On Slavery, Beans and Rhythm

demba foli, originally uploaded by Arriving at the horizon.

Written in early November.

When I stepped out of the Bamako airport, I felt as though I had never before experienced darkness. There was a lit-up walkway leading out of the airport, probably to a parking lot or a road, but the lights along it seemed to serve the only purpose of intensifying the darkness around us. Walking towards the thick night with all my luggage, I was closely surrounded by taxi drivers and families eagerly waiting for rides and loved ones, and I felt relieved that Maxim and Violetta, a French-Polish couple I'd met on the plane, had offered me a ride into town. They were staying with a friend of theirs, and there was a spare seat in the car.

I had no idea of where in town they were going, where they were staying, or -- slightly more importantly -- where I was sleeping. I had had the foresight to call ahead to a hotel to make sure I could tell a taxi driver to go to a place where a room would await me, but had left the address to said hotel in a book somewhere in some bag I wasn't sure where. In the rush of getting us all into the cab, I didn't manage to get the book out, so I sheepishly shrugged my shoulders when they asked where to let me off. After a few minutes of chatter, I managed to figure out that Moussa, Maxim's generally unintelligible friend, was telling me about a hotel near his house where I could stay, and I agreed. The rest of the ride, I stared out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of this town I had arrived in, but saw only fragments of run-down buildings, gravelly narrow streets, and slow people, walking with tomorrow as their only destination, and without being in any particular hurry to get there.

Once at the hotel, we had to figure out how to handle payment. Because we had hurried so to leave the airport, I still had a wallet full of only Euros instead of CFA, and therefore it was decided that I should leave my passport with the Chinese hotel owner as security until I had exchanged money. The Moussa character offered to take a 20 Euro bill to the bank, and return the next morning with CFAs. I had all the contact information of his European friends, knew enough about him, and was tired enough to decide to risk it. It was also at this point that I began to realize that although Moussa takes the prize as most impossible to understand, French here is overall a different breed than the French I know. “Comment tu t'appelles?” becomes “C'est quel nom?” (it's what name?), and You want some bread (Tu veux du pain?) can become “C'est le pain?” (It's the bread?) Takes some getting used to, and since I typically imitate those around me, a few months here will turn my French into a sad sad shadow of its former self.

The hotel room was air conditioned (to the point where I woke up shivering during the night), but there were indications that its previous inhabitant had put it to very enthusiastic use. I'll leave the rest to your imagination, but I have since found out that the Chinese supposedly operate a system of hotels, restaurants, and bars in Bamako whose primary purposes are not sleep, food, and drinks. Despite this, I slept OK, much thanks to the protection of a thin silk sleeping bag that my mother's (and my) friend gave me a while back. I woke up to a hot day, red soil like a carpet below my feet, ladies slowly rocking their hips past my window, balancing clay pots and plastic containers on their heads. Ah, I thought, so I am in Africa, then?

And Africa welcomed me. Adventure vibrated in the air like the heat, and the people I met radiated even more warmth than the sun. Before noon struck on this first day, I had bumped through little streets on a motorcycle, successfully dodged the police who don't allow three people on one motorcycle, and lazily enjoyed the shade underneath a roof of leaves. Before the afternoon was over, I had been installed in a tiny room on Moussa's grandmother's courtyard, eaten a falafel-sandwich lunch with an English woman who runs an NGO on pastoral issues, and been given a Malian name by my neighbors. Before I went to bed, I felt pretty overwhelmed by the slow intensity with which everything was happening, but also felt happy, and safe.

And intense it remains. In my first three days, I made it to a wedding dance, a djembe lesson, and to two different Makis, little bars where musicians' hearts beat in rhythm with their drums, where white people are a rarity, and the beer watery but cheap. Towards the end of this first wedding, the speed of the drum beat rose, and dancer Djennebou's feet were more airborne than grounded -- she was consumed by the music. As she swung her arms and legs, no one but me seemed to notice the flock of fifteen sheep that suddenly raced by the musicians, and through the circle of lookers-on. I was left to question whether it even happened.

Within the first five days, I began feeling comfortable sending little boys off with money to fetch me things from the corner store, asking the woman who always wears a shawl over her shoulders what the cuts were from (“my husband whipped me”), and vegetating in the shade of my neighbors' tree. After the first week, I had promised Djennebou to dance at the next wedding I attended, and I had begun ignoring the green-headed lizards that scramble up all walls at all times, and the old men, wearing skull caps or wool hats, no longer made me smile as widely as they did the first couple of times I walked faster than they pedaled... I am still reveling in the temporary disorientation this country has me experiencing, and in the sunsets that soak the sky in the same bright red color as the dust below, but the little kids of my street are no longer terrified of me.

Update.

Yesterday, Habib, six years old, decided that he will come home to Sweden with me, I danced at a baptism after-party, and I think I might appear on Malian television this evening.