Nine Hills to Nambonkaha by Sarah Erdman

Author:Sarah Erdman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10

Source

I have tried to dash back from a film festival in Ouagadougou to meet Abi for a trip south to her hometown. But the train from Burkina Faso never dashes. It shrugs through the gray Sahel, past arid bastions of civilization isolated among the acacias. Six hundred kilometers take eighteen hours. It is deep night by the time we’re allowed across the Côte d’Ivoire border. Somewhere near the end of the line, the train passes within throwing distance of Femme Claire’s house. How lovely it would be to fling myself off like a vagabond and sleep in my own bed! But all is blackness outside, and as hard as I try to distinguish the tall tree by the road to the ancestors’ bridge, the shadows are confounding.

In the morning, when I finally pull up to the village from Ferké in an orange taxi, Abi’s son Tidiane is waiting by the side of the road. “Eh! Maman has gone! Just now! She didn’t know if you were coming.” The three hours to Abi’s home village seem like nothing compared to last night’s journey. I can catch up. So I run by Sidibé’s to tell him I’m off. I pull a few things from my bag and put a few other things in, and within twenty minutes I’m back on the road, waiting for transport to Bouaké.

The great thing about Africa is that, armed with only the name of a village and the name of a person, you can travel confidently without the faintest clue where you’re going. All you need is patience. In Bouaké, when I tell a taxi driver to take me to the Tiébro bus, he drops me off at a lot packed with ancient station wagons. Token itinerants are draped over benches and plastic chairs. Some are drivers, some ticket sellers, some drivers’ mates, but all the roles appear to be interchangeable. A car has just left, they tell me, so I’ll have to wait till this next one fills up.

By the time the car finally fills an hour later—a “sept-place” they call it deceptively: seven people fit snugly, but they rarely leave with less than nine—the itinerants have become friends. I’ve been entrusted with greetings for Sidibé’s brother, who is apparently a great friend to all of them, and messages for a gas merchant in Tiébro, and the woman who sells eggs just past the teak tree. Doors slam shut, there’s a bang on the roof, and every man in the vicinity pushes us out of the lot till the engine wakes up. My new friends run alongside, heads bent in my window, gasping wishes for a safe journey.

The driver zips along a smooth paved road—this is Baoulé territory, the land of the ruling ethnicity. There are some days when Abi considers herself Baoulé. Her dead mother came from that tribe, but Sidibé and his family are pure Dioula, and her father is half Dioula, half Peul. Out of habit and practicality, she’s taken on Dioula tradition.

Tiébro

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