Several hours later, we reach Thomas’s village, which he prefers not be named to protect it against intrusion from outsiders; The three of us constitute the great number of   toubab, or whites, who have ever visited there at one time.  We sit with the chief and several elders on sisal mats in front of his house, in a narrow alley lined with cylindrical adobe granaries with rakishly tilting conical thatch roofs. The men are swathed in turbans that can be quickly rewrapped around their entire heads, except for the eyes, when the sand is flying.  “It has always been dry here,” says the only one of the men who speaks French. “C’est un pays désertique.  This is desert land. But in the 70’s and 80’s things weren’t going well at all. There was a drastic reduction in the number of trees. The water table sank below their root systems and they just shriveled up and died in place.” Thomas is helping the villagers build stone retention walls around
 the 100-foot-high knolls where the millet fields are, to keep the soil from blowing off and going down into the crevices between them, where it has to be brought back up by mules. “Life is harder because there used to be a lot of fruit trees,” says another, Thomas translating his Dogon. “Munju with little fruits. Lemon trees, mangos. Sa berries, which are like grapes. Add a little sugar, it’s good.” 

“There is less rain,” says a third, “because there are more people now, and they are doing things that Amba [the supreme deity in the Dogon’s animist pantheon, who has been merged with Allah] doesn’t like, and it is Amba who brings rain. 

The people are not obeying the unifying principles. You tell them they can’t burn their fields and they go ahead and do it anyway. The young people aren’t listening to the old people any more.
 They just want to go to Bamako. 

“It used to rain before,” the old man continues, “because everybody did what they were supposed to do. They prayed for rain and it was in their hearts. But not everybody’s heart is
 in their prayers now, so Amba doesn’t listen to them.” 

The elders have stopped giving initiations to the young men because they don’t think they’re worthy to receive them, so in another generation, if not sooner, the traditional Dogon belief system will only exist in the ethnographies of the early anthropologists. 

At least 59 organizations have anti-desertification programs in Mali, each with a different approach to the problem. We visit ALCOP, a Canada-backed Malian group in Douenza, and talk to its chef de projet, Modibo Goita.

  ALCOP, he tells us, is growing and distributing saplings of Boscia senegalensis, a tree that sets fruit just during the most stressful weeks of April and May, when the temperature hits 110 and the villages run out of millet and money. It is also combating “genetic erosion,” the loss of traditional varieties of millet and other food plants, by collecting seeds from the villages and growing them in experimental plots to see which do best in the drought-shortened growing season. It is collaborating with Israeli arid-land specialists from Ben Gurion University of the Negev on techniques for getting the most out of each drop of water, like waffle gardens. In this strategy, each plant grows in its own little water-retaining box of mud. In others, the sprouts are covered with a moisture-retaining layer of straw, or with a plastic sheet with holes that they can grow up through; or hoses with holes poked in them at intervals are placed so that only the immediate area around each plant will be watered.

  The Traditional Medicine Center in Bandiagara, which we visit on the way back down, was started by the Italian government’s international aid agency in l984 and is now entirely run by Malians.  The center prepares and packages 20 species of native plants that Dr. Pakay Pierre Mounkouro, its director, tells us work in some cases better than Western drugs for such ailments as hemorrhoids, hypertension, malaria, constipation, dysentery, and hepatitis.  

“These plants are in big demand all over the country, and are a major cause of deforestation,” Dr. Mounkouro explains.  “We are training the women in 40 villages to grow them and to make cuttings of the trees in the forest without killing them: If the bark is stripped, cover the gash with mud; if it is a root that you want, don’t take the biggest one. 

There are 300 species of medicinal plants in this forest, but we have already lost 20 to 25 of them because of deforestation, lack of rainfall, and la récolte inconsciente, heedless harvesting.

 And once a plant is gone, the knowledge goes. C’est fini. The old people die, the young don’t get it. So our botanists are in a race against time.”

  “The medicinal-plant initiative is a win-win situation,” Alison observes.  “It protects the forest and reinforces the people culturally, so they are not so dependent on pharmaceutical products from the outside.” 

Another strategy is to reduce population growth. The New York-based Population Council, which has centers in Bamako and Mopti, is trying to persuade Malian women not to marry so young. “Those who stay in the villages often become by the age of 14 the last wife of someone 30 years older,” its director, Judith Bruce, told me. “If their parents can be persuaded not to marry their daughters off right away, but to send them to work in one of the cities until they are 18, the girls are able to build a trousseau and develop savoir vivre and acquire some bargaining power, which will serve them well when they become wives and mothers, and this four-year delay has a staggering effect on demographic growth. It lengthens the span between generations, and the later a woman has her first child, the fewer she will have down the line.”

  There is some effort to make more efficient cooking stoves and ovens available, but not enough. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization had just given a grant to a community of 100 fishermen on the island of Woyowayanka, three miles down the Niger from Bamako that enabled the women to buy four Chorken [a traditional design whose origin I haven’t been able to find out] of fish-smoking ovens, which have double burners that circulate the fumes, and they are using much less firewood to smoke the fish the men bring in.

 Efficient stoves, if widely utilized, could be 25 times more effective than tree planting in taking the pressure off the native forest, according to the traditional agroforester David Farrelly.  But they are not out in the villages.

   Despite all their efforts, most of the organizations I talked too remained pessimistic. The general consensus was that the villagers will continue to multiply and cut trees until the Sahel becomes completely denuded and desiccated and uninhabitable—that nothing more can be done about the degradation narrative than about the remote influence. So the Sahel seems doomed.

       Darkness fell as Shek and I, alone now, were still 90 miles from Bamako, and the Sahel in every direction was soon ablaze with illegal fires. The degradation narrative was in full apocalyptic swing.  “The functionaries of the Service des Eaux et Forets who are supposed to control the fires only work from 7:30 AM to 4 PM, so the people clear and torch their fields and cut their firewood at night,” Shek explained as we ploughed through a thick curtain of smoke billowing across the road. “To make a field you are obliged to set fire to the forest. That is why
 the Service, when it gives you a permit to clear a field, taxes you for replanting the trees you burn. But nobody wants to pay the tax, so they do it clandestinely, and in actuality no trees are being replanted.”

  I mentioned to Shek the primatologist  Alison Joly’s remark about how the people of Madagascar are sacrificing their future so they can survive in the present, and he said, “Do you know why the people here are sacrificing their future? Because their religion says the future is uncertain. It is even uncertain that you are going to live to see it, whether it will be good or bad. The duration of your life, who can know, so you just have to live in the present, and the future belongs to God. That is how they think.”     

After this tirade against the ignorance and fatalism of his countrymen, Shek told me how the searing second peak of the drought, in l983, was “ended by the capture of a sirène [a mermaid] by some Bozo fishermen, who held her hostage until she unleashed a tremendous deluge that caused floods, then they let her go. I personally saw her,” he assured me. “She was dark brown, the color of hippo skin, and a meter long. She was covering her face, but I could see that it was somewhat elongated. She was not a god, but a génie fétishe [a luck-bringing demi-goddess] of the water.”

We stopped at a roadblock manned by the Service des Eaux et Forets. “Everyone who passes with wood must have a permit,” Shek explained. “You go to the Service and they ask what kind of trees are you going to cut, and how many? You say only Caritea trees, and if they find you with a tree that is not Caritea, you pay a fine. But in all this there is la corruption. So it is impossible to stop the desertification and the future of the Sahel is not good.”

The latest news from Mali, after three summers of good rain, seems more encouraging. Saplings have sprouted in the desertified land around Alison’s village, and in Thomas’s village only the old people can recall when it was so green. The inland delta has been flooding extensively. Dense rookeries of water birds are beginning to fill the inundated treetops again, and as the water recedes, crops are being sown in the new coating of  sediment as the water drains off.  But Dr. Bouboucar Diallo, the Institute of the Sahel’s economist, was not overly optimistic about this let-up of the drought. “The immediate picture for the Sahel is looking wetter,” he allowed, “and the food security situation is better than it has been in years. But this is only a temporary respite.” 

The long-term, overall picture is that the worldwide warming and drying trend will continue, the El Niños will become more frequent and intense, and the forest will continue to disappear, until Malians will have to find somewhere else to live.

 The Sahel will be one of the first places to go, and the rest of the earth’s desertifying land surface will follow suit.   One night, at one of Bamako’s numerous night spots, I heard a musician named Jimmi Jakob perform a song he had written called “Ghigi Chyena,” which means “all hope is gone” in the language of the Bamana. It was a haunting rendition of the degradation narrative, a Malian blues for the Sahel. “If the trees are gone, what will become of the birds, and what will become of the streams?” 

Jakob explained afterward. “And if the streams are gone, what will become of the fish? What will become of us and all that lives?  If you don’t have a mother or father, what can you do? We are the orphans of the world. When the population cuts the forest, there is no hope. Everything is spoiled. The world is going bad. That is what this song means.”

 But as if to temper his catastrophism, to remind us that the ways of nature, or Allah, are inscrutable, an unseasonable torrent of rain began to pound on the tin sheets of the little dive and to pour down through the numerous holes in them on to the dance floor, where couples were slowly gyrating in the darkness. They moved away from the splashes and kept dancing.