Return to Timbuktu by Camel, Part 2

by Clifford A. Wright
It’s strange to think of Timbuktu, this town at the end of the earth, as cosmopolitan but in a curious way it is because the potpourri of people there mirrors the rest of Mali, a country with more than thirty different ethnic groups and languages.  But the population of Timbuktu is predominantly Songhay and Touareg.  In the fourteenth century Timbuktu was one of the leading scholarly centers of the world and even today it’s rapidly deteriorating private libraries hold thousands of priceless manuscripts of history, linguistics, geography, astronomy, and other sciences from the early Islamic period.  You can read more about this at Libraries of Timbuktu.
    When I was researching my new book Some Like it Hot:  Spicy Favorites from the World’s Hot Zones, forthcoming in October 2005, I had come across a famous Songhay dish called tuvasu (also called tukasu).  Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly famous, but it was the only Songhay dish I had heard about.  And all I had heard about making it was that it was a “recette difficile mais succulente!”  I didn’t know much about it as I didn’t know much about the Songhay, who live mostly in Niger, but it sounded intriguing and I knew that it was not a dish we would encounter unless I made arrangements.  During one of our little pow-wows to plot our daily affairs with Youssouf, our Bambara guide who accompanied us throughout Mali and Haliss, our Touareg guide here in Timbuktu, I inquired about tuvasu.  They both knew I was a food writer and Youssouf was already impressed with the fact that I ate local food, as he called it, without ever a cringe of the nose, as opposed to expecting tourist food as is most common among Western travelers.  Haliss said he would have to arrange it, since no local restaurant served it, and restaurants are entirely for tourists in Mali as people are too poor to be eating out.  In any case, it’s a dish prepared for special occasions and wouldn’t have appeared on a menu anyway.

  So after the wedding party (see part 1), we drove back into town in Haliss’ SUV to go to the Poulet d’Or, a restaurant where Haliss had pre-ordered a tuvasu, which takes several hours to prepare.  I was already fascinated with the small culinary incidents where I could encounter food in situ in Africa.  That might sound strange if you are traveling in Italy or France, but here in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the expansive Sahara, people ate wherever they could, and they didn’t eat much.  So for someone to share food was a great honor, although common, as these Muslim but non-Arab people have inherited the great traditions of hospitality known in the Arab world.  (Although we were fully expecting and intending on paying for our tuvasu).
    Earlier, for instance, while we waited for our ferry on the Niger River, some Songhay men were cooking fish soup in a deep metal pan over an open fire of hardwood charcoal at the opening of their camel-skin tent.  Their eating looked private so I hesitated going into the tent. But Youssouf was already inside and, chuckling, he beckoned us. Youssouf was quick to laugh about everything, which made him a great guide and a great friend.  I went into the dark tent and was hit by the wafting aroma of the fish soup and my hunger spiked immediately, but I made no indication that I would like some.  Although Youssouf, a Bambara from the south, was as black as the Songhay I couldn’t discern what distinguished these people from one another on the surface, outside of language.  They spoke different languages.  After time I did get better at distinguishing ethnic groups in Mali, but that was because I began discerning ethnic dress.  When I asked Youssouf if he could tell what someone was by looking at facial features alone, he said, yeah, about eighty percent of the time. 
    One Songhay man offered me a place next to him on the ground and ladled out soup for me into a small tin bowl.  I thanked him in Bambara.  “Inché,” I said ( I had learned the usual useful phrases in about five of the languages spoken in Mali).  He smiled broadly.  My buddies were a little intimidated by this proximity to “reality” and suspect food and stayed outside.  Youssouf, who speaks Bambara, French, and English spoke to the Songhay in Bambara, one of the two lingua franca of Mali (the other is French).  He must have told the men that I was very much interested in their food because suddenly I started getting a lot of information. All of these men wore the tattered dirty clothing typical of poor Africa and yet through their near-feral look they exuded a masculine dignity that was both kind and content.  Of course this kind of pop anthropology can be misleading; for all I know the guy was pissed off at his wife and just wanted to hang out with the guys.  One must be careful of thinking “noble savage.”
    I had no utensil to eat with and neither did they.  I picked the flesh off the whole little fish in our soup with my fingers.  The fish was a kind of little river carp about the size of a red mullet.  It was boiled in water until nearly falling off the bone in a broth emulsified by boiling with peanut oil, and chopped potato and chile leaves and something that made it taste earthy–a kind of spice like coriander seed maybe, although ground baobab is a possibility in these parts.  We dipped Touareg bread into it, a bread that is like a two-inch thick Arabic flatbread.  It was very delicious.
    Our “restaurant” was called the Poulet d’Or, a very fancy name for a hole-in-the-wall in Timbuktu that had all the ambience of an auto body shop.  But this is where we would have our tuvasu.  There was no evidence at all that this was a restaurant.  And it just didn’t seem that this place could have been a tourist place as it had a dirt floor and consisted of two large rooms with one table in each.  The white paint on the walls was chipped.  There was one picture on the wall, and the room was lit by one fluorescent bulb and was dusty and dingy.  But, you never know.
    They set the table for us with glass salad plates and a multicolored tablecloth of red, green, white, and blue strips with little red and yellow squares and dots in the center.   We ordered apple soda, a locally produced bottled drink of which we had grown quite fond.  We ordered water too, which one always does in the desert.  Youssouf and our driver Siddiqi joined us.  We were happy Siddiqi  joined us as he usually didn’t.  Siddiqi is a Dogon and only speaks that language and Bambara, but we communicated with him constantly about everything using our goofy pidgin African.  Our hosts first brought out a salad of tomatoes, boiled potatoes, onion slices, fresh chile slices, green bell peppers, and parsley on lettuce, with a creamy vinaigrette dressing.  I had no idea if this salad was Songhay, but I suspected not; it seemed French to me, but I didn’t care because I was famished and this was an incredibly good salad and we ate it with Touareg bread. 
    Then came the famously unknown Songhay tuvasu.  I had spent the day talking David and Steven, my companions, into eating this stuff, convincing them that it was an extraordinary dish and unique and you couldn’t leave Mali without having tried it.  I made that all up.  Even though I had asked for it with some authority, according to them, I actually didn’t have a clue what it was until it arrived at the table.  Even then I wasn’t sure what we were to eat. 
  Two large platters arrived.  In one a mound of very red sauce covered pieces of mutton that had been stewed for many hours in peanut oil, water, tomatoes, onion, and “twelve spices” our cook told us.  The cook was Songhay and spoke broken Bambara with Youssouf who translated.  But the cook didn’t know the names of the spices in Bambara.  I never did get exactly what the twelve were, but we did figure out that salt, black pepper, chile powder, aniseed, cinnamon, garlic, cloves, coriander seed, bay leaf, and ground baobab were ten of them.  The mutton ragoût is braised until the liquid is much reduced and saucy and unctuous and glistening a brilliant fire-engine red.  I knew from experience that that meant they must have used a lot of tomato paste, maybe up to a half pound.  There were also chopped dates and fresh tomatoes and fresh chiles in the ragoût as well. 
    The other platter contained grapefruit-size spongy bread dumplings with the consistency and texture of angel food cake covered with a little of the sauce.  These dumplings were steamed as they sat on top of the mutton in an hermetically sealed cauldron.  These huge dumplings were taken out as the mutton continued to cook.  We spooned the spicy mutton sauce over the dumplings and ate.  There were six of these Rabelaisian dumplings and all five of us very hungry guys could only eat three of them. 
    The mutton fell off the bone and the sauce and dumplings were very heavy and rib-sticking, but very satisfying.  In fact, it was the type of delicious food that you keep shoveling into your mouth long after you’re full.  After dinner we were joined by some Touareg men selling daggers and jewelry and of course we had to buy some.  For dessert the waiter brought out these very surprising and very spongy crêpes coated inside and out with granulated sugar, a dish which they called “flan.”  But I was wondering if this might not just have been their version of the Algerian ghrayf (غرايف), a spongy semolina crêpe.

To be continued

The Songhay tuvasu

Youssouf, Siddiqi, David, and Steve eating tuvasu at Poulet d'Or, Timbuktu

Ferry crossing the Niger River near Timbuktu

The main drag in Timbuktu

Comments

[John]

Those are the biggest dumplings I have ever seen in my entire life.

What a journey you went on.

[Mohamed]

Mr Wright, your photographs are so nice. You write about Africa and Arabs without looking down at us as cute people. It is very good to read such clear words.

[Phillipe]

The hospitality is legendary. They will not eat to feed a guest. It is always an honor to dine with such people of flowing generousities. This is why people still dream and talk about Africa after having left it over 50 years ago. It is the people, especially the touaregs who are so magnificent. I left my heart in Algeria too.

[Amina]

You eat with the people. You eat what we eat and it touches our hearts. That is the way we are. It makes us smile and so happy. We tell everyone that a foreigner loves our food the way we eat it.

[Hussein]

my english is notso good. but i can read more better than i can write. i like story very much. very true account.

[James]

I like the way you matter of factly describe things that to my western mind might seem unusual. And of course you are absolutely correct to do so, because that is the life there and nothing unusual about it.

I had no idea it was a center of scholaryl studies. I just thought of it as a far off place. Fascinating. I am mesmerized by all this. So much history there.

[Patrice]

I am French born. My parents are from Mali. They do not like to talk about their past too much. I am learning alot from your series. You are a very clear writer. Very sensitive too, but not romanticizing. You are absolutely right about the dignity but not getting into noble savage stereotypes. Thank you for writing this.