Black smoke billowed up in the distance. The sound of
gunfire ringing out intermittently. Pitch black all around except for an orange
glow on the horizon. The border guards, jittery and trigger-happy at their
posts survey the landscape through their Kalashinikov sites. Two South African
figures leopard-crawling through no-mans land escape their vision. Hearts
pounding in their ears, the two protagonists edge slowly through the darkness,
aware that every movement may be their last. After what seems like an eternity
they see it: the Burkinabe flag. They
have made it. They have crossed the border.
This is not at all what happened to us.
We were sleeping on the roof of our room rather than in it.
Which is normal in Mali. We were woken by a beat-boxing imam at 04h30. Which is
normal in Mali. We were greeted in the morning with “the president has been
kidnapped”. This is uncommon in Mali. Even more uncommon was the sight of men
gathered round radios rather than making tea. The only channel available was a
French station – the military had ceased all the local ones. Needless to say
the combination of ghetto-blasters still packing cassette-decks and a signal
transmitted from nearly 6000kms away does not make for coherence. No one knew
what was going on but no one seemed particularly edgey either. “Yes, but not
such a big problem. These things happen” he continued. Malians are not prone to
hyperbole.
All through Mali we had heard murmurings of discontent with
the current government. The people were angry that president Toure, rather than
fighting the Tuaregs in the north, was continually giving them money. An
unusual military strategy, sure. And no one seemed to believe that any future
president would do any better. Infact, given that the election was scheduled
for next month we hadn’t seen a single election poster in over two weeks. So I
suppose it was in the midst of all this that some cheeky generals saw a
half-gap and decided that the general populace of Mali were just too chilled
out to mount any kind of real defence. They were right. They mostly just drank
tea.
These were the thoughts largely going through my head as we
trundled along in a bush-taxi for the border. I was covered in a diffuse
smattering of cow shit from when our previous mode of transport decided to have
explosive diarrhoea all over me and, in a panic, our cart driver had attempted
to physically plug the torrent with the animals tail. Anyone who has ever
watered a garden with a hose pipe knows how that story ended. So it was on the
back of this, with the closing of borders looming and the prospect of our
entire trip ending in the inauspiciously named town of ‘Bankass’ that we found
ourselves in one of the most frustrating taxis in Mali. A tyre puncture, three
breakdowns and – the coup de grace – running out of petrol 8kms from our
destination stretched a one hour trip into a five hour ordeal. And each time we
broke down, an old toothless man would slowly trundle past us on his donkey
cart and eventually disappear into the distance. The problem would be fixed, we
would take off, smugly pass the bastard only to breakdown and, once more, suffer
the ignominy of watching him slowly mosey on past us once again.
Against all the odds – and with the infuriating knowledge
that the donkey man had arrived in town before us – we got the last two seats
of the last bus through the border. We thought this was very lucky until we
found we were sharing it with three American Peace Corp volunteers. Apart from
telling us that they ‘Import American culture’ to Burkina Faso, they spent the
entire journey yelling into their phones to the phantasmagoric presence of
their supervisor on the other end, who – in turn – kept phoning ahead to all
the ‘authorities’ to tell them that three Americans were on the road, teeming
with US dollars and government-backing, and were coming their way. Considering
we were still in Malis terrorist ‘red-zone’ this seemed to me to be a
particularly stupid thing to do. Probably on par with plying northern
insurgents with money instead of bombs.
The borders had been officially closed when we eventually
got there but it seems this group hadn’t got the memo so they gamely let us
through. It was only once we arrived in Ouagadougou that the extent of the coup
became apparent. So, while we were extremely lucky to get out in the nick of
time, our story is less like a John le Carre novella and, alas, more like an
Archie comic.
* * *
The coup aside we had a pretty awesome time in Mali. Ill
stick up some posts on it as soon as Ive got some time. But in the meantime let
me leave you with this…
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