Fishing in the Sky: The Education of Namory Keita

Fishing in the Sky

The Education of Namory Keita

Donald Lawder

For Donny, Bruce, Amy, Linda, Wally, and Donna

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Book I (1983-86):

A Celebration Of Differences

1. La Maison Des Jeunes

2. Moribabougou

3. Born Again

4. Making A Home In The City

5. L’ecôle Normale Supèrieure

6. Aisha

7. God In The Classroom And Other Anecdotes

8. Dreams And Near Disasters

9. Partings

Book II (1988-94)

Fishing In The Sky

10. Return Of The Prodigal

11. Will I Ever Get To Timbuktoo?

12. Playing Grandfather

13. Explosion!

14. The Best Of Times . . . The Worst Of Times

15. Grandfather For Real

16. Bless You Aminata

Afterword

Acknowledgments

I can’t have been as wholly undeserving as I sometimes think, for during my life I have made and kept a number of wonderful friends, some of whom have helped make this book possible. It was Stephen Dunn who first insisted that I give literary form to my personal observations and experiences in Mali and who patiently commented on my early drafts. Richard Gardner hides an abiding love of poetry and art behind the gruff exterior of a data-processing wizard; when I left permanently for Mali, he surprised me with the gift of the computer on which this book was written. The novelist Edward Hower stayed with me for three days in Bamako while visiting a near relative among my fellow volunteers; he took back with him a copy of this manuscript to show to his publisher, with the result you see here.

Like the volunteers in their charge, the local officials of Peace Corps—Country Directors and Assistant Directors—come and go every few years. The day-to-day work of running the operation is done by Malian nationals, and these have been uniformly helpful to me. Kader Traoré, who is responsible for handling the mail, has gone out of his way to make sure I received letters and packages addressed to me, even after my official connection with Peace Corps was ended. Mamadou Coulibaly (Mama) relieved me of any worries I might have had about the permanence of my residence in Mali by securing for me a five-year visa with a promise of renewal. Marie Claire Jubin, the Director’s secretary, has helped me in innumerable ways, as have a host of others, including Sire Diallo, Sidi Yattara, Sambou Konaté, and Kadidia Dienta. The spelling of Malian names and Bambara words was a problem at the beginning, and I am grateful for the help of Mamadou Samaké and Veronica Coulibaly, who screened my early drafts for errors in this and in the interpretation of certain Bambara customs. To my many friends, colleagues, and former students in Mali, my debt should be self-evident in the following pages. Finally, I want to add a special note of gratitude to my son Wally who has stood loyally by me during all my travails and has made a number of useful suggestions for the final draft.

Foreword

This is a thin book to contain so many years of life and discovery. A lifetime, it seems now. A second lifetime.

Originally, this was not to be a book at all but a series of letters to family and friends describing my day-to-day adventures and encounters in a world that hitherto had existed only in my imagination. I was proud—too proud, I see now—of my ability at age sixty-six to thrive under conditions that were daunting young men and women a third my age. Thanks to my sympathetic audience, I actually conceived of myself as a kind of hero, and I believed that whatever interested them was bound to interest everyone else.

I myself knew I was not a hero at all. In fact, my adventure in Africa was undertaken for the most cowardly of reasons, as an alternative to a decade or more of checker games in a senior center. Weary at the futility of my work as an advertising copywriter, and disheartened by my failures as a husband and a father, I had taken advantage of a flexible work schedule to go back to school and prepare myself for a golden-age career as a college English teacher. But I soon found that the demand for sixty-five-year-old English teachers was inconsiderable.

Then I learned that the Peace Corps was looking for teachers to work as volunteers in some of the poorer countries of the world. It paid these volunteers only enough to subsist on, but what was important to me was that the work seemed useful and there was no upper age limit. I fired off an application and two months later, after an interview and a physical, I received an official invitation to teach English to French-speaking young Africans at the national teachers’ college of the Republic of Mali in West Africa.

The intervening years, most of which were spent as a teacher of English at L’Ecôle Normale Supérieure in the impoverished Republic of Mali, have taught me that the real hero of the story was never myself, but the extraordinary people among whom I lived. I got to know them well—as students and colleagues, as friends and as lovers. I was adopted into a Malian family and given a Malian name. I fell in and out of love with an African woman less than half my age, prayed at the mosques, held hands with dying friends, and threw my own handfuls of earth into their open graves. I was eyewitness to the first democratic revolution in Africa. I serve now as grandfather and head of household for an African family of six children from four to twenty-four years of age.

In the beginning, I expected to stay in this kind but ill-favored country for no more than the required two years, but out of love and wonderment I have stayed for over a dozen. Ultimately, what began as a series of personal letters has become instead the memoir of a love affair with Africa and a kind of hymn to the glorious diversity of humankind.

All the happenings described here actually happened, and all of the people are real. However, to protect individuals from embarrassment, I have here and there changed names and details.

Book I (1983-86):

A Celebration Of Differences

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers forth whose beauty is beyond change:

Praise Him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

1. La Maison Des Jeunes

Early in the afternoon of July 8, one week after my sixty-sixth birthday and a few hours out of Paris, Lynn Griffith called to me from her window seat across the aisle, Hey, Don, we must be over Mali! I see the Sahara down there!

A serious young woman from Wyoming, tall and fairly large-boned with perhaps a few drops of Native American blood, Lynn was one of my early favorites in our contingent of Peace Corps volunteers, perhaps because, at twenty-six, she was one of the oldest. After college, Lynn had tried a few inconsequential jobs and, when she found them leading her nowhere she especially wanted to go, joined the Peace Corps; she had a wonderful sense of starting over.

I leaned over and craned for my first look at the country where I, too, was to spend the next twenty-four months, but there was nothing to see. Nothing, that is, but a great ocean of beige stretching from horizon to horizon, textureless and vacant. Half of Mali, from its northwestern borders with Mauritania and Algeria eastward to the ancient cities of Timbuktoo and Gao, is like this, peopled only by passing caravans and a few thousand nomadic families. Together, we stared fascinated for hours and saw never a hint of shadow.

I tried to visualize the kinds of lives that might go on in that featureless desert, but all I could bring to mind were childhood pictures of conquest and adventure—Lawrence of Arabia, Chinese Gordon, Ronald Colman with the French Foreign Legion in the film Beau Geste—all the great jingoistic books and movies. I thought of my destination in the Dark Continent—the heart of darkness below the desert. What did I know of Africa and Africans besides a few exciting stories of jungles and lions—hapless Frances MacComber with a bullet in his skull—outnumbered British mercenaries falling before the black dervishes at Khartoum—wild Stanley gunning his way down the Congo in search of fame and Livingston?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t find lions in Mali, nor mobs of whirling dervishes either. I was going to be living and working in a country where the natural graces of rain and fertile soil are so scarce that even the feeble help I and my fellow American volunteers could offer would make us absurdly welcome. Still, my bookish childhood kept haunting me, shaming me with its distorted perceptions.

The seat-belt light came on and I felt the plane descend toward Mali’s capital city of Bamako. I glimpsed a blur of gray-green, then a sleek, professional-looking control tower and, as we taxied, a conventionally shiny airport building with a glass-walled restaurant on its second floor. Like Topeka, Kansas, I thought. Like anywhere.

Once we alighted, I knew I was wrong. Nothing about this place was shiny. Everything—everything—was the reddish color of clay—the grass, the occasional trees, even the restaurant windows. The parking lot was almost deserted. On a field large enough to handle the biggest jets, ours was the only visible plane.

A score of large black men in flowing robes of many colors—apparently government officials or visiting dignitaries—preceded us importantly off the plane, and then we fifty-odd volunteers, each eager to place both feet on African soil, swarmed onto the tarmac. John Zarafanides, the local Peace Corps director, and some members of his staff were on hand to greet us. So was the U.S. ambassador, a soft-spoken, sprawly sort of man with unpressed trousers, unshined shoes, and a face that reminded me of Howdy Doody. He spoke for about two minutes in a light Minnesota accent, and I felt he was the right man for such a place. The temperature must have been a hundred and one.

If anything, it was hotter and dirtier inside the terminal. The glass-walled restaurant that had looked so tempting from a distance was empty and apparently closed. There was no newsstand, no gift shop, not even a Coke machine, just a score of officials in olive drab uniforms listlessly directing traffic, and a couple of old men with carvings to sell.

Evidently the Peace Corps had made some sort of arrangement with the military government, for we volunteers were waved through customs uninspected and were out of the building in less than half an hour. Once in the street we stowed ourselves and our luggage in three or four bashées (middle-sized pickup trucks with side benches and canvas tops like the weapons carriers I rode in the army forty years before) and headed for the center of Bamako.

Now for the first time, Bamako began to hint at the exotic side I’d heard and read about—small villages of thatch-roofed mud houses, humpbacked cattle, miniature donkeys as comical as Giapetto’s pulling loads that towered twice their height above them, women in brilliantly colored ankle-length robes, bearing on their heads platters of bananas and baskets of vegetables, green oranges, and what appeared to be laundry.

As we approached the city we found ourselves part of a procession of vehicles—battered Peugeots and Citroens, shiny black Mercedes, twenty-five-year-old Volkswagens, and scores of vans, trucks, and overloaded taxis competing doggedly for space with what must have been hundreds of bicycles, motor-cycles, and motor scooters.

At last, after ten or a dozen miles of this traffic, we came to the famous Niger river, pronounced by everyone here in the French fashion, ni-ZHAIRE. The Niger is one of the great rivers of the world, traversing almost the entire width of West Africa and nourishing the dry land in the same way the Nile nourishes Egypt. For most of its course, the Niger flows so slowly that one of the great puzzles to nineteenth-century explorers was, Which way does the river flow, westward toward the Atlantic or southeastward to the Gulf of Guinea? For some reason, they failed to learn this from the fishermen along the river, and the direction of the Niger’s flow remained an enigma until a Belgian named Speakes worked his way to the vicinity of Bamako, where the current is a bit swifter, and saw that the flow was to the southeast. In the process, he caught malaria and died; he is buried not far from Bamako, in Koulikoro.

However impressive the Niger may appear in atlases, it looked pretty ordinary here, and the low bridge across it was no more spectacular, though perhaps longer, than the Post Road bridge across the Saugatuck River in Westport, Connecticut. As soon as we crossed, our driver turned and pulled up at a big, three-story masonry building surrounded by enormous kapok trees standing tall on their roots like a squadron of Tolkien’s Ents preparing to charge.

La Maison des Jeunes, or Youth House, the place was called, and it was here the Peace Corps had arranged for us to spend our first week in Africa. Built by the French during the colonial regime, La Maison was once probably modern and solid, but was now falling apart because of lack of maintenance. Windows were broken, doors didn’t latch, toilets had no seats, shower drains were clogged, and the whole effect was of appalling decadence and decay. Worst of all, the Peace Corps had packed us in like herrings in a barrel: My room contained ten cots placed six to eight inches apart so I had to creep sidewise into bed. The shower room was coed. Defecation was performed standing up or squatting. No place for the squeamish.

Once our duffels were unloaded and partly unpacked, we gathered in the yard to listen to Rebecca, our pretty Peace Corps Medical Officer, give us a quick review of elementary health precautions: Don’t drink untreated water (bacteria and parasites); don’t eat ice cream sold on the street (tuberculosis); take Chloroquin tablets religiously (malaria); and use condoms (available free and in a choice of colors) during intercourse. It was about five o’clock, and above her voice I could hear the hoarse cries of what sounded like a flock of starlings in a roost. I looked up, and there, wheeling among the branches above us and thick as insects around a lamp, were hundreds of giant bats; their wings seemed a foot and a half across. These were fruit bats, I learned, and they don’t zig and zag like the bats I knew back home, for they don’t eat insects at all, just dates, mangoes, and other fruits. I made a tape of their sounds.

Out of consideration for bodies six hours out of step with African clocks, we were allowed to sleep late our first morning in Bamako, and when I awoke it must have been nearly nine o’clock. I wrapped myself in a towel and waddled along the balcony to the coed shower, then dressed and went outside to listen to the chatter of the bats. They fly about constantly except during the hottest part of the day, between noon and three o’clock, when they fold themselves into their wings and hang head downward from the branches.

But it was soon clear that we weren’t brought to Africa to muse on bats or other bits of local color. Breakfast was a fast hustle of French bread and Malian-style coffee—a quarter teaspoon of Nescafe and three soupspoons of sweetened condensed milk in a tin cup of hot water, like a hot malted milk with too much syrup in it—and by nine forty-five we were out under the date palms for our first training session. Life, we were told, will get tougher: classes from eight to noon; a three-hour break for lunch and siesta; classes again until six in the evening; training sessions most evenings as well.

This first morning was Orientation, and it began with the introduction of our professors, the young men and women who were to spend the summer preparing us for whatever it was we were expected to do. All of them were Malians, except for Monica Kerrigan, the snub-nosed Irish-American consultant who’d been brought over from the U.S. to coordinate our training, and a stupendous young redhead named Becky who had just finished her own stint as a Peace Corps volunteer and was helping out with the logistics; when not rushing about getting things done, Becky kept busy cleaning pus from an ulcerated sore on her left calf.

The Malians were a surprise to me. I don’t know what I had imagined they would be like, if I imagined anything, but they certainly didn’t remind me of black Americans. First of all, they were, with just a couple of exceptions, really black—black the way a freshly polished iron stove is black. Yet the faces of most of them were not what white Americans like myself have been taught to call negroid. They seemed to be, and in fact they were, of many ethnic types, and despite their color the features of some of them could scarcely be told from those of a European.

Their manner, likewise, didn’t fit my romantic stereotypes, and I could see that whatever might have remained of the old tribal ways had been well veneered by four generations of French colonial occupation and a further twenty years as an independent satellite of the great powers; nothing of the primitive was apparent in their behavior. During the school year, most of these instructors were full-time lycée teachers or graduate students of education at ENSup (the school where I was scheduled to start teaching in just three months), and because of this, and perhaps especially because Mali was their country, their own turf, they were completely at ease in their professorial roles.

The instructor in charge of this first morning’s session was a light-skinned, loose-jointed Malian whom everyone called Sam because his last name was Samakè (SAM-a-kay). Of all our trainers, Sam was the only one I might have mistaken for an American; his cowboy slouch and easy, expansive gestures had nothing of the Hollywood African about them. Sam was in charge of what is called cross-cultural training, and apparently his first responsibility was to see that we learned enough of the history, traditions, and customs of Mali to keep from insulting people by accident.

There would be no forks and spoons in the bush, so we were taught to eat our rice as the Malians do, with our fingers from a common bowl. There is an etiquette for this. The family gathers on low stools around the food, the men and boys in one ring, the women and younger children in another. The chief of the family washes his hands in a bowl of water and then passes the water around the circle so that everyone in turn can wash; he also gives the sign to begin. The meal is eaten ravenously and in silence. Each person must eat only from that part of the bowl that is in front of him, and only with the right hand. This last is especially important, as the left hand is reserved for cleaning oneself with water after defecating; toilet paper is not considered effective and, in any case, is almost never available. There are other taboos against the use of the left hand, such as shaking hands and offering gifts or money.

At lunch we had a chance to practice all