AFRICA DAYS 18: The Dogon People, a Desert Decision and Dakar
Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts (for free) on this site or at https://genevaoverholser.com/
From my journal: “Thursday, 21 September 1976, God-knows-where, Mali: Yesterday afternoon, we suddenly found ourselves without a horn — and without a battery. Absolutely dead. We pulled over. Got out the books, checked the fan belt and the electrical system connections. Our hydrometer, bought in South Africa. had busted in Kinshasa — no way to check the battery. Our battery head cleaner brush, also bought in South Africa, had been lost, and we have searched in vain the last several cities for baking powder to clean the battery. We had noticed that our supplementary battery has been dying, so we had unhooked it yesterday morning, and we found water under it.
“Now we figure it must have something to do with the generator failing to charge either one. We’ve been reading all we can but we can’t determine whether it would hurt a faulty generator if we just push start and try to drive to Bamako (150 kms at least). We’ve cleaned the battery as well as we can — difficult because it’s too large for its location, since it’s oversized — none of the right size having been available. So here we are, it’s hot as hell and there are tsetse flies all over. We’re both badly bitten from yesterday. And we’re so isolated that I don’t know how we would find anyone to help push start us.”
This was just one of a long string of mechanical difficulties that would dog us as we drove toward Bamako. We’d patch one thing — and another thing would go bust, often at some desolate spot with no help available.
Finally, one evening, we decided to take stock. We sat down and made a chart: Dakar vs. The Desert. Alas, The Desert lost. All those months of preparation, all those sandladders and jerry cans for fuel and water, everything stored just so in our bus designed for this, everything hauled all these miles. We knew we would survive a Sahara crossing; the rules of the road (or, in this case, track) meant someone would pick us up and haul us north. But there would be no hauling Miles. Leaving him in the dunes would mean losing not just our transport but also our room and board for the weeks to come in North Africa and then the months we planned to spend in Europe.
The decision was heartbreaking, but it was clear: We must put the bus (and us) on a freight train from Bamako to Dakar, and then onto a French packet boat to Casablanca.
In Bamako, we rushed from post office to bank, tourist office, a security firm and shops of all kinds, gathering information and supplies. We sold off the jerry cans. We were ready to head west.
But first, we had one more dream to fulfill here in Mali. As we ran all those errands, a mechanic had gotten Miles running smoothly again (at least for now). Now we would visit the mysterious Dogon civilization. In a letter to my brother, I wrote: “We had a great adventure today here in this godforsaken, dried-out, bug-infested country. We drove across 100 kms. of miserable road — sometimes piles of stones marked the route across boulders just like a mountain trail — to the town of Songha. From there, we set off to see the Dogon cliff-dwellers — an area that feels like Mesa Verde come alive. We walked about 9 miles in far-west-looking country of red rocks and scruffy plants with mesas in the distance. We descended a great escarpment, scooting on all fours down boulders and teetering scarily along large notched tree branches serving as staircases. As the valley below appeared, we saw our first village: Ireli, looking like a baked-mud fairyland, with straw roofs whose peaks reached high above little square granaries, and with rock walls making separate family and closures.
“Some of the houses are built into the lower cliffs, and among these were a few whose outer edges were supported by great forked branches. All up in the cliffs — really in every nook and cranny — are the dwellings left hundreds of years ago by pygmies who preceded the Dogon people, who now use many of the ancient buildings as granaries. There they store the millet that seems to be growing everywhere out of dry sand and must be practically the only thing these people eat. The village was large (we figured maybe 500 people) and it was noisy in its echoes against the huge cliff wall, though we saw very few people outside. Our guide said most were indoors, which is unusual for Africa, but here they don’t have much in the way of yards.
“We did see old men sitting in ‘palaver’ huts in Ireli and in the four other villages we passed through. These huts are open-air and roofed by at least 6 feet of millet stalks stacked in alternating layers to provide cool and shade, and they have big snakes carved over the one mud support wall. Once, as we sat resting, we saw children playing on one of the big boulders, sliding quickly down the smooth tilted surface. We got a view from above of the last of the villages, as we rested by a small waterfall in the shade of kingly baobab trees with their funny fruits hanging heavily on long stems.”
This would be the last of our many grand adventures in sub-Saharan Africa. It had been a hundred days since we left Kinshasa, following our two years living there. It would be more than a week before we’d get ourselves aboard the boat in Dakar. But there‘d be nothing about that period that we‘d recall with pleasure. Complexities and disappointments and discomforts and unpredictabilities had accompanied all our travels in Africa, but never had the bad outweighed the good.
Until that week.
After a couple of days of “you can/you can’t,” “get this permit from that office/that office is closed until tomorrow,” “there is no certainty about departure times,” etc., we at last got us all onto the train. Which meant three days of rocking and rolling in Miles on a flatcar and sitting for hours, often without moving, in the worst heat we’d ever felt, with no protection from biting bugs or blazing sun. Finally we made it to Dakar — and two more days of “can/can’t/come back tomorrow/go to this-no-that agency” — simply to get Miles off the train. Followed by two more days with the auto-loading people and the insurance people and the diplomatic officials, until finally we boarded the ship. Whose stabilizing bar wasn’t performing properly. The foul results of that, I will spare you.
HOWEVER — we got to stroll around lovely Las Palmas during a brief Canary Islands stop. Casablanca would soon come into view. All of North Africa’s pleasures awaited us.
The delight was about to return.
Your endurance is amazing. Can you believe you did all this?