A Sight You'll Never See

Women folding themselves in half to plant onions.



Agha and Noufou in a happier moment.
Photo: Mike Wagner



I don't usually like taking very many pictures. I don't like feeling like a tourist in a place where I live, and besides, I'd rather be participating in the daily routine rather than documenting it. For work related events, or big celebrations, I'll break out the camera so I have something to show people at home, but generally I'd rather leave it at my house and spend the days unencumbered.

Usually this suits me just fine, but there have been three occasions so far when I was so struck by an image, by its visual effect and wider relation to Burkinabe life, that I have thought, “Man, I really wish I had my camera.”

The first came last May, when the villagers were preparing the fields for their cereal crops. I went out to a friend's field to watch, while he and two others started digging shallow holes to deposit seeds into. The holes catch rainwater, and more ambitious farmers fill them with compost, which not only adds nutrients to the soil but attracts termites, who then tunnel downward, allowing water to penetrate the ground even more and further improving soil viability.

There weren't any extra tools, so with nothing else to do, I climbed up a nearby Karité tree. The Karité, besides having strong, wide branches that lend themselves to climbing, is also famous for its fruit, which is used to produce shea butter, a popular ingredient in soaps and skin products sold in Europe and America. Burkina has the largest concentration of Karité trees in the world, a rare claim for any natural resource around here. Furthermore, the flowers that precede the fruits are claimed to make the best tasting honey on the continent.

Keeping an eye peeled for bees, I scrambled up to a suitable perch and looked down at the laborers. They were three in a line, bent over at the waist, having completed perhaps a twenty foot square field of small holes, standing out on an otherwise flat and uninspiring landscape.

Burkinabe spend a surprising percentage of their lives bent over at the waist. All facets of agriculture require it: digging and weeding with short handled hoes, sprinkling seeds and fertilizer, and chopping the stalks off near the ground at harvest time. Cooking is done in pots only a few inches off the ground, the cook bent over to stir, add ingredients, and tend the fire. The same goes for laundry and dishes, washed by hand in bins on the ground. If there is no pulley over a well, to draw water out people stand right on the edge and bend all the way over the mouth so as to not scrape and tear the water jugs on the well walls. People have died in this manner when a snapped rope causes a sudden and unexpected shift in center of gravity and the unfortunate person goes tumbling into the abyss.

Sweeping, too, is done with a handful of straw, bent over. I was once reprimanded by my host family for squatting down to sweep my room: “You have to do it like this,” they told me, bending over at the waist. In fact the only times I have ever seen a Burkinabe squat are to discretely urinate, or to eat. Mealtimes everyone crouches around the food, though I'm not sure why it's okay to eat but not sweep in that position. Watching the farmers dig from my spot in the Karité tree, I marveled that more people aren't crippled by bad backs.

The second time I wanted to take a picture but couldn't, I was visiting the host family I lived with during training. They live in the city of Ouahigouya and are well off by Burkina standards, with electricity and television in their house, and two cars in the courtyard. There's no running water but their existence is certainly far more modern that anything you see in village. The family consists of a husband, two wives, ten children ages 0 through 19, plus whatever relatives happen to be staying with them at any given moment. Five children belong to Abibata, the older wife, two to Mariam, the younger, two to another women whereabouts unknown, and one is actually an orphaned cousin who was taken in by the family. All the children are treated equally by all the parents, receiving love, instruction, and discipline from whomever happens to be around.

On the day in question, Mariam was applying a black dye to her feet in zig-zag patterns, a traditional way of decorating the body for a festival or special occasion. When she finished, she started on the feet of Ahga, the four year old girl, biological daughter of Abibata. Noufou, Mariam's six year old son, looked on. If Noufou lived in America he would be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated with a steady dose of pills. As it is, he is free to do what he pleases, which usually means stripping off his clothes and dancing naked in front of the television, shiny brown bottom shaking in time to the music videos. His other favorite activity is provoking his siblings, and especially Ahga, with whom he had at least one shouting/ shoving/ punching/ crying match per day during the time I lived with them. The worst was when she pushed him off a barrel, opening a bloody gash in his head. He retaliated by hurling a rock the size of a Big Mac at her, and through her tears she made ready to throw a piece of cinder block back before we managed to intervene and separate them.

While Mariam worked on the girl's feet, though, there was none of that, no fights, no crying, just three heads bent over together, concentrating, watching the application of traditional body art still relevant to this family, their lives somewhere in transition between ancient and modern.

In village, things like televisions are much more of a novelty. There are perhaps two or three families that own a set in Zogore, which they run off car batteries. Otherwise the only screen is at the bar, which for this purpose doubles as the town movie theater. The owner hooks his TV up to a generator and shows soccer games or kung fu movies and the patrons all pay around 20 cents to watch. Ever since cell phone service arrived in village last July, he has also allowed people to charge phones off the generator.

I was there one evening after dark to charge mine, while a soccer game was playing. Soccer is big here, especially if the game involves Didier Drogba, the Cote D'Ivoire star who plays for Chelsea in the English Premiere league. As I fiddled with a balky cord in the power strip under the television, I happened to glance up and look at the assembled crowd. On the backdrop of a dark night I saw a hundred dark faces, illuminated only by the glow of the television screen. All two hundred eyes, gleaming white in comparison, were fixed forward towards the action of the game. Expressions were uniformly serious, everyone concentrating, no movement, not a sound to be heard save the announcer's voice, everybody fixated on the game, silently rooting on their hero Drogba. I regretted not having my camera, but I doubted it could have done justice to the scene anyway, and especially not to the contrast when the Ivorian scored not minutes later and a pandemonium erupted of yelling, jumping up and down, and handshakes all around.

So, there are no appropriate photographs to accompany this piece. It's just as well, since descriptive as they might be, I don't value the photos enough to justify carrying a camera around everywhere I go for the rest of my life. It's good enough, I suppose, to observe and remember.