Usmane

               The story of Usmane is a composite of stories I heard from Nigerien friends and expatriot workers when I was growing up.        

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      Usmane was born in the mud-brick-and-millet-stalk hut where his Hausa mother birthed his nine siblings and where she eventually died in labor with the tenth one. He remarkably survived three bouts of the fever and chills that killed six of his mother’s babies and eleven of her two cowives’ infants in their first year. After his mother died, the cowives used her hut for storage. Usmane and his three remaining siblings slept on tattered palm mats beside grain sacks that dwindled to empty during the two droughts of his first decade. 

The night the second drought broke, Usmane sat in the firelight at his father’s feet awaiting his turn to sip the dregs from the pot of syrupy chai. Because Usmane’s mother was his father’s first wife, and Usmane was his mother’s last child, Usmane’s father was unusually fond of Usmane. Hausa love is its own beast. It manifests in subtle survival advantages – in slightly delayed punishment of small errors, in scraps of food from the patriarch’s bowl before the women and children are allowed to eat, in occasional eye contact, in a pet name – for Usmane, Kai Wanga (“Hey you there”) –, in a seat at the father’s feet listening to the mutedly hopeful conversation of the old men watching long-awaited lightning play tag with the parched Sahel. Hausa love is a complex of distant hints at significance. When the torrential rain suddenly broke loose from its lightning vanguard, Usmane’s father snatched up his folding chair and ran into his own hut, forgetting the chai pot in its little coal brazier. Usmane, scurrying toward the storage hut, looked back over his shoulder. He saw brazier tip and spill the chai pot into the sand amidst a shower of glinting coals. Usmane felt attached to few people, but it darkened his little heart to see his father’s cherished chai pot dashed out of the brazier. He ran back through the sandpaper wind, scooped up the brazier and the chai pot, and darted into his father’s hut. Like a good Hausa parent, the old man shouted at and slapped his child for entering the patriarchal hut unsummoned. But the slap Usmane received was a gentle one, and the old man put away the brazier and chai pot and muttered, “Sit you and stay you here on the mat by the door until the waters of heaven stop.” So Usmane curled up on the mat by the door. Raindrops slipped around the frame of the corrugated aluminum door. Usmane awoke early the next morning when his father nudged him awake with a crusty callused foot. “Get up for us and go, you call your brothers, they take their hoes, we go to the fields.” He was damp, but unlike the three siblings and a goat under the collapsed mud walls of the old storage hut, he was alive. 

The family and their neighbors cleared the rubble and threw the goat on the dung heap for the scavenging dogs and buried the children’s small bodies in the town’s burial plot. Usmane and his family cultivated millet and sorghum in their plot outside town that rainy season. Usmane was a stoic by culture and by life experience. But maybe not all the salt water that dripped off his chin into the clods between the millet stalks was sweat. Usmane’s father was old, at least fifty rainy seasons, when Usmane was born. He was one of the longest-lived elders of the town when the fever and chills struck him for the last time. Perhaps it was his age that gave him insight. Or his memories of Usmane’s mother, the girl his parents chose for him when they were children. Whatever it was, Usmane’s father recognized that Usmane perceived and experienced life differently than his other children. Usmane was a strong boy, but his connection to the world was weak – especially after the hut collapsed. Most Hausa men would not have rebuilt the fallen hut. But when the grain ripened, Usmane’s father looked up from his small portion of carefully rationed rice and announced to his sons that tomorrow they would take the donkey cart to the swamp to pick up the mud bricks he had purchased. The boys rebuilt the hut and in it they stored the grain harvest, and Usmane and his father never directly acknowledged what rebuilding the hut meant. But Usmane spread his palm frond mat beside the grain sacks again. 

As a child Usmane hummed and talked to himself. As he grew older, he interacted less with other people and more with an unseen world. He startled easily, stared aimlessly, had little common sense. His stepmothers learned not to send him on errands if money was involved, because if it was not his own he had no value for it. His siblings stopped attempting conversation with him because he was likely to become distracted or start talking to invisible entities. He became increasingly distant. The neighbors shook their heads and the old women murmured stories about what his mother must have done to anger the local sorceress, the shriveled crone who lived on the edge of the village and marked her path to its central market with little spit-piles of the kola nuts that had stained her gap teeth blood red. In time they stopped murmuring, because most of the time Usmane did not appear to hear even what was shouted at him. They just spoke in their clusters. 

Usmane’s father and brothers bought a share in the brick-making at the swamp, and Usmane happily made mud bricks and loaded them onto the donkey carts and daily was paid a five franc piece for his labor. He took his money home, talking suspiciously to himself and glancing in challenge at everyone he passed until he hid the money in his secret stash. Everyone in town knew where his money was stashed – everyone who did not see him wrap it in the red rag and stash it under the millet stalk roof of his hut heard him talking loudly about it to himself. People teased him that they knew where his money was, and he denied it. He never believed they all knew because it never went missing. He did not understand that the reason they all knew – their proximity to each other and the tight collectivism of their village – was the reason it never went missing.  Personal freedom can suffer when everybody knows everything about everybody. But personal safety can thrive. 

Usmane’s siblings grew up and married and moved to new huts on the growing outskirts of the village. Usmane did not. In the ways of their people, Usmane’s father arranged a marriage for Usmane with a girl from another town who also talked to herself. When the girl caught sight of Usmane, she shrieked and fell down in one of her famous convulsions. The town sorceress happened to observe the convulsion, and she ordered the elders to annul the marriage and apprentice the girl to her. The girl talked to herself while she hunted for tamarind pods and ground spices for the old woman and seemed content. Usmane talked to himself while he made bricks and hid his money in everyone’s sight and lived alone in his hut and likewise seemed content.  In the evening he swept the sandy yard and carried firewood and in exchange his stepmothers fed him. When night fell he crouched beside his father’s rickety folding chair until his father gave him the dregs from the chai pot, and then he fell asleep on his mat in his rebuilt hut. The townspeople nicknamed him Mai-Sabon-Daki, a name that poked fun at his rebuilt hut, and by renaming him they gave him a place in their town. Usmane heard more of what was said than people thought, but he processed it differently than they would have. The voices in his head and the voices outside his head blurred together but did not threaten him. Maybe it’s a cruel system, one that names a person by their known personal tragedy. But although it names people by tragedy and limits them by name, at least it names them and gives them a clear role. Usmane was not respected, but he was accepted and allocated a functional identity.

Usmane’s worlds were multiple and his reality unique, but for a while they were safe. And then they changed. The Nigerian merchants came to the village south of Usmane’s and built a concrete hangar to house the weekly markets. The elusive Tamajeq tribesmen diverged from their old salt-trade routes and camel caravans descended periodically on the well outside town. The shunned Wodaabe herders left their browsing grounds north of the village and the Hausa villagers tolerated their passage through town because they brought sheep and cattle to sell. Suddenly Usmane’s life was full of new voices that spoke in new languages, deepening the complexity and stimulation of his daily life. The sandy trail from Usmane’s town to the new market deepened and hardened into a dirt road under the weight of traffic. The women and children of Usmane’s town set up firepits near the well and sold bean cakes to the travelers. Then a white girl from the Peace Corps came to town and the elders built her a hut and she taught children to read in the white man’s language. The world shifted. 

Usmane’s father fell sick that rainy season. He had caught the fever and chills many times in his life, but this time the fever and chills caught him. Usmane and his brothers buried him in the burial plot with his wife and children. And Usmane had only one name now – no one called him Kai Wanga. He was entirely Usmane Mai-Sabon-Daki.

One day Usmane was walking home from the swamp, talking about hiding his money, and something hard struck him on the back. He turned and saw a group of children staring. They shrieked at his look and took off running. An old battery that had not been there a moment before now lay in the dust of his path. Usmane looked at the battery and he looked at the fleeing children, and he kept walking. But the next time he saw a child he picked up a stick from beside the path and chased the child, waving it. Clearly, Usmane would strike before someone struck him again. The children learned to fear him, and they ran away before him, but they threw rocks at his back. Their parents scolded them and laughed at them. And the parents shrugged. The world had shifted. 

Then one day the whole world changed. Usmane was squatting near the roadside stand where his half-sister sold beancakes, waiting for one to fall from the pan where they simmered. He was allowed to eat the dirty beancakes. As he waited, the shriveled sorceress hobbled up, followed by her apprentice. Usmane’s half-sister looked down in deference, never making eye contact as she ladled bean cakes into a bag and accepted payment from the apprentice. She did not want to incur a curse. The half-sister claimed that from the corner of her eye she saw Usmane look at the old woman. Usmane probably did not intend to look at the old woman. He had just heard a new sound, a rattling humming banging sound, and was looking for the source. But the old woman suddenly shrilled, “Look away from me! Na ci uwarka!” The half-sister clicked her tongue and slapped Usmane on the heel. Usmane glanced down at his half-sister’s hand, and the sorceress gathered up her garments and hobbled away with her apprentice in tow.  Na ci uwarka is a curse and an insult that literally translates as “I ate your mother.” Which one the sorceress meant is up for debate – and was the topic of town debate for months. The half-sister broke out in a rapid-fire string of countercurses just in case a curse was intended. Then, because responsibility for Usmane was part of her village role, she buffeted him across the head shrieking questions. But Usmane was not listening. As the sorceress stormed away, the source of the noise came into view. The villagers had never seen an automobile before. The bush taxi, a dinged Toyota Peugeot, was outfitted with a cage over the bed, a large roof rack, and a loud horn which the driver used almost incessantly as he pulled to a stop. The villagers were fascinated, but Usmane was entranced. He ran his hands over the hood, he poked at the wheels, and the driver got out and slapped him and chased him away with a stick when he attempted to open the engine. 

Usmane mimicked the car for days. He hummed and buzzed and growled and imitated the incessant horn. All his family members swore at him to shut up and when the children saw him they shouted “Beep beep!” and giggled as they ran away. More cars came as the road was established as a taxi route; people from other villages gathered by the well with their wares, awaiting a ride to the big market. Usmane haunted the well awaiting the marvelous vehicles. He attempted persistently to get near them, to touch them, to look inside them. The drivers began carrying camel whips to ward him away. When the cars drove into town, and when they drove out of town, Usmane ran after them. Still he came back, and still he hummed and honked and growled through his daily activities. The whole village grew annoyed with Usmane, and when the children gave him a new name, everyone adopted it: Mai-Bin-Mota (“The Car-Follower”). Then one day Usmane noticed that some people were allowed to touch the taxis without being whipped or sworn at. In fact, some people were allowed to get into the taxis. He watched carefully as the people swarmed round a taxi, holding something out. The sunlight glinted on what they held – money. 

The next time a taxi came, Usmane ran after it, but this time he was holding something out, something wrapped in a red rag. His half-sister saw him, chased him, and caught him by the elbow. “Son of worthlessness, what are you doing?!?” 

“Money for the takasi!” he shouted in the driver’s direction, waving his rag-bundle. “Money!”

“Where will you go, eh?” the woman demanded. “What will you do at the market?” 

Usmane did not understand why she was asking him these things. He did not intend to go anywhere. He did not understand why she thought he would do anything at the market. People were paying money to touch the taxi. He had money and he wanted to touch the car too. His half-sister slapped him and shouted until other people came to help and they all told him to take his money and go home. He could not get around all of them, he could not get to the taxi. He took his rag-wrapped money and skulked home, whining and sighing. But he tried again, every day, every taxi, until the rains came and the road developed deep potholes and fissures from water runoff, and people were too busy in their fields to go to market regularly. Then the taxis stopped coming and the women rarely sold bean cakes, and Usmane went to the fields with his half-brothers. 

One night the rain rushed in with its lightning-and-dust vanguard, and the wind shrieked all around the sides of Usmane’s hut, and Usmane grew frightened alone beside the empty grain sacks. The rain fell, and fell, and fell, and it seeped in through the doorway onto his mat. Usmane sat up and put his back against the mud-brick wall of his house, and the wall bent away from him. The roof gave a dampened creak, and somehow Usmane knew that he must get out. He leapt up, grabbed his mat, and rushed out the door just before the walls of his hut crumbled in. Usmane fumbled through the mushy rubble in the wet cold darkness for hours until he found his soaked money rag. Then he crouched on his heels and rocked back and forth. Somewhere in his complex world he understood that he was no longer Mai-Sabon-Daki. He no longer had his hut. And he was not Kai Wanga. So he fell back on his remaining identity. 

        Later the village people said there was no explanation for what happened except that the sorceress truly had eaten his mother’s soul and moved on to his. Why else would a bush taxi arrive early in the morning – after a rain? When the taxi driver pulled to a halt by the well, there stood Usmane with his rolled up palm-frond mat and all his savings in his hands and no half-sister to stop him. The driver, who thanks to the storm was a day late to market and short on passengers, did not ask questions. Usmane Mai-Bin-Mota climbed into the back of the truck in a rapture so deep that he was not surprised when the vehicle jolted forward, leaving his village behind. 

Usmane’s family found the fallen hut and searched the rubble for his body. The villagers looked for him in the fields and by the well for several days. And then everybody shrugged and the women whispered that the falling of the hut was no coincidence, that the old sorceress had claimed the child who evaded her curse. One of the town children claimed that the sorceress and her apprentice had been roasting meat the day after the rain, and although nobody discussed what this could mean, everybody agreed that all their questions were answered. The sorceress and her apprentice received many spontaneous gifts of guinea fowl eggs, wild squash, and tomatoes and experienced a surge in commissions of charms against infertility and spousal infidelity. The Peace Corps worker, an American girl named Amy, noticed Usmane’s absence and asked about it. Because she was an outsider, for several weeks she got nothing but tight-lipped denials of his absence, and then one day a small child spilled the beans. “He was eaten by the sorceress that ate his mother!” 

This made no sense to Amy. As a foreigner living in the village, she was not a stranger to multiple worlds. But this story demanded a world that she did not think existed. To Amy, Usmane was clearly mentally ill – schizophrenic, perhaps, likely autistic, and possibly emotionally damaged by his many personal losses. But to the villagers, Usmane was designated for bad luck by God, cursed by a sorceress, and identified only by his possession of an unstable hut and his penchant for bush taxis. Amy felt sure that there was another answer. 

And so there was. At the end of the rainy season, a taxi brought several government soldiers from a town two stops down the trade road south. The villagers had rarely heard of government soldiers – let alone seen them. The driver pointed out Usmane’s half-sister at her bean cake stand. When the soldiers approached, Usmane’s half-sister shrieked in terror, threw down her ladle, and ran away homeward. The men of the town did not want to bear government wrath on her behalf. The soldiers all carried machine guns. The village men caught the half-sister, wailing and flailing, and dragged her back to the soldier who ordered her to be quiet. “Are you the relative of the man who chases cars?” he demanded. Terrified, she denied it, but the other villagers affirmed that she was. “Call me the men of your family,” said the soldier. And so she did. After a pow-wow, one of the half-brothers grudgingly got into the taxi – eyeing the soldier’s AK-47 and looking miserable. The villagers watched fearfully as the taxi drove away. But they gathered round in wonder when the taxi brought back the half-brother and an oblong cargo wrapped in a palm-frond mat. 

The next day Amy was invited to a funeral at the house of one of the elders. She approached the family – Usmane’s family – to offer her condolences. The people shrugged. The situation was so far beyond their understanding in some ways, and so clearly cursed in others, that they did not want to think about it. “Don’t be sorry,” they said. “Usmane liked to chase cars, and he was chasing cars when a car hit him.”

What really decides a person’s story? Is it fate? Destiny? Bad luck? Personal loss? Individual choice? Group allocation of identity? The world you choose to chase?

Maybe a kola-toothed sorceress and a cursed hut are the easiest explanations after all. The family sent a gift of food to the old sorceress and her apprentice. They commissioned a house-protecting charm and sealed it into their door-frame. And they built a new storage hut in a different part of the yard.