I recently returned from a
two-week, overland, always exciting vacation to Mali. The trip has been many months in the making and was
organized around the Festival sur le Niger, a four-day West African music
festival on the Niger River, and hiking in the Dogon country of Mali. As is always the case, and west Africa
is no exception, getting there was half the adventure. A group of nine of us
met in Tanguieta, a pretty town in the mountains in northwestern Benin where
two married volunteers live, the night before the trip was to start. A van came to pick us up at 3:00am the
next morning, and after a few stops and one memorable two hour long wait for
the Benin-Burkina Faso border office to open, we made it to Ouagadougou, the
capital of Burkina Faso, by around noon.
I was surprised to notice such a difference once we crossed into
Burkina, since in reality most of the borders delineating African countries are
arbitrary in terms of ethnic and language groups. For one, the roads in Burkina are much, much better than in
Benin. It reminded me of driving
north from North Carolina to Virginia and suddenly feeling the bump bump bump
of uneven pavement give way to a smooth ride. Second, there were donkeys everywhere. Hooked up to carts, carrying people,
tied to trees, and just grazing.
Donkeys are used in place of human labor in Burkina, while for whatever
reason this has yet to really catch on in Benin. Third, and most exciting to us, there were new street
snacks! Street snacks being what
is thrust into the windows of the taxi for you to buy every time the car
stops. We sampled sesame cookies,
yogurt, and sheep jerky covered with peanut butter (tastes better than it
sounds).
Arriving in Ouagadougou with a lot
of daylight left, we decided to continue on to Bobo and spend the night
there. We found a bus and headed
out, after waiting the necessary 3 hours or so. A note about buses in Burkina Faso and Mali. Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been pampered
this last year and a half with air conditioned buses in Benin that stop only at
designated spots and are generally punctual. Our bus from Ouaga to Bobo, and every other bus we took on
the trip, not only did not have air conditioning, but did not have windows that
opened, leaving circulation to come from one opening in the top of the
bus. We got into Bobo at around 11
pm and checked into our cheap but nice (there were showers, even if they were
shared) hotel. The next morning we walked around the main market area in Bobo,
bought and thoroughly enjoyed fresh strawberries, and had good beer unavailable
in Benin called Pelforth. We had
the whole day in Bobo to marvel at evenly paved roads, gas stations with actual
convenience stores, and the calm and quiet of the city. I quietly appreciated the lack of
annoying car horns, blaring indecipherable music, and constant harassment that
is found in our biggest city, Cotonou.
The next morning we continued on to
Segou, a town on the Niger River that hosts the music festival. We got in at nightfall and checked into
our room aboard an aging but fairly clean riverboat. Yep, all nine of us slept in a bunk bed-filled room aboard a
boat for the duration of the festival.
The performances were mainly after sunset, so during the day we explored
Segou. We took a pirogue (wooden
canoe) ride across the Niger River, ate grilled capitaine (river fish), and
haggled over souvenirs. At night
we watched performances on the main stage, which was set on a barge docked a
few feet from shore. Most of the
musicians were Malian and there were even some famous names, although all were
new to me. Lots of drums,
instruments I’d never seen before and can’t remember the name of, and powerful
singing in languages I couldn’t understand. We also saw performances by a Swedish woman and a Senegalese
man, a woman who was a previous Malian Peace Corps volunteer, and an acrobatics
group. The majority of the crowd
was African, and it was heartening to see how into the performances they were. Art and music don’t play a central role
in Beninese culture and I was surprised at first to see how established the
arts are in Mali.
I was excited about the music
festival, but in all honesty I was on this trip for the four-day Dogon hike,
which was coming up next.
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| Music festival in Segou, Mali |
