Internal Conflict
On a cool morning in Kéniéba I rose uncharacteristically quickly and made for the shower to catch a splash of warm water before the power was cut at 7 am. The Angie Stone song that had taken up residence in my head over the last week wailed "I can't eat, I can't sleep any more" and true to its lament I found that no breakfast was available at the hotel that morning (despite its inclusion in the price of the room) so with my only sustenance being a brief chat with Sule and The Drillers I got back on the road to Bamako without thinking too hard about it. A man motivated by hunger.
My mental playback of Angie's "Wish I Didn't Miss You" accompanied my rolling wheels along the well-worn route to Bamako. I coasted past smiling, industrious villagers moving to and fro between clusters of round, thatched huts. I weaved around scores of broken, bent and mangled trucks and through that rocky, red landscape towards Bamako and The Sleeping Camel (a distinct dot on every West African overlander's map) where I hoped to find a sort of cultural embassy and perhaps some like-minded souls to connect with and offload onto.
Along the way I stopped at a roadhouse (road-shack) to satisfy my significant hunger with a mayonnaise sandwich and a Nescafé. I was happy to discover that I must have ridden through the catchment of a lonely cell tower because my phone had received a barrage of messages with kind words of support and encouragement from home. "Well, that's nice" I thought, not referring to my breakfast.
Approaching Bamako in the early afternoon, the sporadic hut collections thickened into clusters of low-lying brick buildings which I anticipated would congeal into a typical, dense urban sprawl surrounding a yolk of central-district buildings rising (against odds) many stories higher than the structurally less fortunate dwellings around them.
Reaching and winding down the edge of the escarpment where the plateau north of the city meets the northern bank of the Niger the architectural change was quite abrupt and I saw a dense, organised little city ready to greet me at the bottom of the pass.
On the way down I passed the scene of a small (by African standards) accident where an ancient Mercedes tipper truck's brakes had failed and it had overrun a right hairpin bend into the striped, red barrier on the low side. Traffic waited patiently while an accident response team arrived with shovels and sand-filled wheelbarrows to deal with the resulting oil spill. My impression from the flurry of the (atypically) energetic road crew and the scene surrounding them was that this was a city making the most of cards they had been dealt rather than waiting in apathy for someone else's solution.
Closing in on the CBD I saw that some architectural outliers were even made of glass and steel—reaching aspirationally skyward on either side of the Niger River which ran like a thick, twisted crack through the centre of the city. These buildings (banks, hotels, hospitals, embassies and institutions) had an additional distinguishing feature: they were surrounded by tank-proof concrete barricades garnished with razor wire or glass shards and guarded by heavily armed and armoured soldiers. The entrances of each of these forts had heavy, interlock gates and an untrained observer might confuse the Radisson Blu for a maximum-security facility for high-risk political prisoners.
Away from that city centre overrun by anti-terror infrastructure the rest of the city was bustling, energetic and (at least visually) unconstrained. It was well-worn and, though not traditionally beautiful, it had plenty of personality—unique and vital. Traffic was as usual far more voluminous than the city had ever been designed to process but a culture of etiquette and honour was apparent in the swarms of "Jakartas" (Indonesian and Chinese motorcycles) gathering obediently at the traffic lights in their designated little motorcycle lanes.
I passed through central Bamako and crossed onto the south bank of the Niger over the Ponte des Martyrs finding The Sleeping Camel down a wide, dirt side street (much of the city's grid is unpaved). The Camel slept amongst embassies, banks and other nondescript, low-rise buildings—all heavily fortified and revealing little about their occupants.
After being accurately profiled as a non-terrorist by a laconic security guard the heavy, steel gate was heaved ajar for me to wheel through into the eclectic oasis within. Though it was a few hours shy of beer o'clock the memorabilia-laden, open-air bar and colourful Rastafarian murals heralded the potential good times to be had within.
Leaving my bike to laze under a generous tree I took a room and a shower and made my way to the bar for a cold beer or two to pass the time that lay between me and my dinner. As the workday drew to a close the bar started to fill up with a quirky crowd of expats, NGO warriors and military contractors—a reenactment of the spaceport "Cantina" scene in Star Wars where diverse forms of intelligent life gathered to blow off intergalactic steam.
I was the only overlander there and by the sounds of things the kidnappings and other ripples from trouble in the North had severely throttled the flow of tourists to Mali. Through my chats with various characters I gleaned that many Western powers had a military or diplomatic presence in Mali (especially the French and Americans with much of their efforts internationally outsourced) but I never quite understood why it was so strategically important. It gave me a glimpse into the underworld of sanctioned international conflict and revived images (real or constructed) from my childhood: my days spent at the military base's preschool where we were taught bomb-drills in the playground surrounded by young men driven from high school uniforms into military ones. I remember them armed and ready to mobilise at a moment's notice to the northern frontier with communist Angola and cruising in gigantic, fortified vehicles that made all the little boys like me stop and point and made our parents think uncomfortable thoughts. Ordinary people living ordinary lives while ideologies clashed around and upon them.
At the bar, well into my after-dinner lagers I found myself having my ear bent by the husky voice and loud cackles of Richard, a jittery cockney pom and likely failed, small-time gangster of about sixty who was clearly avoiding something legally uncomfortable back in the UK in favour of being a slightly bigger fish in Bamako's small pond. He spent most nights in the ex-pat watering hole, smoking his teeth to twigs and dragging along for company his beautiful, young escort or girlfriend or fiancé (I thought I'd seen a flashy ring but wasn't married enough to know whether it was on a significant finger). While Richard regaled me she simply sat there staring silently into her large, expensive phone like a bored teenager (she may even have been one).
I pondered the dynamics of sex, money and power and wondered whether I too should consider cashing in my first-world endowments to tempt a Malian beauty to join me in a life of expatriate bliss, ever dangling the potential of an escape back to my first world while I lived like a king in her third: "your place, or mine?"
As if on cue, Fatim, a six-foot undiscovered supermodel who looked as if she'd just turned down a starring role in the music video for Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" swanned by to offer me another beer with a slight but discernible twinkle in her eye. "Oh God," I thought.
The mind of a man with low esteem and high hopes is a dangerous place and I knew it. Fatim was so out of my league she was playing a different sport. As Richard's tall tale-telling began to dessicate into white noise my mind inevitably wandered into complicated territory and I spent the remainder of the evening quietly fiddling with my moral compass.
