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GREAT STORIES:
Journey
Yields Glimpse of Missing Past The Missing Past
The
Miami Herald
November 7, 2004
Niger is
Africa's second-largest country, about twice the size of
Texas. Much of it lies in the Sahara Desert, north of
Nigeria. It's a difficult location which, combined with
the fact that the nation is landlocked, helps explain
why its population is a relatively-small 11.3 million.
Indeed, this former French colony is one of the
least-densely populated places in all of
Africa.
Not that you'd know this from stepping
into the streets of Niamey, the capital city. They,
positively writhe with activity. Cars rush headlong.
Scooters with men riding double weave dangerously among
them. People drive with a recklessness that would make a
New York cabbie flinch.
The curbs are crowded
with mud huts and lean-tos from which sellers step into
the street to hawk candy, Coca-Cola and cellphone
calling cards. The air is cross woven with sounds of
French, Hausa, Djerma, more. Some people wear
traditional African robes. Others opt for T-shirts
advertising Adidas, Phat Farm and Jesus. The sand is
everywhere, covering everything. Indeed, there are
places where the pavement just ends, as if in surrender,
and the sand takes over, vast avenues of it, ferrying
cars and people and the occasional camel to their
destinations.
My guide is Kedidia Mossi, a
40-year-old single mother who runs a public relations
firm. A Nigerien born in France, she spent a dozen years
studying and working in the United States. For the last
five years, she has moved back and forth between France
and Niger.
Kedidia is Songhay, the tribe to which
my maternal DNA links me. She says her family is after
her to stop her wanderings and settle in her ancestral
home.
She wants to. And she does
not.
France has infrastructure, medical care,
opportunity. But Niger is home. She is torn.
On
this first morning, she takes me to do some sightseeing
and to run some errands within walking distance of my
hotel. It's an educational experience.
We visit a
zoo where sickly looking animals lie prostrate in the
shade. We tour a small museum of Songhay artifacts –
musical instruments, cloth and gourds.
Then
Kedidia leads me through a crowded marketplace. People
reach toward us, advertising either the trinkets they
have for sale or just their own misery and need. Kedidia
passes them as if they are not there. Which seems cold
until you count the hands and realize that if you stop,
if you even make eye contact, you will be subsumed. The
need – for food, for clothes, for everything – is
greater than your resources.
So I keep moving,
stepping gingerly across a sidewalk where a vendor is
selling guinea fowl. The birds lay still, as if
plastered to the concrete by the heat. The street itself
is also obstructed, so crowded with vendors that cars
are forced to creep through single file. At the end of
the block, a white woman stands looking sheepish, having
driven her 4X4 head first into one of the craters –
calling them potholes really doesn't do them justice –
that pockmark the streets.
Kedidia and I pass by
just as a crowd of two dozen African men seizes the
front bumper of the car and with a manly shout, lifts it
from the hole. The sheepish woman drives quickly
away.
We cross to a supermarket. Sitting on the
curb outside, a man in a dirty Chicago Bulls T-shirt
reaches an empty hand up to me. I ignore him as I have
seen Kedidia do. He swivels after me on his hands and I
see that he is wearing sandals on them. His legs are
shriveled and useless. Polio, I will later
learn.
I pass him a couple times and each time he
follows me, swiveling as if on a hinge, then lifting his
empty hand.
We go around the corner where we
finally find what we were looking for: a vendor selling
an adaptor that will enable me to plug in the expensive
electrical devices I have brought with me from
home. |
