Feeling as Small as His Herd

Every sunset, when his favorite cow ambles to his bush camp, Bermo Bello leaps up like an overeager suitor, scurrying to meet her with a twitter in his voice.

On this evening, Houley, once a great beauty, stands, her great curved horns held high, listening but not approaching. Bello calls to her in his own special way, a honeyed stream of croons, smooches and clicks that tumbles out like a gift.

Houley draws in closer. A young bull in the straggle of cattle with her licks Bello’s fingers. Finally Houley steps up to Bello and lets him scratch her neck.

“When the sun is setting and when the cows come back, I always stroke her,” he says. “It makes me happy, because I love my cow and she loves me. With human beings, there are people you love more than others, and it’s the same with cows. She is so beautiful.”

A few hours earlier, Bello had returned to the camp after a couple of days away in the bustle and shouting of the market town of Sakabal. Restrained and imperious, he folded up his tall figure and settled down on a mat on the grass under a tree, waiting for his wives and daughters to minister to his needs. He sat, saying little, until he was transformed in a blink by the sight of his cows coming back to the camp.

Chief of a nomadic Fulani tribe in Niger beneath the southern reaches of the Sahara, Bello has lost nearly everything in less than a year. Just as the 1929 crash wiped out Wall Street, a catastrophic season of drought has wiped out the herders of the Tuareg and Fulani tribes.

A year ago, each sunset, about 130 cows would come home with their calves to the camp where Bello’s extended family lives, a stretch of grassland known simply as the Well of Bermo, although it actually lies between six wells. Now there are only three cows, two young bulls and two calves. Ninety died of hunger, and he sold the others to buy food. It is rainy season now, but the wells are almost empty. His family has to drink murky brown river water.

Bello fears he will die a poor man as the desert expands, stealing away the green from his sons and grandsons.

“As a young man, I wanted to get rich and have great success. I wanted to own 500 cows,” recalls Bello, 50, who has two wives, eight sons and seven daughters. The 130 cows he accumulated, perhaps worth $100,000 or more in a good year, made him wealthy and respected.

With their loss, he feels as though he has lost himself.

“A man who has no cows is someone who has nothing to say,” he says. “Even if he speaks, no one will believe him. All his children will be scattered and leave him.”

A cousin of Bello’s named Mofalley Hodi cut the throats of his 10 best cows as they lay dying of starvation, to end their misery. He was too bitter and sad to eat the stringy meat.

“We’re not butchers,” Hodi says mournfully. Three of his herd of 70 are left. One morning last month, his favorite cow, Fadalley, lay dying. Three times that day he took his knife and went to end her suffering.

“But my hand was shaking so much I could not do it,” Hodi says. “I prayed for a long time to God to save her.” His prayer went unanswered.

A wild, bewitching aura of romance surrounds these nomadic men who have long traversed the sandy grasses with their great herds of cattle and camels. The British historian Lesley Blanch, author of the 1954 book “The Wilder Shores of Love,” was captivated when, during her travels in Algeria, “out of the sand rose the most marvelous creature -- a Tuareg. And that was it. I realized I was never going to be able to look at anybody in the West.”

Their features are proud and aquiline, but to the tribal women, the men’s beauty and allure are multiplied after they veil their faces, from about the age of 20. The men wear turbans, winding the cloths down across their faces to cover their cheeks on down; sometimes only their eyes are visible. Occasionally they can be glimpsed turbanless at the barber in the bazaar, exposed, like hermit crabs stranded with no shell.

The men laugh coyly when asked about their turbans, and lift a lower flap of cloth shyly to their faces. “It’s our tradition. If you are afraid of someone, you lift it like this and hide your mouth. It is like a feeling of shame. We saw our fathers do it and we do the same,” says Hodi, 55. The most prized and expensive turbans are dark indigo, almost black.

The men also wear leather amulets containing verses from the Koran to ward off evil spirits, intricate swords that are handed down from generation to generation, and daggers. They carry battered metal kettles for washing before prayer.

In recent decades, the Tuareg and Fulani people, who make up one-fifth of Niger’s population of 12 million, have been forced to travel increasing distances to find fodder for their herds because of desertification. Others have settled in villages and towns. Some look to tourism for a living, some to banditry and smuggling.

Oxfam, the international relief agency, reported recently that 12 centuries of nomadic culture could be threatened unless the tribes got help rebuilding their depleted herds. This is the worst year since a series of severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, which devastated a region seen by meteorologists as one of the driest and most precarious climates in Africa, and depleted the nomads’ herds.

Oxfam, which is teaching nomads agricultural skills and running food-for-work programs, has a long-term project to encourage nomads to sell some cattle rather than maintain huge herds, unsustainable in this fragile environment. But it’s a difficult challenge given that herd size is so intimately linked to a nomad’s sense of self-worth.

Out in the wild grasses around Bello’s camp, time seems to unravel like a scroll that someone loosened with a flourish. The sky dims into a soft violet glow. Bello sits in quiet contemplation while the women work. Motionless, lost in thought, he gazes into the distance for hours at a time while wives, sisters and daughters take turns pounding the millet he brought from the market, thumping long wooden clubs into a hollowed stump of wood, over and over.

His younger sons, wearing coarse braids, like dreadlocks, look after the animals during the day, while his older sons sit around on mats, brewing endless pots of tea by propping small enamel pots directly on coals.

Bello prays to God, dipping his head into the sand, which adheres to his forehead and nose. Then he sits again. Occasionally he shouts an instruction to one of his daughters or wives.

For men here, contemplation seems almost a lifestyle. For women, similar stretches of time go into chores. Each woman has a big callus at the base of each thumb from pounding millet. The women are like bright flowers in the landscape, with colorful clothing, bead necklaces and big hoop earrings. Their hair is typically gathered forward into a fat ball worn just above the forehead with a pendulous braid hanging on either side.

The women milk the cows and bring Bello and the other men sweet, nutty milk in calabashes, or bowls made out of gourds. His wives and daughters chuckle indulgently, describing how fat he used to be, when times were good and he ate only milk and cheese.

Houley, his beloved cow, once fat and sleek with a becoming flash of white on her face, is thin too, her bones jutting out.

“I used to give her a lot of millet,” Bello says mournfully. “I gave her everything, even medicine.”

There is grass after some decent downpours in the current rainy season, but herders say it is too low and scarce to offer much hope. Millet prices more than doubled in the areas hardest hit by Niger’s food crisis, while livestock prices collapsed to about $60 a cow, a tenth or less of their normal value, just enough to buy a sack of millet. Tuareg and Fulani herdsmen are selling everything for food.

In Sakabal, near the market, a Tuareg herdsman, Hardo Maydgi, 59, proffers his rather blunt sword hopefully to visitors.

“What will you give me for it?”

Sitting under a shady tree outside the Sakabal market, on a patch of sandy, tick-infested grass, Mayou Marafa, 55, a Tuareg chief who wears a stunning marigold yellow turban like the sun, sold his heirloom sword that had been in his family for generations. He feels uncomfortable and a little insecure without its reassuring weight at his side.

Marafa divorced his two younger wives in the dry season and sent them back to their families because he could not feed them. He kept all 22 of his children.

“When God says you are finished with a wife, it’s like fate. There’s nothing to be done,” he says.

Marafa is more philosophical about his wives’ tear-sodden departure than about what he calls the “shock” of being forced to sell many of his cattle. The night before such market days, he says, he can never sleep.

In Bello’s camp, another cousin, Gambo Tchiro, 67, explains the hollow feeling of loss: “It seems as if we are not alive at all. When we lost our cattle, it seems that we lost ourselves, as if we don’t even exist.”

To him, it seems as if “the desert is moving, it’s spreading. And it brings much suffering. It’s become more difficult to survive.”

With the sunset, a sliver of moon rises over the Well of Bermo. The women mix the ground millet with muddy river water and boil up a gritty brown porridge on the fire, served with a sour sauce made of wild grasses. Turning shyly away from strangers, the men eat, then they brew small pots of tea so bitter that, even syrupy with sugar, it sears the tongue. A lone voice drifts through the night, singing a song about truth.

In years past, when rains brought good grass, the rainy period was the season of hope and love. Young men would wander the lush grasses following a girl they loved, singing made-up songs about her beauty and grace. Or a girl might sing about a handsome man. Once married, a girl never sings to her husband again.

Bello remembers that first warm flush of love. “Among a thousand people, you choose one. I loved everything about her. I used to sing to her to show that I loved her. She was happy. She did not look at me, but she listened.”

They would sit apart, sharing the shade of one tree. Gradually, he pared away the distance, getting closer and closer, until he could take her hand, then stroke her cheek and her hair.

After he took a second wife, he says, the two women grew jealous of each other, quarreling so much that female relatives were summoned to try to make peace. Grinning, he claims they still quarrel, but the women know they are never supposed to answer back to him.

The enchantment of the seasons of his youth seems lost now. Lately, the rainy seasons have brought disappointment and pessimism.

He might have to sell Houley in the end. But she will be the last cow to go. He prays it will never come to that.