the baobab stories

                When the French came to the Sudan, as it was then called, they met the men of the ruling tribe in battle. Scimitars against machine guns.  The “battle” ended predictably. With the ruling tribe gone, the remaining tribes bowed to the French colonials. The French recruited an indigenous army over which they placed French officials, and they settled the officials in existing villages from which they might govern the tribes. Dakoro was one of the villages they chose.

 At the time, Dakoro was a tiny herder’s camp in the northern Sahel, too young to have any of its own stories. The camp sat at the foot of a hill near a swamp. Beside the swamp grew a massive lone baobab. The swamp signaled a subterranean aquifer and the single hill among flatlands gave the French military an advantage. The French officials forcibly resettled farmers from southern Sahel to build the whitewashed barracks and the new military governor’s house. They even imported the new French governor’s wife from Paris. The new inhabitants of Dakoro were unhappy. The French governor’s wife was a snippy twiggy woman who shuddered at the raw concrete floor of her new house and drank nothing but French tea from French teacups. The laborers and farmers had nothing but the rags on their backs, the rations their colonial supervisors provided, and their fear of the lone baobab tree. 

                Even the farmers’ youngest boy, Baba Ali, knew that the baobab tree is a home of spirits and the guardian or destroyer of the community around it. But a baobab tree flourishing alone on the edge of the dry Sahel is a tree of unusual power.  The baobab did not seem to concern itself about who claimed the land on which it was rooted. But it demanded respect. One day, in astounding carelessness, Baba Ali climbed up into the baobab tree and began to chop off one of its limbs. As he chopped, sweat began to drip down his brow. He raised his head to wipe away the sweat, and in front of him he saw a naked, paper-white woman sitting on the branch. She stared at him unblinkingly, from huge, entirely black eyes. And as she stared, she hummed softly and ran a comb slowly through her long, glistening hair. Baba Ali saw that she was beautiful, and just as clearly that she was not safe. He tried to look away and found that he was paralyzed. His axe fell with a splash into the swamp below, and immediately afterward Baba Ali landed hard on the roots of the tree. His arms were both broken, but his memory – he claimed – was entirely intact. The people clicked their tongues and shook their heads and said he had dozed off in the tree, but they said it uneasily. 

So the farmers cleared trees around the swamp for their fields and hauled them away to support the walls of the barracks, but no one brought an axe near the mighty baobab tree.  Instead, they clustered away from it and spoke reverently of it around the campfires in the evening. Dakoro grew beside the baobab tree, a collection of little mud brick huts and straw shelters the farmers built for themselves after they finished building the barracks and the governor’s house.  And the baobab stretched its branches languidly over the swamp that soaked its roots and the goats that nibbled on its bark and the zebu cattle that watered in its shade. 

                And then the harmattan wind shrieked in from the desert and brought the cold season with it.  The farmers and their families shivered without blankets.  The baobab was still placid, unshaken by one more harmattan. But one night in the winter, there came an unmistakable sound from the swamp.

                “Mon Dieu,” cried the French governor’s wife, “how is a woman to rest when all night long the frogs are croaking in the swamp?”

                So the French governor spoke to the captains, and the captains spoke to the laborers. “Every night twenty of you will stand by the swamp, and when you hear the frogs begin to croak you will throw a rock and scare them. You will frighten them so they stay quiet, so the French governor’s wife can sleep.”

                The people were used to the croaking of sub-Saharan frogs. They sent a nightly delegation of watchmen to throw rocks at the frogs. But the watchmen, weary from their workdays, sat down on the edge of the swamp and curled up tightly and fell asleep.  

                “Merde,” said the French governor’s wife. “Make your people silence the frogs. I am already dying in this godforsaken desert.”

                “What is the problem?” said the French governor to the supervisors.

                “What is the problem?” said the supervisors to the people.

                “Monsieur,” said the shrewd spokesman of the people to the supervisors, “clearly these are not ordinary frogs, these frogs croaking in the winter. They must be cold. Let you bring blankets to us, so that we may cover the frogs.”

                “Blankets?” said the French governor when he heard the supervisors’ report. “Blankets? Do these people think me an idiot?”

                But, “Blankets?” said the French governor’s wife. “Is that all they need? Am I to be forever sleepless because you can’t even provide blankets? Mon Dieu, you are an imbecile.”

                So the French governor provided the supervisors with blankets and they gave them to the watchmen. The watchmen gave the blankets to their families. And Baba Ali was warm while he slept. 

                “The frogs are still croaking at night because there are not enough blankets for all of them,” said the shrewd spokesman boldly to the supervisors the next morning. 

                So the French governor provided more blankets. And the watchmen rolled up in them and slept under the baobab tree. But the frogs were silent. And the people marveled. 

The town grew and the farmers planted more fields and people from neighboring villages came weekly to Dakoro to barter for goods. They made their marketplace on the flat bank of the swamp and the path they trod out between the village and the market ran near the roots of the baobab tree. In time they bartered for more than goods. One night a grown up Baba Ali left his wife sleeping in their hut and stole out down the market path for a moonlit rendezvous. As he passed the baobab tree, he was startled by sudden movement at its foot. There on one of its snakelike roots sat a short, stout man smoking a cigarette. Waving his cigarette, the man got up off the root and walked up to Baba Ali.  He stared up out of huge black eyes at the mesmerized Baba Ali, took a deep pull on his cigarette, and then suddenly reached out a hand. Baba Ali found himself dangling in the air, suspended by the little man’s hand around his neck.

“What are you doing out here at night?” said the little man. 

Baba Ali gasped but could not reply.

“Next time you come out here, bring me cigarettes, or I will choke you to death,” said the little man softly. Suddenly he let Baba Ali go, and the farmer landed hard on the ground, gasping for air. Baba Ali scuttled away across the sand, crawling and clawing through bushes and grasses, afraid to look up, until he found himself on the outskirts of the village. Baba Ali did not tell his story to his wife, but he told it to all the men in the village. It was many years thereafter before cigarettes came on the Dakoro market. And until cigarettes became available for purchase, there was no coming or going down the path to the market at night. Once cigarettes could be purchased, no one in town walked past the baobab tree without carrying a precautionary cigarette in their pocket.

The baobab tree stood strong and tall for almost a hundred years while Baba Ali grew hunched and wrinkled, long-bearded, and nearly blind. The French colonists put in a pipeline to the subterranean aquifer and people flocked to the new water supply, turning the village into a town. The children of resettled farmers all over the country grew up and rose up against the French colonists, who surrendered whitewashed governors’ mansions and barracks all across the southern Sudan. The new indigenous government named the country Niger Republic and laid down a road to Dakoro. 

Humanitarian projects sent American and Belgian workers to Dakoro and the people saw white children for the first time ever. “Don’t comb your hair like that,” they said to the first white girl when she let her hair down one day. “There are stories about a white woman who combed her hair up in the tree.” She looked at the baobab tree, and she just saw a tree. But the people poked and licked her white skin to make sure she was real. 

The weather changed, and the swamp receded, and the Saharan sands crept closer to the town. The Kristas came and built a straw shelter and called it a church. In it they sang strange songs about a man whom they said died and woke up several days later, and they instructed their followers to dispose of their traditional protective charms. Tsamiya, the leader of the local witches, shook her head and laughed at their impotence.  And the baobab towered calmly over the marketplace.

Then one day there was news on Baba Ali’s shortwave radio. Airplanes had crashed into towers in Amerika. Suddenly the radios were full of conflicting opinions; indigenous commentators taking sides, shouting insults at each other, at each other’s tribes, at the local and international authorities, at each other’s religious views. One day the people heard their president’s voice on the radio. 

“Let those of you who want to fight come to the capital city, so that we can help you. We will put those of you who support Bin Laden on a plane and send you to Afghanistan so that you can look for him and see if he wants you. We will put those of you who support George Bush on a plane and send you to American so that you can look for him and see if he wants you. This is the only way we will support you. If you do not want to go away to Bin Laden or George Bush, let you close your mouths.”

Everybody closed their mouths. 

Then one night there was a new sound in the town. It echoed across the swamp to the baobab tree. There was a new mudbrick mosque unlike the others. It was an Isala mosque, a seed of Al Quaeda, home to a new sect that demanded violence. The farmers of Dakoro were peaceful people. But the builders of the new mosque offered them money to make their women wear burkhas and to send their children to militant schools. 

The farmers took the money. Suddenly the tiniest girls to the most shriveled grandmothers were shrouded in burkhas. In the new schools that opened up, little boys who forgot part of their radical recitations were beaten with camel whips. One child ended up in the hospital. At night the preaching echoed over the shrinking swamp from loudspeakers in the minarets – “the infidels eat pigs and drink wine and administer sterilizing medication to your children under the guise of immunizing them against polio.” 

The president's voice came on the radio again. "By Allah, we will find you, I and my guards will find you, you who speak words of conflict and stir up the people. We will find you and we will put you in the prison to speak your words only there." But the Isala leaders were not to be found, because the people did not know where to find them. The president and his guards did not ask the right questions. If the president had asked where to find money, he might have found the Isala leaders. The people did not know where to find the ones who spoke words of conflict. But they knew where to find money. 

That year, the baobab tree did not bud.  That summer, one of its branches cracked and fell off, crushing a market stand. The people looked at the fallen branch and realized it was dry from the inside. By winter, all its bark had sloughed away, leaving its stout white trunk naked and stark on the flat market plane by the swamp.

The next year, the townspeople razed the stump. Baba Ali died that same year. The old stories died with him. 

                But there were new stories. Baba Ali’s great-great-granddaughter was learning them in the church. And Baba Ali’s great-great-grandson was learning them in the militant Isala school.