Chapter 1: The Skeptic
I parked the air-conditioned Toyota Prado inside my compound. The white bodywork was immaculate, the engine silent. My name is Amadou Diallo, I am forty-two years old, and I built my life on the concept of control. Control of time, space, and materials. The only thing that escaped me was the spiritual climate that always hovered over Bamako.
My house was a manifesto against chaos—a modern block of smooth concrete and glass bays, angular and cold. Ironically, it contrasted with the single concession I had made to the old world: the large, gnarled baobab tree sitting at the center of the courtyard, a silent giant I hadn't dared to cut down. I was the embodiment of modern Malian success: a graduate from Paris, pragmatic to the core, and deeply skeptical. To me, the past was a disease that needed to be cured with reinforced concrete and interest rates. African myths, djinns, and epics were nothing more than picturesque folklore with no relevance to the future.
As soon as I pushed open the main door, a joyful and familiar cacophony hit me. The house, for a moment my refuge, transformed into a theater of traditions. There was the dry sound of a tapped calabash, the enchanting murmur of a deep voice, and above all, the crystalline laughter of my two children, Ismaël (eight) and Aïcha (six). I found them on the veranda, sitting on a woven mat. My mother, Mama Fatou, was the center of this small assembly. She was wrapped in a large indigo boubou dyed in the old fashion, her face weathered by years and dignity. Her slender hands gestured, painting images in the air.
"...and the Manding Bô, the buffalo of Manding, was so powerful, my children, that even the bravest hunters feared his breath... But Sundiata..."
I felt the usual tension rising. Always the same nonsense. I removed my beige suit jacket, trying to maintain a tone of professional calm.
"Mama. Always the same stories, eh? You're going to put them to sleep before dinner with these tall tales! Ismaël, Aïcha, don't you have homework to do?"
She stopped speaking, her wise gaze settling on me. She never took offense, which made her resistance even more exasperating.
"Amadou, my son, our sleep is a bridge to our heritage. Without the sweat and magic of people like Sundiata Keïta, the Lion of Manding, and all the kings who preceded him, our country would not be what it is today. You walk on the earth they forged, even if you don't want to feel it under your feet."
I shrugged, a mocking and disdainful smirk stretching my lips. "Nonsense, Mama. What forged this country is the oil we're trying to find and the roads we're trying to build, not magicians riding buffaloes."
I retreated to my office, letting my mother's voice resume its course. Folklore was a disease that couldn't be cured with arguments; it just had to be avoided. I needed my blueprints, my figures, the reassuring certainty of matter.
A few hours later, the silence had returned, thick. I was about to slip into my canopy bed when my gaze was drawn to two objects on the rug next to the nightstand. There was Ismaël's history notebook with its gaudy cover, and beside it, a book. It was a volume bound in dark leather, yellowed and cracked; it looked centuries old. The spine, stained with what looked like ochre earth, bore a handwritten label. I picked up the object. On the label, in my mother's handwriting: "Fatou Diallo - Gift from my late father, 1957".
I sat on the edge of the bed. It was an inheritance, then—a relic. I opened the book with care. The interior wasn't printed but meticulously calligraphed by hand. The smell was strong—old shea butter, papier-mâché, and cold incense. At the top of the first page, the text was written in Bambara but transcribed in Latin characters, a language I had abandoned for the French and English of business, but which I could still decipher with effort. I translated mentally, slowly, line by line.
"Musa Kònò. Nesin Fàntànmùsow kan. Kalo. Awa. N'i ma nafa dòn, i kana kala, n'i te kàla, i jigi bila dugu la." ("The Work of the Gods... Attention. Warning. Do not read the work concerning the gods without being a believer, at the risk of perishing (or losing yourself).")
I let out a brief, hoarse laugh. It was the ultimate proof of the superstitious absurdity in which my mother and her country were locked. A theatrical threat, a magical protection against reading. My nature as a scientist and rationalist took over. I will read. I will read, and then I will go to sleep. And nothing will have changed. Because none of it is real.
I turned on the small bedside lamp, preparing to dismantle the absurdity. I began to browse the story of the serpent Bida and the ancient pact. The words were slow, precise. The day's fatigue and the hypnotic character of the calligraphy acted like a sleeping pill. The lines began to dance. I felt my eyelids grow heavy, the weight of the book on my chest becoming comforting. I sank into sleep, the volume open.
The awakening was a sonic assault. A barbaric, powerful, piercing din tore me from sleep. It wasn't the sound of the 21st century. It was a discordant and primal mix: the rhythmic metallic sound of heavy hammers hitting an anvil, the hoarse shouts of men exchanging orders in pure Bambara, and the heavy bleating of cattle. The noise was so dense, so viscerally foreign, that my body jerked upright, heart pounding.
"SILENCE!" My cry was high-pitched, strangely light, almost like a child's.
I opened my eyes, panting. Reality tore apart. My brain refused to process the information. I was wrapped in a warm, smoky darkness. The air was saturated with an acrid smell of wood ash and cattle, with a note of rancid shea butter. Where... where is my room?
I was no longer in my air-conditioned villa. My bare hands felt the wall. It was beaten earth, irregular and rough under my fingers, pricked with bits of straw. My bed was nothing more than a woven mat placed on the floor.
Panic choked me. I was in a round hut with a heavy, thick thatched ceiling. The only light filtered through a small, low opening. I rushed toward that light. My body moved with a lightness and speed I hadn't known since my twenties. Stepping out, the sun—though veiled by morning mist—hit my eyes. The air, despite the heat, was purer than that of Bamako, without the smell of diesel.
I looked at my hands. They were slender, the phalanges delicate. No protruding veins. Not a spot. They were encased in the sleeves of a simple tunic of raw cotton, thick, dyed a faded indigo.
"No. No, it's impossible." My murmur was weak.
I rushed toward the well. A large calabash of muddy water sat there. The trembling water reflected back a face that wasn't mine. It was a young man, eighteen or twenty at most. The features were regular, the complexion lighter than mine, with large eyes filled with the naivety and sap of adolescence. My bone structure was light, my neck thin. I was a prisoner of a body I did not recognize.
The physical shock faded before the magnitude of the environmental shock. I took a few steps, staggering on bare feet across the hot earth. The square was crowded. The sounds of the forge came from a large awning of dry grass where two men, shirtless and muscular, beat iron with a thousand-year-old rhythm. Sparks flew. Their tools were primitive, forged by hand.
Around me, the buildings were nothing but round huts with conical roofs or rectangular houses with raw clay walls. Not a single electric pole, no corrugated iron, no plastic bags, not one sign of the 21st century. I observed the inhabitants with the eyes of an anthropologist, or rather, with the terror of a man witnessing the end of the world. Women carried heavy water jars on their heads, dressed in wrappers with complex traditional patterns. Their movements had a fluidity and strength no longer seen. Men in simple tunics tended to cattle or fields. Life centered on the herd and the land, with manual labor as the only motor.
I was in the Mali from before writing, before electricity, before my existence. It was the world Mama Fatou described in her tales. The earth under my feet wasn't the paved road I had designed. It was the earth that Sundiata had trodden. Amadou Diallo—the architect, the rationalist—found himself in medieval Mali, prisoner of a fable. The dry laugh I'd had while reading the warning transformed into a silence of icy terror.
"Do not read the work concerning the gods without being a believer, at the risk of perishing."
I was lost. I was a nobody, alone in a world of ochre and myth.