French guys and I struck up one of those fast friendships that are often given birth to on travels like this. They were a nice and friendly couple and the fact that they both spoke a reasonably good English certainly smoothed the path for our communication. As opposed to me, they were travelling only across Mali, but same as almost every other western traveller, they had roughly the same itinerary plan as I did. The differences were minor and they very seldom meant skipping something everyone else deemed worth visiting. It was more about how long to stay in a certain spot.
My plastic container wasn’t exactly the most comfortable seat I’d ever sat on, but at least I did have a good view of the road and the surrounding area. However, every now and then there was a serious threat of one or the other of my legs going numb, so I had to shift my position every once in a while. But I had to do it carefully because in the moving bus the stability of such makeshift seats is always questionable. I wasn’t really dying to end up sprawled with my head between somebody’s feet. Also, there was another thing. Those plastic containers look heavy and sturdy when full of liquid. But you’d be surprised how way more pliable they are when empty. And even if I can’t brag about excess weight myself, even as such I appeared to be too heavy for the old container. So with time the poor thing gradually started giving in under me and simply sagged out of shape. With every new deformation, not exactly the five star seat at any point, it lost a bit more of what little comfort it had offered me in the first place.
When some three hours into the journey we arrived in the town of San and the driver announced a fifteen-minute stop-over, I was probably among the most relieved.
Without any hesitation I jumped onto the opportunity to leave the bus and stretch my legs outside. The bus stop was at a run-down fuel station by the main road, way out of the town centre. By all rights, it should have been just a drab spot with hardly anything to do as the hub of local activities was elsewhere.
But today it was all very much different.
Quite improbably, there was a huge crowd outside, literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of people going up and down along the main road, some of them in the same direction as us, but most of them in the direction we’d just come from. Most of them were on foot, but quite a few rode bicycles or motorbikes. Some were in cars, some in buses, some in trucks. They were young and old, dressed up and dressed down, men and women. It seemed as if entire town population descended on us. Or, more likely, it seemed as if we had just arrived in the middle of some sort of celebration.
And San itself is the town of some 35000 inhabitants. Not inconsiderable in size for Malian standards, but not a place you’d necessarily include among must-see highlights of the country. It has a status of municipality, so it may be said it’s a kind of minor regional centre. As practically every other Malian settlement, it too boasts of a number of mosques, which are probably the biggest draw in terms of what to offer a foreign tourist. OK, in 2008 they had just established the first incarnation of so-called „Festival Sanké Mo“, an event named after a local lake – or pond, maybe – combining music, dance, sport, fishing and a commercial trade fair. They probably hoped this thing would go traditional, following somewhere in the footsteps of what they already had in Ségou and particularly Timbuktu. But for now, they didn’t have way too much to offer yet. Or at least both the French couple and I thought so.
The crowd was very friendly and in a buoyant mood. Whatever the cause for this huge gathering, it had worked well.
Our fellow passengers, i.e. local Malians, seemed pretty much unfazed by the whole show, though. They went about their own business, doing whatever they did to kill this fifteen-minute break. Some went in search of something to eat or drink. A few of the guys produced small-size carpets, unrolled them, laid them right on the ground a bit away from the bus, by a low wall, and bent and knelt down in a collective Muslim prayer. And some never left the bus at all.
Only the French and I turned our full attention to the crowd.
We all took pictures. The French tried to ask for permission most of the time before shooting and I pretended like I didn’t shoot them at all, doing it from my waist. It had worked before and it worked fine now. Then the French lady engaged in a conversation with some of the passers-by, obviously curious, same as me, about what was going on. When she was done, I asked her what she’d found out.
„They say a President was here,“ she said. „From Burkina Faso, I guess.“
Burkina Faso? Interesting.
Even if it kind of didn’t add up. I mean, I don’t say she was wrong. She probably told me what she’d heard. Of course, you could never know why a Burkinabe president would come to a town like San. Theoretically, there could always be a reason. Well, whatever it was, whoever had been there, the event had drawn a handsome crowd.
Fifteen minutes passed fast. The crowd was still streaming by and we had to go back inside the bus. It was time to move on in the direction of Mopti.
And later on, much later on, when I was already out of Mali, I stumbled upon an information as to what I had witnessed in San on that early afternoon during those fifteen stop-over minutes. The thing is, the Chinese had constructed a 5000-seater football stadium there, and precisely on January 4, the day when we had stopped by, it was officially inaugurated. And yes, the President had been there. But not the Burkinabe President, but rather Amadou Toumani Touré, the Malian one.
That finally made sense.
