Africa & Middle East > Mali > Niger River > Timbuktou > Articles > Mali Passing Through

The Bittar Transport coach trundling across Mali towards Mopti had once been a German city bus. Inside it still had signs telling us that rauchen was verboten and counselling against hinauslehnen. But outside, above the windscreen, where the route-indicator might once have read Innere Stadt or Josefstraße, there was now a neatly-lettered legend: Le Destin Est Fatal - Fate is Inevitable. Which, as it turned out, was far more accurate than suggesting an actual geographical aim. The bus broke down late at night, spluttering and whining to a halt in the scrubland.

Thirty of us stood around the bus in the warm, insect-buzzing night, whilst the driver tinkered under the bonnet for the very few minutes needed to work out that the bus had reached its Bittar end. He climbed back into the cab, stretched out and fell asleep. The night was as dark as the oil squittering from the bus' engine, but there was the faint flaring of a nearby fire. David and I walked towards the flames.

We had flown into Mali's capital, Bamako, that morning. Our aim was to reach Timbuktu and 'the world's remotest music festival,' a traditional swords 'n' camels Tuareg celebration, with an eclectic range of Malian and western bands booked in to add more noise. The festival was an excuse for a fortnight's jaunt around Mali.

I'd been to Mali before. Twenty years earlier I'd bought a second-hand Phoenix bicycle in neighbouring Burkina Faso. A month of energetic pedalling had carried me from Ouagadougou through the south of Mali to Bamako and finally onto The Gambia. It had been an....uh, ah, yes... an 'interesting' trip. Being short of money I'd worked along the way in exchange for food, trying out part-time careers as a palm-tree frond trimmer, pirogue deckhand and harmonica tooter in a highlife band. But mostly I’d been full-time poor.

Though, obviously, not as poor as most Malians were back then. A decade of drought in the Sahel to the north had pushed Tuareg and Fulani herders down into Songhaï, Bambara and Dogon territories. Their movements were like snooker cushion-shots knocking one tribe into another and setting ever more 'balls' in motion. Plenty of folk were walking or, like me, riding cheap bicycles to look for work. Or food.

In the intervening twenty years both Mali and I had seen an upswing in our fortunes. Hanging from the bus' open door, ('nicht hinauslehnen,' indeed), I looked out on a familiar but more verdant and plumper countryside. Fenceless grasslands dotted with massive baobab trees gave the impression of an endless 17th century English park. Fulani shepherds in conical hats and Wee-Willi-Winkie robes drifted along behind their flocks of goats. Village children bowled hoops through the dust between globular, stilt-raised grain stores. It seemed a nursery rhyme landscape to my eyes.

With the bus' breakdown it looked like I was going to relive one of the many nights I'd spent bivouacked out in the West African grasslands. But first there was socialising to be done. From around the fire a stock herding family rose up in greeting. In very few words of French and a lot more of Fulfulde they offered us a patch of swept earth to sit on and shot-glasses of green tea. The Fulani clan seemed unsurprised, pleased even, at our chance arrival. The father was reassuring. Very confident, in fact, that we'd find some way to continue to Mopti. And possibly quite soon. Or certainly sometime. Probably. In'shalla! He was right. Within an hour a jeep turned up and after a quick haggle we were driven to Mopti. The next day we continued onto Timbuktu in a hired Landcruiser with patches sewn onto its tyres with stout thread, and driven by the irrepressible Kassim Konate. The drive north on an undulating sand track provided a hypnotic – and, for one brief moment, adrenalin charged – roll-by of the Sahel.

We overtook long lines of pack-donkeys, carrying maize from the Dogon villages on the Bandiagara escarpment towards Timbuktu. We, reluctantly, passed a turn-off that would have taken us to the lanky-legged, ghostly-pale desert elephants of Goundam. Then the front-wheel blew out with a bang like a landmine's explosion, sending us skidding off the road and slaloming through a chicane of boulders and trees to a miraculously four-point landing. More peacefully the low-angled, last light of the sunset lit the desert's sparse grass like a bald man's fuzz giving the brief illusion of a full head of pasturage. We bucketed along the sand track late into the night, following the tunnel of our headlights' faint illumination. Then crossed the Niger River on the ferry before, finally, grinding into Timbuktu.

We continued into the Sahara the next morning to reach the festival site at Essakane. In dunes like warm snowdrifts, three thousand Tuareg had already gathered for their témakannit. Along with Led Zepplin's Robert Plant, a Navajo grunge band, Malian's Ali Farka Touré and Oumou Sangaré, and a handful of toubab - white – music fans.

Three hundred camel warriors had lined up, hump-to-hump, in welcome. Broadswords hung from their belts, and swathes of indigo cloth swathed their heads. Their robes had the blinding, static-flash colours of computer screen crashes. Formation was only broken when they started on sprint races across the sands, their camels urged into shambolic, tumbling gallops, the riders' whips whirling. There was the smell of mint tea from the dark caves of goatskin tents. And everywhere – and for the next two days and nights – there was music. Acoustic guitars, battered from desert travel, plucked around campfires by Tuareg from Niger. The deep thudding drum, low hissings and high ululations of women's group Tartit. And ex-rebel band, Tinariwen – who had lain down their Kalashnikovs after the 1990s’ Tuareg rebellion, and taken up electric guitars instead - firing out staccato riffs over the beating of camel-lope rhythms.

But more than anything the 'third festival in the desert' was the chance to experience a highlight of the Saharan year amongst the desert's own people. On the second day a Tuareg, Illili, and I rode his two camels far out into the acacia-fringed dunes. The festival’s ‘Medieval jousting tournament meets Glastonbury’ hullabaloo faded behind us, and then there was only the two-time 'pud, pud-ing' of our camels' feet shuffling through the sands. We could have continued for a 120 ‘camel days,’ as some Tuareg still did to trade far to the north in Morocco. But that would have meant missing out on Timbuktu.

An appreciation of Timbuktu depends, perhaps, on which direction you’re travelling from. When we’d passed through to Essakane, fresh from Europe, it had struck me as a disappointingly bland and dusty village, scooped up like a child's ineptly built sandcastle from the surrounding wastelands. But coming back in from the desert it was a magical 'port' on the edge of the Sahara’s oceanic expanse. Seen from the terrace of the Hotel la Colombe, whilst drinking cold beers and contemplating the laundry price list, ('loin cloth - two-piece boubou - hunkerchiefs'), Timbuktu seemed a metropolis.

At the time of the Songhaï’s gold rich empire, Timbuktu stood as a wealthy trading city, and famed seat of Islamic learning. A few hundred years later, in the 19th century, European explorers were willing to risk death in their attempts to reach a city whose streets were, according to legend, paved with gold. The journals of those few who made it couldn’t hide the disappointment of having arrived rather too late; they’d discovered the same dusty desert settlement we were in, but without the beers and service laundry.

Led by our resourceful young guides, Baby and Bouba, we set off to find the memorials to the three most famous of Timbuktu’s first European visitors. The houses where Heinrich Barth, René Caillié and Gordon Laing had set up their different camps seemingly embodied the attitudes, past and present, of the explorers’ three nationalities towards Timbuktu and West Africa in general. The German Barth’s was an ordered museum full of eruditely explained exhibits. The French Caillié’s house was home to a Malian family who continued cooking as we climbed up onto their roof to survey the ‘city of 330 saints.’ The British Laing’s we never found.

Instead, Ibrahim Touré took us round the dark, pillared caverns of the 700 year old Djinguereber mosque, the oldest in West Africa, and the only one in Mali open to foreigners. One of the mosque’s twelve doors, the guardian pointed out, had been ritually sealed shut for five centuries since an unbeliever had entered and been changed by magic into a lion before fleeing into the desert through that very door. Outside in the sun-shaded yard a kitten’s paws had left tiny, wandering tracks in the fine sand between the mats and prayer beads as if in a miniature replaying of the big cat legend.

Compared to the tranquillity of the Djinguereber Timbuktu’s narrow alleys were frenetically busy. There was a lot of ‘business’ going on. Whilst, out on the edge of town, camel trains were bringing in slabs of salt from the Taoudenni mines 700 kms to the north. I thought of Ali Farka Toure’s words; "For some people, when you say 'Timbuktu' it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world."

We left ‘the heart of the world’ squashed inside an over-passengered ‘public jeep, our knees forced up around our chins for twelve hours of bucking and jolting. Crossing the Niger there were hippos rising and sinking like cartoon submarines off the bows. Then, once landed and on the long sand track south, the driver gunned the ancient top-heavy Landrover into a rocking and slewing hurtle towards Mopti, muttering about ‘banditisme,’ and stopping only to load ever more folk onto the roof rack.

Mac's Hostel was reward for the rigours of the journey. Born in Mali to American missionary parents, John ‘Mac’ McKinney was a proselyte for modern pisé architecture, a collector of ancient flintlocks and alchemist of potent rum cocktails. His ‘world cuisine’ suppers – Chinese on Friday, Mexican on Saturday and so forth - cold beers, and swimming pool were a haven for travellers using Sévaré as a base for exploring nearby Mopti.

The taxi that took us along the long causeway into Mopti had two small goats curled up on the back seat. “They like the movement,” explained the driver, “and it means I can keep an eye on them.” Malian transport was becoming charming rather than merely interesting.

Amadou, who punted us from Mopti across the Niger in his wooden pirogue, found us as entertaining as we’d found the taxi driver’s kids. Having visited the adze wielding boat-builders of a Bozo fishing village we set off up river into a wine-stain-on-damask-linen sunset. I took over the boat-length punting pole. Huge pinasses laden with the salt slabs we’d seen arriving into Timbuktu passed effortlessly as I zig-zagged us effortfully across the river’s broad width. Amadou reclined back on the deck imitating the indolence of a tourist and giggled happily at my poor attempts to rediscover a skill I rather thought I’d mastered when last pirogue-ing twenty years before.

The transport adventures continued on our taxi trip to Djenne’s Monday market. The ancient Peugeot coughed and spluttered for the sixty kilometre outward journey, barely making it to the crowded market square. We parked under the walls of the mosque, the largest mud-brick building in the world. Sticks prickled out of its walls and towers to provide scaffolding for its annual re-mudding. But apart from its bustling energy and the full range of costumes, scarrings and jewellery on the women of different tribes, the market was unremarkable. Trade staples seemed to be buckets made out of old car tyres, tiny smoked catfish, heaps of millet, calabash bowls and used syringes. It was, basically, an al fresco Tescos. Useful but not actually fascinating.

In compensation, we discovered a Liberty’s treasure trove of Bogolan textiles in a long room high up in one house. Pama Sinin Gao was a famed designer and dyer of' ‘mud cloths.’ In the gloom, Dave and I sorted through soft, toppling heaps of her indigo tinted rugs and earth brown batik decorated ‘hunter’s cloths,’ before starting on the bargaining for the pieces we’d picked. Strangely in the whole of Mali, this remote town was the only place – including banks – were my sterling bank notes ‘did nicely.’ “What’s the exchange rate for the English money, because I don’t know,” I was asked by the cloth-dealers. I told him. He nodded. I paid. We were both happy with our mutual honesty and trust.

A few days later we were back in Bamako, staying with Djelimadi Tounkara, the Super Rail Band’s guitarist whom Dave had managed in the past. In Malian terms this was rather like being Keith Richard’s houseguests, though with excessive indulgence in mint tea and huge chicken feasts rather than drugs and bourbon. Usefully his compound was on the edge of Lafibougou, the ‘music quarter’ of Bamako. By day musicians would drop by and we’d play French swing on Djelimadi’s arsenal of guitars. By night, we’d club hop down a line of dark bars. Live bands provided a pulsing cacophony of dance music. Young men readied themselves like football substitutes, ready to replace a flagging player on guitar and djembe the stronger to press home the attack on the gyrating, snaking, jumping dancers. The smartest of men wore two-piece boubous tailored from exotic print fabrics. All the women dressed and carried themselves like models, their coiffures a competition of bangs, beehives, extensions and sculptings. Cold, phlegmatic, gloomy Europe seemed an unattractive proposition. The temptation to give my air ticket to the first Malian to buy me a beer was almost overwhelming.

Though not quite. Two days later we boarded the Point Afrique flight to Paris. Only to find ourselves making an unscheduled detour via Ouagadougou to pick up a few more passengers. “Mali,” I nudged Dave, as I looked down on land that I’d cycled across in the other direction twenty years before. “Mali, eh! Transports of delight.”

Articles

• More from Jasper Winn