Chapter 2: The Well of Memory
The terror was too cold and too vast to allow for hysteria. My architect's mind, accustomed to managing crisis-ridden construction sites, took over. I needed a plan, an explanation. This hut, this village, this body: all of it was the effect of an anomaly, a mechanism that had to be identified.
I retreated into the relative shadow of the round hut. It was of absolute simplicity: a cold central hearth, rudimentary earthenware and wooden utensils, and rolled-up sleeping mats on the wall. The smell was even stronger there, blending cold smoke with the animal musk of sweat. I immediately thought: Air quality: unacceptable. Structure: doubtful.
I began to search—frantically, meticulously. Under the mats, near the walls. I was looking for a clue: a fragment of machined metal, a battery, anything that wasn't manufactured by ancestral craftsmanship. Where is the book? The leather volume? That's what made me fall. If it's here, I can.... Nothing. Only hard, compacted earth. I felt the clay walls, hoping to find a hiding place. My mother had often scolded me: "Amadou, you know nothing of our old ways! You don't even know how to tell millet from sorghum!". Those lessons, which I had rejected as superstition, would be vital to me here. I was a total misfit.
As I knelt in the dust, a strange sensation crossed my skull. Images flashed—not mine, but those of this body's host. It wasn't a personal memory; it was a bank of factual data. I now knew that this body belonged to a young man named Bakari, son of a farmer named Daba. I knew the location of the enclosure, the name of the blacksmith (Djimé), and the trajectory of the sun to determine the time. It was Bakari's technical and social memory, a survival map, but it buried my identity as an architect even deeper.
A sharp noise at the entrance of the hut. Someone leaned in. It was an elderly man, back bowed, face hard, dressed in a simple brown cotton shirt. His gaze was severe, tired. In this hut, there was a familiar and respected scent that, in Bakari's memory, was associated with this man: the Father.
"Bakari! Still loitering? The sun is already shoulder-high. Your father is calling you. The sorghum fields don't wait for the lazy. Take your hoe".
The man, Daba, gave me no chance to respond, walking away with a slow, steady step.
My new "father"!. I seized the hoe with its smooth wooden handle leaning in a corner, analyzing it first as an object of study, not a work tool. I hurried out of the hut, walking on my heels with the brisk, jerky gait of a man in a hurry and used to asphalt. Daba was waiting for me in the shade of the great baobab. I walked toward him, the hoe carelessly resting on my shoulder, the iron pointing toward the sky, and said in the tone of a foreman questioning a subordinate:
"Hello. Where exactly are we going to work?".
Daba froze. He turned his head slowly, staring at me with an expression mixing surprise and latent anger. He didn't answer immediately.
What did I say? What would Bakari have said?. The memory information sounded the alarm: Greet elders by bowing slightly, never address them directly without a ritual formula of politeness. And the word exactly was of an insufferable urban pedantry.
"I... father Daba," I stammered, trying to correct my course with the greeting. "I am sorry, I was... asleep".
Daba sighed heavily. "It's not your mouth that bothers me, Bakari. It's the speed of your step and the pride of your posture. A son does not walk like that before his father, like a war chief before his men. And a son does not rest his tool on his shoulder without reason, like a fetish priest. Your head is elsewhere. You have the gait of a man who has nothing to learn".
He pointed toward a spot without looking at me. "We are going to the West field. Today, we finish weeding. Avoid stepping on the shoots".
He began to walk, his step slow and measured, forcing me to slow mine to stay respectfully behind him. My young man's body wanted to run, to overtake this old man, but my brain, panicked by the previous error, held it back. We left the village. My bare feet, which I hated feeling dirty, were getting used to the sensation of the hot, grainy earth. I looked at the landscape with two pairs of eyes.
The village, a cluster of thatched roofs and clay walls, shrank behind us. In the distance, the flat-topped hills stood out, capped with a light mist. The sky was vast and of an immaculate blue, without the slightest trace of pollution. It was of an absolute aesthetic brutality, a landscape worthy of a historical fresco that I could have framed in my office. The people we passed greeted Daba with respect: "Hello, father Daba". I tried to respond with a nod I thought appropriate, but it was undoubtedly too abrupt—the simple nod of a man in a hurry. We reached the fields: immense, unfenced plots where the high green sorghum swayed in the breeze. Daba stopped abruptly, spitting on the ground.
I noticed two men further along a hedge of millet, who seemed to be discussing animatedly. They were visibly from another clan or another village. Daba whispered in my ear: "Don't listen to those snakes, Bakari. They are men of Kassa; they always have venom in their mouths".
My body of Amadou, the modern man, couldn't help but listen to the gossip. The wind carried their words:
"...Yes, they say he has returned, the son of the Sorceress Queen!. This Sundiata! He thinks because he knows how to talk to a few birds, he will take the rightful place of his brother!. The Manding is weak, but it will be broken by this cripple. He would do better to stay in exile in Nema!". The other man snickered, a dry sound. "Kings are fools, but did his father, King Naré Maghann Konaté, not see that this child was nothing but a bad omen?. A cripple! How can a cripple lead our warriors?".
Amadou the intellectual's blood froze. These were the exact names my mother had spoken the day before: Sundiata, the Lion of Manding. These men weren't talking about history. They were talking about the current political news of their kingdom. I was not only in the past, but I was—in an incredibly dangerous and irrefutable way—at the heart of the Epic of Sundiata Keita, at the time of the intrigues and exiles that would forge the Mali Empire. The skeptic had been dropped directly at the bedside of the myth he denied.
Daba turned back, paying no attention to the conversation of the Kassa men. He handed me the strap of a calabash and a small gourd.
"Water is rare. Drink little, work much. Weeding is unforgiving. You were too slow this morning, Bakari. Your head is too heavy with dreams".
He began to strike the earth. I had to imitate his movement. It was the first time in my life I had held a farm tool. My slender hands, the ones I didn't recognize, were quickly painful. Bakari's memory told me what to do, but Amadou's office-worker body couldn't follow. I gave a clumsy blow with the hoe. The earth rose in small blocks, but the tool slipped, missing the weed. The movement was jerky and purely muscular, without the body's sway that gives power.
Daba stopped. He looked at me with an expression I knew was disappointment, not anger. "What is wrong, my son? You strike the earth like a man who has never held a hoe. Your movements are stiff, urban. You have a shoulder reflex that only men who wear suits and make limited gestures know".
I didn't know what to answer. How could I tell this man that until yesterday, I was the boss of a team of a hundred men and that I spent my days drawing skyscrapers?. "I... I woke up poorly. My back is stiff, Father Daba".
Daba nodded, a rare small smile of amusement lighting his severe features. "Let the blacksmith examine you tonight. But until then... you must work. Strike from the hips, not the arms. Let the weight of the sky help you. The field will not forgive your softness".
He returned to work, his movement fluid and powerful, moving more earth in a single stroke than I could in five. I had to integrate, to fade away. Amadou had to become Bakari, at least in appearance, if I wanted to survive the Epic unfolding around me.