north celebrated the anniversary of their unrecognized independence; festivities included camel races. A thousand French troops were searching for terrorists outside Gao, where almost five hundred years earlier Songhai forces had lost a battle and an empire to Moroccan mercenaries. Suicide bombings, corruption, refugees. New knowledge. New dispensations.

Babourou went on.

“In the past a Fulani would sell a cow and buy a horse. Now a Fulani sells a cow to buy a motorcycle. Some boys sell their cows and come to the city and eat meat and sleep with women and they lose their cows and they leave the bush for good. In the past people didn’t know about months or hours of the day, and now they do. But they are losing their knowledge of stars.

“For example”—he pointed—“look at this one!” An old man in a white boubou had dismounted a Toyota motorcycle and was shaking hands around. “This one here”—Babourou grabbed the man by the wrist—“he is my cousin. He is a Fulani but he sold his cows to marry a second woman and buy a television. He is a very stupid man!”

Ali the Griot perked up.

“He has nothing now, just his penis.”

The man snorted at such clumsy
sanankuya
jokes and bent down and pulled a cigarette out of Babourou’s chest pocket and turned to Ali for a light. He exhaled the smoke through his nose and said: “Babourou! You’re not a man because you only have one wife.” The prescribed exchange of vulgarities was thus complete and the men went back to their newspapers.

Babourou himself didn’t know much about stars. His ancestor, the
diawando
Diabourou Koïta, was one of the seven Fulani nobles Sekou Amadou had requested to remain in Djenné as part of the Massina Empire’s new ruling class two hundred years earlier. That
diawando
’s descendants stayed put also. Babourou did not herd cattle and he lived year-round in a clean banco house that had electricity whenever the town generator was running. He wore a watch and on a wall in his house he displayed a Gregorian flip calendar that had photographs of cows in it, a different kind of cow for each month. He rode a motorcycle and read newspapers and books when he could lay his hands on them and he sent his children to school. Someone else took his massive interbreds to pasture each morning and brought them back to town at night. He did not trust the bush with his cows. They were not many, but they were much more expensive than the zebu and the amount of milk they gave was astounding. Once a year he hired merchants to take some of them to Côte d’Ivoire to sell or trade. He took me to see them one time, in a small corral at the end of a labyrinth of adobe alleys in east Djenné. He walked among them and touched each one on the flank with reverence. “Métises,” he whispered, awed. “Ten liters of milk per cow!”

The venerable opinion of the educated men in town notwithstanding, the Fulani in the bush saw no threat to their expertise or lifestyle at all. Millennia on the hoof had taught them to absorb whatever was of use at any juncture—slaves, plastic tarpaulins, flashlights, motorcycles—and to cast aside whatever was not, to combine the old knowledge and the new in an optimally advantageous fashion. Their communion with their cattle remained unchanged.

The first thing a Fulani cowboy learned was the itinerary: where the cattle went to pasture and to water. He learned to identify the hoofprint of his cattle. He learned to tell from the depth of the hoofprint in the mud by the side of a swale whether the animal was running or walking. On dry land he learned to interpret the movement of small rocks, to infer the cow’s pace from how far the animal had flung stones from its path. He learned to tell whether the cows were thirsty by the height of the veil of dust in their wake. He learned to tell apart the drool of a cow that was near labor and the drool of a cow that was sick. He learned the difference between trees, and which fruit were edible for humans and for animals and which leaves could stanch the bleeding if a cow got hurt and which could cause or ease bloating. He learned the different names for the hippo grass, which was the most delicious, and the nutsedge, which was an anti-inflammatory and helped contain diarrhea, and the thatching grass, which animals rarely ate, and the short hot-season couchgrass and the translucent grasses that grew on the granite cliffs of the rainy-season grazing land near the border with Burkina Faso, and the pale delicate lovegrass that appeared on some pastures at the onset of rain.

He learned the ancestral complexities of the relationship between farmers and herders, the reciprocal animosity and the mutual respect. He also learned where the sweetest grass grew, even if it happened to be on a farmer’s land.

He learned the different ways to talk to the cows.
“Ay!”
meant the cowboy was calling them to come close to him.
“Shht!”
meant he wanted them to stay close together.
“Ay, shht, oy, trrrrrr, uh!”
meant he was taking them out to pasture, and
“jet jet jet!”
or
“jot jot jot!”
meant he was taking them on a long journey, on a stretch of seasonal transhumance. He learned by being with cattle, by watching his father and brothers and cousins, by listening to their fireside talk.

He knew all this by the time he had turned seven. All Oumarou’s sons had grown up with such knowledge, and when their own sons were old enough they would carry it with them on the old paths of countless herders.

As for stars, it was simply impossible for Fulani cowboys not to know them—maybe not all, but some. They had to. Without such knowledge, Oumarou explained, they wouldn’t know to avert their eyes on the night the Pleiades first sprayed into the eastern sky. Only three creatures could look at the Pleiades on the first night of the constellation’s heliacal rising without harming themselves: a black horse, a strong cow, and a black addax. But if a man saw the constellation on that night, he would die.

—

The sun was high by the time Ousman drove the herd to camp. The Sahel bent in the heat. Within six weeks farmers would get ready to plant and pasturage would become limited and the Diakayatés would have to buy cottonseed in the market to keep the cattle fed, one fifty-kilo bag each week. Already some land around Doundéré had been turned and farmers had burnt footwide strips of straw along the perimeter to discourage cows from ambling into the fields to graze.

Ousman passed a Bozo woman from Dakabalal who was pulling behind her a turquoise plastic basin on a rope like a sled. She bent down now and then to pick up dry manure and drop it into the basin. Beside a lonely thorn tree across the fen from the camp, two of Afo Bocoum’s calves lay on the ground in quarantine. One, a black calf, made to rise but stumbled, and Ousman steadied it with both his arms. The calf shook gently. Small flies buzzed about. “Malaria,” the man said. “That one, too.” He clicked his tongue. Afo had entrusted the calves into his father’s care and now Ousman would have to walk to Djenné and trade a goat for the injections he himself would administer.

But that would turn out to be unnecessary. By noon both calves would be dead, and pied crows and black kites would feast in the shade of the thorn tree.

—

The cows arrived at the camp lowing in waves, like ocean swells rolling ashore. The cow that had calved the day before came up to the thorn tree and stood over her calf and licked and licked it.

Oumarou walked among the herd. Making sure the animals had had enough food. Making sure they had been properly watered. Making sure none got lost or mixed with someone else’s cattle. Young people could bring cows back, he grumbled, but they didn’t always know their father’s cattle from someone else’s. Ousman bore the insult in silence. He knew that in just a few hours he would be eating beef, and that exhilarating prospect made it difficult to focus on any parental offense for a meaningful length of time.

A
Fulani nomad would slaughter a cow under two rare circumstances: when the cow was deathly ill or when a boy in his family was getting married. The day before, the tenth of April, marked the first day of the Fulani wedding season, and at nightfall a wedding party had screamed up the road past Doundéré: four carts, music blaring, men yelling, horses at a reckless and random-footed gallop. Most weddings in the world share the same ecstasy of promise, if not for the betrothed then at least for the guests. At the sound of the procession, Isiaka’s son Yaya—twenty-three years old, heavy silver and agate rings on almost every finger, a purple plastic comb in his afro, a long sheathed sword in a scabbard of etched leather across his back, and dangling on leather lanyards from his neck a cellphone, a remote key for a motorcycle he didn’t own, a lighter for the cigarettes he didn’t smoke, a small mirror, and a medicinal pouch for gris-gris—danced through the camp yelling: “Wedding tomorrow, meat tomorrow, dances tomorrow, it will be crazy good! Tomorrow-tomorrow-tomorrow is the day of the young! Tomorrow will be awesome!” The next day, Sita Dangéré’s son Allaye was scheduled to celebrate his wedding to his cousin. The couple had married the previous summer but had had to postpone the nuptial feast because by then most of their relatives already had begun their rainy-season transhumance.

Allaye was twenty-four, broad-shouldered and short like his father. His bride was a leggy girl a head taller than him and seven or eight years his junior, with a ready smile and large breasts and a runway walk. She had arrived at the camp a week earlier.

“Fanta, what’s the girl’s name?” I asked, forgetting that Fanta was the bride’s grandmother and the rules of
sanankuya
applied.

“Pain-in-the-Ass,” said Fanta.

And Oumarou said:

“Her name is Kajita, and”—here he raised his voice—“if Allaye doesn’t bring me the hump of the bull they kill for their wedding feast I will marry her myself.”

—

The bull slaughtered for a wedding feast had to be healthy and fat, to demonstrate to the guests that the family of the groom blessed the union openheartedly. The slaughter had to be performed by a marabout or a respected butcher. One hind leg and a kidney had to go to the mother of the bride, to compensate her for the loss of a cook, a fetcher of water, a collector of firewood, a seller of milk. Another leg, a kidney, the liver, the lungs, and the heart were to be cut into chunks and mixed and taken to the relatives on both sides of the family, men and women, to ensure a strong union in marriage. The hump went to the eldest male relative of the groom. The ribs and two remaining legs were to be grilled and eaten by the groom’s male peers and their older brothers. The head and the hooves were to be handed over to the women at the camp, who would cook them for dinner by narrow moonlight. The young boys of the camp had to steal some meat from their older brothers, who had to fight them off with broadswords and staffs, allowing, however, for enough meat to end up in the youngsters’ bellies. Such were the ancient edicts of a Fulani wedding. The Diakayatés observed them as best they could.