Sabalibougou, Bamako

Here's my Flickr page, full of photos though none yet of the Tuareg Numuw and Sabalibougou

It's been a while since I was really able to sit down and write and I feel a bit like I'm telling the story backwards, or at least in a strange retrospection. Where my writing a voice on a radio telling a story sometime in the past I'd tell you settle down into your couch, close your eyes and listen to my tale. Bamako is a city much like any other major city. A ton of people all rushing about during the day trying to make their fortune. In so many ways it feels like if the cities and governments were abandoned by the current governmental and industrial leadership and the regular people took over and began to make their own nation. Everywhere things are placed togetherin an organized, disorganized fashion, shops are small so all the inventory is placed out on the sidewalk, so people walk in the street and the busses and motorbikes take turns trying to run them and each other over. There are a million bright colors on products and people, the houses earthen and sometimes made of dirt. Now when I heard of mud brick houses I though of an earthen sunbaked ceramic. I have learned that actually in Mali mud brick is dirt in the shape of a brick and rubbing it the wrong way, rain etc. makes it fall off, and come down just like you might imagine a dirt wall to. People live inside of these things, though I can't imagine how the fare the rain storms. But what is lovely is this means that everyone has a domicile and people don't have to live outside. Incredibly Black in my opinion. Okay, no place to live? Well we're going to find you a place even if we stitch it out of trash bags, we'll make a way. Beautiful. Until you look around the concrete and dirt houses, colorfully stylish people and things and see the endless parade of trash and putrid festering things on the ground. God save us from the contagion one foot roared to the rest of my body today as I accidentally disgustingly placed it in some sort of putrid water substance. Trash is everywhere in the city. My friends the Tuareg smiths live on the other side of what looks to be a river basin, water fall, hilly settlement overlooked the Niger basin, with a beautiful view. This scenic breath taking wonderful place to live is offset by the fact that the most scenic part is also a sprawling trash dump. It actually looks like a landfill on top of a resort quality area turned foot traffic highway. The animals eat things out of the trash, the water is frightening colors and everywhere Black folk are living, smiling, I saw not an ounce of crime, stress, and everyone employed in some hustle making it happen. The city is fast paced but with an African familial and social rhythm that contrasts it. I love the market as I've said before and it loves me. It's style is bewitching. I love my people always, but hear where people aren't afriad to just be as they are (or are less afraid than I'm used to), you find a reason to smile and stare everywhere you look.

I work in the quarter of town with the landfill at it's center called Sabalibougou. I love the winding road in from my area of town. The read earth on the sides of the road, the careening sway of the overcrowded transportation system called the soutrama, the craziness of the soutrama experience... I love it. I ride to work and then hike through the market, then the frightening disgusting, brilliantly beautiful dump, up the hill, around some corners and up another hill to my friends shop in his yard. Mohammed has like six of the small anvils they work in this part of the world and a crew of six to three people given the day. He has to gorgeous wives, beautiful children and lovely shade situation hooked up over the work area, delicious food and what seems to be a good degree of peace. Working with the Tuareg smiths is great because their work is incredibly rich in design and style. They make many a knife and sword, which is of course right up my alley. They work completely by hand and so by the time you've finished a product it is truly a wonderful thing. There are all these techniques for embedding curved metal into blackened ebony, indenting shapes into the metal and applying one metal to the next, bronze and coppers on steel etc. They create incredible leather boxes which I may as well photograph because I sure can't afford.

the Tuareg smiths speak Tamasheq and a little Bambara, along with French. I speak more Bambara than French, no French and no Tamasheq. So we communicate with very few words and hand guestures. One of the Tuareg smiths is deaf though so Mohammed being his close friend is quite used to a kind of sign language I've grown accustomed to. So in this way we hand craft art. Being a bladesmith (novice, beginner, all that) I of course was interested in the Tuareg knives, handles and knife like designs etc. Mohammed asked me, so do you want to make a bottle opener, or a box first? Of course my response is the bottle opener handle with a knife blade. I go buy my hardened car spring steel I know from back home and go to work. I sure learned something over the next few days. There seem to be many things you can do in life. However, the reason some people do certain things and not others is because it just makes good common sense. The Tuareg smiths work with smaller hammers, and small handles, smaller anvils and sometimes no fire. The point is that the work is for sale to turists. My knive making education and learning experience comes from a group of smiths who live in hugely forested areas in rural Southeast America where hunting culture is the culture. My knife making education has been in outdoor knives, hunting, survival, etc. I still wanted to work like that in Africa but with a little fire, tiny anvils and hammers and a completely different work set up I learned a bit of common sense and a bit about going with the flow. At least I learn that it'd be a good idea after I finished my knife. It was beautiful to.

The Tuareg women work in leather, and make delicious food. Their designs are excellent drawings etched into leather which become bags and pillows and all sorts of leather things. When you see the tuareg leather work, metal and many decorative things you really have to marvel at the creative mind. It's not that they are doing the impossible, or working in gold, it's just that their work is beautiful, especially when light shines on it. It looks like something good is inside of it.

One day working at Mohammeds place just chilling out either dodging the rain, sun, breathing in the good life Mohammed mentions the fact that the hammers and tools are not just simple tools. They have have a sacrifice don't on them, blood poured out, and a cow feasted on by I can imagine a host of happy Tuareg folk. I'm not sure the celebration it was tied to, either the opening of the forge site, the blessing of the tools for the work ahead... dunno. Thing is, Mohammed told me he wasn't involved in the magic because God didn't want it. So you can picture me wide mouthed when he spoke about the ritual. Well sure, makes sense to me I'm familiar with sacrifice, and that a blacksmith should seek blessing for his tools and hold a feast in that honor is something I could see. I guess I just associate sacrifice with African ritual and Islam the beautiful religion of this region, these folks, and this household with... well not. Especially when a person says no don't do this or that because God says not to. Certain groups define Islam more closely to standards one might find in the east and the Tuareg are one I know. And yet here I was working with blessed hammers all the time and didn't know it. Cool.

Later on that day I heard drumming and singing. Thinking it was a recording I ignored it and upon heading home for the day only on a whim did I follow my nose-ears to the sound. And low an behold... a possession ritual. The music was a haunting beauty, stringed instruments sang and whinned along with the singer an instrument himself. Calabash rattles where being played, djembes which I thought interesting and while the music wove its song story a woman danced carrying the spirit. They were dressed in the ancient cloth of the region. Sort of like being drapped in heritage I guess. It's called bogolon and it's nothing to look at, but something about it is rich. It's hand woven so maybe that's the pull. The women, spirit person walked around, I'm not quite sure what she was doing other than dancing and being present, but it did feel refreshing. I certainly didn't expect to see people that involved in their ancestry here. I know Africans navigate Islam, defining it for themselves and creating their own way of relating to God and the world. And yet I also know the large religions have actively killed people for dancing with their ancestors, following the ancient traditions. Certainly comming out of Mohammed's blacksmith shop and them regularly making their prayers to the east I had not expected to run into this ceremony. I wonder who these people were, why were they still dancing and singing in this way and why Mohammed smiled when I asked where was the music coming from saying yeah go check it out. African complexities I must say.

I wonder at the meaning in the Tuareg designs and much of the design I see here in Bamako and Mali. layered on top of an endless succession of tradition and culture is todays religion Islam and todays culture interest, America. The long trail of the meanings of things is sometimes lost as cultures transition into a new period. I like the roots of things it seems. I like the full story, the deep whys, because something there seems to wish to speak. It's as if something wants to say hammer's are alive, the remember the fit of your hand, the history of your work, and the memories of yesterday are still on todays air. Can you taste them there when you breathe? It's as if beneath the surface the world is alive with stories waiting to be told, the trash to be cleaned from the lanscape, and an endlessly beautiful song revealed, resplident and brillant like the Sabalibougou view near Mohammed's shop.