Day Three – visiting the chief

My hands are sore, and I guess Moussa knows it. This morning he declared we have to go pay a visit to people in the village. What I haven’t dared to tell him is that my butt actually hurts as much as my hands, from sitting on a tiny wooden bench all day to weave yesterday. My rear will have to adapt… and a walk through the village will do me some good.

The village chief’s house is ten minutes by foot on a tiny sandy path. We’re travelling across his mango orchards, beautiful and large plantations of mature trees, half of which are in full blossom… a sugar fest for the village’s bees! The chief himself has gone to the fields. We are invited to take a seat for a while. The chief’s compound is breathtaking by size. I count around twelve mud huts and the same number of grain storage units. The number of kids is also disconcerting. Moussa explains that a household here groups many generations, and many wives, especially when the so tiguy, the “chief of the house”, is wealthy. In fact, the chief’s brother’s family is here too. As the latter passed away, his wife and kids have come to live with him, contributing by their work to the life of the household.

A house (center) , and a food storage unit (left)

I ask Moussa how one becomes chief of a village. Civic representation, like land ownership, is a matter of who was here first it seems. The first person to be there was a hunter, Moussa tells me. The chief’s family came in this area and settled in what is now Toussian-Bandougou. People settled here, and appropriated land by cultivating it. Now there are two hundred people in the village. Some older families own more than a hundred hectares. Newcomers own no land, and they cultivate what the land owners can’t cultivate themselves. This doesn’t reflect any consideration of superiority. Everyone cares for his or her neighbours. On the other hand, land cannot be sold here. It is free and if they ask for it, it is naturally lent for an agricultural cycle to the people who can cultivate it. Yet the owner will not often accept that the borrower plant new trees on the land, as this would mean long term use of the land. Practically, it represents a change in land ownership, which has to be discussed beforehand.

Banji collection. Four times a day - 11pm, 4am, 10am, 3pm

The chief has now showed up, with two of his nephews. We are served some Banji in a calabash. Banji is the sap of the Ronier, collected by some villagers making it their trade, four times a day. The drink is sweet in the morning, and alcoholised in the evening (The Perfect Drink...) We meet Si Barthelemy Sanogo, the first son - as his name, Si, indicates – of the chief’s deceased brother. Si is also a beekeeper. He says he used to weave traditional houses. Like Moussa, he has received training on honey making by the PAMER, the project I work for, and now owns one modern bee house. His take on honey making is drastically different from Moussa’s though. It seems that with the revenue from the mango orchards, Si doesn’t really have any incentive to make money on his honey. The modern bee house he got just replaced the numerous traditional houses he had to weave to replenish his own yearly supply of honey. We are far from the enterprise Moussa is considering, yet they received the same technical and commercial training by the project I work for.