Three pm in Sabualla. It’s tea time. But when isn’t it tea time? The twenty-something-year-old trainees are seated obediently on a mat in front the village elders – as many as would assemble in the afternoon heat – who are exchanging the stereotypical five-minute greeting. We are silent, already having exhausted our salutation-relevant vocabulary approximately four and a half minutes ago. Included in the group of shyebaniin (elders) is Sabualla’s Imam and school director, Saalek; Ginger’s host mother, Maasora; and a reluctant elder, our youthful facilitator Brahim. The focus of our attention and interview questions, however, decidedly belongs to Ba, Ginger’s host father. Over three quarters of a century old, his body is frail, his dark skin creased by the sun, his eyes entirely sightless. Withered as his physical presence is, his wit is twice as sharp, and the harsh sounds that escape his leathery throat – a version of Hassaniye indecipherable to us foreigners – nevertheless command our attention.
Daylight is a precious commodity in a village without electricity, so we begin once the greetings trail off. One of the trainees pummels Brahim with a do\en or so questions, at least the entirety of our planned interview plus several alternate translations. I wonder silently how many and how well they translate, especially since her two-minute onslaught is conveniently economised to a succinct thirty seconds. I opt for patience, allowing the interview to unfold as it will. And unfold it does.
Our laundry list of questions concerning the environmental history of Sabualla appropriately yield a story about a lion. One of those “you-wouldn’t-believe-it” kind of stories. Ba’s eyes absolutely sparkle behind clouded lenses as a memory resurfaced. He remembers his grandfather remembering a young man walking from his village to the then swampy river with a small traditional weapon as his only defense. There are rumors of a lion versus man tangle. When the young man does not return as promised, his parents naturally think him dead. Days later, however, the young man is found, boasting of his mortal battle and lucky victory. “This big deal,” Brahim explains while Ba continues with gory details and inexhaustible admiration for the young man. “Only someone very courageux, mtiin, very strong could do this,” Brahim says. Very little is lost in the trilingual translation, if only because the old man’s gestures compensate for missing words.
We finally redirect attention, both ours and Ba’s, and arrive at the single most defining environmental “story” of Mauritania: the drought. Although the drought began in the sixties and has persisted since, the drought indisputably refers to the years between 1973 and 1978, half a decade without rain. At all. Existence in the RIM organizes itself around these five years, which serve not only as the most important event in Mauritanian environmental history, but seemingly the only event.
Ba recalls his childhood and methodically taps his tisbih, or Muslim prayer beads. Click. Plastic disks and round balls, colored the burnt orange of faded henna, slide down the leather cord. Click. Hypnotic, methodical. Click. Deliberately, distractedly, he slides the disks into each other. Click. His account of pre-drought conditions is almost mythical: jungle so dense you could not navigate a straight path, and trees so thick you could not find the road or your cattle or a place to raise your khyme. To say resources were plentiful would be a gross understatement. An entire shaariit of wood sold for a single ougiye; villagers were kept from crops during uninterrupted weeks-long rains; you could barely walk the landscape without encountering packs of hyenas, herds of giraffe and gazelle, and other various troupes of untranslatable fauna. Brahim could not even begin to name the hundreds of trees Ba could identify – it was sufficient to say they were big, green and everywhere.
Ba was born in a town not far from Sabualla in the 1930s. He remembers when they planted the date palms, imported from Tidjikja by camel. As a small boy, he was bribed with cookies to water the seedlings whose descendants now tower over fields of stunted sahelian shrubs. He remembers when his tribe made the short journey to settle in what is now Sabualla. He remembers when they built that house, that house right there, he says, a structure of mud and cement, crumbling and struggling against fifty years of desert. He remembers having to wait until the dry season to farm, after the shemams – seasonal lakes – had receded, leaving perfectly saturated, fertilized agricultural interruptions in dense forests. He remembers moving to Senegal briefly, not for lack of resources or means of income, but merely for curiosity about a big city in the south. He remembers as he absent-mindedly clicks his orange beads.
Urged by American conceptions of time constraints, we push Brahim to ask about the drought. We expect the tone to darken, but instead Ba and Brahim are laughing, suddenly applauding a response I expect has little to do with our drought inquiry. A lion, Brahim explains through giggles, he is telling me of a lion that he met himself. For every ten words Brahim translates, Ba says thirty and punctuates his story with gestures his frail body should not be able to do. We gather, as he ducks down against a pillow, covers his head with his bony arms and yells, that the lion was an unexpected encounter, arousing more fear than courage. Ba gestures like he is washing his hands, his elbows, his face and Brahim hardly needs to translate: Ba had furiously prayed to avoid the lion and live to tell the tale. We understand now his earlier story was merely a frame, a preface to his own experience, which we inadvertently interrupted with silly questions about trees and droughts. I express adequate wonder and admiration for his “bravery” and slowly grasp the Mauritanian method of story telling slash interviewing. We have been sitting on these mats for only an hour, but it feels like seven in the way a soul mate instantly feels like a lifelong friend. It makes me hope someday I have a story that is worth telling.
We wander back on topic, and Ba does somber up. The drought was simply unbelievable in its duration and destruction. One day, it just stopped raining and the animals either migrated or died. The few trees that survived were used ignorantly to feed livestock which also eventually died. Vegetation adapted for rain while the fertile floodplains suffocated. The drought was a perfect antibiotic and Mauritania was effectively stripped of its life.
Unexpectedly, the mood shifts again, back in a more jovial direction. Ba remembers his lion again, and the four women eaten just the week before. He had prayed amidst their remains and could we believe it?? I am suddenly nostalgic for my first days in Sabualla as Ba reviews the body parts he saw: raas, saag, kersh… a veritable lesson in Hassaniye anatomy, more grim than that taught by my host mother just weeks before. Luckily, Brahim spares us the second round of gory details and allows us to translate the old man’s story best we can with Western ears.
When the conversation completes its tangent, we discuss post-drought flora, both wild and cultivated. The only trees to survive the seventies were “non native” species that all but characterize the Mauritanian landscape today: aisin, acacia and the ubiquitous turga, erroneously cursed by locals as a cause rather than a symptom of drought. Despite the painful lack of trees, shemam farming has given way to slash and burn agriculture, euphemistically called teleywi. Cutting down a plot of trees and burning the stumps yields several results: live fencing via the remaining perimeter trees, a year’s worth of fertilized soil, increased millet harvests, and a practical justification for deforestation. With limited resources, however, there is little else to do; the flood plain has been barren for thirty years.
To be fair, neither slash and burn agriculture nor rampant deforestation is common anymore. The extended drought conditions have birthed a new environmental consciousness, even if Mauritania had yet to codify a vocabulary for it. Mauritanians and Sabuallans in particular appreciate the value of trees and embrace their newly required stewardship role. Ba mentions recent dune stabilization projects, new chapters in his long Sabualla history. Two projects, he explains through Brahim, began and failed in the late nineties. The self-diagnosed impediment was not one of motivation, but one of want: want of fencing against ravenous goats, want of water when the season’s first rain is merely a tease followed by weeks of deadly drought… it is clear, the elements kill both seedlings and local initiative. Will you continue dune stabilization projects, we ask? The elders rebound the question without skipping a beat: isn’t that why you are here?
The trainees ended the meeting with a more intimate understanding of Mauritania’s environmental history, her present-day crisis, and wealth of character found in her oldest inhabitants. 1973 to 1978 is not merely a span of time to place casually on a calendar. It was the social and environmental turning point for an entire country. In the seventies, herdsman lost their livelihoods and learned to sell charcoal for income. Farmers forgot the dense forests and cultivated an unfounded hatred for turga “weeds.” A new turning point is surely on the horizon, however, one in which Mauritanians exist harmoniously with nature, under a new set of rules, under a new definition of sustainability. To ask Ba what has changed within his lifetime is a ludicrous question. Everything has changed, much of it recently for the better. Mauritania is on the cusp of an environmental awareness, as is the globe for that matter, after whose awakening everything with change again. Well, everything except decades-old pride over a battle with a ferocious lion. Some things remain, thankfully, consistent.
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