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Published: March 5th 2006
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insect art
termites at their most artistic... While most charismatic mega-vertebrates have been hunted or chased or driven to extinction out of Mali, there is some wildlife left to enjoy, some legends of giant snakes still slithering about, the occasional creature to marvel at (termites, I’m thinking of), and ‘work’ domesticated animals to often pity, really.
Luckily, most animals I saw were outside our sleeping or eating quarters…more than I can say for other trips…and most were the kind you shrug off in petting zoos, or after years of living in West Africa…but there’s always that fleeting moment when you realize just how strange it is that people passing on donkeys and camels have become part of the backdrop to your life.
Many shots I wasn’t able to capture with the camera (this group of photos I do have to share is sparse for the very fact mentioned above of the mundaneness of it all - you forget at some point it would seem novel to others or to yourself years later)…
These lost glimpses of wildlife forever on my brain’s harddisk include:
* Cattle tied so closely together in twos while being nudged across a bridge in Kayes that they actually lost their
all aboard!
it took some time, but eventually us, the 600, a few women, two carts, and about 15 donkeys were squeezed onto a small 1-car size barge... balance, fell over, and it took about ten Malian men to get them upright again. While I tried to laugh off the minimal animal abuse taking place by appreciating the comical site of these cattle struggling to walk, then falling, then being pushed to their feet, my heart really broke when the men, mad at the cattle for falling over, beat them the rest of the way across the bridge.
* Beneath this bridge, people were doing their daily/weekly/monthly washing in the sparkling, streaming current of the river. Washing included: clothes, cows, feet, goats, scooters, and children.
* Looking down from our rooftop mudhouse lodging in Djenne, I was able to spy a bit on what life looked like in this neck of Mali - an ancient village overrun with tourists coming to see a UNESCO Heritage Site Mosque. We were staying a bit on the outside of the tourist mayhem - so I was curious to see if the living conditions were close to that of quasi-suburban villages in Dakar. The bathing system, house floorplan, and food didn’t appear very different, perhaps the children were slightly darker in color, and the fabrics boasted splashes of slightly different
splotch of white
whizzing past flora and fauna, the occasional white camel stood out against the brownish landscape... colors and patterns…but the only stark differences were those of the house being made of mud instead of cement or straw, and the fact that the courtyards were home to not only goats, but to geese. Goose and gander. Huge. Strutting around squawking their contentness or discontentness. Nipping here and there and one another. I was glad to be far up from snapping distance of their beaks believe you me.
* The seconds and minutes after the slaughtering of a cow. We stepped off a barge and onto the banks of a river to be greeted by a small circle of onlookers watching men begin to hack away at a cow whose throat had just been cut and whose head was positioned just at the tide’s edge to allow the blood to empty into the river. I looked and didn’t for the next half an hour, but the sounds were inescapable. Mostly that of the blades hitting bone and being swiped back and forth to clean them off - but also the small bleating noises the cow was making as it died. As we were stuck in that particular spot waiting for something or someone (I can’t remember), Craig
holiday traffic
and you thought I-95 traffic gets heavy...spotted the day before tabaski, this bus, with goats strapped atop, barrels down dusty roads at 80 kilometers per hour, transporting people and the main 'guests' of tabaski dinner... walked right up and watched the butchering process, but I tried to distract myself from all the action, and plopped myself down about 15 feet away and was playing and ‘talking’ to some children. My two new best friends were both girls who could not have been more than 3 years-old, and it was with a sick, twisted awareness that I realized the ‘tune’ I thought they were humming as they circled around me and sat on my lap was nothing more than innocent parroting of the cow’s final bleating rhythm. (Though, I can say, as a vegetarian, I do appreciate the intimacy with which people deal with the process of animal-to-table - and the butchering process was amazing, two teenage boys took about 20 minutes to cleanly finish up that cow…it could be an Olympic sport. Right up there next to sheep-shearing.)
* I missed with both the camera and my eyes, the hunter and the hunted in the northern most (touristically-famous) village of the Dogon county, Fombori. The only evidence I had of their existence were what I heard: gunshots - and the explanation by our guide. I was disturbed by the fact that as we were
free-ranging goat
hopping from rooftop to rooftop in Djenne, I wonder, do free-ranging goats taste better? approaching a cavernous rock formation to climb up and see ruins of cliff-dwelling populations, there was the sound of sporadic musket gunfire which was streaming across the very plain we were walking across. Our guide calmly reassured me that hidden up in the rocks was a man hunting an edible animal which lived on this lot of land (ok, this still didn’t relieve my fears as I can imagine the eyesight and accuracy of both the shooter and the gun itself). My guide didn’t know the common (or scientific) name of this hunted creature, and from what he described, it sounded like a small-sized burrowing mammal. All I could picture was a clever gopher, and an estranged Bill Murray up on the rocks with a rifle from the early 1900s. Great.
* The migrating elephants of Burkina and Mali. I hadn’t really expected to see them, and I was pathetically excited just to be in their natural habitat, but it would have been nice… I did scan the horizon for about 100 kilometers of well-paved road which they do cross over… But no dung, nothing. I would desperately restudy the tour guide’s small map equipped with arrows pointing this
malians on the move...
just to give you an idea of the mundane... i secretly snapped this photo while on the bike: just a normal woman, on a normal day, making her way through town... way and that as to what month they usually cross at what villages…but, oh well. Our first day of elephant chasing did end us up on our 3-day extended ‘tour’ of remote Mali, but other than that, my elephant excitement mostly stemmed from meeting the director of the reserve, who once we spoke about my former employment, took me to the regional office, unlocked the tin doors, dusted off a chair for me and removed a shaggy cover from a brand-new computer and walked me through a PowerPoint presentation he had just given at the last international conservation conference. Reviewing tagging excursions, breeding and migration patterns, and dwindling numbers with him, while sitting kilometers away from these charismatic mega-vertebrates roaming out on their own, well, that was pretty cool.
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