The Shadow of the Sun

A Day in the Village of Abdallah Wallo

It is the girls who rise first in the village of Abdallah Wallo and go for water even before the sun is up. This is a fortunate village: water is nearby. All one has to do is climb a steep, sandy bank down to the river. The river is called the Senegal. On its northern shore lies Mauritania, and on its southern the country with the same name as the river — Senegal. We are where the Sahara ends; ahead of us lies the barren, semi-arid, hot savannah known as the Sahel, which, several hundred kilometers farther south, toward the equator, will in turn give way to the humid, malarial regions of tropical forest.

After reaching the river, the girls fill tall, metal tubs and plastic canisters with water, help one another place them on their heads, and, chatting, climb the steep incline back to the village. The sun rises, and its rays catch the water in the containers. The water trembles, sways, and glitters like quicksilver.

The girls disperse to their houses, their yards. From the earliest morning, from the onset of this expedition to the river, they are carefully and neatly dressed, always the same way: in a wide, loose dress of flowered calico, ankle-length and concealing the entire body. This is a Muslim village — nothing in a woman’s attire should suggest that she might wish to tempt a man.

The sounds of pots being set down and the splash of water are like the tolling of the bell in a small country church: they bring everyone to life. From the mud huts — there are only mud huts here — children tumble out. There are throngs of them, as if the village were a giant kindergarten. As soon as they step over the thresholds, the little ones start to pee, instinctively, in no particular place, to the left, to the right, some carefree and joyful, others still a bit sleepy and sulky. They finish, then rush to the buckets and canisters for a drink. Girls — and only the girls — seize the opportunity to wash their faces. It doesn’t occur to the boys. The children now turn their attention to breakfast. Or, rather, that’s just how I think of it; the concept of breakfast does not exist here. If a child has something to eat, he eats it. It can be a piece of bread or a biscuit, a chunk of cassava or banana. He never eats this by himself, for the children share everything; usually, the oldest girl in the group makes certain that everyone receives an equal portion, even if it’s only a crumb. The rest of the day will be a continuous search for food. These children are always hungry. They instantly swallow anything that is given them, and immediately start looking for the next morsel.

Mornings in Abdallah Wallo are not accompanied by the barking of dogs or the clucking of hens or the lowing of cows. There is not a single animal in the village, not one creature that one could describe as being livestock — cattle, domestic birds, goats, or pigs. As a result, there are no barns, stables, pigpens, or henhouses.

There is also no vegetation in Abdallah Wallo, no greenery, flowers, or shrubs, no gardens or orchards. Man lives here one-on-one with the bare earth, loose sand, and crumbling clay. He is the only living creature in the hot, blazing emptiness, and is wholly preoccupied with survival, with the effort to remain above ground. There is man, and there is water. Here, water takes the place of everything else. Because there are no animals, it nourishes and sustains; because there is no shade-producing vegetation, it cools; its splashing is like the rustle of leaves, the murmur of shrubs and trees.

I am the guest of Thiam and his brother, Yamar. They work in Dakar, where we met. What do they do? Different things. Half the people in African towns don’t have defined occupations, permanent jobs. They sell this and that, work as porters, guard something. They’re everywhere, always at one’s disposal, ready to serve, for hire. They perform their task, take their wages, and vanish without a trace. Or they can stay with you for years. That depends on you, on your money. They tell rich tales about what they have done in life. And what is it that they have done? Thousands of things — everything, really! They stay in the city because it is easier to live there, and one can earn something now and then. If they manage to make a few pennies, they purchase a few presents and travel home, back to the countryside, to their wife, children, cousins.

I met Thiam and Yamar just as they were preparing to leave for Abdallah Wallo. They proposed that I go with them, but I had to stay in Dakar for another week. If I wanted to come after that, however — they would be waiting for me. The only way for me to get there was by minibus. I must arrive at the bus terminal at dawn, they admonished, when it is easiest to get a seat.

So, a week later, I went to the terminal. Gare Routière is an enormous, flat square, still empty at this hour. A group of young boys materialized instantly at the gate, asking where I wanted to go. To Podor, I said, because the village I was traveling to was in the department of that name. They led me to more or less the center of the square and, without a word, left me there. Because I was alone in this desolate place, a group of vendors, shivering in the still-cool air (the nights are cold here), gathered around me, pushing their wares — chewing gum, biscuits, baby rattles, cigarettes, sold individually or by the pack. I didn’t want anything, but they kept standing there; they had nothing else to do. A white man is such an anomaly, a foundling from another planet, that it is possible to stare at him with interest almost forever. After a while another passenger appeared at the gate, then one more after him, and the vendors moved off in their direction.

Finally, a small Toyota van pulled up. These vehicles are built to seat twelve, but here they accommodate more than thirty passengers. It is difficult to describe the number and nature of all the additions, the welded-on extensions, the little benches inside such a bus. When it is full, for one passenger to either get out or get in, all the others must do so as well; the intricate calibration of the internal arrangements is as tight and precise as the workings of a Swiss watch, and whoever occupies a place must take into account the fact that for the next several hours, for all intents and purposes, he will not be able to move so much as a toe. The worst are the hours of waiting, when one must sit in the hot, airless bus while the driver collects his full ensemble of passengers. In the case of our Toyota, this process lasted four hours. We were just about to set off when the driver — a powerful, well-built young man named Traoré—announced upon getting into the bus that someone had stolen a package that had been lying on his seat, with a girl’s dress inside. Thefts like this are a common occurrence the world over, but Traoré fell into such a rage, a fury bordering on insanity, that we all cringed, fearing that he would tear us — innocent passengers! — limb from limb. It was yet another instance of something I had observed in Africa before: the reaction to a thief — although there is plenty of theft here — has an irrational dimension, akin to madness. Because there is something inhuman about stealing from a poor man, who often has but one bowl or one tattered shirt, that man’s response to the theft can likewise be inhuman. If a crowd catches a thief in the market, on the square, on the street, it can kill him on the spot — which is why, paradoxically, the task of the police here is not so much the pursuit of thieves as their protection.

Initially, the road skirts the Atlantic coast, passing through an avenue of baobabs so formidable, gigantic, lofty, monumental, we might as well have been driving among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Like elephants among other animals, so are baobabs among trees: they have no equals. They are from some other geological era, from another context, from another nature. They cannot be compared with anything else. They live for themselves, and have their own individual biological program.

After this kilometers-long forest of baobabs, the road turns east, toward Mali and Burkina Faso. In the town of Dagana, Traoré stops the bus. There are several eateries here. We will have our meal in one of them. The passengers divide up into groups of six to eight, and sit down in a circle on the floor. In the middle of each circle, a boy from the restaurant sets down a metal basin half filled with rice generously covered with a brownish, heavily spiced sauce. We begin to eat. And this is how we do it: one by one, in turn, each person extends his right hand into the bowl, takes a handful of rice, squeezes out the excess sauce, and lifts this compressed dumpling to his mouth. We eat slowly, seriously, mindful of the order, so that no one is wronged. There is great tact and restraint in this ritual. Everyone is hungry, and the amount of rice is limited, yet not one goes out of turn, hurries another, cheats. When the basin is empty, the boy brings a bucket of water from which everyone, again in sequential order, drinks a large cupful. Then we each wash our hands, pay, step outside, and get back on the bus.

A moment later we are on our way again. By afternoon we reach a town called Mboumba. I get out. I have ahead of me ten kilometers of country road, through dry, burnt-out savannah, hot, loose sand, and crushing heat.

So, morning in Abdallah Wallo. The children have already scattered throughout the village. Now the adults emerge from the huts. Men spread out small rugs in the sand and begin their morning prayers. They pray enclosed within themselves, hermetically oblivious to the bustle around them — children running, women going about their chores. At this early hour the sun already fills the horizon, illuminates the earth, pours into the village. One feels its presence immediately; all at once, it is already hot.

Now begins the ritual of morning visits and salutations. Everyone visits everyone else. These are backyard scenes — no one enters the houses. For the mud huts serve only as sleeping quarters. Thiam, after prayers, starts his rounds with his nearest neighbors. He walks up to them. A mutual exchange of questions and answers follows. How did you sleep? Well. And your wife? Also well. And the children? Well. And cousins? Well. And your guest? Well. And did you dream? I did. Etc., etc. This goes on for a very long time, and the longer we ask, the more detailed is this exchange of courtesies, the greater the respect that we each evince for the other. At this time of day, it is impossible simply to traverse the village; with each person encountered one must enter into this unending exchange of questions and greetings, and one must engage each one individually: addressing a group, collectively, would be rude.

I accompanied Thiam for the entire length of the ritual. It took a long time to complete the full circle. As we moved in our morning orbit, I noticed others circulating in theirs; the entire village was in motion, and from all directions one could hear those ritualized “How did you sleep?” and the reassuring, positive “Well. Well.” As we walked the village, it became clear that in the tradition of its inhabitants, and even in their imagination, the concept of divided, differentiated, segmented space does not exist. There are no fences, boards, or wires, no hedges, nets, ditches, or demarcation lines anywhere. The space is single, communal, open — transparent even; there are no screens in it, no erected barriers, dams, and walls; it puts up no limits, offers no resistance.

Now a portion of the people go work in the fields. The fields are far away; you cannot even see them. The soil near the village has long been exhausted — barren, sterile sand and dust. You must walk for kilometers before you can plant something with the hope that, if the rains come, the earth will yield a crop. Man has as much land here as he can manage to cultivate, but the fact is that he will cultivate very little of it. The hoe is his only tool, he has no plow, no draft animals. I look at those setting out for the fields. Their only nourishment for the entire day is the bottle of water they carry. Before they reach their destination, the heat will already be frightful. What do they cultivate? Manioc, corn, dry rice. Wisdom and experience dictate to these farmers that they work little and slowly, take long breaks, conserve their strength, rest. For these are weak people, poorly nourished, without much energy. If someone were to start working intensively, toiling, going all out, he would grow weaker still and, in his exhaustion, easily succumb to malaria, tuberculosis, or any of the hundreds of other tropical diseases lying in wait, half of which are fatal. Life here is a constant struggle, an endlessly repeated effort to tilt in one’s favor the fragile, flimsy, and shaky balance between survival and extinction.

The women, from the morning on, prepare the meal. I say “the meal” for one eats once a day, and terms such as breakfast, dinner, or supper are not applicable: one doesn’t eat at any predetermined time, only when the meal is ready. This occurs most frequently in the late afternoon. And one always eats the same thing. In Abdallah Wallo, as in this entire region, it is rice with a sharp, spicy sauce. There are rich and poor in the village, but the difference in what they eat lies not in the variety of dishes, but merely in the amount of rice. The poor man will have only a scant portion, the rich man a heaping bowlful. But this distinction holds only in years of plenty. A drought of long duration pushes everyone down to the same level: the poor and the rich alike eat precious little, if they don’t simply die of hunger.

Preparing the meal takes a woman the greater part of the day — the whole day, really. She must set out first thing in search of wood for the fire. There are no trees anywhere, the land was deforested long ago, and searching for slivers, splinters, and sticks on the savannah is an onerous and time-consuming task. When she finally collects and brings back a bundle of firewood, she must set out again, this time for water. In Abdallah Wallo the water is nearby, but elsewhere she would have to walk for kilometers to get it, and in times of drought she must wait for hours until the water truck delivers it. Having fuel and water, she can begin cooking the rice. But not always: she may first have to buy it in the market, for she rarely has enough money to purchase a supply of it. And then, on top of all this, noon arrives, and with it hours of such debilitating heat that everything stops, grows numb, dies down. The bustle around the fireplace and the pots likewise subsides. The whole village appears deserted, all life drains from it.

One day I summoned my strength and set off on a walk from hut to hut. It was noon. In all the dwellings, on the earthern floors, on mats, on bunks, lay silent, inert people. Their faces were bathed in sweat. The village was like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean: it was there, but it emitted no signals, soundless, motionless.

In the afternoon we went with Thiam to the river. Muddy, dark gray, it flows between steep, sandy banks. No greenery, plants, or shrubs in sight. One could, of course, build canals here, irrigate the desert. But who is to do this? With what money? What for? The river flows as if for itself alone, unnoticed, of little use. We ventured far out into the desert, and the dark caught us as we were returning. There is no light in the village. No one has a fire going, because that would be a waste of wood. No one has a lamp. No one has a flashlight. On a moonless night like tonight, you can see nothing. You can only hear voices, here and there, snatches of conversations and calls, stories being recounted that I do not understand, words ever less frequent, softer, for the village, taking advantage of the bit of coolness, grows silent for a few hours and falls asleep.