Most of the Sahel was originally acacia forest, scruffy and dense in places, once extremely diverse in species of flora and fauna, but very fragile. The greater part of what is left of the acacia forest, as we can dimly see, has been thinned out, trampled, overgrazed, or converted to agriculture. The wildlife that once thrived in it is now scarce. We will see no antelopes or gazelles, warthogs, leopards, or tortoises, none of the three species of monitor lizard, one of which gets seven feet long. “The animals have all been shot and eaten,” Shek says. “There are none left to kill.” The only wildlife we see are long-tailed starlings coasting saucily over the road right in front of us, and assorted birds of prey circling high above.

  We pass fields of cotton—a thirsty crop that requires the pumping of ground water and is bleeding down the already drought-stressed water table—and other fields with gigantic white calabashes lying in them, mango groves, commercial plantations of neem, tamarind, and kalia tea. One hundred and fifty miles northeast of Bamako, cultivation gives way to rock desert. The rock strata have been eroded into stacks of brown wafers—curious artifacts known as torres, or towers. In the crevices between the torres stand big baobab trees, with bloated trunks and stubby, bristle-tipped branches. The baobab is a very useful tree for the people here. Its inner bark is twisted into rope; its fruit is ground into a cereal and made into candy. Wherever we stop, children run up with plastic bags of white baobab candy, their eyelashes and lids coated with red dust from the kungoforoko.

  Goats have penetrated every corner of the landscape. Every reachable plant not protected by thorns or toxic alkaloids has been clipped by their teeth. I wonder how many species have been chewed to extinction. The Sahel is hardly a “natural” landscape any more. It belongs to the goats.
 

  We stop at Alison’s village, near the trading center of San, 180 miles northeast of Bamako. It is called Koroguelenbougu and is down to 300 permanent residents, less than half of what it
 once had. Most of the young adults have gone to try their luck in Bamako or one of the other cities. They have chosen the path of education, of trying to break into the modern world,
 over the increasingly marginal viability of traditional agriculture and only come back at harvest time. It is bone dry here and baking hot, but nothing like what it will be like in two months, when he dry season climaxes with ground temperatures of 110 degrees F and higher.

   “The forest is pretty much gone,” Alison says as we motor through a flat, desiccated landscape devoid of plant life except for a few tall trees along what appear to be property lines. It is hard to conceive how anyone could manage to eke out a living here. “Each family has a piece of land, and takes care of what trees and medicinal plants remain on it, and they don’t poach each other’s, so private ownership offers some protection for the vegetation that is left,” Alison explains.

   We pull into the village. A crowd gathers around the car and she and the villagers exchange long, traditional greetings: Has there been peace in the day? Is your family healthy? How
 is your mother, your father, your children and relatives?   How’s the wife? How were the people in Bamako? I am growing impatient because I am having the runs. A boy is sent off
 to collect some leaves that are brewed into a bitter tea, which works.

 The Malian herbal pharmacopoeia can be highly efficacious, as Western researchers have discovered. Alison, a 23-year-old blonde in a sun bonnet, has won the villagers’ hearts with her selfless dedication and beautiful manners but is finding it a “huge challenge” learning the language and how the villagers see things and what they need. Water, of course, is the biggest issue.

 “The three village wells are filling with sand because the water table is sinking,” she explains, “so I’m helping repair their walls and line their bottoms with rocks.” Any day she is expecting a pump from World Vision, an American Christian organization that has an office in San, 25 miles away. “It’s going to be huge for women,” she continues. “They spend two hours in the morning and another two in the evening hauling up buckets from the wells.”  Last year before the rains, the village ran out of food, as it had repeatedly since l968. But this time the villagers had stored millet, their main crop, from the previous year’s harvest in a bank that Alison’s predecessor had started, so they could borrow enough to get through the worst of it, and when the new crop came in they restocked it.

We find several elders in the one-room school, relearning their ABC’s, which they were taught in the French colonial schools in the late 1950s but have forgotten. The literacy rate in Mali is shocking: 79 percent of the men and 85 percent of the women can’t read. The old men, sitting at tiny desks in their frizzy grey beards and skullcaps, beam the imperturbable good cheer that I often encounter in Africa, even in the most horrible circumstances. Sacks of millet take up half the room. The school doubles as the grain bank.

 One of the elders reminisces about the terrible drought in the early 1970’s. Alison translates his Bambara (the language of the Bamana). “The first year we were reduced to eating roots and leaves, but we stayed. The next year we finally gave up and abandoned the village and went to the cities.”

 Why has everything been drying up? I ask. “We don’t know,” he says. “It is the will of Allah. You can resist what men want you to do, but you can’t fight your destiny.”

 Overpopulation, deforestation, overgrazing—do these have anything to do with it ? I ask. 
“No,” says another man. “When we were growing up in the forties and fifties, we cut a lot of wood, but still the rains came. When the rains stopped, the trees died. The cutting of trees did not stop the rain. Allah gives rain. He is so old. He knows better than us.” 

“Last year we planted 1,500 Acacia senegalensis trees around the village,” Alison says.  “They’re good for the soil, and PDO  a French organization, says it will buy the wood. But the problem is that a tree crop takes longer to come in than an annual food crop, and a big drought can wipe it out. These people don’t have the luxury of waiting 10 years to be rewarded with the fruit of their labor, of investing time and energy in something that they may get a return on in the distant future but that every year they have a chance of losing. So not enough trees are being planted.”

  “When the rains come, we have to plant millet and other crops every day, from sunup to sunset, for four months. We don’t have time to plant trees,” a third elder says.

  This explains why none of the reforestation programs in Mali have been catching on in the villages. And the first man’s contention that the desertification has more to do with the lack of rain than the lack of trees is borne out by the most recent scientific findings, that the remote influence is a more important factor than the degradation narrative.

 The drought in the Sahel clearly correlates with El Niño, a cyclical warming in the Pacific Ocean that causes a disruption in global climate conditions.  During an  El Niño year,  a complex, non-linear system of “teleconnections,” or atmospheric feedback loops,  interacting over vast distances causes the harmattan to blow hard, suppressing the moisture-laden winds that come up
 to the Sahel from the Atlantic during the summer monsoon season and bring rain. (The southwestern U.S. is on a similar El Niño-driven drought cycle.) There is consensus among 
climate scientists that the current global warming trend, the almost vertical rise in the world’s mean temperature since l970, has a distinct human “fingerprint.” (See the previous
Dispatch on Dr. Camille Parmesan). 

 The current desertification of the Sahel may therefore be doubly anthropogenic—caused not only by the physical removal of its vegetative cover, but by far-away emissions from smokestacks and cars that, according to a growing number El Niño of climate scientists, are acting on the El Ninos.

  We continue to Djenne, in its heyday the biggest city in West Africa, as big as medieval London until 800 years ago, when a big drought drove everyone out (the population at the time was not large enough for deforestation to have played a role). It is still recovering from the l983-4 drought, when all the herds that sustained the city were lost and there was nothing to eat. Most of the buildings are made of mud and are hundreds of years old, including its mosque—the largest adobe structure on earth and one of the wonders of Africa.  Its imam is like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and there are some 60 Koranic schools in the city, which is visually
 little changed from the 13th century. A colorful cornucopia of ethnic groups in turbans and boubous is bartering in its numerous bazaars. Camels saunter down its dusty streets. Djenne’s fortunes depend on the annual flooding of the Niger’s inland delta. From here on up to Timbuctu, the northeast-flowing Niger spills its banks during the rainy season, forming the world’s second-largest inland delta (after the Okavango River’s in Angola), becoming a labyrinth of lakes and one of the most fecund freshwater fisheries in Africa, with raucous nesting colonies of water birds. There are 359 bird species, 147 of them endemic to the Sahel, in the delta. But the 1969-73 peak of the drought destroyed almost all the nesting colonies, and half a dozen species disappeared. In the old days flood-recession agriculture, a simple but ingenious practice, enabled Djenne, and later Timbuctu, to flourish. After the delta had flooded, as soon as the water seeped into the ground and the soil was gleaming with a rich new layer of sediment, the people sowed their crops. There was enough residual moisture in the soil to produce prodigious harvests without a drop of rain. The American organization World Vision revived the practice on eight square miles up near Gao, the port of Timbuctu, and grew bumper crops of sorghum, but the project was phased out in 2003 because of security problems, like the danger of being kidnapped, and because World Vision decided to  focus on drilling wells and providing each village in Sahelia Mali with a dependable source of clean water.  With the recent rains, flood-recession agriculture is returning to the delta.  It may save the day for Mali, or at least buy it some time, although parts of the  country where it hasn’t rained are still in trouble.

The next morning, after spending the night in a nice little whitewashed adobe hotel run by the cranky son of someAmerican missionaries,  we reach Sévaré, which is on the edge of Dogon country, where 300,000 of these small, pygmoid people live in villages of mud scattered over 5,000 square miles (about the size of the Navajo Reservation) of mostly bare rock.  The ones who live under La Falaise, the Cliff—as the escarpment is called—mummify their dead up on its ledges and believe that they reincarnate as the little children playing on the valley floor. They dance with masks and stilts like the Zuni of New Mexico   and are extraordinary wood
 sculptors. An old Dogon piece can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in Paris.