I once spent Christmas Day sitting on the veranda of a run-down hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali. I was part of a group of package tourists that had set out from Nairobi four months earlier. We were waiting for the train to Dakar, which was our journey's end.
We were all physically and mentally exhausted. For the past six weeks we had lived almost exclusively on a diet of goat meat, rice and bananas; some of us were recovering from malaria or dysentery. We had been threatened and robbed, stoned and robbed, or merely robbed in every one of the 11 countries we had visited. (I was held up at gunpoint in a Nairobi backstreet before we even started.) In Lagos, four female members of the party were abducted by a maniac, driven out to the suburbs and held at knifepoint for two days; one of them was raped. In Niger our truck rolled sideways off a crumbling embankment, injuring two. By the time we reached Bamako, the sum of my ambition was a cold shower, something ungoatlike to eat, and a moment's rest and solitude. I had never heard of Mali before.
The veranda was wide and wooden, overlooking a quiet sandy street. After breakfast I washed my shorts in an enamel bucket and hung them out to dry. For the rest of the day I sat there sipping bottles of Sprite, while the sun moved from left to right across a cloudless sky. I was so beat, it felt like I was stoned. All day long I sat there, just staring out on a hot, sandy west African street, empty but for some chickens and the occasional passer-by. Somewhere a radio was playing Malian pop music.
Unexpected highlight of the day, however, was a man being beaten almost to death in front of the hotel: he came staggering up the deserted street at about midday, like an actor making a dramatic appearance on an empty stage. He looked like he had taken one bashing already and was followed be an angry mob of about 20. They caught up with him right in front of our hotel and gave him another portion.
The beating was savage and prolonged. The man repeatedly tried to get up and run away, but he could only reel about tragically before being felled and beaten again. Someone hit his head as hard as they could with a short plank of wood-Merry Christmas, mate.
From my seat on the veranda I was in the advantageous position of being able to see everything without being in any appreciable danger myself. My initial thought was that it was nice to see a local man persecuted for a change. But he was being so mercilessly beaten, it was horrible to see; it made my heart race. On hearing the tumult outside, the hotel manager and several of my fellow travellers came out to watch. "Him thief," said the hotel manager proudly. After what seemed like a very long time, the mob tired of hitting him and left him lying in the road. Miraculously, after a while the man rose unsteadily to his feet and staggered away-but it looked like it would be a long time before he would be playing the harmonica again.
While we were in Mali, we had to be accompanied by an official tourist guide, a condition of entry at the time. This official came aboard the truck at the eastern border and stayed with us until we left.
Dorro was tall, suspiciously thin and constantly in fear of evil spirits. He also had the unfortunate conviction that Europeans came to Africa for only two things: prostitutes and marijuana; so he was constantly offering them to us at knockdown prices. Our repeated refusals to buy from him-due mainly to exhaustion rather than to moral continence-did not deter him: he thought we were merely holding out for a better deal. The more we rebuffed him, the more he liked us.
Throughout my lone Christmas Day vigil on the veranda, Dorro kept coming out and offering me drugs or the services of various women of his acquaintance. Sometimes, instead of coming over, he merely hissed at me and gestured obscenely with his pelvis. As the day wore on, the prices got cheaper. To pass the time, I haggled with him to see just how far he was prepared to lower his original prices. As I had no intention to buy anything, I was in a strong, possibly unfair, bargaining position.
Dorro's profit margin on a bag of marijuana must have been small, because he would not shift from charging the equivalent of ?5 for a supermarket-bag full. His tariff for women, however, was ludicrously flexible. For a "clin" woman, room with a fan, a condom and a cup of tea thrown in, he wanted ?3.50 for himself and a little extra for the woman if she went out of her way for you. For your bog-standard brass with no condom and no facilities, negotiations started in the equivalent of ?1.50. By the end of the day, I had got the "clin" woman price down to ?1, and the bargain basement no-frills poke down to two filtered cigarettes, and I think he would have come down even more than that.
At about five o'clock the sky turned red and large bats began to fly along the line of rooftops opposite. They came singly at first, then in small untidy squadrons, then in one long, continuous flock which took so long to pass overhead it must have been one of the wonders of the natural world.
