Niger River Project

We’re back on the river after our brief detour to Dogon country. The mode of transport is a pinasse complete with 40cc Honda motor. The destination is Timbuktu, the fabled city of gold whose discovery cost so many European lives.

We’ve been joined for the three-day trip by four friends from the UK, Cat, my girlfriend, an Australian, Trev, who came with us to Dogon Country, and two other English guys and one woman we’ve met in Mopti. Strangely, the two guys, from London, are also called Ben and Dan; should make for an interesting ride…

The first bit of the trip is a straightforward rerun of our earlier ventures to Lac Debo – where readers may recall I was first hit by malaria. It’s much the same as before – peaceful, little fishing villages slipping past as we eat up the miles.

During the journey, I find myself reflecting on Mungo Park’s journey up this part of the river. By this stage, Park was a desperate man. He had lost most of his men to malaria or murder. His presence – not for the first time – had not been welcomed by many of the local kings, but Park resolved to press on, abandoning all his usual diplomacy and opting instead to fight his way down the river.

In our pinasse, with its gleaming new outboard, we whip along at a pace. How different for Park; with nothing but wind or manpower to propel his craft along, progress would have been slow. Split into narrow creeks and channels, the Niger at this point is narrow. In their flimsy boat, Park and his men would have made a tempting target for any angry tribesmen attempting to hinder their progress.

Because none of Park’s diaries from this stage of his journey survived, one can only imagine the horrors he and his men endured as they fended off attacks from the bank. The wide open space of Lac Debo, where the tendrils of the Inland Delta come together, must have come as a welcome relief to the crew of the Djoliba.

For us, it’s Lac Debo where the fun begins. Due to a late start, we’re running slightly behind schedule – as far as anything in Africa ever runs to such a thing. There probably isn’t even a word for it here. If we’re to make Timbuktu in time for our next date – a three-day festival in the middle of the Sahara – we need to be across the other side of the lake by the end of the day.

Night falls, and still we’re a long way off our target. Somehow, though, our skipper manages to plough on in the dark. And it’s proper dark here, African dark – not a photon of light pollution in the sky and, tonight, no moon.

For us passengers it’s a wonderful opportunity to lie on the deck of the boat and watch the stars, Orion doing his nightly stellar battle with the mighty Taurus. For the skipper, though, the conditions are tough.

Even at this time of night, some Bozo fishermen will still be out dredging the waters for fresh catches. Some of them have lights in their pirogues, and these we can see twinkling in the dark. But it’s the ones we can’t see that are the danger. At any moment I half expect to hear bangs and shouts as we plough across the path of a canoe hidden in the murky blackness of the lake.

But after about an hour and a half, the skipper brings us skillfully up on the far shore of the lake, with scarcely a bump. We all applaud, relieved to be on terra firma.

After a night camping on the lake’s sandy shore, we set sail early. Day two passes in much the same way as day one. We stop at a village to buy fish – the plump, fleshy capittaine for which the Niger is famous, and seems to produce in endless quantities.

Mid-afternoon, the pinasse pulls into Niafunke, a town situated on the beginning of the Niger’s Great Bend, where the river gradually begins to deviate away from its logic-defying journey north into the Sahara, to a more sensible course east then south towards the Atlantic.

Niafunke is only small, but it’s famous for being home to the great Malian blues musician, Ali Farka Toure. Toure sadly died last year, but the town has been imortalised as the name of one of the last albums he recorded. For all that, it’s not much of a place – sandy, hot, the usual ramshackle market place, no sign of its illustrious son. We don’t stop for long, the pinasse skipper keen to push on.

Day three, I awake on the sand dune where we’ve stopped for the night with a strange thought rolling through my head: for the first and possibly only time in my life, I can say, ‘Today I’m going to Timbuktu’.

After our sojourn in Djenne, the feeling that we want to get back on the river is strong. It’s over two weeks since we were last in Djoliba and we’re getting withdrawal symptoms.

Our next goal is the Niger’s so-called Inland Delta – a vast wetland area covering some 30,000sq km, where the river spreads out into an intricate network of channels, creeks and lakes. At the heart of the delta is the huge Lac Debo, more an inland sea than a lake, especially at this time year before the dry season really gets a grip.

I’ve organised a guide through a Dutch charity, Wetlands International, which is working on various projects to conserve the wildlife and biodiversity of the delta. We arrange for a pinasse (a large covered pirogue complete with outboard) to take us on a four-day excursion into the delta to get a feeling for the area and meet some of the villagers who manage to scratch out a living in this watery world.

We nose out of Mopti early on a Sunday morning. Mopti is the largest and busiest port town on Mali’s stretch of the Niger, and the best starting point for any trips to the delta.

It’s a brilliant morning, bright and fresh. Already, the local Bozo fishermen are hard at work, gliding across the river in their pirogues, casting nets and pulling in glittering heaps of fish. Oumar, the helmsman of our boat, tries to weave a course through them, but more often than not ploughs straight ahead, leaving them to get out of our way.

The roof of the pinasse provides a perfect platform for watching Niger life slip by. We pass countless villages, where children run along the bank waving and shouting “toubab” (whiteman) as we glide by. Humble as these villages are, almost all of them boast an intricate mosque, like scaled-down versions of the great mud edifice at Djenne.

Soon the sun is too ferocious to allow sitting on the upper deck, so we retire to the cool shade below. Sine, our guide, begins to explain to us some of the rich bird and wildlife that lives – or lived – in the delta.

It’s a tragic but all too familiar tale: although still a highly important habitat for migrating birds, the delta today supports only a fraction of the mamalian and reptilian life it once did. A combination of hunting, population growth, deforestation and desertification have all but wiped out the area’s once rich wildlife, and the lions, crocodiles, elephants and other game that once roamed here have either been killed or found other places to live. Weltands International is doing valuable work to stop this trend, particularly where the delta’s birdlife is concerned, but for the area’s other wildlife, it’s probably too late.

After about four hours’ cruising down one of the Niger’s many channels, we reach an area where the bank drops away, the horizon opens out and there’s little to see but water, vegetation and more water. Occasionally, tiny villages punctuate the scene, somehow clinging to the few patches of dry land in the area. This is the beginning of Lac Debo.

The river channel we’re following twists and turns through the marshland, one of many that criss-cross the delta. Somehow, unneringly Oumar manages to pick the right one, and soon we enter the lake proper.

To our left, the lake is so large you can’t see across it. Straight ahead there is a distant shoreline of sand and bushes. This is the first hint that, in spite of the predominance of water around us, we’re heading into the world’s largest desert. The contrast is a sharp reminder of the fragility of existence in this remote place and a graphic demonstration, if any were needed, that here the Niger is life.