The world and its places

Senebia

A short note at the front of the book sets the ground rules. The two countries are fictional, and so are their towns and villages, the people of the story and some of their customs. The land they share belongs to neither country, as the note explains:

“The peoples of both countries call the wider region Senebia, a name older than the border between them.”

Senebia is drawn from the Sahel, the dry belt south of the Sahara, and the floodplain country below it. A border cuts it into two republics, and people on both sides belong to something older than either state. The state does not share their map: when the name turns up on official papers later in the book, the reply from the capital is a letter saying that “the Republic knew of no place called Senebia” (ch21). That quarrel between a people’s own map and the state’s runs under the whole book.

Two republics

Each half of the novel takes place in a different country. Readers who know West Africa will recognise one shaped by a French colonial past and one by an English past. The novel never says so; it shows it in titles, words and the way offices behave.

In Awdagha, Mustapha holds Madina’s papers “since the old chef de village had gone blind and left the papers to him” (ch2), and greets the visiting Minister as “Madame la Ministre”. Talib takes his sister’s exam fee to the gare routière, the lorry station at the crossroads. In the Bakoro hospital the senior midwife has the French ward title: “Everyone called her Major, the doctors too.” (ch4)

In Tekuru, village heads are alkalos and district chiefs are seyfos, the titles used in The Gambia: “Alkalo Sankung signed for Nafawol, alone, as alkalos did, with the pen he kept for petitions.” (ch11) When the Ministry of Rural Development moves on the village fund without consulting him, the seyfo sends his greetings and a proverb: “A visitor who does not greet the house has not come to eat.” (ch17) Tekuru has a cotton board, schools to grade nine, a banking regulator, and laws under which a village fund can register as a savings society, and more than once the villagers protect themselves by finding the right office. Neither system is held up as the better one. Both states are poor, and both can do harm with a stamp.

Nabari

Nabari is the one language in the book you will not find on any map. The note at the front of the book calls it “the fictional regional language of administration and trade, spoken alongside each people’s own”. Who speaks it matters. In Madina the foreign engineer has “no Nabari” (ch2), and when the Minister of Energy turns to it to address the crowd, he cannot follow a word. Ten years later, in Nafawol, he speaks it carefully and well, which only makes the elders warier of him. At the moments that matter most, characters drop into their own languages: Kadiatou thanks Dr Arramata in Sarahule, Isatou counts in Mandinka under her breath, and the cotton buyer’s agent always greets Fatou in Wolof.

Real peoples, shown by what they do

The peoples of Senebia are real: Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola, Sarahule (the novel’s name for the Soninke), Serer and others. The novel does not sort its characters by rank or caste, and seldom labels anyone by their people. It shows the region’s old roles through the work people do.

• The griot keeps history, family lines and memory, and carries messages between families. Balla, the Minister’s griot, sits on a low stool through every meeting and remembers every word. Griots carry the kola before a marriage and sing a child’s name back through its fathers.
• The smith mends what others throw away. Malik keeps Madina’s one tractor alive with parts of his own forging; in Nafawol, the smith’s yard going quiet or busy is one way the village shows its health.
• The kafo is an association, often of people of the same age and sex. The road crews come from “the kafo, the age groups that had always turned out together to clear land or roof a house” (ch13), and the women’s kafo, led by Isatou, feeds every public work.
• The osusu is a rotating savings group: each woman pays in a fixed sum and takes the whole pot in turn. Isatou keeps it in an old cooking pot with a crooked lid, and it holds its own against every newer institution in the book.
• Joking cousins may tease each other without giving offence. Alkalo Yaya of Kumbawol and Alkalo Musa of Sirawol are joking cousins, kal in Wolof. Accused of eating for three at a Kumbawol naming ceremony, Musa answers, “Because Kumbawol cooks for one,” (ch21) and the hall laughs.

Faith in daily life

Islam is part of the texture of both villages, present without fuss. In Nafawol, when the looms have stopped, “Only the call to prayer kept its hours.” (ch10) The ledger goes up on the wall every Friday after prayers, tying the village’s newest habit to its oldest weekly rhythm.

The festivals, under the names used across the region, work as a calendar. A minister arrives “Three days after Koriteh, on the first working morning” (ch17), the feast that ends Ramadan. A boy plans to buy a motorbike with the goats he will sell at six Tobaskis, the Feast of Sacrifice. On Tamkharit, ten days into the Islamic year, children with painted faces stop a committee meeting until the elders pay them to sing elsewhere. At Gamo, the Prophet’s birthday, the marabout’s pupils recite in the square until late.

Remembered empires

The peoples of Senebia remember three real empires: Wagadu, the old Soninke empire that the Sarahule claim; Kaabu, whose fall the Mandinka griots still sing; and Jolof, the Wolof empire. Wagadu comes first. In Part One, the Minister’s griot gives the grandmothers’ account of its fall:

“The histories say drought. The grandmothers say a promise was broken, and after that the rain simply stopped coming. Both are the same sentence, told by different people.” (ch8)

Kadiatou’s grandmother told of Wagadu’s covenant with the snake in the well. Kadiatou’s own view is plain: “I have never decided whether I believe the part about the snake. I decided long ago that I believe the part about the water.” (ch10)

One people’s memory is never allowed to stand for everyone’s. The Fula grandmothers of Madina keep a different story, of a people who walked behind their herds so long that “to them a road had never been an ending at all” (bridge). When Dr Arramata says of Wagadu, “Dispersed. Everyone in this room is what Wagadu turned into.” (ch19), Mamadou replies, “Or into other stories,” and adds, “My people kept their own.” (ch19) The griot who teaches at the academy goes from Wagadu to Kaabu, Jolof, the Fula roads, the Jola rice country and the Serer kings, “so that no child went home without hearing their own” (ch19).

Memory here is a warning, since empires are lost through broken promises. It is also a source of nerve: Balla says Wagadu was “Four times lost, and four times found again.” (ch8)

What is real and what is fiction

Fiction: Senebia, Awdagha and Tekuru; Bakoro, Port Walada and every village; Nabari; the Proxima Fund, the Coffer Fund and TransGlobal Agriculture; the title Yaara-Jaxo; the ñan-kale, a public challenge settled by results; the Planting of the First Word; the stone vote; Madina’s two clans; every character.

Real: the peoples and their languages; the empires; the festivals and prayers; the food, from domoda to attaya; the kora, balafon and sabar; the offices of alkalo and seyfo; the kafo, the osusu, the lumo or weekly market, the bantaba or meeting platform under a shade tree; the harmattan wind; the crops and trees.

The methods sit in between: air-water harvesters, drip lines, stone lines and half-moon pits are all used in dry country today, though the novel’s machines and their numbers belong to the story.

Part One: Madina and Bakoro

Madina is a village in the dry north of Awdagha. When the novel opens there have been three bad seasons and the river is falling: “The rain has forgotten the road to Madina,” (ch1) an elder says under the meeting tree. Its landmarks are the meeting tree, the well, the little mosque, Malik’s forge and the weaver’s house where Talib and his father work their looms. Its two clans, the Mashrik and the Magribe, are divided over a grazing line, and the plant is built on that disputed ground.

Bakoro, the capital, a day’s drive south, is a city of ministries, power cuts and a General Hospital where Talib’s sister Hawa trains as a nurse.

Part Two: Nafawol and its neighbours

Nafawol lies in the Republic of Tekuru, “Six hundred kilometres south, across a border” (bridge) from Madina, on a floodplain “the river had long since abandoned” (bridge). It has about two hundred households, some eighteen hundred people. At its centre are the old well and a baobab with a bantaba beneath it. Beyond the fields lie the dead beds of the old river channels. As Part Two goes on, the village adds a fenced harvester and solar plot, a meeting hall, a mill, an academy and a belt of young trees.

• Sirawol, the next village along the floodplain, is larger and more divided, with three big families who have quarrelled for decades. Its alkalo is Musa.
• Talawol is the market town, with the weekly lumo where Fatou trades and the lorry park where families leave for the coast.
• Kumbawol is rice country, where “every good year has begun with our feet in the rice mud” (ch22), as its alkalo, Yaya, says.
• Kerewol appears only in the last chapter, and is best met there.

Port Walada, Tekuru’s capital on the coast, holds the ministries, the cotton board’s ginnery, the docks, the courts and the banking regulator.

Distances and travel

Distance is one of the things that keeps these villages poor.

In Part Two everything depends at first on the old track to the coast, “a path widened by generations of use, cut by feet, donkey carts and habit” (ch13). Until the village builds its own road, a buyer’s agent drives up with scales in his truck and buys cotton at the farm gate, less a transport charge he sets himself, “because for most of those years there had been no other way for the cotton to reach the coast” (ch14).

How houses are built

Readers who picture mud huts will find something different. In Nafawol, homes and public buildings are of cement block with corrugated metal roofs, which the villagers call zinc: “The houses of Nafawol, block-walled and zinc-roofed, had taken on the colour of the dust itself.” (ch10) Houses stand in compounds, a family’s buildings round a shared yard. When the mill’s steel is held up at the port, the builders use beams of floodplain ironwood, a wood that “blunted every saw in Nafawol, and termites would not touch it” (ch18).