Night of the Living Dead

(Note: This marks the first presentation of the "Lost Dispatch" — never published on mungopark.com, and seen here for the first time. For continuity, I have numbered this and subsequent dispatches in sequence, although the original Dispatch 10 is now Dispatch 11, and so on.)

From the time we reached Djenne, we had been hearing a word in our wake whenever we met a group of Malians — "tubabu." Not to our surprise, it referred to us — we were "tubabu," or white people, Europeans. We tried to find out exactly what it meant: was it related to the Tuareg word "birbu" for red, the lighter skinned of their race? Did it mean "Check out Whitey?" Or "Here comes the fools?"

Our boat guide tried to explain it to us in finer detail, but it simply seemed to mean white-skinned, which even after ten days in Mali we were. We are two babu, motoring through Mali in the path of the Mungo, first European to inspire the epithet.

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As we neared our second river camp, Alberto disappeared with the pirogue pilot into a village. We had stopped less than an hour before at an earlier village, where we walked the streets trailed by a cloud of the curious, and had little interest in yet another village stop. But Alberto insisted, telling us there might be something "very special to see."

When he came back our pirogue pulled just a few meters downstream, then nosed in to make camp."These people here, they are Moslems," he explained by way of introduction. "Islam is a strong religion, like Christianity, but it cannot be all things to everybody. Here you have animism growing through the carpet of Islam, like you have it in Christianity too. In Togo, in Benin, in Haiti, you have voodoo. Here, I don't know what you call it— it is a new religion, and it is very strong."

Suddenly our interest picked up. Voodoo ceremonies in the bush? Goat sacrifices, perhaps? Possession, speaking in tongues, public licentiousness? We pelted Alberto with questions, but he was evasive. "It is mainly the drumming. Sometimes an animal will enter a dancer, and if someone is sick the spirit will come out." He sighed and thought out his next words. "I have seen strong things, sometimes people get sick, or the foam comes from their mouth. Sometimes stronger."

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As we conducted our own magic — aiming the sat-phone antenna to the western stars, and talking to the morning at Microsoft — we began to hear the cries of women in the night. We hurriedly hung up, and followed the pilot and the tall Coleman gas lamp down a path leading to the village. The buildings were absolutely dark, illuminated only by starlight and our movable realm of light. But the singing got louder, and the drumming got stronger, and we turned a corner to find a pulsing mass of humanity, almost invisible in the night.

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It must have been the entire village that gathered around that dark courtyard, bathing in the powerful beat of Hauka, the Islamic voodoo. Four men sitting cross-legged literally pounded the stuffing out of pillows to lay down a four count, while the multitude clapped in a syncopated three-beat pattern over it to create a rapid pulse. It was not unlike the Monkey Dance of Bali, Kechak, but unlike that 20th century choreographed display, this was raw, from the gut to the gut. Six women danced before a seated priest of some kind, at whose feet a woman was hunched over as if in supplication. Surrounding the women, a man in green gown prowled, every now and then striking the women with a grass whip. Cries and howls erupted from the crowd, children watched wide-eyed, a single-stringed lute played out a wavering melody that threaded through the rhythm like the insistent whine of a mosquito.

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I am not making this up: it was the stuff of nightmare, or the apocalypse. One of the women threw herself to the dirt at our feet and twitched uncontrollably, until she rose shakily to her fours and crawled back to the dance circle, possessed by some unknown animal. Dust filled the air, and the scents of human sweat. The clapping crowd chanted a refrain I could not make out in the din, but it was repeated again and again as if in invocation. If we had not brought our own light with us, this entire scene would have been played out entirely by starlight, so dark was the night and the people who danced inside it.

Alberto, Denise and I wove through the crowd in a vain attempt to make some sense of the frenzied energy, recording only what fragments our minds and media could grasp. The next day Denise and I speculated that it was possible it was all a set-up: a negotiation between the tourist guide and the village, a secret pact to provide a riverside show that would not soon be forgotten. But we had long since discovered that such subtleties were beyond the reach of Mali, where tourism was still in its infancy. I am convinced we watched the ancient human impulse to reach into the depths of the spirit, beyond the physical, to the realm of the strong brown god.

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Beyond the dark, pulsating village the river flowed onward. "The Strong Brown God" was the title of Sanche de Gramont's history of the exploration of the Niger, lifted from T.S. Eliot:

For Eliot it may have been poetry; but did de Gramont see this face of the Niger's power? Did Mungo Park, on his initial reconnaissance to the Niger, or his final flight down it? Did we — or did we only skim the surface of a mystery deeper than the river's current?

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