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Mali?
Do You Mean Maui?
Discovering Beautiful People and Remote Villages
in Mali, West Africa
Judy
Babcock Wylie
 With
a whoop and a high pitched
trill, the Dogon tribal dancers wearing 2 1/2 foot high wooden masks scrambled over high boulders and ran down into the cliff -side clearing, jumping, turning and leaping
in unison, their raffia ankle bands bristling, cowrie-shell
suspenders rattling, masks
looming. Their agility was
remarkable because they were dancing on stilts. As gray-bearded elders of the village of Tirelli watched the
dancing with a critical eye, the performers seemed to become more frenzied. The Dogon believe that if a dancer makes a serious misstep, he could bring
the ancestors’ wrath down
on the whole village. The dancers knew that anyone badly out of step could
be banished to a cave for
several days until he improved
his technique. Talk about
performance anxiety.
 Few
places in the world still define the word exotic. Mali is one of them. Beautiful people in bright- colored outfits crowd markets selling
fragrant cloves, cinnamon and turmeric, slabs of salt, carved wooden ritual masks, balls of onion paste,
kola nuts and exquisite gold and silver jewelry. Unlike many African
countries in the news, children
appear well-cared-for, village life is full of ritual and strong social connections, and the market economy
is thriving. Connecting it
all is the Niger River, which
runs through the country like
an aorta, pumping the lifeblood of commerce as it goes.
Most
Americans have no idea where to find Mali on the map. In fact, one friend I told about my upcoming trip misunderstood completely, and said "Oh, you'll love Hawaii!"
The
Republic Of Mali is in West
Africa. It's shaped like an
ascending butterfly, its right wing reaching into the Sahara Desert to the
north, and the Niger River tracing a pattern from the east across the left
wing to beyond Bamako, the
capital city. The landlocked country is bordered by Mauritania and Algeria to the north, Senegal on
the west and Guinea, the
Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso on the south.
"You
mean there really is a Timbuktu?
“ another friend sputtered when I told her I was headed for Mali. The
city is a remote desert outpost a bit down at the heels now, but was once
fabled for its gold and dangerous Taureg nomads. For hundreds of years adventurous travelers set out for Mali but many
were never were seen again. Mali is a lot more welcoming now, but this is
still not an easy country to travel through alone. Distances are long, the
geography is rough and in large parts of the country, roads are
non-existent. It will help if you can speak a bit of French. After centuries of succeeding African dynasties ruled the region, in 1890 France
conquered Mali and controlled it for more than 100 years. So French is the
language of business.. Without it you
won’t be able to communicate a simple request to a hotel desk clerk or make a phone call. Outside the cities, most people speak only the local dialect.
Unless
you are the kind of person who likes to travel via camel carrying only a
toothbrush, don't try Mali
without a tour company. I
signed up with Bambara African
Tours for a ten-day tour called The Road to Timbuktu, which included guides, hotels, meals, transfers and transportation in Toyota Land
Cruisers and was glad I did. We were a varied group; from a photographer
in his twenties to a hip New Yorker in his thirties, to a conservative Harvard graduate in his late 60s. We met in the capital city of Bamako, a jumble of low mud buildings, commanding mosques—much of the population is
Muslim—and a few sleek hotels, bordered by roads clogged with donkey carts, mopeds, trucks and buses. In the lobby of our hotel businessmen wore sleek suits, but not far away the cattle market
was held at an open field right in town, with Fulani herders milling about, offering
for sale their wild-looking long horn cattle with pinto markings. Without
the cattlemen’s long robes it might have been Tulsa.
On the Road to Segou
 Our
guide Congo, an elegant man from nearby Burkina Faso, greeted
us the next morning as we
climbed into two Land Cruisers, and we took off on the road to Segou. It was the end of the rainy season, in September, and the landscape was lush and green, with manicured
fields of millet, a small grain used for both human and livestock food, onions, peanuts and corn as far as the eye could see in every
direction. Young boys watered the crops by carrying huge gourds full of
water from the river. Villages of mud
brick houses with thatched roofs were buzzing with commerce. As we drove,
women walked along the road, balancing
four-foot long bundles of
wood on their heads, en route to outdoor
ovens where the wood would be baked into charcoal to sell. Old beer bottles full of gas for mopeds stood on wooden tables,
next to piles of mangos and jars of amber honey. Other women in bright
colors also sold kola nuts,
peanuts and small watermelons.
Like
a mirage, suddenly a herd of
cattle appeared in the road, coming our way. They were ushered along by several Peul,
also called Fulani nomadic cattle herders who wore pointed conical hats
trimmed with leather, and long robes. We slowed then stopped, and they
expertly diverted the cows into the ditch and brushy areas off the road. Later we also saw the
nomadic Tauregs, dressed in deep blue caftans and wearing only silver
jewelry, the Bambara, who are
an agricultural people, and the Bo Bos, usually fishermen, but sometimes
farmers. What we didn't see were many
Westerners, and being inside the pulse of a foreign culture almost
untouched by American popular icons was thrilling..
Women of Mali
 It
was soon clear that the backbone of Mali is its women. How did these women get so beautiful, and who taught them how to
dress? Many
of the women lived in one-room
enclosures with dirt floors and thatched roofs. Their days are as full as any dot-com cyber- manager, but more physically challenging. They roast karete nuts, carry bundles of branches to burn, pound millet and till peanut fields.
“The women here work twice as hard as the men; perhaps harder, since
they work in the fields, take
care of the children, keep the home and feed and bathe the husband” Congo said with a slow smile.
So
when they emerge in public, why do they look like they are on their way to
a photo shoot at Vogue? Their long skirts are wrapped
expertly to drape in almost Grecian folds, the matching tops snug and feminine but not too tight, the coordinated shoulder wraps as causally but elegantly
thrown as any cashmere shawl, and
the topper, the head wrap, often worn with a kind of stiff tail that
shoots off at a sharp angle to the face, like a. piece of modern
sculpture. The constant accessory was a tiny baby’s foot peeking out from either side of a woman’s waist, as she
carried her infant against her lower back. Each item of clothing (even the baby’s) was pressed crisp. How do
they do that without spray starch? I asked Congo. “They have hollow
irons they fill with charcoal” he
said patiently, as if everyone should know that’s how you iron.
At
one point our driver Sidiki stopped the van to ask for information, and a
small boy roughly eight years old, dressed in shorts and an old T-shirt, ran to the driver’s door with an embossed metal tea pot , a cup
and a tray and offered to sell him tea. As Sadiki sipped, the child
muttered a rhythmic chant, his eyes sweeping our faces. “He is giving us
a memorized ritual blessing for the trip He is a student of the Koran”
said Sadiki.
In a Bambara Village
 After
an hour, we slowed down and pulled over. Gazing into a line of trees, we
could just make out a village. Close to the road we noticed five men stretched out on a resting platform made of
tree limbs, built about four feet off the ground. Congo approached them to ask where
the chief lived, so he could ask permission to enter the village. He
disappeared and soon returned with a slender elder chief dressed in a deep blue
silk robe and a knit black and white cap.
With
great dignity he agreed to our entering, and led us to where a woman was
putting piles of kerate nuts into outdoor beehive ovens to roast. The nuts
are used for cooking oil, lamp oil and cattle feed, and have also been
exported to France and used as
a base for cosmetics . Children in shorts, printed skirts and worn t-shirts gathered around us, staring. They tagged along as the
chief led us to a walled
compound that belonged to a man with four wives. The head of the family
sat on a woven chair watching
three of his young wives work, one sweeping the compound, another
pacifying a fussy toddler, one carrying nuts to roast..
Congo
interpreted, explaining that each wife had her own hut, and every fourth
night it would be one wife’s responsibility to take care of the husband.
After her normal work in the fields, she would draw his bath, bathe him, cook the evening meal for the whole compound, including other wives
and children, then if she wanted the husband to sleep over for the night, she would take his tray of food into her house, and cut his meat.
They would eat there together, then there was a period of time set aside
for conversation, then he spent the night. After this explanation, all of
the women in our small group blurted out “How civilized!”
Segou
At
Segou on the banks of the Niger river, we arrived just in time for the
boat races. The entire population of the town was crowded 12 people deep
at the river’s edge cheering on their favorite crew. In the swirling
crowd, five small boys stood out, dressed in black with peaked hoods. They
carried noisemakers which made a clanging sound as they chanted. They had just been circumcised and were required to
wear black for 28 days and make noise to call attention to their having
completed this ritual passage.
Simple wood and thatch shops sold slabs of salt that had been shipped from the Sahara, musical instruments such as the kora, and Dogon masks and carved
wooden doors. I stepped into a cool small space roughly 9x9 feet and picked out a 2x2 foot granary
door carved with mythical images, including the twins that are so powerful
in Dogon legends.
Liberation Day
It
was Mali’s Liberation Day, September 22, when we checked into the
conveniently named Independence hotel, with a towering plaster giraffe
in the front yard, a cool courtyard in the back.
After a dinner of
capitan, a local fish that appears on every menu in Mali,
we set off for a Liberation day celebration. At an outdoor pub
which looked like a home, we entered a low mud- brick walled compound just
as the sun slipped into the river. In the dark we could
barely make out
people roasting millet in an outdoor oven and
putting it into a vat for making millet beer. To one side, a small
performance area had been set up, and a group of five women dressed in
matching long white dresses with a scattering of blue flowers danced in
a circle, doing a kind of West African bunny hop with plenty of
booty- shaking for emphasis. As they danced, they invited us to join them,
gesturing in time with the music
like a Motown girl
group.
An
older woman dressed in a boldly printed dress and head wrap was clearly
the hostess, and she made sure a big
bottle of millet beer was passed around to all. I took a swig, but
it tasted sour, a bit like weak vinegar, not at all like beer made from
hops.
Djenne
Our
Land Cruiser inched onto the tiny ferry and we floated across the
rain-swollen delta to the
island city of Dejenne
in roughly five minutes. Djenne
is famous for its mosque, the largest mud brick structure in the world.
The rounded mosque, built in
1907, seemed to lean into
itself, as if concentrating holy thoughts, the dense pink adobe and
simplified knobs for turrets seemed a distillation of devotion.
Non-Moslems cannot enter, so we could
only imagine the cool dark interior. Turning to the rest of the
town, we saw a softly rounded mud brick skyline and wandering alleys. We
had come on a Monday, market day, to
stroll the teeming stalls
selling yams, meat, yarn, spices, fabrics, jewelry
and herbal potions. Djenne has been famous since its founding in
the 13th century as a trading city, where traders exchanged
gold, slaves and kola nuts from the South for slabs of salt from
the Sahara.
Street
sellers in Dejenne are enthusiastic. Men selling mud-cloth weavings called
bogolons step in front of
you, blocking your path, waving them as if you were a bull about to
charge. Small boys offer Taureg silver crosses and rings,
and older men loaded with 50 types of pointed Fulani woven hats
show you the red one, the brown one, the black one, until you want them
all. After a lunch of chicken and couscous at Chez Baba, Congo led us on a short walk and a climb up
narrow stone steps to the top
floor of a two-story building. Stepping
into a shop that was more like a museum store room,
we gaped at the rows of
ritual masks, walking sticks,
four’ high wooden bird statues, and carved wooden doors from
Dogon country. The dignified owner explained some of his pieces, and said
he often sold to museums and
galleries., One mask caught my eye, a simple smooth animal face with a
snout. “That is a Dogon jester’s mask, when a person wears it,
he can criticize anyone and he will be forgiven.”
"Give me that!" I said, tossing him the money.
Mopti
 Back
at our hotel in Mopti, the Kanaga, we made the rounds of the vendors who
gathered each day in the large open space to sell jewelry, carvings, wood
and leather boxes, masks, and bogolons, or mud cloths, and patterned
woolen blankets, called kassa.
We
were later taken to a part of town where the Fulani, or Peul live. The Peul woman who welcomed us to peek in her home had the
typical pattern of dots tattooed around her mouth and chin,
considered a kind of beauty mark. Former
nomads, Peul wives wear their husbands worth.
Their earrings of thin beaten gold are the size of
Krispy Creme donuts,
and shaped like them too. Her earrings
hung almost to the shoulder, and by sheer mass were
heavy enough to need supporting
by a sturdy piece of yarn over each ear.
Dogon Country
 As
we drove east a line of cliffs
on the horizon seemed to run into infinity. In fact, the Bandiagara
Escarpment ranges for 90 miles. The Dogon people
have lived on its terraces, and in its crevices
for 1,000 years, where they retreated to retain their animist
beliefs and avoid being converted to Islam.
As we looked down on the vast
plain from high on the cliff,
a local woman passed us, walking erect with a large bowl full of
grain on her head, then disappeared.. As we peered over the edge we could
see her descending the narrow fissure on a rough ladder of branches, still
walking upright, with perfect posture. When we reached the plain below in
the Land Cruiser, we drove for miles, getting stuck from time to time,
getting out to push, and greeting the children who suddenly appeared,
until we saw villages studding the cliff face in the distance.
At
the village of Tirelli we climbed through the several vertical levels
that make up a Dogon village,
which is said to be laid out like the human body with the togu na or
village elder’s shelter .at the head, the chief’s house as the chest
and the sacrificial altars at the feet.
We struggled past
conical storybook granaries with thatched
top hats that looked
drawn by Disney, as if they would come alive and dance off at a moment’
s notice, past adobe brick dwellings with flat roofs for drying corn and
onions, past carved doors depicting twin figures, telling the
mythical beginning of the Dogon people . Above us we could see the village
elders’ togu na, which has
a very low roof. It is built
low so that no one can stand up in anger and come to blows with others.
Far below we could hear
the rhythmic thumping led by chanting as
village women pounded millet in unison with heavy
5’ high
wooden pounders
in receptacles the size of a deep wash tub.
As
we climbed, we were on our way to a village dance ritual
but we didn’t have a clue what the purpose of the ritual was. The
reason was a secret known only to village elders and they weren’t
telling, Congo said.. The
sky overhead was a clear blue and the sun was harsh..Just as if seemed we
couldn’t get any higher, we clambered left, over a last few boulders,
and onto a roughly round performance
platform enclosed by rocks
rising forty feet on one side up the hill.
We
had just settled ourselves, our backs to boulders, and turned to see
the dancers in their masks and shells rushing toward us. Absorbed
in the spectacle, we brushed off the first drops of rain, but then they
came harder, and soon it was a downpour, soaking both visitors and
dancers, who looked up at the sky and
stopped moving. As we
rushed to cover our heads and cameras,
we noticed the villagers smiling and nodding to each other. I’m
sure I saw one of them wink. The reason for the ceremony
may have been a secret before, but now the reason
was clear. It was a ritual for rain.
Bambara
African Tours
www.discovertimbuktu.com
(877) 462-6354
info@discovertimbuktu.com
You
can travel solo or as a couple with a guide and driver, or be part of a
group. Mali trips are 13 to 14 days, and a short trek to
stay in overnight in
Dogon villages can be included. Trips range from $2500 to $3000, per
person, without airfare.
Sabena
Airlines flies from New York to Bamako via Brussels. In the Fall,
which is off- season, a round trip coach flight costs approximately
$2,140. Call (800) 955-2000.
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