Malian Plumbing

Location:
Mali

Mali, Dogon Country, African Plumbing

By Lorna North

August, 2007

I’d been working as a journalist on a three month internship in Ghana, West Africa. Once this was over, I devoted a month to my own travelling. The tenancy on my residence in Accra where I had been working ended and as I handed over my keys, my status changed from volunteer to traveller. I was now a snail with a house on my back and in the words of Paul Young, wherever I lay my hat, was my home.

But I didn’t have a hat, just a green scarf and a 70 litre rucksack and these two pieces soon became my travelling identity.

Although I was adequately equipped in ragged traveller’s clothes and my hair was sufficiently unruly and matted, I was still lacking one feature that was rather integral to my position as a traveller. And this was a plan, or at least a preference as to where my scarf, rucksack and I were bound.

So for about a week my address became1 Rucksack Road, The Beach, Ghana where I resided in a green tent and congregated each evening with the mosquitoes around torch light to flip through the pages of The Rough Guide to West Africa, looking for inspiration.

On one of these evenings my mind strayed down a philosophical avenue, probably enhanced by the passive influence of whatever the beach-dwelling rastas were smoking. It occurred to me as I was batting off one particularly lecherous mosquito that the destination was not the objective but rather the journey itself and soon I came to the conclusion that distance was what I should strive for. The question had now changed from “where shall I go?” to “how far can I get?”

And Mali was the answer.

I will begin with the figures. I had two and a half weeks to do a round trip of 1576 miles relying on unsafe modes of land vehicle. I spent just over 72 hours in total on the road crossing three different countries: Ghana, through Burkina Faso and ending in Mali in the Dogon region, about 200km south of the legendary and mysterious Timbuktu.

I had at different stages two companions, John Barker, 28 from Dublin who came up as far as Po in Burkina Faso. I was then alone for a couple of days in Ouagadougo, the Burkina capital and this is where I met a bleary eyed Simon Lucey, 19, from Cheltenham who had caught the red eye bus straight from Accra which took 36 hours. We then crossed the Mali border together and explored the marvellously traditional and primitive Dogon country.

When my time was up I enviably left Simon in Mali to continue onto Timbuktu and I set off on my race back to Accra which involved 3 days of long and lonely hours catching a couple of winks on benches in between buses. All the usual long journey time wasters like hangman and eye spy are wasted on the single traveller so I tried playing “spot the white man” for a while. But again, given my geographic location, the game was short lived.

Back to my theory of “the journey”. The journey itself provided me with an education in cultural diversity. It was through the cracked and dirty windows of whatever vehicle I was in that displayed the visual alterations from South to North. I watched as Ghana’s fertile leafiness gradually faded into a drier yellow as I got closer to the Sahara. I saw churches turn into mosques, skin tones become lighter, temperaments become more subdued, camels replace donkeys and French take over English.

But of course it wasn’t only the visual that completes the experience, it is also the challenge of getting from A to B, negotiating unorthodox methods of transport, enduring a lot of hassle when plans fall through, having to adapt to a huge variety of people and their customs in a language that isn’t your own. And then the triumph when you finally reach your destination.

Naturally I don’t want my writing to bore people so much that the NHS start prescribing it for insomnia. Therefore I will limit this final chapter to one anecdote in keeping with my pursuit to refresh the genre of the travelogue which for the rise in gap years in the last decade has suffered the undignified relegation to the bottom of people’s inboxes. This anecdote is about a toilet.

It had been a hard few days. Simon and I had been making our way across to Dogon country from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. Whilst there I had been trying to organise a visa for Mali which had all the usual hassles of administration attached to it plus the lack of technical efficiency that we are lucky to have. I was drained from having to navigate my way around a new city, by far more impoverished than Accra, with people constantly asking me for money. Thankfully my French proved sufficient but by the time Simon met me in Burkina after his 36 hour journey from Ghana, we were both in need of a beer.

The next day the trials continued. I had to go to the Ghanaian State Transport office in Ouagadougou to pre-book my ticket to Ghana that would ensure I would make my flight back to London. As we were leaving the office I said to Simon, “imagine if I lost my ticket!”. He smiled and replied, “just don’t lose your ticket”.

Later that day, I lost my ticket. But by that time I was so desperate to leave Ouagadougou that I left my return journey to Accra in fate’s hands and began the two day journey to Mali.

To cut a long story about the volatility of African transport short, Simon and I made it to the Dogon town, Sevare, after a long journey in the back of a truck, sat on people’s laps and taking turns holding different Malian babies that were passed around on some sort of rotation.

By this stage we were two desperate people just looking for a bed anywhere. Curling up on the ground on top of our rucksacks seemed like an enormous luxury so you can imagine our elation when we came across a hidden gem called “Mac’s Refuge”.

Set back in a leafy enclosure, the aptly named “Refuge” was a popular stop off point for weary travellers who had been trekking through Dogon country or taken the boat to Timbuktu. Mac, the owner was an American who had been born and raised in Mali after his father set up a missionary in the 1930’s. The man must have been in his sixties and had an air of Father Christmas paternalism about him that was gratefully received by Simon and I who, by this time looked like stray orphans of the storm.

The place was like uncovering a lost valley or finding out that your fire place is actually a secret door to a cave of gold you never knew you had. Basically it had a toilet, a shower and food. Certain things that we had been lacking for the past few days.

Obviously luxury like this comes at a price and the Refuge attracted the higher end of the budgeters but despite this Simon and I thought it a worthy splurge and stretched together seven pounds for a room. We were slightly out of place in terms of the clientele. In fact everybody was part of a couple, generally at the pre-marriage/ serious relationship stage and seemed to be using their trip as a test to see whether they could handle spending the rest of their lives together. Simon and I also felt a little incongruous in the pleasant surroundings as we had been on the road for some time and looked comparably dishevelled and unkempt.

At dinner time all the guests sat around the table and listened as Mac regaled stories about his life and everyone took it in turns to state their nationality and relationship status. The table had a contrived family sort of set up with Mac as the respected father figure and the guests as his children. Simon and I definitely felt like the naughty youngest siblings.

There was a lot of small talk. One couple discussed the benefits of importing one hinged toilet seats as opposed to the Western two hinge set up. I’m not certain what their exact reasoning was as my mind shut down after the first hour of the discussion but I’m sure it was very interesting.

Already rather self-conscious about feeling a little out of place, it didn’t help matters when I woke up needing the lavatory in the middle of the night. I tentatively crept about the place so as not to wake anyone up. As I went to flush the toilet, I realized it didn’t work which of course was no surprise to me. This was Africa, the toilets never worked and after about three months practice dealing with the stubborn toilet facilities of my last residence in Accra, I believed myself to be a plumbing expert.

However, this proved not to be the case as I, having reached into the cistern to get a firmer grip of the flush ended up snapping what turned out to be a rather important pipe.

Water has never been so aggressive. Niagara Falls looked like a dripping tap in comparison to the geyser I had just managed to create in this quaintly decorated hotel toilet and I, who had been contently snuggled up in an actual bed for the first time in weeks was dripping from head to toe in toilet water.

The spray powerfully hit my face as I tried to manually block it with my hands unsuccessfully. It looked like an awful black and white slap stick comedy and it took a very long time to get Simon, who had been woken up by the commotion, to stop laughing.

After a good fifteen minutes of Simon’s hysteria at my expense, he suddenly realized that we would actually be in quite a lot of trouble with Mac, who seemed to already see us as liabilities, if we didn’t try and rectify my awkward situation. So we pooled together our resources. We had a roll of Elastoplast and three hair ties and with these limited supplies we managed to reinforce the burst pipe using the plasters (luckily waterproof!) as a sealant and the hair ties to elevate the pipe to make it sit at the correct height. We predicted it would last about three hours just in time for me to make my dreaded confession to Mac over the civilized breakfast that was due to take place in the morning.

Well, to summarize, Mac wasn’t impressed by the state of his soaking bathroom or the pitifully repaired pipe wrapped in plasters so our sheepish departure to Dogon country as early as we could get out of the Refuge was very welcome. Simon and I concluded that we should really go back to sleeping on floors and dirty mattresses because pleasant guest houses turned out not to be compatible with us.

And the next night we found ourselves staying on the floor of a local man from a Dogon village whose house was made of mud and who cooked us the best supper over a little fire. This was more like it. Dogon country is basically made up of several villages that are dug into the cliff side and are remarkably untouched by modernity. Their cultures and customs are so interwoven into their society that it seems no rise in technology could ever affect their ways of living. Sadly I really don’t have enough time to relay all their customs in this email as I have a flight to catch but I am hoping to do some more research on Dogon when I return.

We stayed in the villages for two days, interacting with the locals and witnessing unobtrusively how they lived. The women were constantly asking for any medicine we had so that they could use it on their children but I came to West Africa pretty ill-equipped in medical supplies. In fact all the medical supplies I brought out, I had used to fix the toilet the night before.

So the objective of my journey was finally met. I reached Dogon some way or another and on route saw a multitude of sights that I could write about for the rest of my prospective career.