Almost 40 years ago, long before you were born, there was
hunger in the land – great hunger and great drought – and that land was Africa.
It was 1974, the time of the great drought in the Sahel, and
I was seated cross-legged at the edge of a campfire in the middle of the
Sahara, with nomads who don’t share a similar spoken word, but whose soft
singing in the desert night touches my soul.
I smile; smiles are the
universal word, and the young man rises and gives me a simple bracelet he’s
been working on as he rests around the campfire singing. It’s formed of braided leather and a few bits
of hammered metal. The leather is from
either cattle, sheep or camel, all of which these nomads herd when they are not
on caravan through the desert, when they are with their families in the few
villages near a well or oasis.
When I slept that night, all I heard was the sound of my own
blood beating a soft tattoo against my eardrum.
All I saw is a black sky and clear stars. All I felt were soft grains of sand drifting
against my face. I was completely at
peace, and I had the knowledge that all are one.
Somehow, it is always easy to realize these things in this
great continent, the birthplace of humankind.
The next morning, our band of rag-tag travelers got back in
the three 40-year-old Bedford army trucks that were abandoned in Tangiers, on the shores
of Morocco after World War II. Some of
us piled into one of the two Land Rovers which were old enough to have no
shocks left. Our Tuareg guide took us
deeper into trackless desert.
We passed skeletons of camels then, and dead goats
also. Nothing much was alive during this
drought as we crossed the rock trails of the big Masif in Niger.
In Agadez, roused early by the call to prayer, we saw the
women draw muddy water from the old well in the middle of this oasis town.
Near Kano, in northern Nigeria, the Fulani women had taken
their emaciated herds to an almost-dry well.
An unwritten rule of first-come first-served meant that many women and
children waited all day in the hot sun for their turn. When at last they could lower their poor pails
made from gathered-goat-stomach skins into the well, the skins came out of the
well only half-filled with murky water.
Our group was almost out of water too. We’d filled up in Morocco, because crossing
over the Atlas Mountains into southern Algeria, and we’d rationed ourselves
with only a cup of water a day for bathing and 2 quarts for drinking. Still, at this point, the jerry-cans were
empty.
The head driver of our group gathered us around his Land
Rover and said he knew of a source where there was water near where we were headed in central Nigeria, but the source had
bilharzias parasites in it.
It was a somber day of traveling, and then a miracle! A sudden cloudburst, the kind that runs off
the parched earth quickly and by no means nourishes the land. But the children in the nearly village
inspired us, and we held up the jerry cans to the edges of tree branches and
gladly took the run-off.
We arrived in Cameroun at the onset of the wet season. After a difficult day of driving on
rain-rutted roads, we pulled our Bedford trucks and Land Rovers into a somewhat-dry meadow at the last light of the day. We stationed them at the four points of the
compass – north, south, east, west – with a clearing in between, much like a
wagon train crossing the west in the United States in the 1800’s. We turned on the headlights of the trucks to
make camp.
Suddenly, the meadow was filled with men, women and children
with brooms, rakes, and bush branches.
Just as suddenly, the locusts and grasshoppers rose from the damp ground
toward the truck lights. The villagers
swatted and gathered the insects into their baskets, eating a few as they
worked.
The next day, passing through a village large enough to have
a good-sized open air market, we stopped at the clearing in the packed-mud road
to buy shrunken bananas. By then, the
night’s bounty had been roasted. So too
were a few monkeys, sold by halves – top half, and bottom half. We passed on the bush meat and the insects, in favor of the vegetables.
When we crossed into Zaire, now called Congo, we traveled
through pygmy lands for a few days.
There was hunger here too. In a small jungle clearing with a few shelters built mostly of branches, a
mother with two small children offered to share her bowl of cassava gruel with
fat juicy wriggling grubs in it.
Despite the hunger, the pygmy and the other peoples of
Africa survived this and other droughts.
In Congo, they called on their nature gods to help. They sent up their chants not only with their
voices, but with the help of the sacred patterns they traced in the ground around
their mud brick and thatch houses.
The people used their water wisely, shared what they had,
and helped each other.
Our band of travelers
dispensed what medicine, food, money and clothing we could spare along our way
across Africa. By the time I reached
Nairobi, I had these items left for my trip back to the United States: one piece of cloth that I could wrap for a
skirt, two teeshirts, some underwear, and a pair of torn sandals.
I saw and experienced all these things I've written about here, and I did what I could to help. That was 1974, when there was great hunger in
that land of Africa. But those people survived
because they had each other, and now, the world has you.
Inshallah. Do what
you can to be kind.
Love you,
BaBa
BaBa
