As some of you, my readers, might have deduced, I was keen to visit Mali at some point. I wanted to visit Mali and Bilal's family and generally experience the environment that has made him the man he is today. This is the reason why I have not posted for quite a while now.
Our journey commenced at Marseille-St. Charles station. Marseille has very good connections to Charles de Gaulle Airport via the high-speed lines, with the trains leaving the main route shortly before Paris and entering the LGV Interconnection Est. Given François Hollande's very high taxes, I feel the need to pursue cheap train fares where this option is available (hey, some sacrifices are sometimes needed if one wants two penthouses and eat only the highest quality food!) and I was delighted that Bilal and I managed to find cheap idTGV fares between Marseille-St. Charles and Charles de Gaulle-TGV stations. Vive la France! From there, we took a flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali. We could have flown onwards to Mopti, but Bilal wanted to show me Bamako first and we figured that car rental choices would be better there. I rarely seem to travel by car, but in Mali, it turned out to be
necessary: - we didn't have enough time for travel by camel to be
practical. Even though I, as an impossibly dainty Frenchwoman, love to walk everywhere, the distances were
too great to be practical. Tee hee!
Another reason for hiring a car was that some members of Bilal's family met us at the airport. Even though I am able and willing to walk long distances, the relatives who met us were not! We needed the car in order to have the flexibility of visiting relatives of his in different parts of the country. I said Bilal comes from the Timbuktu area, which is true, but the definition of the word "near" is somewhat flexible here! The word "near" could mean several hundred kilometres in a vast and empty nation like Mali! MDR. Being a Touareg, the question of where he comes from is somewhat nebulous. However, the specific town he is most associated with is Douentza. Douentza has an airport, but we had no success in finding information out about flights there anyway. Douentza is quite small, with a population of only about 20,000, but they seemed very hospitable, even if they are under the yoke of Islam. Douentza sits in the middle of nowhere in between two beautiful mountainous areas.
I always viewed Bilal as being very athletic and rugged, but I was in for a shock when we went into these mountainous areas! Training as a herdsman began for Bilal at the age of approximately three to four years, in line with tuareg custom. Various people in La Savine are pseudo-tough, as are some people in the dodgy Paris suburbs. So too are the wiggers in various middle class areas of French cities! If one wants to see tough, one should see what people who have been surrounded by gangland culture in La Savine and grown up as a herdsman in the harsh, unforgiving environment that Bilal grew up in!
As I have often said, Bilal is very much a hip-hop person, having grown up in La Savine. When he speaks, his French is somewhere between a Marseille 'hood accent and a Malian accent. When he is in France, it sounds more like the former, whereas during the trip to Mali, it sounded more like the latter. Given that we were in Mali, he toned down his hip-hop vocabulary, knowing that people there would not understand words like "pineco", "darblé", "renoi", "rebeu", "racba" etc! He was also easier to understand for me as well, as the gulf between Malian French and French French is much smaller than the gulf between La Savine hip-hop slang and French French!
Being the Impossibly Dainty French Woman, the thing that was most notable during the whole of the visit was the attention given to my weight. In France, I am rightly admired for having a dainty figure, but various stupid people in Mali looked upon me with pity! People were constantly asking me if my father did not feed me properly, to which I had to reply that I was earning my own income and that my impossibly dainty figure is something I consciously chose! In Mali (and indeed many African nations), obesity is regarded as a sign of prosperity. In France, we regard it as a sign of stupidity. Luckily, Bilal was willing to be a dissenter and tell people around him that he simply did not find it attractive for a woman to be overweight. Also, I found that there were a few relatively Westernised people in the larger cities (e.g. Bamako, the capital) who follow Western fashions and therefore know that being thin is attractive and a sign of sophistication.
Shopping for local attire was difficult, as the (relatively) high-quality clothing tended to be made for disgustingly obese women, whereas the clothing suitable for impossibly dainty women such as myself tended to be lower quality on the expectation of such people having lower incomes. In the end, I just visited a local seamstress who made something for me, having taken my measurements. I don't like dressing in a way that exposes large amounts of flesh, as I feel it is not befitting of a Christian woman and does not look attractive anyway. However, on this trip, I felt it would be practical to cover even more of my flesh, given that the sun is very intense at this time of year in Mali.
Obviously, given that we weren't in France, the food was not of such good quality as I am accustomed to in France. However, it wasn't as bad as in the Anglo-Saxon world! MDR! Taguella is a ubiquitous part of Touareg cuisine and tends to be made out of millet: - as I understand things, it can be made out of wheat, but fortunately for Bilal's bowels, this is relatively uncommon common in Douentza! Millet porridge is very common as well: - it is relatively easy to grow millet in hot and dry climates. People tend to eat sheep, goat and camel meat as and when their finances allow. I got the right 'ump (said in a Cockney accent) when I found myself having to eat the latter, MDR.
As a result of the lower quality, it was inevitable that I would find myself eating more. However, that wasn't a bad thing under the circumstances, as I was even more active than normal. The reason for this is that I tended to accompany Bilal on his journeys to look after his family's livestock. Just following him was exhausting enough! However, being a quintessential Frenchwoman, I was well prepared. As I have often mentioned, a Frenchwoman does not like to use lifts or escalators and prefers to use the stairs where possible. I live in a penthouse in a tall and luxurious building near the Vieux Port in Marseille (which has a lift as a grudging concession to the wealthy and overweight foreigners who have bought flats there), so I am naturally used to such exercise! My physical fitness attracted stares from puzzled locals, but who cares? Anyway, I found that my dainty Frenchwoman portions were not enough for the physical exercise I was doing, so I found myself eating more, but I quickly burned the calories off, given the increased exercise.
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As mentioned, although Douentza is the town Bilal is most associated with, he does not have an overwhelming association with one town, given that he is a Touareg and the Touareg people often live a nomadic lifestyle. Douentza is at the edge of the zone inhabited by the Touareg peoples. Douentza is on the edge of the Pays Dogon (Dogon Country), which is primarily inhabited by, yes you guessed it, the Dogon people. The Pays Dogon is an absolutely beautiful mountainous and historic area. There are lots of historic Tellem granary buildings everywhere and I am told the environment is a lush and green one (Bilal and I were there towards the end of the dry season).
Timbuktu was also another region we visited. The mosques there were the main architectural attraction in terms of their historic value. They are completely devoid of spiritual beauty, being mosques, but they abounded in architectural and historical beauty, particular the Djinguereber Masjid. Bilal took me to see some relatives there and again, they asked me if my father was starving me and again, I had to explain that being slim is a sign of sophistication and being fat is a sign of stupidity.
One thing that was noticeably different was Bilal's temperament. He often has a facial expression (often obscured by a hooded top or a chèche) that looks rather wistful, as if he is homesick. I have never visited his home in La Savine, so I don't know if it is absent there, but it was noticeably absent in Mali. Granted, believers should not feel entirely at home anywhere on earth, as they are looking towards the future in their celestial abode and Bilal is delighted to be in church on Sundays, but he still seems to feel as though he is out-of-place when he is in middle-class areas of Marseille. He is normally painfully shy, but during the trip, he was noticeably different. He was unusually inclined to start conversations with others and he was not avoiding conversations with monosyllabic answers as he normally does. Whatever is most normal for him, I adore him, I was glad to see part of the other country that has gone into making him the man he is today and I can't wait till he makes a proposal of marriage.
