The Baobab

A former volunteer in Africa thinks back on his memories of an incident in northern Nigeria.

The Baobab

    Sipping my chocolate I sit in a doughnut shop  and watch the cars stream by.  The dark sky presses down upon a gray land.  I look into that drab mass.  My drink cools, forgotten.  I see another sky, an arc of shimmering blue with a sun so bright my eyes begin to water.  I think of a plain stretching away to the deserts of the north and of a girl sitting under a baobab tree.

      Lyn and I were approaching the end of our third year in Nigeria.  We were teaching at a girls’ school at the northern edge of Nigeria, only a few kilometres south of the Niger. The town we had been posted to, Mallam Madori, was a tiny place, a stop on the railroad between Kano and Maiduguri. It served as a market centre for the local farmers and for traders coming down from the Niger.  If you went to the end of nowhere,  Mallam Madori was one hundred kilometres beyond that.   Even so, we liked it.  The people were friendly.   Compared to the chaos of Kano and Lagos,  life was peaceful, one day drifting into another.

   The harmattan, the time of cold nights and perpetual dust  blown south from the encroaching desert had passed.  Now the heat mounted with every passing day.  Once classes ended at two o’clock we could do little more than crumple on top of our bed and sleep until the heat began to ebb.

    About four we would rise, dress and begin the two-kilometre walk from the school to the town.  There we would check our mail and visit the market, the merchandise spread out on straw to keep it out of the dust.  Nodding at the Fulani herdsmen and Hausa farmers and traders, we would buy our meat for the next day, brushing away the flies covering the meat.  Behind us women in colourful wraps, babies on their back, jostled with one another to fill cups with rice from an open bag on which had been stenciled USAID.  A merchant offered the rice at fifty kobos a cup. Tuareg tribesmen from Niger, wearing deep purple robes, ogled the baturis.  It would give them something to discuss on the long camel ride back home.

 Before going back to the school we would relax with cold bottles of coke and roast bulangu (lamb) or suya (beef). We would sit and gossip with some of the townspeople that we knew or one or two of the other teachers from the school, a pleasant way to end the day.       

 We passed out of the broken gate of the school .  The  one-eyed maigardi (watchman) waved at us, sending us a cheery sannu (hello).   Exchanging yaya da aiki Aiki da Godiya (how is work, how is life) , we  stepped onto the  road. Its black tarred surface rose above the plain, running straight towards the town.  Ahead of us we could see the grey fingers of a baobab tree that marked the halfway point between the town and the school.

    More than any other plant the Baobab suits Africa.  Ugly and ungainly, it survives where few other trees can.  Often called the upside down tree its branches, bare most of the year, resemble roots. The trunk has the look of an elephant’s leg.  The bark, a smooth, dull gray has a texture as pliable as rubber.

   Beneath the tree sat a girl about fourteen years old.  She was wrapped in dust-stained  cotton,  once bright red, now faded. On her back was tied a sleeping baby. She sat in the shade of the tree.  In front of her was a bowl of hollowed wood inside of which was a solitary five kobo coin. I do not know where she was going, where she had come from or how long she had been under the tree.  I can only assume that she had interrupted her journey to rest during the heat of the afternoon.

I believe that she was Fulani, being of a slim build with high cheekbones.  Most Fulani girls carry themselves well,  as if aware of belonging to a clan that had ruled over the Hausa for two centuries.   She looked up as we approached.  Eyes, telling of a life that had become too much for her, stared up at us.  As is traditional  among women seeking a request, she dropped to her knees.  Lowering her eyes she asked, “ Please, Mallam, Mallama, buy my baby.”

  I glanced back at Lyn.  She looked at the girl for a moment and then at me.  We said nothing but our thoughts were the same.

“I’m sorry, mallama,” I told the girl.

I dropped a fifty kobo coin into her bowl.  We went on our way.  I glanced back.  She was still sitting under the tree, her back resting against its smooth trunk.  The baby was beginning to cry.  When we returned, an hour later, she was gone.

We knew why she had made the offer.  Her husband was either dead or had left her, or unmarried, she had disgraced her family.   Without money or education,  there were only two roads open to her, begging, or prostitution. If she were lucky, and could raise a little money, she might open a stall in the market, selling groundnuts.  That was the best that she could hope for her and her baby.

I could have tried to explain, at least to the limited extent that her knowledge of English would allow the reasons why we could not buy the child.  We were only teachers earning a small salary.  We had no property, no money in Canada. The Canadian government would not have approved.  One did not buy children.  We had done the right thing, the sensible thing.  If she had known that, then she would not have asked.

What did she know? Did she know what Canadian law would have to say? Did she know our economic position? All that she knew was  that we were Baturi coming from a land blessed with infinite wealth. We were Baturi. Therefore, we were rich.  Why could we not afford one small baby.  The baby would live well.  Without the baby she would be free to go back home. It must have  seemed a sensible solution to her. Why could we not have seen it? Strange are the ways of the Baturi.

We left Nigeria two months later. We would return to Africa again, twice but not to Nigeria. What became of the girl, I do not know.  If she is still alive she would be an old women.  People age fast in the north.  The child would be grown with children of its own. I wonder if its mother told it about the Baturi who turned it away?  Does  it dream of how different its life would have been in the land of the Baturi. I will never know. Would it have been so terrible to have said yes? 

My drink is finished and my desire to loiter in the warmth of the shop  is overtaken by my need to be somewhere else. I step back out onto the street. Bracing myself against the cold, I look up at the sky.  I see the darkness and long for the blue skies of Africa.  Again I wish for the brown fields and for the baobab trees standing against a molten sun.

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