Forty five minutes later we arrived at the border post on the Malian side. Nominally, it carried the name of the nearest settlement, the village of Kiri. But truth to say, we hadn’t seen a single hut, let alone a house along the way to possibly let us in on the fact that people lived around. But Kiri it was.
Just twenty kilometres to the southeast from Koro, or even a bit less than that, it wasn’t exactly at the other end of the world. But in these parts even twenty kilometres seemed to represent a respectable distance.
The check point itself didn’t offer much by way of points of interest. You could tell it suffered from a rather obvious neglect and even by African standards it was pretty much a backwater. There was a tall, half-rusty metal pole on which they hoisted the red-gold-and-green Malian flag, with those pan-African colours in reverse order, of course. There were a number of low, red-brick buildings were some locals lived and eventually it led me to a conclusion that this tiny cluster of huts was the settlement of Kiri. There were two rusty and battered metal barrels, which once upon a time had been coated with red-and-white paint in the same mould as those that I’d seen on my way into Mali. Except that these particular two had clearly been kicked aside and no one could be bothered to put them again to any use.
And there was a tent where the officer in charge was handling the border matters at a wooden table which served as the official desk. Just outside, a bit to the side, there was a low, makeshift table knocked literally out of few thick sticks and some kind of plate, with two deck chairs and a few plastic chairs around it.
As usual by now, since I was the only white person there, I was given a preferential treatment and my passport was processed first. The inside of the tent was dark, with no lighting whatsoever. But I guess the officer was used to the low level of light and acted as if things were just fine. He was polite and didn’t bother me much. All he cared to check, my passport, my visas and my vaccination certificate, were all right, so in short order I was free to leave.
Except it didn’t help me much. As ever when tied to the public transport, I had to wait for everybody else to go through the same procedure before moving on. And as ever here in Africa, roughly half of my fellow passengers didn’t have all it took to have a smooth border crossing. Most of those „had forgotten“ to take along the vaccination certificate. Even if I seriously doubted they had ever had one in the first place. But one or two did one better. They had forgotten passports. Or any other form of ID.
Now, this being Africa, the fact that you didn’t have your passport on you, or an ID, didn’t necessarily mean they would turn you down at the border and send you back. No, it only meant that what you now needed were right negotiating skills so that they let you through at a relatively low cost. Because, of course, it all came down to money.
As a consequence, roughly the half of us with orderly documents were soon waiting for the other half without them to haggle their way across the border. And that was the part that took time.
So what could a westerner like me, temporarily stranded at this out-of-the-way border outpost, do while waiting for the apparently endless discussions between the border police and those wishing to cross into Burkina Faso to come to an end? Not much, really. The most enticing pastime I could think of, i.e. talking pictures, was already a risky business in far less sensitive places in this part of the world than the one here. I had a first-hand experience on that score.
And yet, the devil wanted to have his way. I just couldn’t resist the temptation to shoot a few and so I did. Two policemen outside the tent eyed me with utmost suspicion. They sensed something was wrong and it was obvious from their face expressions that they trusted neither my camera nor me. But over the twenty-and-something days here in West Africa I had evidently perfected the art of shooting from the waist so well that the guys, much as they seemed intent on jumping me at the first sign of transgression, eventually noticed nothing concrete.
Yes, it was a risky business. No joke. So after just three pictures, I didn’t have the nerve to go on any more. But I did catch the tent and the officer inside, one of the policemen half sitting and half lying on a deck chair with his boots off and bare feet airing freely, and the other one watching me. And that Malian flag on the pole.
And then I stopped.
While my fellow passengers were still haggling with the officer inside the tent, two French bikers arrived on their bikes in a cloud of dust, going the same way as we were. Their papers were in order and in just a few minutes they were on their way.
Now, for all my quirky wishes to share travelling experience of the local population, for once I envied those French guys as they rode off into Burkina independently of the whims of local transport customs.
However, after a long and lazy wait, enough money was finally collected to please the police officer in the tent and we were at last given the green light to resume our ride. Again I got away scot-free with few pictures whose value this time lay more in the circumstances they’d been taken in than in anything else.
On the whole, everyone was relieved when our driver finally started the van.
And so I left Mali.
