The Storm

In 1981 I was living in North Central Mali, in a village called Bourem Sidi Amar. It was about 35 kilometers from Tombouctou, but there were no roads, so I visited that famous place just once in a year and a half.

I was working as a Peace Corps Ag. Volunteer on a USAID Project - Action Blé, which was trying to increase or stabilize wheat production in the area. Wheat was a traditional crop, and it was primarily consumed as a whole wheat pita type bread, called takala. The one available luxury of any sort in Bourem, was a takala right out of the oven dipped in clarified butter. In a place with no toilets, no electricity, no clean water, (you could still get cigarettes), takala was the best thing.

That part of Mali is called the Sahel. It is a transition zone between the desert and more livable climes. It receives very little rain. It rained once the whole time I was there. I lived in a mud brick house with a deep sand floor that I shared with my landlady, a widow. The house was divided down the middle into two rooms each with separate doors, and I had one side, while she lived in the other. The roof was flat and made of small logs, with twigs filling the cracks and then coated with the same earthen clay as was all around us, mixed with a little manure to give it more durability. Because it rarely rained, earth would do for a roof. There was a half-meter knee wall running around the outside edge of the roof. Some slightly more substantial houses, might have locally fired terra cotta spouts, channeling water away from the roof. The inside walls were smoothed and finished with mud. There were a few arrow-shaped alcoves built into the walls where I put books or candles. Because of the sand floor, and a slipshod door made of very old wood, it was not uncommon to wake up in the morning to find 4 or 5 earthen-colored scorpions which had slipped onto my mat during the night seeking my warmth. I was never stung.

The wheat fields were irrigated from the Niger River, and were divided into little 2 by 3 meter paddies that were fed by labyrinthian canals. The canals are at paddy level, but the river is sometimes 15 feet lower than the fields, depending on the season. At other times, the fields themselves may be under water if the rainfalls in Guinea are substantial. The whole region of braided streams making up the Niger bed, is called the Inland Delta. The orange soil was generally hard as a rock when dry, but became a sticky gumbo when wet. Walking through it then would cake your feet with an inch or more of gooey soil.

Water from the main channel of the river was brought near the fields by deep canals, entirely dug by hand with short-handled hoes. These 15’ deep canals could run a quarter mile or more from the river. When they neared the field, there would be a constructed stair stepping series of small ponds going up to field level. The Songhai farmers would make rubber buckets out of old inner tubes, with a rigid wire mouth. Ropes were attached to the mouth and the closed end. With a swinging motion, the farmer would dip and fill the bucket and toss it up over his shoulder to the first pond, a little over head height. When that pond was full, he would climb up and toss the water to the next pond higher, and so on, until it reached the surface level canals and could flow into the field.

I have never met any people who worked harder for their daily bread. They were excellent, careful farmers. The mens’ forearms were huge and hard, and they often sported black glazed ceramic bracelets on their upper arms, above and below the biceps, which were said to be a form of light armor, and could repel a sword slash. A typical local wheat sack, tightly woven from dried grasses, would weigh 300 pounds. Two farmers could move them. One would grasp the wrist of another, and they would tip the sack over into the cradle of their arms and away they would go.

Action Blé, (blé is French for wheat), was an attempt to bring new wheat varieties, and a more modern water pumping technology to the region. As usual, the thought would be production could be increased and that would pay for upkeep and replacement of the technology. The technology chosen was a simple diesel pump from Pakistan. They were kind of beautiful machines, with a baked enamel deep blue paint. One flaw in this scheme was that there existed no diesel fuel supply line in the region and no non-seasonal roads for tanker trucks.

Any diesel brought in, had to come in fuel drums, poled up the Niger in large locally made cargo-carrying canoes called pinnaces. Google up pictures of Mopti, Mali, and you will see a beautiful earthen mosque, but also a port filled with pinnaces of all sizes. The Bozo (a nomadic nautical river people) boatmen would pole these up and down the river, aided with a square sail when the wind was right. The working outfit for boatmen, when not in port, was Chinese briefs. Every muscle on those boatmen was highly defined because they used every muscle all day long. And when they ate, it would include a mound of rice bigger than your head. Those men burned 5000 calories every day.

I guess it was thought that if cigarettes could get to Bourem Sidi Amar, diesel fuel could also make it. That was a bad assumption. We always had fuel shortages.

The project also trained local blacksmiths in diesel repair, but no one had thought through the issues that arise when there is no shop building, and engines must be torn apart in loose shelters with straw mat walls. Sand was continually drifting into any and all parts.

The final bad assumption was that the market place would reward the increased production. USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, was large enough that there could be miscommunication within the agency. The first large crop of Action Blé wheat to market, coincided with a USAID shipment of famine/drought relief wheat flour from the States, which drastically lowered the value and price of the local wheat harvest. The relief destroyed the market.

So, the project had problems. My role was training extension agents, there to help the farmers transition to the new technology. Almost all of them were Bambara, from the southern, non-wheat growing, and more urban regions of Mali. The farmers however, were Songhai/Sonrai, and knew way more about wheat culture than the people sent to help them. So we concentrated on how to irrigate with pumps, maintenance, and tweaking the canal systems to account for the much heavier flow of diesel pumps, rather than the gentle pulse of hand-tossed water.

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Action Blé had a trial field where we could grow out short straw wheat varieties released by CIMMYT, the international wheat research center in Mexico. It was about a 30 minute walk from Bourem, and I would spend most of my days there, planting and weeding, maintaining the bunds and canals. I built a miniature field with straighter, wider canals to illustrate how the main irrigation canals would have to accommodate the increased water from the pumps. Periodically we would bring in farmers and extension agents to look at new varieties and see what we were up to.

There was a couple who stayed at the field and served as watchmen and caretakers - El Moctar and Aaminata. They were Bella. The Bella are a group of mixed ethnicity. They are not a tribe. The are typically described as slaves of the Tuareg people - the Berber tribe that also inhabits the region from southern Libya and Algeria down into Mali and Niger. The Bella were the poorest people I met in Africa, other than dispossessed famine refugees in Ethiopia. The Bella/Tuareg servitude is multigenerational. Families live side by side for generations, but clearly the Tuareg are masters. Bella women were often distinguished by their dusty charcoal-colored clothing.

El Moctar and Aaminata were no longer tied to any Tuaregs. If they had any money, it was kept on them. They possessed only the clothes they wore, a 4’ tall rounded hut made of bowed sticks covered with a couple of handwoven mats, a blanket, a cooking pot, a winnowing basket, and an old Hugaropest pea can and a water jar. They had been given a small female goat that they were fattening for Tabaski, the fete which honors Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. As you may recall, Allah provided a lamb instead, and today this is remembered with the sacrifice of a lamb, ram or goat. Their goat had become a pet, and followed us around everywhere. I would bring rice, tea, sugar, takala or some other foods when I came every day and we would share a mid-day meal.

As mentioned, it never rained. One afternoon, to our surprise, a dark cloud developed to the west, and it began rolling towards us, pushing a wall of dust. Truly ominous and black. We dropped our hoes and all three of us sprinted towards the mat hut. The goat was right there with us. We scooted through the round door and put the winnowing basket up to shut it as tight as we could. There we sat under those few sticks and mats as this howling storm hit, tearing at the mats which covered us.

The rain and dust came swifter, and two passing women joined us. They were walking from Dire, 20 kilometers away, with their babies on their backs, headed to Hara-Hara - another 3 kilometers. One of the babies had stuck his hands in a boiling sauce pot two days before, and they were coming from the doctor. The boy’s hands and arms were wrapped in white gauze and he held them out, looking like stamens on a flower.

We held the winnower/door and the four of them climbed quickly in with their heavy headpan loads. Just as the storm really hit, a fat toad squeezed under the door and joined us, making us laugh at our shared multi-species fear. We chatted and laughed nervously when gusts drove the mixture of fresh rain and sand in through the crawl hole

So the 9 of us rode it out. After the storm, the wind was strong and fresh. The countryside, for the first time in 9 months, is the dark brown of wet soil. There were no rain gauges around, for obvious reasons, but it felt like one to two inches fell in a short time. Work was done for the day, and we all headed off. On the walk back to Bourem, I strode in the sand along the river to avoid the gooey soil.

When I arrived back in town, everyone was out and about, talking and taking stock. My landlady’s house, my residence, had literally split in two. The roof had liquified and the mud walls became soaked and crumbled. She was surprisingly cheerful. Her house was old, and this meant she would be building a new one. All our goods, meager as they were, were pulled out. The same timbers and much of the mud would be recycled into the new bricks and roof of the replacement house.

The villages in that area often sat on low mounds. When you looked out across the flat landscape, aside from sand dunes, you could see at least three flat topped hills on the horizon. If you walked to them, you found them covered with pottery shards, metal slag and stone tools. Those hills were tells. They were village sites where people had lived for hundreds or thousands of years, building new houses out of the surrounding soil, and rebuilding and expanding on top of the abandoned structures destroyed like our house was. Eventually, those villages rose above the plain until the vagaries of the braided stream, which was the Niger, made them too far from water, and people moved elsewhere for some other reason.