Squirting Milk at Chameleons: An Accidental African

172 Pages·2015·4.78 MB·English

by  Simon Fenton

Published in 2015
by Eye Books
29A Barrow Street
Much Wenlock
Shropshire
TF13 6EN
www.eye-books.com
ISBN: 978-1-903070-91-8
Copyright © Simon Fenton, 2015
Cover by Bert Stiekma and Simon Fenton The moral right of the author has been
asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without
the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Contents
Senegal and the Casamance
The Gris-Gris
A New Life
Toubab
I Dream of Africa
Bleat, Pray, Love
This is Africa
The Little Baobab
Mango Time
The Soul of Africa
Boily Boily
Cooly Cooly
The Casamance
Palm Wine Drunkards
The Tree of Life
Things Fall Apart
Photographs
Epilogue
Further Information
“Abarakas” (Acknowledgements)
About Eye Books
About the Author
To Khady, Gulliver and Alfie
Senegal and the Casamance
The Gris-Gris
The Baye Fall are Sufi mystics: a whirl of bright patchwork robes, beads
and dreadlocks. In Dakar, one is trying to sell me some tourist tat, but he
realises I don,t have any money left. So we sit and chat around a fire on
the sandy roadside. His name is Ibrahima and before long, he beats a
rhythm with a plastic water bottle and chants:
“Simon, I wish you long life, I wish you good life ...”
Later, as I prepare to leave, Ibrahima pulls off one of his many necklaces,
which consist of small leather pouches on cords.
“This a gris-gris, wear it to protect you when you travel. Never take it
off. Never give it to anyone.”
The day after I nearly died, I sat in the Senegalese gloom, sweating and aching,
whilst a bare-chested black man vigorously rubbed my back. He took my head
and violently cricked my neck, shoved a knee in my back and pulled on my
shoulders. I felt my spine crack, then I rolled exhausted, onto the floor.
I was in a small mud-floored chamber with a dirty mattress and posters of
American superheroes pinned to the wall. By my side was Khady, a beautiful
Diola tribe girl who worked at the house I was looking after. We’d travelled
together to the provincial capital of Ziguinchor to try to connect said house to the
electricity grid and to collect her identity card.
The trip was unsuccessful. The man at the electricity company – who was
working hard in his hammock when we arrived – said he’d been too busy to
complete the connection. Definitely next week, though.
“Okay, great, see you next week.”
“Inshallah,” he replied. This translates as “Yes, if God wills it”. But in real
terms it meant that we might have electricity in the next few months or we might
not.
If I were a betting man I’d have tended towards the latter.
As for Khady’s identity card, that took a further two years.
The masseuse was named Tierno and he was a marabout – a West African
Islamic holy man who is a kind of shaman, sometimes known as a witch doctor.
Tierno was also Khady’s brother-in-law. The previous evening, she and I had
been on a local bus when a tyre burst, causing us to crash. We were up front near
the driver, who was drunk, and everyone was screaming as the top-heavy vehicle
swerved from one side of the road to the other. I felt an odd calm knowing that I
had a slim chance of surviving this crash. It wasn’t so much my life flashing
before my eyes as a satisfaction that despite the mistakes, the struggles and the
disappointments, I had lived my life my way, mostly happily, and in a way I was
proud of. I was ready, which is not to say I wasn’t shitting myself.
That evening, after the crash, I crouched in the dark and ladled water over
myself to wash off the diesel, dust and blood. I felt Ibrahima’s gris-gris around
my neck and when I returned to the house, voiced my cynicism. It hadn’t
worked; the gris-gris was nothing but superstitious nonsense.
“Of course it worked. You were the only person to walk out of the crash
without even a scratch, weren’t you?” Khady replied.
As the crash occurred, the bus skidded on its side for a few hundred metres
as everybody screamed. The windscreen popped outwards and I clung to the side
window, holding Khady with my left arm for as long as I could before being
jolted off. We both fell on the driver.
As we slid to a stop, I felt the warm wet spray of diesel in my face and heard
a cacophony of moans and groans. Khady was dead; I was sure of it. I went
through the motions of dragging her out, panicking as I thought the whole bus
would blow – a Hollywood fallacy, of course. Thankfully, she came around and
we were able to assist others to safety.
Apart from my emergence without a single scratch, there were a couple of
other remarkable things about this accident. First, we were only a mile or two
away from a military hospital, and the medics arrived within minutes. Second,
Khady’s uncle lived minutes from this military base. In hindsight, the latter fact
seems less remarkable – it doesn’t matter where we are in the province, Khady
will always be related to somebody there, often someone useful like Tierno. My
bag was lying in a bush about 15 metres away. It had been ejected through the
front window. I am writing these words on my laptop, which – along with my
camera – was in that bag and survived as unharmed as myself.
At this point, Khady and I could barely communicate through language, but
we seemed to understand each other perfectly. Tierno had finished roughing me
up and she indicated that he was going to give a reading. These procedures are
important after a near-miss with death. He carefully unwrapped a dirty cotton
cloth, tied at the corners. Out fell a collection of beads, shells, old coins and
bones.
He threw them into the dust, raised his fingers to his temples, closed his eyes
and made a pronouncement. Khady translated.
“You will have a child in Africa.”
I laughed. “Yeah, right.” I had tried to have a baby for nearly 10 years with
my ex-wife back in England, and had reached the point where I figured it just
wasn’t going to happen. I was cool with that. Although I’d have liked a family
and the experience of being a dad, I also loved travelling and my freedom.
Besides, Khady and I were only just beginning to make tentative steps towards a
relationship, and at that point everything felt way too crazy to take seriously.
The date was 31 March, 2011.
A New Life
Khady and I walk along a sand track with our son strapped to her back.
There is not a cloud in the sky and the sun beats down as we shuffle
along trying to keep in the shade of the cashew trees. Abruptly, Khady
halts, beckoning for me to do likewise. Ahead, crossing our path, is a
strange creature – a chameleon, almost luminous green in colour – with
an alien head and an odd circular motion to its limbs. Without missing a
beat Khady pulls out a breast and with a deadly aim, fires milk at it.
“What the …?”
“If I don’t offer it milk, our son will grow up to look like a lizard,” she
explains.
Clearly I have a lot to learn about life in Africa.
31 March, 2012
Khady woke me from a deep sleep. Bleary eyed, I pulled together some
belongings and guided her, groaning, towards our Land Rover. It was 3am. We
set off down the deeply rutted sand tracks through the dark forest towards the
small village clinic. I parked and Khady leaned against the truck, clearly in
agony.
“Simon, it hurts. Help me, help me.”
I plunged into the darkness, knocking on doors until I found and woke up
Ndoumbe, the midwife.
After much deliberation, Khady and I had decided to have the baby at the
maternity ward in the local village. Ndoumbe had impressed us and the ward had
been recently fitted out by a French philanthropist. When I say “fitted out”, this
meant it had basic equipment and a fresh lick of paint, not new incubators and so
on. They just had three light bulbs wired in above a bench.
It was mostly me doing the worrying; Khady was casual about the whole
affair. It turns out that women have babies all the time in Africa. In the event, she
started labour both in the middle of the night and 10 days early, so even had we
made the decision to go to a European clinic in neighbouring Gambia, we’d
never have been there in time.