Purity and danger

Riddles are a favourite way of transmitting culture anywhere in Africa. A riddle from the central and northern regions in Chad goes: ‘Mačet, wa merem jidey nadani. I was on my way when a young gazelle (a gazelle princess, literally) beckoned me’. What is it? The answer: gum Arabic, and the link between gum and the gazelle is arresting beauty.

Ali Mbodou Langa has been a friend since the time I first came to Chad as a development worker and he had a similar job with another organisation. The country had just emerged from almost three decades of civil war and was deeply longing for reconciliation between peasants and herders, Christians and Muslims, and other groups who all felt they had been set against each other by professional warriors for no good reason. It was a great time for making friends. Ali grew up in the Batha province, in the northern part of the country, where his family used to roam the savanna with their cattle, along routes that have been set generations before. As a child, he walked about twenty kilometres each morning, from well to puddle. I once saw him kill a pigeon for dinner. While he held it in the bend of his left arm, the bird could not have felt anything but kindness, calm and tenderness, until it felt no more. This morning, behind his desk at a small development organisation in Ndjamena – his office in the architectural uniform of such establishments, its concrete walls and floor painted a faint and shiny yellow – he explained the riddle to me: ‘When a gazelle beckons to you, that is, when you come across a gazelle out there that looks you in the eyes, all you can do is stop and respond to that beauty. You are curious and are captivated. You forget everything else. It is the same with gum Arabic’.

I smiled. That is what happened to me.

‘Wherever there are acacias, there will be gazelles’, he went on, ‘and monkeys, snakes, and goats. They all love gum. And so do children. When I was a little boy, I had to take our goats to grassy places every morning, and bring them back in the evening.