Aminta and Le Vieux
Aminta Diop (like Jope), my Senegalese mother, was born in 1923, according to her identity card. Such cards began to be issued long after that time, nor did Senegalese track births or anything according to the Julian calendar then, so the year may be inaccurate. There was no date of birth on the card. Her son, who is unsure of his own precise age, but is probably about fifty-four today, thought that she was between fifty-five and fifty-eight when she died at the end of 1980, so 1923 is probably not far off, if at all.
She was raised in Guinguinew, a village in the modern region of Kaolack. Wolofs
and Serers live there in about equal proportions, with a smattering of Diola,
Manding, Tukulor, and several clans of pastoral Peul crossing and re-crossing
the territory. Her family were prominent nobles, which means that they had some
land but enjoyed about the same standard of living as anyone else. Her parents,
older brothers, and other grown relatives attached to the household all worked
on the farm. She mentioned once that her paternal grandparents had both been
alive during most of her youth; I don’t remember whether she had much
contact with her maternal kin. The Wolofs practice patrilocality by preference,
which means that the typical residence includes at least a couple, their small
children, their married sons and their wives, and may include two or three more
generations of patrilineally related males with their wives, sons and unmarried
daughters. Aminta, as is typical of West Africans, did not like to put numbers
to people; she could or would not tell me exactly the size of her natal home
population.
Having had no formal education except a few years of Koranic schooling and the
traditional initiation-ritual training, she married Gallo Fall when she was
about sixteen. Fall took her to his house in MBacké, a village rendered
important by its proximity to the Mourides’ capital, Touba. She successfully
bore eight living children over the course of the next twenty years, and suffered
at least two miscarriages. Gallo Fall was an older man of some means. In those
days, a man’s prestige was measured in the size of his compound and the
number of his dependents. Fall was housing and feeding several of his own kin,
and took in Aminta’s half-sister Ngone Seck and nephew Codé Diop
for a few years, when the latter’s father died. Fall had done some learning
with a French master himself, and encouraged all the boys of the household to
go to school. They all worked on the farm, and Codé and some of the others
went fishing frequently. Fall’s wealth in animals was impressive, as well.
His flocks of sheep and goats, his cattle herd, which he owned corporately with
his brothers who resided nearby, and his handful of horses, were the responsibility
of the men of the compound. Aminta and the other women took care of the chickens,
the children, the men, the household, and their share of the agricultural labor.
(Women’s ‘share’ of such labor in West Africa can measure
up to 80% of the actual hours or tasks.) They walked to gather firewood, gather
wild fruits and herbs, to market. Aminta inherited from her father at some point
a small parcel of land, with orchard and crops, which she tended alone or with
her sisters. She once mentioned that her mother had passed on to her a small
piece of property, but I don’t know what happened to it.
All of her children died by the time they reached puberty, with the exception
of my brother Papa Fall. His name is actually Mbaye Jarra Fall, but he is addressed
as Papa in deference to the respected man for whom he was named. For the Senegalese,
the name carries something of the person in it, and to refer or speak to a young,
possibly impudent and obstreperous, person using an elder’s first name
is to be discourteous. Often the nickname, usually a title or kin term, sticks
for life. You will meet many people called Papa (Dad), Yaay (Mom), Baay (Father),
Ndeye (Mother), Maam (Grandparent), Serigne (Pastor), Cheikh (sheik), and so
on, in Senegal. I once knew a small boy called Wiye (a wolofization of ‘vieux’
– old man, for Wolof people, an elevated state). Maybe when he is in fact
an old man, he will be able to use his name, Njaga, or maybe the title will
become his own, Vieux Njaga, Elder Njaga.
Papa himself had contracted whatever disease had carried away his siblings.
He thinks he was ten or eleven years old. He says he swelled up all over, fluid
oozing from every orifice. He was taken to traditional healers, to the marabouts
in Touba, to the missionary clinic, to the dispensary in Kaolack. He felt as
though his spirit had departed his body and was looking down on him the whole
time. Finally, he recovered, through what agency he doesn’t know. Aminta
didn’t care to talk much of these terrible events, the losses she had
borne. She would just say, “All the rest died. Only God knows why.”
Gallo Fall married a second wife when Papa was a teenager. Both he and his mother
said it was a consequence of the deaths of his seven siblings, in two senses:
the husband wanted to have more children than she seemed able to provide; he
and many others feared there was a curse on Aminta that had expressed itself
in that way. Eventually he divorced her. Codé had leftto pursue his studies
in Rufisque some years before. His mother, Aminta’s sister Ngone, had
remarried. Aminta took her son back to her home in Guinguinew, now presided
over by a brother.
Papa says his mother’s loveliness as a girl and young woman was sung by
the griots well into his remembered childhood. Her beauty still emanated from
the older face I got to know. There was a quality of repose to her smile, even
when her eyes were lit up with hilarity or irritation with her wild great nephew
who lived with us. Wolofs, as some other Africans, prize fair skin, and Papa
says that when Aminta was young, and even when I knew her, her coloring was
bright as the sun on copper. I think this color prejudice probably comes from
the long colonial contact with people who systematically practiced color discrimination,
favoring light-skinned, particularly métis (cross-blood), Africans in
political, economic, and educational contexts. It is appalling to see it persist
among modern women and men, to the extent that skin-bleaching creams are still
in use. It is especially shocking, to this foreigner anyway, to find such a
color aesthetic among a people whose skin can be of an iridescent blackness
like a feather or gem. The results of skin lightening cream rarely match Michael
Jackson’s efforts in this endeavor; rather, most applicants achieve a
blotchy, tomato-like hue that looks as though it might itch or peel off.
In any case, Aminta was one of those Wolofs whose fairness of skin and fineness
of feature bespoke northern, Saharan ancestry. She had the careful grace of
a pea-hen, whether she was chasing the neighbors’ chickens out of the
compound, harvesting mangoes, or cooking, endlessly cooking. She had been married
to Maguette Cissé in the sixties, I gathered. Apparently, she never conceived
by him, if she was still capable of it at all. He was divorced, with older children
than Papa. I moved in with them at the beginning of 1975, when she was in her
early fifties. Any vestige of youth in her form or face was long gone, bujt
she moved and expressed herself with vigor and humor. She was not preoccujpied
with her physical or economic problems, which were substantial, and instead
interested herself in the activities and conditions around her. She used to
say, when I would inadvertently indicate surprise or pleasure that she knew
about some event or had perceived some subtlety of interaction, “I have
never been to school, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.” (The
Wolof language she chose was somewhat sharper.) In fact, she had an incisive
intelligence. She looked for meaning in everything, but wasn’t satisfied
unless it also made sense in practical, human terms. She studied other people,
and words.
Because the communication barrier between us was so high at first, my mother
and I did many things together in silence. I used to wonder what – even
how – unlettered people thought. I knew that my thought pattern reflected
the literary life I had led, that all the books I’d read had given form
to my interior world, as to my conversation. My efforts as a writer had further
molded my speech and thought. I could not imagine the passage of a life of thought
entirely without reading or writing, as was her case. How many hours did she
sit with no book at hand, while I was avidly reading? (There was no television
in the household, nor many in the entire town.) Yet she was fully alive, aware,
responsive, interesting. She thought through discourse. She thought in or about
oral literature, of which she knew a formidable quantity, for a non-griot. These
texts give rise to structured contemplation to the same degree as literacy.
They require analysis and memory, skills comparable to those required by reading.
(Among communicative devices, only television requires no skill at all, even
attention, so far as I can tell.) Though confined by her circumstances and gender,
my mother had few limitations of imagination or interest.
Aminta Diop’s life spanned an epoch of jarring change. Many old people
will tell you it was better under the whites. Their reasons for this point of
view appear to be manifold: 1) it is less humiliating to be called an ignorant
peasant by a foreigner who knows nothing about your culture than by someone
who speaks your language and looks like you, except for his expensive clothes
and car, 2) when the French occupation was in full force, they maintained the
domestic peace and tranquility, and 3) before and between the imperialist wars
(what we usually call World Wars I and II), the expansion of the French realm
and entrenchment of its global trade network induced growth in the economies
of some localities and increased professional, political and educational opportunities
for some persons in Senegal. Furthermore, until the 1950’s and 1960’s,
countries in Africa had not fully been hustled into the scam of development
programs or the sham of nation-building. The dissonance produced by being blessed
with nation-state rank alongside the former masters while having no wherewithal
or experience with which to participate on an equal footing in global affairs
had not yet trickled down to the rural populace. The need to exploit them more
and more aggressively, on the part of the world’s privileged, had not
yet arisen.
Aminta regarded the sweep of change with equanimity, condemning greed or haste
wherever she saw them, bemoaning the loss of her people’s autonomy and
stature, delighting in the idea of air travel (she never had the experience).
She wasn’t sure how to evaluate television, nor many other technological
marvels of which she had only second-hand knowledge. She had been on short trips
in automobiles. She had never been to Dakar, though was willing to go, in spite
of its bad reputation in rural areas. (It is roundly believed that most of the
city’s population is made up of witches and slaves from the countryside
trying to escape their status and reputations, and that they spend their time
in thievery, prostitution, and drug use. Of course, the wealthy and political
elites who also live there are considered to be practicing their own brand of
theft and pimping on a much larger scale.) She wanted to go to Mecca as well,
and the United States. I have never met a Senegalese who did not want to go
to the United States, but I think her desire was simply to see its wonders and
not merely to pick up the dollar bills that are lying on the streets in piles.
As I became more coherent in Wolof (she spoke no other language), we developed
a more serious relationship than is required for plucking chickens side by side
in silence. She was a gifted teacher, in the sense of being able to answer questions
as fully as she could or not to be able to answer them without being flustered.
It fell to her, as my mother, and Senegalese take their mothers very seriously,
to attempt to explain to me practically everything that was going on around
us, from inter-personal interactions and relations to figures of speech to religious
principle to the politics of the township. My father and brother did a great
deal of this as well, but since they felt themselves to be much more worldly
than she, would sometimes rush over parts that they thought would be self-evident
to a sophisticated person. Aminta was also one of the rare people for whom externalities
are unimportant. I doubt that she had known many white people, certainly none
to be close to. I should have been as alien to her as to all the other village
people who stared or poked at me day after day. She shared some of their misconceptions
about Americans – that we throw our clothes away when they get dirty and
buy new ones, that we prefer anything out of a can or bottle to something from
the ground or a tree, that we only eat in restaurants. The differences between
us constituted a formidable obstacle. My background and life experience were
utterly different from hers. My youth, my education, my comparatively easy access
to opportunity, money and health, my foreign birth, and of course, my skin,
were all matters that could have prevented us from trying to get to know one
another. I was ready to overlook my own characteristics (though this isn’t
so easy), but many other peole found it impossible to ignore these attributes
and get to the human individual inside. Even my common womanhood with other
women and girls did not count for much with some of them, for I was a woman
still single in her late twenties by her own preference, a woman with a lot
of choices and advantages and status, hence even more an anathema than the white
men they occasionally saw, whose power and freedom were taken unquestioningly
for granted, like those of their own men.
Sometimes I felt, when we were talking, that Aminta saw through all this social
structure. She was aware of it, but she didn’t worry about it: she never
tried to manipulate me, never posed or second-guessed, always treated me as
a normal person with genuine emotions. You may think this is not a great thing.
Most white Americans don’t have occasion to be one of a kind for long
periods, so when they are within their milieu, they forget about that aspect
of their assigned identity and can focus on their and others’ ‘real’
personalities, or whatever lies beneath the skin. (Of course, they may have
other features of their social identity, such as being gay or working class
or disabled, that can get in the way of ‘real’ interactions –
but you get the idea.) Most Africans do not have this experience, either, as
long as they remain within their own territories, and so they had little or
no sensitivity to my reaction to being ‘the white woman,’ ‘the
American’, ‘our toubab’ – a whole class of people stuffed
into one body, not an individual in her own right. African-Americans have this
experience all the time, of course, and so do other minorities in their own
country, so they tend to understand instantly when I have tried to explain the
phenomenon. Aminta, in any event, was prepared to respond to me on the basis
of whether I was kind, bright, lazy, eager, selfish, funny, or whatever, rather
than simply white, well-educated, and presumably rich as a baroness.
To have known someone of such perspicacity was a privilege. I am also convinced
that she loved me; I know I loved her. The communication of such feeling between
almost any categories of relatives or friends in Senegal is hedged by etiquette.
Reciprocal love ordinarily reduces distance; the complementary rather than reciprocal
quality of the Senegalese social system and the rules of conduct that enact
it reinforce distance. Great familiarity is possible between grand-kin (that
is, the grandparental generation and their grand-child generation), siblings
(though often Senior Brother assumes an authoritarian stance in relation to
his junior brothers and sisters), and parallel cousins (children of brothers
or of sisters), who are considered peers. Cross cousins, children of a brother
and sister, have a ranked relationship. Wives and husbands are not peers, either,
and are enjoined from verbal or physical expressions of affection in public.
Friendship is highly regarded. Same-sex friends are peers and are expected to
make any kind of sacrifice necessary for one another, particularly males. Friends
have an elaborate set of mutual rights and responsibilities. Still, it is widely
held that the most significant other person in one’s life is one’s
mother, and that, if there is love beyond passion in any human relations, it
is there. Yet, still, mothers and children make no declarations of love for
one another once the latter are past three or four years old. Fathers are farther
yet.
Aminta was prepared to stretch her roles to their maximum, without trying to
step out of them. She spoke very frankly of the emotional content of her relations
with other people. In my case, she sought to make real the fiction of our adoptive
relationship and to expand its meaningfulness: she took seriously our mother-daughter
connection in the terms of Senegalese roles as she knew them, and also attempted
to learn from me how American women dealt with their mothers or daughters and
to introduce these elements of greater parity and openness into our communications
with one another. While we were mentor (she) and protégée (I)
for the most part, we could also be friends.
Aminta took me to meetings of the women’s association of the neighborhood
every month or so. The association was a political and economic one, in which
she had a strong voice. Some of the other women had richer or more prominent
husbands or father; one or two had a little formal education. In a society in
which women and men are not expected to be very close to one another, unless
they are siblings, both groups fulfill whatever needs for emotional intimacy
they have within their own group. This is slowly changing, but the general parallel
social order will continue to exist for a long time; in it, the order of men
is of the public domain, and more highly esteemed and rewarded, and that of
women is of the private and less prestigious, though still essential. In any
case, it was very clear to me that a great deal of Aminta’s and other
women’s self-esteem, interest in life, and social growth came from their
relations with other women – not to mention the importance of women to
one another as sources of the most precious currency of all – information.
Maguette Cissé – ‘le vieux’ – said he was around eighty years old (in the mid-1970s). He also occasionally claimed to be much older, up to 100 years old, but he didn’t look even eighty. He had been in World War One, fighting with the French, from whom he still received veterans’ compensation. Thus, he must have been born before 1900. Mercurial, intense, thoughtful, dictatorial, Cissé had led a full and fascinating life. He was from Gujinguinew like Aminta, and their arranged marriage, his third, appeared to be a close one, by their standards. Aminta kept at the prescribed verbal and physical distance from him, addressing or referring to him by his last name or as “vieux.” But it was clear she controlled her own domain. He was irascible and critical with everyone else, including me. A brilliant and complex man, he was capable of great tenderness with a grand-child at one moment and of berating me in the next breath for anything from spoiling the same grand-child to not knowing how to direct my research. He, of course, knew better than I about many things and so gave me a great deal of advice. I always listened to it, though, like any child of the house, sometimes followed my own intentions. He sometimes forebore to call me on it when he noticed I had made a mistake in so doing.
Cissé had learned masonry and carpentry as a youth, but his principal
trade was herbal and ritual medicine. Although he was semi-retired during my
fieldwork, people still came to him from as far away as Mali, Gambia, and Guinée.
Since he spoke ten or twelve languages, he could nearly always communicate with
them in their language. His reputation was based on his high rate of success
with psychiatric cases. An African family with a member who becomes troublesome,
depressed, or deranged generally seeks help from a traditional healer. In a
few extreme cases, the mad person is excommunicated from the family and/or village
and may be found roaming loose. The village idiot – referred to as a “fou”
by most Senegalese, using the French term – is a reality in West Africa.
Most of them are not violent, merely delusional, but their madness incapacitates
them for normal life. When the family can no longer control or care for such
a person, the traditional healer is the only resort available. There are no
psychologists, social workers, or psychiatrists in an African village, and not
very many in the capital city, either.
However, traditional medicine has proved efficacious in dealing with mental
disorder, as with many other ailments, conditions, injuries, and complaints.
In theory, its efficacy derives from its holistic approach to the human being
and its inclusion of family and community in the ritual process. Also, of course,
herbalists possess a deep knowledge of the native pharmacopoeia. Cissé
usually went to his home bush near Guinguinew for materials. Once, though, he
took me with him when he went to gather wild products in the wooded stretch
east and south of Tivaouane. It was one of the most interesting walks I’ve
ever taken.
The bush on that side of Tivaouane is for the most part unprepossessing straggles
of short thorn trees, taller neems, and brush. Termite hills rival and sometimes
eclipse these trees, until you get to the mango, papaya, cashew, citrus and
other fruit plantations that people intersperse with uncultivated forest, so
there is no clear separation of nature and (agri)culture. Occasionally, a palm
of the many varieties found there (though not the oil palm whose fruit makes
the most fragrant cooking oil in the world) or a baobab, a tamarind, soars above
the crowd. Underfoot is a tangle of stickers, grasses, mostly with paper-thin
blades that cut, and crawling plants gripping the sandy earth tenaciously. On
that day during the rainy season, it was verdant, if not lush. The cacti and
pricker bushes in the treeless zones were in flower. The forest was illuminated
by a dripping sun. The trees were noisy with insects and birds.
Cissé walked with the aid of a cane, embellished by himself with meaningful
designs and figures. This day he did not also carry his parasol, of which he
was fond, for in the sheltered groves, the pressure of sunlight would not be
great. “Le vieux” also carried his collection bag slung from a shoulder.
He moved slowly. He was nearly blind, and hard of hearing, too, but his carriage
and progress told me he knew where he was going and what he was looking for.
He didn’t say very much to me, and I was too entranced to conduct an interview.
But he was talking to the forest all the time, imprecations, discussions. When
I infrequently asked something about what he was doing as he cut snippets of
this and picked up that, he would usually give me a double answer: this is a
[French or Wolof word], sometimes a Latinate or taxonomic term I’d recognize,
and it is a ‘thunderclap’, ‘devil’s horn’, or
other ritual identification. Occasionally he would provide only part of this
formula. Then he told me what each item was good for in relation to symptoms
– headache, fever, swelling, hallucinations, and so on. He didn’t
think of his materials in terms of specific maladies, but rather in terms of
what he had learned about their properties or means of acting on ailments of
the mind or body.
Unlike the majority of African men, le vieux could cook and keep house. His
mother had had no daughters to help her, so he was the son appointed to this
task. He rarely did these things while married to Aminta, but he sometimes did
the marketing, a daily task, when I was living with them. He said he liked to
go to market to get the news and to save money. He claimed that Aminta gave
money to the street urchins or bought them candy, so that she had nothing left
when she got home. I went to the market with her a lot, and it was true what
he said. The generosity of the poor is a miracle I have witnessed many times.
Apart from faulting her for her generosity, the old man also criticized her
cooking and advised her as to superior methods of preparation based on his boyhood
training at his mother’s side. She bore these commentaries stoicly.
Cissé had four or five sons and an equal number of daughters. He had
many grandchildren. One of his sons was in the military, posted in Dakar. This
is a good job, for a Senegalese. Another was a businessman in Thiès;
the old man went to see them periodically to ask for money, and complained about
them and his other children the rest of the time. His youngest son was in the
merchant marine as a radio operator. He later opened an electronics repair atelier
in the sand of the courtyard in front of our house. This was El Hadj (another
title-name, meaning The Pilgrim, which meant he was named after a man who’d
been to Mecca) Cissé. When he wasn’t at sea, he was busy impoverishing
his father by getting girls pregnant whose fathers would then solicit payments
from him. He had a wife and one-year-old son who lived with us until the baby’s
death. Mignan (pronounced like Minyan) was a deep-eyed, sweet-natured little
boy just learning to walk. He seemed to cry a lot. We were pals, partly because
I was tape recording his speech for my project, partly because I was the only
one who played with him. He otherwise sat all day with his little bowl of rice
watching everything, his nose running. A friend of El Hadj’s took him
to the hospital one night while I was on a trip. I returned shortly, and on
that day, they got news that he had died in the hospital. They described a suppurating
sore on his throat that had just gotten bigger and bigger, bloodier and bloodier.
Yaws, perhaps. No one could tell me for sure.
It took the household a long time to recover from losing Mignan. His mother
went back to her father’s house. I had a really hard time getting over
my grief mixed with guilt for having been gone when the crisis came. I kept
thinking that if I and my car had been there, we would have gotten him to the
best hospital in the country in Dakar, and I, with my attention-getting white
skin and riches it connoted, could have gotten him in to see the doctors instantly.
Instead, I imagined a drawn-out process of finding transportation while he fussed
and festered, getting to any hospital where someone knew someone, then waiting
with the dying baby among a crowd of similar tragedies.
Le vieux and Aminta grieved the little boy, too, though, characteristically
of their culture, there were no tears shed. Her grief was visible in her drawn
face, silence, and sighs, his was audible in prayer. The Senegalese don’t
cry for their dead, because it is thought to draw unwelcome attention from spirits
or witches during a time when a spiritually dangerous transition is being accomplished.
The Senegalese are aware of their physical and economic vulnerability, but they
express real fear only in connection to their ritual or spiritual vulnerability,
which is inter-connected with the significant events or changes in the life
cycle of individuals and communities. One or two people also commented to me
that expressing grief in tears shows displeasure with what God has brought to
pass. Indeed, when someone dies, they usually remark, “Yalla baaxna,”
‘God is good’. At first, I found this astonishing. Later on, after
hearing it many more times than I thought I could bear, I began to understand
that, for them, death is part of life, and to try to reject or deny it is to
deny life as well. That philosophy was little comfort to me as I attended funeral
after funeral of people I’d known and cared for – the neighbor man
who was bitten by a puff adder on his bare foot digging in his peanut field
and died the same day, Codé’s mother, several children, Aminta
herself.
Cissé was Sosé by ethnie, a people renowned by other Africans
for the richness of their folklore and for their bravery and implacability in
resisting the French. He had married Wolof women. Aminta used to say the Wolofs
were bad – “baaxul”, ‘not good’ – in her
no-nonsense way. She was probably referring to her people’s reputation
for sorcery and greed. Like all stereotypes, this one is untestable by any statistical
sampling method I know of. I certainly encountered plenty of greed in Senegal,
but it’s not limited to Wolofs, nor, of course, to Senegalese or Africans.
I heard of many sorcerers and even knew some. The one I worked with briefly
in Dakar was a Malinké, and the others were not all ethnic Wolofs.
In any event, the old man’s ethnic mixing was not limited to inter-marriage.
His studies of ritual healing and herbalism had taken him through most of the
countries of former French West Africa – Mauritania, Mali, Guinée,
Ivory Coast, along with Gambia and Guinea Bissau. Thus, he spoke many African
languages with varying degrees of fluency. I believed him when he said he knew
over ten languages, because I heard him speaking them and came to be able to
identify Bambara, Pulaar, Serer, Saraxolé, Diola, Arabic, etc., even
though I knew none of them myself. We talked in Wolof or French. His rusty French
was that of someone who has never been in a classroom. His grammar and pronunciation
were sharply divergent from what the French call French, but his vocabulary
was a lot better than mine. He must have learned French before his military
service to have been enlisted. He had picked up some Russian and English during
the war. He liked to try the latter on me, since I was the first English-speaking
person he had met for sixty years.
I like to think of the vieux as the quintessential pre- and post-colonial man
(the quintessential woman of this kind would have a different life path). He
moved effortlessly between and across cultural and geographic space, trading,
learning, healing. Borders were fluid in West Africa until the colonial masters
began fighting to establish and control them, and even after the map-making
was over, most Africans continued to ignore the frontiers of whatever colonies,
protectorates, territories they now inhabited; they still do, sometimes to the
despair of the new nations trying to rule their people. The colonial maps, of
course, had nothing to do with languages, ethnies, historical relationships,
or even, in some cases, topography. They had much to do with which European
power got where first and where they ran into another one and fought to a standstill
or came to an agreement that would result in a, to the Africans, arbitrary division
of land and assignment of masters.
Cissé was no assimilationist, despite his willingness to join the effort
in the first world war. We often talked of the racism of the French and the
destruction of African life brought about by colonial contact, colonial administration,
and the slave trade. Both of us occasionally would point out that it was dangerous
to blame the living for the deeds of their ancestors (though in traditional
African thought it is commonly held that the living may be punishable for their
progenitors’ crimes) and to over-generalize, i.e., that there might be
some French people who weren’t racist, just as there were Americans who
weren’t rich, and Wolofs who were honorable.
Contrary to the image children are presented of tribal society, pre-colonial
West Africa was not a grid of isolated, independent cultures with their own
forms of leadership, distinctive languages and social systems, all determined
by what was available in the local resource base. From talking to old people,
from the newer histories and archaeological findings, and from many other anthropologists,
I see a moving picture. Ethnic groups may have been distinctive from one another
in certain ways, but the constant rate of exchanges of technology, stories,
marital partners or lovers, medicines, comestibles, art forms, ideas, across
their boundaries meant that their distinctiveness was neither total nor permanent.
Change and migration and trade produced a polyglot population who were sophisticated
in their dealings with each other, even when they were exploiting them, who
were knowledgeable about the natural world, and who were busily transforming
their traditions, even while telling others that they were clinging to them.
Cissé embodied this kind of successful African person to me. This set
of attitudes and skills also strikes me as adaptive to a post-modern world,
in which we must be able to function in many settings, we must refine our notions
of learning and experience to be inclusive of more contexts, and we must renew
our sense of connectedness to nature and to other beings. For Cissé,
national frontiers were meaningless, irrelevant. That day may come again.
When my then-boyfriend Dan and I went to visit them in 1981, we found Aminta gravely ill. I am sure the shock in my expression saddened her terribly, but I could not control my horrified reaction to her appearance. She and Cissé were sitting on mats on the floor on the porch. She was bare above the waist, as is still fairly common in some parts of rural West Africa. Thus, I could see how emaciated her upper body was. Her breasts were mere flaps of skin against her ribcage. The skin of her arms and stomach also sagged because it had no flesh to hold it strong against her bones. She was coughing, a raw, diaphragm-deep hack that brought up gobs of stuff that she spit into a rag. She couldn’t talk without coughing. Disease had bleached the gold of her brown skin to grey.
She was still glad to see us, smiling and struggling to rise. The old man told
her to stay where she was, that I wouldn’t mind coming down to her level
for greetings. He was not anxious to get to his feet, either. Dan shook hands
with them. I hugged Aminta and took the vieux’ hands. Other family members
ran out of the house. Greetings went on for a long time and had to be reiterated
as neighbors and old friends showed up, as well, along with curious passersby.
My mother in Missouri had charged us with bringing her old, but good foot-pedal
type sewing machine to my mother in Senegal. Dan and I had lugged it onto and
off of planes, cars, and the train, and were heartily sick of carrying the heavy
box. When I explained to Aminta what it was, tears of appreciation brightened
her eyes. The idea was that she would use it for some of their household clothing
needs and perhaps even make a little money on the side. She never got the chance
to learn how. I later found out that Papa Fall had sold it.
That visit was consumed by Aminta’s illness and our attempts to get help
for her. Cissé had given her various potions and performed certain rites,
to no avail. Another healer had been brought in after that, who proved equally
impotent to cure the wasting and respiratory failure. Everyone was speculating
about witchcraft, in particular the sorcerers next door. Le vieux had had a
property dispute with the neighbors, unresolved to this day, during which the
two parties had cast spells on one another. Cissé claimed responsibility
for the laming of the family head, a man I rarely saw but who was indeed permanently
crippled. Perhaps this was their revenge.
Aminta had twice gone to see the nursing sisters who had a little clinic near
Mboro, quite a distance for her to travel in her condition, or at any time,
for that matter, considering the cost, trouble of finding transportation, and
her indispensability to the household. The sisters had given her some medication
and prescribed additional ones, all of which were unavailable in Tivaouane.
She continued to languish. When we got there, the situation seemed desperate
to me, but I didn’t know what was wrong with her or what to do. First,
we went to Thiès, where they have real pharmacies (the dispensary in
Tivaouane frequently didn’t even have aspirin), to get hold of the other
medicines the sisters had recommended. Two were in stock at one store. The pharmacist
I talked to, who told me he wasn’t really a trained pharmacist, merely
a former orderly who now sold packagted drugs, listened sympathetically and
seemed alarmed at the description of her symptoms. We administered the new drugs
for a few days, and her condition worsened. My brother was not trying to do
anything about his mother’s emergency. I didn’t realize that I was
expected to take charge.
We took her again to Mboro, in a horse-drawn cart, since there were no public
cars going that way. Most of the nursing nuns were on some kind of tournée,
perhaps vaccinating children in remote bush communities or ministering to those
dying of diarrhea. The attendant we talked to said they could do nothing further
for her. I finally got it through my head that we had to get her to a hospital.
The closest one was the regional hospital in Thiès, a lovely, big, new
structure that was under-staffed, under-equipped, and unpaid-for. We went back
to Tivaouane to collect her things and prepare for the journey. She was exhausted
from bouncing on the seat of the cart. Since we had no car and it was already
late, we would have to go by taxi the next day. After she had rested, she began
calling the children of the extended family in to talk to her one by one.
I did not understand at the time what this meant. She had asked me to buy candy
for her. I thought it an intrusion to sit close enough to hear her distinctly
as the children came, but I could easily see her giving some of this candy and
some coins to each one, and hear her tone of voice. The children seemed to understand
well enough. Papa Sow, my ‘son’, came away from the interview in
tears and ran outside. Ousmane Diallo, a somewhat older cousin, had an edge
to his handsome young face I’d never seen there before. She herself shed
no tear, nor did any expression of regret or betrayal or bitterness compromise
her calm. She managed to keep from coughing somehow. The tenderness in her voice
carried where the words themselves could not reach. She bequeathed to me one
of her cherished possessions, a cheap plastic going-to-market bag, which has
stood the test of time.
Cissé had at first been opposed to the idea of the hospital. Most Senegalese
regard orthodox western-model hospitals with a good deal of suspicion and dislike.
They use them as a last resort, and if you’ve ever been to a hospital
in a West African city, apart perhaps from some private ones, you will readily
see why. With so few doctors, nurses, beds, medicines, equipment, and facilities
per capita, what there is is strained to the limit. Waiting rooms are bursting.
Wards are over-crowded. Staff are over-extended. Some are under-trained. Drugs
or technology are unavailable. Preferential treatment may be given to someone
with money or connections. The horrendous illnesses and injuries the staff must
deal with daily make them callous to all affliction. You go there to die.
We had discussed all this with the old man. Prayer had not worked. Ritual incantation
had not worked. Animal sacrifice had not worked. The medicines we had obtained
had not worked. Aminta herself was willing to try anything now, though she was
already saying, “Yalla baaxna” a lot. He yielded. The two of them
talked until late after dinner that night. Then she seemed to cough for the
rest of it. Her son sat with Dan and me for a long time, mostly in silence.
He was very scared, but was comfortable with the hospital decision and was willing
to leave the trip in my hands, his elder sister with white skin and a little
money.
We hired a taxi to come to the house early in the morning. Aminta took her tiny
parcel of clothes, chewing stick, amulets, and identity card from her room and
gave it to Papa fall to put in the car. Le vieux called everyone around to form
a circle for prayer, and we held our cupped hands palm-up together to receive
the blessing, spit into it when he was through praying to seal it, and covered
our faces with them to bring it home. I realized how bent he was, this strong
and vital, big man of powerful mystery and deep wisdom. My old father was blind
now, but there was no hint that he was concerned for himself, though Aminta’s
absence would make his life immeasurably harder. There was no public display
or exchange of sentiment between the old couple. Their personal relationship
was a private matter. He was extremely agitated, she was as cool as the deep
water of a well. I was nervous and worried.
Daba Kebé, Aminta’s niece who lived nearby in the same quartier
of Tivaouane (and with us when her husband was making things hot for her), went
with us, since she was not nursing an infant at that time. Daba is Papa Sow’s
mother. His father had not chosen to marry her, and was taking little or no
responsibility for the boy. Sometimes he would come to visit him at our house
and hang around so as to be there for meal time, talking to the vieux. Bachelors
of limited means not living at home have difficulty getting enough to eat in
this society, unless they are able to arrange all their visits conveniently
to coincide with meals. Anyway, Papa Sow was not welcome at his mother’s
home with the overbearing man she had married after having him, which was why
he was being raised by Aminta and Cissé. Daba owed Aminta a personal
debt for this service, though it had been cheerfully and thoughtfully undertaken
by my mother. That is really why she went with us. And because they knew much
better what to expect than I did.
There was the usual mob scene at the hospital waiting room. It seemed there
were only two physicians on duty to examine people hopeful of being admitted
to the hospital. Dan and Daba hung around impatiently outside the compound.
Sitting became prolonged, and nobody was paying any attention to us. We had
no appointment, but neither did anyone else, and there didn’t seem to
be any list to determine the order in which we could see the doctor. I couldn’t
stand it, my American urgency for action was too restless, so I went to lurk
outside the examination rooms, and as soon as a patient emerged from one of
them, forced myself upon the doctor.
This one was some kind of European, that is to say, she was white (Canadian,
it turned out). I shamelessly begged her to see my mother next, using the most
descriptive and persuasive French of which I am capable. She agreed, and I brought
Aminta to her. I stayed to translate, Aminta conveying information to me in
Wolof, I passing it on in French, the doctor asking questions, and so forth.
The physical examination was quickly over, involving the usual probings and
indignities that Aminta bore with utter calm. The doctor chatted with me a little
bit before making any pronouncements.
“Vous êtes américaine?”
“Oui.”
She switched fluently to English, informing me she was from Québec. We
talked a little more, mainly about how I came to be in this (to her) godforsaken
wilderness.
“She is suffering from congestive heart failure. Her circulatory system
is not strong enough to evacuate the fluids from her tissues. That is why she
is swollen here,” indicating her lower body, “and why she is having
respiratory difficulties. She will have cardiac arrest unless she goes into
hospital immediately.”
“Can you have her admitted?”
She could and did.
European professionals working in such circumstances are usually there for one
of three reasons: 1) they are complying with some kind of national service requirement
of their government or professional association, 2) they are involved with a
non-governmental organization that has assigned them there temporarily, or 3)
they are incompetent or alcoholic and cannot get a job in their country. Whatever
category may be applicable to them, they often fall prey to two common syndromes:
burn-out from daily horrors, and inflammation of any latent racism they may
carry due to exposure to magical thinking, lack of hygiene, official corruption,
fatalism, and the panoply of other differentnesses that they don’t understand.
When a physician equates difference with inferiority, he or she literally cares
less about the efficacy of their task performance. Particularly if there is
a communication void, it is hard for such people to maintain a feeling of empathy
with patients. This Canadian woman was certainly competent, so she must have
been category 1 or 2. She did not seem to have approached the hazard of burn-out
or bigotry yet, but was more concerned for and interested in me than in Aminta.
She was given the last bed in one of the women’s wards. Fool that I was,
I thought that once one had checked into a hospital, the expert staff would
do the rest. For instance, the doctor had ordered an X-ray to be taken right
away, to help her prescribe a course of treatment. We went to the radiology
lab and found no one. A custodian finally told me the technician wasn’t
in that day, to try the next. We took her back to her bed and settled her in
it. There were no nurses around, let alone doctors doing rounds or other recognizably
doctor-like activities. We exchanged greetings with the other women in the room,
those in bed who were awake and the relatives gathered there. I began to understand
why Daba had come. There would be no amenities provided by the hospital. Most
care would be whatever was offered by the sick person’s family, from chamber
pot to meals to keeping watch.
I gave Daba some money for food and left her with Aminta, after I had sat with
her for a while, and Dan and I spent the rest of the day prowling around Thiès.
We got back to Tivaouane late; Idon’t know who fixed dinner for the old
man, Papa Fall, and the little ones. I told them everything that had happened.
Cissé said he was familiar with “insuffisance coronaire”,
the French for her condition, and that it was often a matter of faith and strength
of will whether one recovered or not. Allah would have the final say. I was
pretty mad at God at this point, so I didn’t choose to argue the point
with him. Everyone was very somber. The dark village glowing from candle and
lamplight but really lit by the Milky Way did not seem the same peaceful and
magical place I knew.
Aminta had plenty of faith and strength of will, but I knew well she didn’t
have much physical strength or resistance. She’d suffered from asthma
most of her life. I remembered her wheezing and coughing all during my stay
with them when I was doing my fieldwork. She’d had repeated attacks of
malaria and dysentery, and probably other parasites, as well, all of which wear
down your immune system. The loss of children, rejection by her first husband,
and a lifetime of hard work with no respite cannot have made it easier for her
to bear the stress of serious illness. Whenever I used to remark to the vieux
that she was tired or sick, he would say, “Mag la leegi,” which
means, “She’s old now,” not without compassion, but as if
to say, this is normal.
We went to the hospital first thing in the morning to report to the radiology
lab. The technician, it turned out, was still not there, nor would be till Monday.
Only he knew how to operate the machine. (This is not the only instance I’ve
seen of the purchase or gift of a piece of expensive modern technology that
is then under- or mis-used or entirely wasted because the rest of the technology
was not also present: the training and attitudes necessary to use it, appropriate
energy at appropriate levels, parts and capable repair personnel, funds to maintain
them, ability and willingness to follow up a capital investment with further
investment in contingency infra-structure. This was merely the grimmest personal
example of the violence done in the name of modernization or development.)
There was a festival going on, the bordu, which is held eleven days before the
big Tijan pilgrimage, and all the staff who belonged to the tijaniyya brotherhood
were there celebrating. That was most of them, since this is the Tijan heartland.
This is where the X-ray man was taking his holiday. I could not absorb this
information, it seemed so preposterous. I kept wondering if my Wolof was failing
me, or all of my senses. The others – Aminta, Daba, the one or two staff
remaining – seemed to regard it as perfectly normal. I tried to find the
Canadian doctor, but she wasn’t available either. The place was deserted
except for the sick and dying people in their beds and any relatives there with
them. There was nothing I could do.
Dan had been on my mind, too. He had expressed no discomfort or disappointment,
but he could not have been having much fun during all of this, our supposed
Christmas break. He spoke no Wolof and very little French, so his communications
with other people had to pass through me, and his ability to be the independent
explorer that he actually is was limited. We had discussed the possibility of
going to St. Louis, the former capital of French West Africa in northern Senegal,
that weekend, if everything was okay with Aminta. Well, everything was not okay
with her – I was terrified, in fact – but my being there wasn’t
improving the situation materially. I spoke to Aminta as my mother and asked
her what to do.
“Go ahead, children, have a nice time. Daniel is a good boy, show him
the river,” she said. (St. Louis is located in the delta of the Senegal.)
“We’ll be back Sunday and come straight here.”
She indicated the other occupants of the ward room and their visitors. “These
are very good people,” which was to say, “Don’t worry, I am
in good company, not that of witches or people of low honor.” I gave Daba
some more money.
We hurried back Sunday afternoon from a happy tour. I went in to see her, and
found her lying still with her eyes closed.
“Yaay?” (“Mommy?”)
She opened her eyes and mutely held out her arms. I fell into them and put mine
around her. This was an embrace I will never forget, a very un-Senegalese expression
of emotional closeness and need for love and support. The other women were staring
at us. The room was hushed.
“D.D.,” she said, my name, not my Senegalese pseudonym.
“Yaay.”
“You’ve come.”
“Yes, how are you?”
Her eyes were windowed with pain, as if she could only keep it at bay by standing
back from it and looking through it. She told me she was trying to hold on and
asked me what was going to happen. Apparently, no doctor or nurse had been in
to see her during my absence. Daba alone had been tending her. Her son had visited
twice, bringing food and a blanket.
I explained again about the “radiogram”, which must have sounded
like Western mysticism, and that once we had it done tomorrow, the doctors would
have a better idea of how to treat her. They had other tests they could do,
too, I babbled on, and maybe you’ll be home in a week or two.
She said “Yalla baaxna” a few times, and “I’m happy
to see you again,” and “You’re a very good person.”
I told her that she was a very good person, too, and that I loved her. She told
me the same thing. I told her that if I ever had a daughter, I would name her
for her. (This in fact came to pass. Aminta Cissé Raffalovich was born
in 1985.) She was pleased. She announced to the room in general that I was a
very good person, then reassured me as to the goodness of her companions. They
were ordinary women in plain circumstances with their own miseries to tell,
but Aminta had found something special about each one, which she proudly related
to me. It seemed to be a profound matter to her to be spending these last days
in good company. She asked about Dan, and when told he was waiting, she instructed
me to take him back to Tivaouane and get some rest after our long ride. I said,
“Yes, yaay,” and hugged her again and was hugged in return.
That was the last time I ever saw her, because Daba came crashing into the compound
in the middle of the night, howling and shrieking like a banshee. I ran out
in my nightgown, as did Papa from his room, and managed to get her to explain
semi-coherently that Aminta had rolled out of bed in her death throes onto Daba,
sleeping on the floor by her side. She must have had a heart attack in her sleep.
She’d died after five days in the hospital, during which no one cared
for her except her family, on the eve of the hoped-for beginning of treatment
and fantasy cure. Daba continued to have hysterics in the dark courtyard. Papa
sat down heavily on the porch with Dan. I went in to the vieux.
“Papa,” I said, the lamp in my hand shaking, as was my voice. He
was sitting up on the side of the bed, his glassy eyes making him seem remote,
or as though he were sleeping upright with his eyes open. He was wearing his
usual shirt and pantaloons, for that was how he slept.
“Who’s that, D.D.?”
“Yes, father.”
“What is it?”
“It’s my mother.”
“I thought so.” Something shifted in his posture, he slumped a little
bit. He began to mumble, and I realized he was saying a prayer. The children
sleeping elsewhere had been disturbed by now and were beginning to cry or yell
as they heard the news. After a bit, the old man told me to go back to bed and
send Papa Fall in to him. They were closeted the rest of the night in the room
still full of her smell and her things. Perhaps they were thinking of her ghost,
too.
Having been created female, I could not attend the funeral ceremony at the mosque
nor the interment itself. Luckily, Dan could go to represent me. Preparations
for these and the three-day funeral celebration at home began the morning after
her death. Relatives began arriving from within and around Tivaouane right away,
those from farther coming later and during the following days. A few of the
women displayed their grief in fashion similar to Daba’s hysterics. Soxna
Guèye, another niece of Aminta’s who lived in the town, literally
threw herself in the dirt of the courtyard, screaming and kicking as though
having a seizure. Another had her convulsions sitting up, howling and hiccupping.
But few shed tears that I would regard as natural, except for children. As is
true of most funerals, this one was an occasion for eating, gossiping, re-acquaintance,
drinking tea, and exchanging gifts. Her family griots were represented; they
sang, drummed, and made demands of money on everyone. Prayers were chanted at
night.
Abdoulaye Guèye, Aminta’s nephew from Rufisque, voiced to me what
he said was a general sentiment in the family. He said it was no coincidence
that I had happened to come at this perilous time, that I had been there at
the end to struggle for her, to help the family, and finally to say goodbye.
Not getting it, I said it was important to me, too, that I had been able to
see her again and do what I could to help them bear the expenses and the sorrow.
I only wished I’d been able to prevent her death. He said, no, no, no
one could have done that, God is good. What I mean is that you were brought
here by Him to be with her and with us. God had moved me and acted through me.
I was a part of the family and close to Aminta, so God had reunited us. Shivers
ran through my bones and nerves the whole time he was talking, as though I was
in the presence of an extraordinary, transcendent force, something truer than
truth, realer than reality. The atheist in me shut up for a while. It is not
often one is told she is significant enough to have been used by a deity in
its unfolding design of some other people’s lives.
The old man sat on the porch in his usual position through the whole thing.
I tried to be with him as much as possible. At first, I couldn’t stop
crying, which he detected in my voice, even though my face was invisible to
him.
“Bul joy.” (“Don’t cry.”)
“I can’t help it.”
“Joy baaxul.” (“Crying is bad.”)
So I had to stop. At one point, I was that he, too, was moved, and said, “What
is it, papa?”
“Sama lep la woon,.” (“She was my everything.”)
This may sound trite to you, but was a revelation of nova-like proportions to
me. This dignified, powerful, elderly man, living in the man’s world of
traditional Senegalese culture, could still admit to a young woman, a foreigner,
his need for and oneness with his wife.
Le vieux died the following year, after a wasting sickness. Aminta’s sister Fatou, with whom he had a stormy relationship, was keeping house for him and cooking. I always wondered whether she was half-witted, disturbed, or merely hard to get along with. She was still that way the last time I saw her in 1987. Papa Fall had given me some of Aminta’s clothing as a keepsake. He wrote to tell me of Cissé’s death, and said El Hadj Mansour, the wayward son, had something for me from the old man that I should come for the next time I was in Senegal. He also asked for money to help recoup the funeral expenses. I wired it. The next time I was in Senegal was in connection with a stint of work with a U.S.A.I.D. project.
When I could get free, I went directly to Tivaouane. The memories assaulted
me from the house like the tricky surf at Mboro, highs and lows and roughs and
smooths all washing over each other. The absence of my old parents was palpable.
Papa Fall had married his girlfriend Fatou Sèye, my former research assistant,
and she ran out to greet me, her middle swollen with what was to be their only
child. He would have five other grandchildren of Aminta Diop with a second wife,
later. Fat Diop was there, embroiled in trouble with Papa and his half-brother,
whom he’d brought to live with him from Mbacké.
El Hadj was running his electronics business from the house. As Cissé’s
only son in residence, he was nominally the head of the household, but because
he was young, alone, and not very practical, Papa Fall was actually in charge
of things. I found El Hadj I his atelier, in the sane of the side entryway,
with radio parts stewn all around getting tiny particles ground into the little
interstices from which they would never be dislodged. He bestowed on me his
sweet, open smile, so like his little son Mignan’s, gone now long years.
I could never see much of the old man in him, certainly not his intellect or
charisma, but he had a great charm, especially when he was trying to manipulate
other people and ending up doing exactly what they had wanted in the first place,
out of pure ingenuousness and good will. He thought this was what men were supposed
to do. I wondered how he got so many girls to fall for him. Maybe they were
unaccustomed to such sweetness in men.
Later, El Hadj gave me my bequest from his father. It was his prayer stone,
a smooth, black, rounded platelet of granite that the old man had polished with
his hands and forehead for a half a century. I had watched him touch his head
to it in prayer many times, seen him rotating it in his hands over and over
as he called forth the creative energy to heal. It was the essence of the ritual
object archaeologists find over and over when they’re not sure what they’re
dealing with. El Hadj had inscribed it in paint, “à Maguette Cissé,
prière qui était son avenir” – “Maguette Cissé’s,
prayer that was his future”. This enigmatic statement balances on the
punnishness of ‘prière’ (prayer) and ‘pierre’
(stone); did he mean both at once? It also recalls to me the image of the vieux
praying throughout his past, his life, and into eternity – the ‘to
come’ into which the French word for future, ‘avenir’, decomposes.
The separation of time into past and future is not, after all, very Senegalese.
They are one; what we do in it is the great thing about time for them.
The stone sits today on my desk. I touch it often; I feel and see him, and her,
every time I do. It is a piece of the earth like us, though not, like us, a
piece that reflects upon itself. But we gather and use such pieces to deepen
our reflection and broaden our connection with each other.
Dorothy Davis Wills