Our friends, the Bozos.

January 25, 2010

We pulled our boat into a small village on an egg mission. They had been our main source of protein on the river, but we were out. The last village, which was relatively large, had none, but we figured we would try our luck everywhere until we found some.

Our boat, on top.

Blai and I made our way into the quiet town. Elderly men in long robes greeted us emphatically, smiling women waved at us from behind the walls of their mud brick compound, and kids in tatters ran toward us or away from us, depending on if they were frightened or curious. We eventually found the town’s only little shop. It was about as well stocked as any rural village’s shop that we had seen. Some boxes of tea, sugar, dusty bags of biscuits and little else. Curling posters with faded Islamic or soccer themes lined the walls. A young man sat in front of the shop filling plastic bags with a kilogram of sugar each. A few older men sat around chatting and drinking tea. We introduced ourselves and they quickly sprang into action, shaking hands, offering us tea, finding chairs for us, and summoning the best French speaker of the group. We bought a few bags of biscuits to munch on as we tried to explain that we were looking for eggs. Nobody seemed to know the French word for it, so Blai volunteered to act it out. He squawked and walked around like a chicken, then plopped a pantomime egg out his backside. They all laughed as they began to understand what we were looking for. They said they might be able to find some for us. They asked how many we wanted, and, knowing how limited the supply would be, we said as many as they could get. They sent the nearest young boy on the egg hunt.

Photo Credit: Blai Garriga

Photo Credit: Jonathan Heier

Within a few minutes the chief arrived. He was happy to see some fresh faces in the village, and we were happy to find someone who had a better command of French than any of the other guys around. Blai asked where the nearest water pump was, as he had brought an empty jug to fill. The chief quickly pulled a young girl, maybe 12 years old, out of the small crowd that had gathered to watch us, and said he would send her to get it. Blai said that he would like to get it, as he didn’t want to make the small girl carry the 20 liters of water. The chief said it wasn’t far and wouldn’t be a problem for her. Blai insisted that it wouldn’t be a problem for him either if it wasn’t far. The chief relented and sent the girl to show Blai where the pump was. Meanwhile, I made small talk with the chief and drank tea with the guys at the shop. Eventually a woman arrived with the eggs. She had ten, and I paid her for all of them, grateful that we would have a bit of protein for 3 or 4 more days. Thirty minutes later, Blai finally came back with the full jug of water. The pump had not been close at all, maybe a mile away. The chief had said it was close so we didn’t feel bad for him sending the young girl. But that is the social order of this culture, whether we like it or not.

We had thought we would reach the village of Tamani, but our village stop took a little longer than expected, and we were getting tired. There was a long argument about where we would stop to camp. I didn’t have a strong opinion, but Blai and Jonathan always do; and they are usually opposing each other. To me, I couldn’t see an ideal spot to stop. Nothing looked good. We finally were forced into a spot that, thus far, was the worst camp spot we had had. We had to park our boat 30 yards off shore as it was too shallow to bring it closer. There was population nearby, leaving us less privacy, and little hope for finding firewood for cooking.

As soon as we unloaded the boat, Jonathan hustled into the bush, trying to find some wood before the sun was completely gone. As Blai and I set up camp, some women emerged from the bush, carrying various things on their head, mostly bundles of wood that would be turned into charcoal. Two of them stopped by our camp and we exchanged greetings in Bambara. They stubbornly continued in their language that we knew little of. They shrieked as they spoke in a tone that left us wondering if they were displeased with us for some reason. Eventually our blank faces made them laugh, though and things became friendly. In this part of the world the men are always nice and friendly. There is little question that they are happy to make a new friend. The women seem a little more ambiguous or even suspicious, but in the end, they are always just as friendly and willing to laugh with you as the men. After the women went to their boat, the two we had spoken with came back with a small basket of fish, they dumped the fish into one of our pots, smiled and waved goodbye. We thanked them, gave them some tea and waved goodbye.

Soon after we saw Jonathan, accompanied with a man, emerge from the bush, carrying a healthy bundle of wood. When looking for wood, Jonathan had encountered this man, who was also collecting firewood. The man recognized that Jonathan would have very little opportunity to find any wood, as most of it had already been picked clean. The man helped Jonathan find some, then took him to his secret wood cache that he had hidden, and gave Jonathan some of his best pieces. We tried to invite him to join us for tea, but he said that he had to go fish. Indeed, right around sunset is the most valuable time for fishing. So we gave him some boxes of tea to go as he rushed off to his boat. Thanks to Malian hospitality and the people’s giving nature, this turned out to be a great camp spot. Perhaps solitude wasn’t such an important aspect of a camp spot.

Our daylight was valuable. While we were making respectable progress, we knew that we couldn’t waste that much time. This is why we would use our morning fire for breakfast to also cook a pot of plain rice for lunch. We were eating a lot to keep up with the incredible amount of energy we were spending to paddle on the river that seemed to have an increasingly disappointing current. Halfway through the day one of us would cut up some tomatoes, onions, garlic, put it in the rice with some oil, soy sauce and, for Jonathan and I, hot sauce. This proved to be a simple way to eat on the boat, so as soon as we were finished we would go for a swim to cool off and keep paddling.

We arrived in Tamani, another small village that had the obvious indications of a colonial town gone wrong. It looked, from afar, like it would be big, maybe prosperous, because of a couple of large buildings and pieces of equipment. As we got closer, though, it revealed itself to be a decrepit backwater that probably once had held some hope for the people. For decades, this town had crawled back into the bush and reverted to its old ways. The largest building and corresponding rusty machinery was a rice-processing factory. There was also sand mining equipment that lay unused. For whatever reason this town never took off as a rice producing hub for the region. As far as I know, nobody even grows rice until Mopti, some 400 km north on the river. Today it seemed that the main activities were mud brick production and sand mining, though only with shovels, buckets and wooden boats, rather than the large rusted out digging equipment that lay fallow on the shore. As we walked through the town’s narrow maze of paths between family compounds, it became obvious that the only non-religious buildings not made from mud brick had long been shuttered and turned to ruins. The town held a creepiness for this reason, as it made me wonder what it had really been like here 60 years ago. Was it connected by a better road that had since become nearly impassable? Did people have a sense of opportunity for the presence of a factory, and perhaps jobs? What happened when it all collapsed? Were the people relieved to get back to life as it had always been, or did they resent the lost opportunity?

The local mud brick makers were very friendly, offering us tea as soon as we arrived.

Tamani had a strong Muslim feel to it. All the men wore long robes, there were four Mosques, and we heard some people greeting each other with Salaam Alaykum, rather than in Bambara. In fact, it was unique in the way that all of the mosques were made from concrete, as opposed to mud and sticks, as in the other villages. The people were extremely warm (handshake binges ensued around every corner), and the homes were packed close together, with tiny paths to walk through. These are quintessential features of what I call a good town. A rule that I live by is that the narrower the roads, the more interesting the town. Varanasi good, Phoenix bad. The medinas of Morocco good, the boulevards of Fort Lauderdale bad. We managed to track down a woman selling some rapidly deteriorating tomatoes and cabbage in her home. We bought a most of what she had on offer.

Back on the river, it wasn’t long before we saw a young boy paddling his boat ambitiously, angling in our direction. His boat was only a little smaller than ours and it was packed with firewood and some rolled up straw huts. We started to race him, and only when all three of us put all our effort into the paddling were we able to achieve a faster pace than him. He took a sharper angle at us and waved. He wanted to pull up to us, so we slowed down. The boys couldn’t have been more than 12. As soon as he reached us, he unceremoniously handed us a large catfish. At first I mistook his silence as unfriendliness, but I think he was just very nervous. He matched our pace for a while, then motioned for us to follow us. He said something in a mix of Bambara and French, of which we only understood “grande capitaine”, the name of a large river fish. We followed him to a nearby beach that held a small Bozo encampment. The Bozo people are the race of fishermen that live along the Niger. Many of them seem to be nomadic, traveling around the river, following the best fishing spots. The invitation to his small camp gave us a great opportunity to learn more about their lifestyle. Most of the people we had encountered on the river were Bozo, and we had regularly seen both small and large camps set up on the sand banks.

After giving us a catfish, the young boy led us to his family's camp nearby.

The boy introduced us to his family, and they proudly showed us their “grande capitaine”. There were large rocks on the sand with a rope tied to it, leading into the water. The boy gently tugged the rope, and huge splashing came up from the water. The large fish was still alive on the other end of the rope. They had four of these ropes with capitaine on the end. Huge and powerful, they must have weighed 30 pounds each. They showed us the baitfish they used and the dozens of large hooks and thick lines. This completely intimidated us from even trying to do any more fishing. We had small hooks, thin line and little patience. The women were packing up there home as they prepared to leave to find a good evening fishing spot. Little boys chased around the chickens to put them into fishing traps that doubled as chicken coops (we had found an old fishing trap and had done the same with our chicken). The straw huts were rolled up and everything was piled onto the family’s two fishing boats. We realized that we were watching them pack up with as much curiosity as kids always did when we were packing. We finally understood how the act of packing can be so interesting. We wanted to know what they had, what they were doing, and how they were doing it. We realized that even though we weren’t really living off the land, we were living a very similar life as the Bozo. We were sleeping on the river in a different place every night. We had homes to set up. We had the same kind of containers to put things in, a large mat to sit on, jerry cans converted into things for a variety of uses, firewood, animals on board, and we were dressed in dirty or tattered clothes. It was a beautiful and simple lifestyle, and they truly seem to enjoy it. The Bozo are some of the happiest and kindest people I have ever met in my life and I truly envy them.

Fish traps.