by Jack Carneal
One night we go drink warmish beers in a mosquito-infested bar with Andrea and Alan, two people Chris works with. They’re unmarried, child-free and excited to attend a concert later on. Naturally they invite us along. I’m quick to blame our one and a half year-old son for our begging out but Chris chirps that in fact we’d love to go. Andy holds his Castel up and says Cheers. He’s a Kiwi, she’s from Switzerland via years of prep school in London and speaks with a posh accent reminiscent of Mary Poppins. They live across town in Lafiabougou, not in the expat-heavy Hippodrome, and in an apartment building instead of a walled fortress. Between them they share a moped, unlike our American friends who drive subsidized SUVs and Peugeot station wagons. Whether true or not the two seem more earthy, more an organic part of things here in Mali.
Andrea works in children’s health projects out in the countryside and is familiar with Bougouni, with the brousse. She cannot believe we are going to live there, and lets us know as much in that British way that seems a lilting, pleasant half-admonishment until we recognize that she’s telling us we’re insane to leave Bamako. Alan is the resident computer technician at the main country office of the Bureau here in Bamako. His laconic Kiwi bearing–he seems always to be pushing his hair away from his head and sighing–makes him the perfect candidate for the job, one which appears to the outsider to be fraught with paradigmatic difficulties. Mali is a prewired society; we are told that the phone lines installed by the French in the 50s have never been significantly upgraded. Computers here are still a futuristic novelty. Witness the attendant at the airport last week fiddling with his tan box spitting out 80s-era data in DOS-orange. Nevertheless the Bureau has recently received a shipment of new PCs from the States and Alan is kept busy. His duties range from teaching the Malians how to turn on their computers to cleaning their monitor screens to rewiring old computers and knowing, for the more advanced users, the various uses of the Microsoft platform.
They seem more appreciative or at least attuned to Bamako’s numerous eccentricities (this latter noun, I see now, might be a euphemism), even though Alan, after a year in Mali and numerous years paired with a near-native French speaker in Andrea, speaks little French and no Bamanankan. His attempts at both send the Malians into frenzies of belly-clutching laughter. I’ve watched Malians stopping him in the hallways of the Bureau just to ask him mundane questions about the weather or soccer or what he ate for lunch just, it seems, to hear what Alan is going to say in order to laugh at him.
Alan and Andrea lived in Kolondieba, the village without electricity in which we were originally supposed to live, for most of the previous year while Andrea worked on a rural health project, and their stories of how awful things were during hot season, the interminable nights spent reading from the dim light of a smudge lamp before falling asleep at 8 o’clock every evening, eating gut-churning instant soups for lunch and dinner, suffering the types of intestinal maladies that ex-pats relish talking about (seemingly while one is either about to put a fork-full of rice into one’s mouth, or lifting a warm, half-rancid beer to one’s lips), seem like polite but pointed warnings. Still, even as both seem barely able to contain the urge to say, Don’t do it! Don’t move en brousse! Stay here in Bamako where at least there is air-conditioning! we know that they are good sports and adventurous types and that they’d be disappointed if we moved to the Hippodrome with all the other Americans.
Andrea and Alan’s position as (sort of) Europeans allows them a better connection to the world of the non-American ex-pats, away from the comforts of the Hippodrome and environs (even as we’ve met a Dutch family and an English family who live in the Hippodrome as well) and later their cosmopolitan friends arrive at the bar in time for the show of Malian music. No one has been able to tell me the exact lineup though current rising star Habib Koite is rumored to be playing, as is someone named Oumou Sangate.
“Sangare?” I ask excitedly.
“Maybe,” answers someone in the group.
“No, no, no,” says someone else. “She is too much a superstar. She lives in Paris now!”
The bar is connected to a concert hall called, paradoxically, the French Cultural Center. It is hard to be ironic in such an earthy place as Bamako, and within a society that is not nearly as consumed as ours by the witty riposte, the barbed comment, and this title—the French Cultural Center, as if it is of paramount importance to bring French culture into this, the center of an impossibly vibrant native African culture—exists, to the non-French anyway, as the most public example of hubris. On some days French movies are shown for the French ex-pats thereby justifying its name, but mostly it is the only non-Malian place—-the only place where, theoretically, tubabs will outnumber farafins—- where one can see live music performed by Malians.
Andrea and Alan’s friends are excited to be out and about, and speak in mostly French, which I still cannot understand. My inability to communicate in this language has created, over time, a remembered empathy with my long deceased grandfather, who spent the afternoons of the last years of his life seated in his La-Z-Boy, hearing aids out, watching the Lawrence Welk Show and Redskins, Orioles and Yankees games, smiling within his mute silence. I am similarly sunk within my own thoughts and can only pretend to know what is going on for short periods of time before succumbing to my own interior dialogue with myself. It dawns on me that I’d better grow comfortable with this arrangement. I literally cannot understand most of what is said to me or anyone else, and all this striving for meaning, of aligning half-heard words together like mismatched linguistic puzzles is more than disorienting and often results in a deflated mental exhaustion, a psychic detumescence, an intellectual depression. But I do hear the word disco repeated throughout their conversation, followed by excited nodding, so it is not terribly difficult to conclude that this bar, this concert, is but the first stop in a night full of activity.
Andrea, Alan and their friends are all childless, while we’ve spent much of the evening chasing Tabb throughout the infernally hot place. I plucked him away from the reeking toilet hole as he prepared to stick his foot into the roiling mass of human waste just inches below the top of the hole, and at any given time there are at least seven mosquitoes–I counted–hovering like drunken fairies around his head. Frustrated, buzzed, hot and tired, I am prepared, even ready and willing, to leave at any minute to retreat to our air-conditioned bedroom. I’m almost looking for an excuse to go home.
Long before I knew I would ever even be near the country of Mali I was familiar with Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure (“Only the tubabu like him,” sneered one taxi driver in Bamako when I asked about Mali’s most successful export), Habib Koite and Salif Keita. To say that one of the primary reasons I decided to risk life and limb to come to Mali was because of its vast musical culture would not be empty hyperbole. I’ve owned a jembe since long before the instrument became abused by white kids with dreadlocks playing lamely in drum circles, long enough to know I’ll never be able to do the beautiful instrument any justice whatsoever. Still, I’d been fortunate enough to play with a drummer in Charlottesville named Darrell Rose who’d studied under the legendary Olatunji, and I knew that West Africa, particularly Mali, was where one might witness the roots of art of playing the jembe. Exploration of the folk musics of Mali has become a sort of pilgrimage, and tonight is my first opportunity to genuflect.
We file into the theater and take our seats. The lights dim. A confused gaggle of well-dressed men walk importantly across the stage, less interested in making sure everything is in order than, it seems, walking importantly across the stage. Soon one man in an overly large pastel-colored suit shoos the others off and booms greetings into a microphone. It’s all in French and I can only understand a bit of what he says. He yells, the crowd responds lamely. He yells again, more loudly, more forcefully. The crowd responds slightly less lamely.
The emcee then introduces the first band. Members rush out onto the stage in the confused manner of a group of fourth graders about to put on a play. Each musician plugs hurriedly into the backline of gear provided by the club; a small bass amp, a drum set, a box that sends the guitar directly into the house p.a. They count off and begin clumsily. People shift in their seats as Oumou Sangate sings flat notes and as the bass player shakes visibly from nervousness. She glares at him, annoyed as hell.
This is, I sigh to Chris, most definitely not Malian super-diva Oumou Sangare. A boy who looks barely in his teens fiddles nervously with the wire leading out of is homemade instrument, which, I note with a chuckle, appears to have only one string. The singer looks awkwardly at the band members, at the audience, as the bass player reaches back to adjust a dial on the lone amplifier at the back of the stage as if by turning a dial he might suddenly make himself play better. “Ah, yes, I forgot to turn down the shittiness before we started…” For two entire songs it is difficult to believe that this band has ever played together before. Tabb cries out. He is sweaty and tired. My stomach hurts from the lousy beers. I look at Chris and point my head longingly at the exit door.
“One more song,” she says.
I nod.
Silence. A few people clap. The kid still fiddles with the wire on his one-string banjo. I watch him spit on his fingers and twist a piece of apparently live electrical cord. A buzz burps loudly through the house system as he draws his hand quickly away and shakes it in the air. Oumou snaps at the bass player: his face is blank. He smokes a cigarette with his shoulders slumped. The dancing women shift and hold their calabashes against their hips like babies. People in the audience clear their throats. I look again at the door. But then the drummer counts of the next song and immediately there is an audible and visible shift in their aura onstage. A union of something inexplicable. A breeze blows through the un-air conditioned theater. I sense the first stirrings of an intense chemical reaction to the night, as one who has taken a psychedelic drug shivers upon first feeling the effects.
The boy has been successful in correcting the short circuit that kept his instrument from being heard and he turns and faces the audience and plucks a series of quick sharp notes. It is what I learn later is called a jelingoni, a one to three-stringed lute favored by the griots from north of Bamako and probably what Gnankouman Doua played for King Nare Magan back in the 1100s. Singer Oumou has gained control of her voice and sings the multi-note melodies popular among the women griots of Mali, sung high in the head with a weird nasal resonance, with incredible, avian grace. Two women behind her sing and dance while tossing cowrie-covered calabashes into the air with perfect, almost eerie synchronicity, as if they are the same figure split-screened.
After a few short songs the emcee bounds out on stage and ushers the band off and quickly is introducing the next group as Oumou and her band are still bowing to the now appreciative crowd. The new band wanders onstage and the members plug their instruments into the same backline. The emcee yells their name into the microphone and walks quickly offstage. They start playing immediately.
It’s a kora troupe led by a young man named Adama Yolomba. The kora is 20-stringed harp held in front of the body and played with both hands, and watching Yolomba sing while playing the insanely difficult instrument I begin to feel as if some basic control of my senses is unraveling as if a spring under tension was suddenly let loose. Yolomba’s eyes are circled with kohl. He performs with the bizarre artificiality of a court dancer one might read about in Flaubert’s descriptions of 19th century Egypt, wide eyes, toothy, cocked smiles, birdlike movements of his head, careful but unchoreographed dance steps. His appearance is more stereotypically Asian than African. Tabb sits in my lap, leaning back into my body not with exhaustion but with something like excitement or fear: he is riveted. A man sits on the stage behind Yolomba thumping an overturned gourd with the heel of his hand and his thimble-covered fingertips. It sounds like a full drum set. Watching someone play an instrument with one string followed immediately by another playing an instrument with 20 strings is some kind of lesson in humility, patience, discipline. When they finish their last song I am not ready for them to leave the stage. I am paralyzed by something like awe. I cannot speak to our new friends when they bend to ask me what I think in their sexy accented English, I cannot speak to Chris. It is hot in the theater and sweat drips freely down my face and I am not sure that some of the wet I feel on my cheeks are tears. When Tabb jumps up from my lap and disappears into a crowd I am unable to follow him, and can only gesture to Chris helplessly, signaling with my eyes that I cannot leave. I am in thrall, hypnotized, made helpless by all that is taking place around me. I could watch Yolomba all night and am half-relieved when he leaves the stage, only so I can try to gather my wits.
No such luck. A Ghanaian drum and dance troupe bounds onto the stage with the restrained, bunched energy of a group of gymnasts. It is as if they have been playing and dancing for the previous hour through the streets of Bamako and have suddenly found themselves, quite by mistake, in front of a crowd in a music hall. They yell at us as the jembe players position their drums between their legs and adjust their shoulder straps. A leader counts off. We, the crowd, are enveloped in a whirlwind of sound and movement so intense that the only thing I can compare it to is the pure rush of adrenaline one feels upon accelerating down a runway before taking flight. The drummers play so joyfully and out of control that one of the players repeatedly breaks enormously thick drum sticks on a massive drum while women dancers dance and jembe players pour sweat and attack their drums with shouts. I am tempted to jump up and yell out loud. I am surprised to feel the pressure of welling tears behind my eyelids.
They are hustled off, another band is hustled on, this one a father/son balafon group. Each balafon, the ur-xylophone, is about five-feet long, and as they’re carried out onto the stage the band of a hundred or so wooden keys atop them ripple like the skins of snakes. Each key must be hand carved from a blade of hard resonant wood and then fired in such a precise fashion as to make every piece pitch-perfect. The balafons are placed parallel to one another so the father and son, as they play, are facing one another while seated on the ground. Pure liquid melodies fill the hall’s increasingly close and smoky air, some strange spirit-balm after the pagan celebration of the previous drummers.
I begin to feel unsettled by my constant amazement. The effect is the exact opposite of numbing, and is instead a jolting, stinging, body-full catharsis. I am so overwhelmed that I suspect I might be having a reaction to my antimalarial, or succumbing finally to the exhaustion that is always just a few steps behind us. It is as if I am witnessing, one after the other, nothing so reductive as the ‘roots of blues’ or the ‘roots of rock’ but instead the ur-performers of something so huge it’s impossible to explain, encompassing centuries of not just human culture but something more pure: the very essence of humanity. The ‘put on your own show’ feeling of the night is punk rock. It is a gift of grace. A slouching, thin man in blue jeans plays a cheap electric guitar as brilliantly and as effortlessly as anyone I’ve ever seen, meanwhile hardly moving at all. Unmiked jembes are almost unbearably loud and echo in the room. I am as out of control of my senses and emotions as one who collapses and speaks in tongues at a revival. Habib Koite finishes the show with a quick practiced set complete with Malian puppet show. At the end of his set he reaches down and shakes the puppet’s hand.
“Congratulations, my little friend,” he seems to say.
In the darkened furnace of the theater I am reborn. I repeat to myself, “I’ve known nothing up til now.”
After the show we wave past a few unlicensed blue taxis and wait and wait for a licensed yellow taxi, to no avail. We are drained. Tabb sleeps limply over my shoulder as we dodge curious crowds. The yellow Peugeots, we’ve been told, are legal, having paid for a license. The blue ones are illegal; they have no license and are to be avoided. Finally a man runs up to us as we wander further into Bamako’s unlit streets, and asks Taxi? We say Oui. He flees again and returns soon jogging next to a blue taxi, then runs off again smiling, satisfied with having done his job I suppose, having never asked for anything.
We lean into this taxi and ask him if he is legal and he says, Oui, Oui, Oui, exasperatedly. “But you are blue,” we say. He shrugs. We get in.
After three short blocks he exhales loudly and dramatically and rolls slowly to the curb. A few seconds later a very polite policeman walks over from his post on the corner and sticks his hand in the window. The taxi driver hands him a bill. We pull away from the curb and again after a few blocks I hear a distant wolf-whistle and the driver exhales again and rolls again to the curb. Again a policeman wanders over from the corner and a disembodied hand reaches into the window. The driver, laughing now, hands another policeman a few coins.
Consequently we turn off of the main route Koulikoro Road and a ride that should take ten minutes takes thirty. We bounce through various dark smoking neighborhoods where clusters of people gather around black and white t.v’s and where children and goats and donkeys run without fear through our headlights’ weak glow. Sharp springs scratch our spines. Tabb awakes periodically to moan. We wipe sweat off his face. The taxi driver apologizes once. He says he is waiting to get his license,that it will arrive any day now. But he had paid out more in fees to the policemen than we would pay him at the end of our ride! we say.
“Bon,” he answers. “Whey, c’est vrai, mais…”
Yes, it is true. He shrugs again.
Why anyone would want to be a taxi driver in Bamako is a mystery. Gas is tremendously expensive here. Our friends report that it costs them 60 dollars to fill up the tank on their petit Peugeot. Yet it costs little over a dollar to go from one end of Bamako to the other in one of these taxis. Airport runs, at 6 dollars, are the only way a cab driver can make any money.
I’ve already learned it is completely common to hop into a taxi and be asked to front a portion of the fare. You might hand him twenty-five cents. Your driver might floor the gas pedal for a moment then as you hear the last fumes exploding in the engine he’ll pop the gearshift into neutral and coast calmly into a gas station, more often than not a table with ten or twenty wine bottles filled with gasoline, in order to put a half pint or less of gasoline into his tank. Having done so, you might sit back again as he pulls back out onto Koulikoro and maybe watch the street pass under you through a hole in the floor or, hearing hoofbeats, watch a man on a pale white horse galloping by.