Culture and Ideas Category—Silver Winner: Sara Kunda: A Homecoming in The Gambia
by Joshua Berman
The pre-dawn sky is as dark and sparkling as it was when we ducked into the mosquito net, only a few hours ago. The last of the goat hadn’t been eaten until after midnight, and the party broke up soon after that. Now Tay and I are barely awake, awash in candle and star light, bathing in the patio while the Imam calls the village of Sara Kunda to the first prayer of the day.
“Allaaaaaaaaaaah hu-akbar!”
The refrain that has sounded five times a day for more than half a millennium in this far-off fold of West Africa is one layer of the waking village soundscape—crickets, cocks, goats, songbirds, and other creatures also join in the declaration of God’s greatness.
“Allaaaaaaaaaaah hu-akbar!” The old, tinny speakers of the mosque make the song soft and strained.
Tay and I take turns squatting next to the plastic bucket of well water, stars fading as we prepare for a long day of travel back to Banjul. The water is earthy and cool and the night’s perspiration rinses from my neck and splashes down my back. I close my eyes to the sensation and wrap my mind around all that has just happened.
“Tay” is short for “Sutay,” which is Mandinka for “recognize.” In Africa, names carry immense significance, beyond mere convenience. A name both labels a subject and gives it a place in the world. Sutay learned this ten years ago, during her first trip to Africa, far from home in Colorado. As the only white person to ever have lived in Sara Kunda, she was easy “to recognize.” That was how it began.
“Sutay Sabally!” During her time here, everyone in the Sabally compound shouted her name as a greeting, and each time the ancient syllables rolled off their tongues, she was drawn deeper into Sara Kunda. When she returned to the United States after two-and-a-half years, she opted not to go back to her American birth name, even though it was common, easy to pronounce, and aroused no questions. In fact, going by “Sutay” in America is anything but convenient, drawing puzzled stares, uncomfortable silences, and mispronunciations.
But here in Sara Kunda, it is who she is. And seeing her in this context—where people know her name, how to pronounce it, what it means, where it comes from—has been watching a mysterious piece of my partner click into place. A part of this woman belongs here and always will. Now I am a part of that, I think, knocking a spider out of my boot before slipping it on and lacing up. Now we have dodged dive-bombing bats together which got caught in the net as we climbed into our bed of sticks and straw. Now we have eaten cous and peanut stew together, taking the food with our right hands out of an enormous bowl which we shared with Gambian brothers and sisters and mothers. Now I too have an African name.
“Sutay! Sutay! Sutay Sabally!”
Seventy-two hours ago, when we marched, unannounced and unexpected, into the Sabally family compound, eight years after she left this place, we were drowned in excited shouts and screams. “Sutaaay!” She responded with rapid Mandinka greetings, surprising herself as forgotten words bubbled up from her past while dozens of women grasped her and held her and cried out her name in love and affection.
I stood to the side, filming and snapping until finally yanked into the knot of people and introduced by Tay, who by interlocking her index fingers together, declared our matrimony. New cheers erupted and claps on my back and smiles! Tears streamed from behind Tay’s sunglasses and from the eyes of those clutching her, tears mixing with the dirt at our feet.
“Sutay! Sutay!” The shouts were exclamations of disbelief, as if saying her name would convince them that their toubob sister, who they never expected to return from toubobadoo, was standing among them. Watching my wife don her decade-old African skin was one of the most amazing moments of 14 months of traveling together—and, for that matter, of our entire 18 months of marriage.
But then again, everything about our trip to The Gambia is remarkable.
After 15 countries, The Gambia is the most exasperating in which we have traveled. Its officials are the rudest, its roads the roughest, and its heat the thickest. The Gambia is rain-smells, mud, soaked greens, and oily browns. It is picking thin bones of fish from thick, salty bowls of groundnut stew; it is the sugary thrill of thrice-brewed, thrice-sweetened ataya tea; it is the hot, funky crush inside dilapidated deathtrap transports.
But beyond mere tastes and sounds and smells, there are bigger things—grander themes. That this is the final week of an epic, year-long honeymoon is one. That Tay and her Peace Corps girlfriend used to dream about returning to The Gambia with future husbands is another. That Tay’s original fantasy was to meet her husband during her service abroad, as her aunt and uncle had done in the Philippines, another. This latter wish happened differently than how she expected, but here we are. In Sara Kunda.
After the thrill of our arrival calmed to a rational, relaxing level, most of our three days in Sara Kunda were spent sitting, drinking ataya, and communicating however we could. While Tay floated throughout the compound on waves of nostalgia, I doggie paddled along an intoxicating stream of stimuli which, on this morning of our departure, does not cease.
To avoid too much fuss, we had intended on slipping out of Sara Kunda as unexpectedly as when we arrived, rising early before most of the village, even though we’d been up late with the dancing, singing, and feasting. Still, we must see Baba.
The head of the Sabally compound and alkallo of the village is known to everyone—family and friends alike—as “Father.” Baba is a serious, 68-year-old Mandinka man of few words and innumerable folds carved into his mask-like face. When he speaks, his language is weighty. When he smiles, his lanky figure lightens. When Tay lived here, Baba was her father. His five wives were her mothers and his many children her siblings. For more than two years, Baba watched over Tay, ensuring her shelter and food. He saved her life once when she was sick, transporting her to Farefenni after his teenage son, Konko, found her sprawled unconscious on the patio where we just bathed.
On the first day of our visit, Baba brought us to Tay’s old house, where Konko now resides. Konko was Tay’s scrawny sidekick when she lived here and is now a muscular, 22-year-old bachelor with his own house and peanut field to tend. He learned English in school and, when Tay’s Mandinka fails her, he serves as our translator throughout our visit. As we stepped through the doorway, Baba stopped and said, “Sutay Sabally is my daughter. Now you are her husband, so I give you the name ‘Lamin Sabally.’”
Lamin is the name given to all firstborn Mandinka sons. I had learned a scant few greetings in my short time here, but did not know the correct protocol for such a moment as this. Winging it, I lowered my head and responded, “It is an honor to call you ‘Baba’.” While Konko translated my words, Baba never stopped looking me in the eyes as he took my hands in his and pressed them.
Because Baba has so many wives, all of whom live in this compound, there are other firstborn sons, other Lamin Sabally’s. Each is my “Toma,” my namesake, with whom I now had a special bond. When I was introduced to each of them while drinking tea or sitting on the central bantaba, we would revel in my new name and our relation as not only brothers, but “Toma.”
Tay’s Toma is Little Sutay, the child she helped her sister, Fatou, deliver 10 years ago on a moonlit night. Fatou’s mother was the village midwife, but wanted to play the traditional mother’s role for Fatou’s first child. Even though Tay had no training and it was forbidden by the Peace Corps to assist in childbirth, Fatou asked Tay to be her midwife. The three of them—Fatou, Tay, and their mother, Nkoko—rode 12 kilometers in a donkey cart to the nearest clinic that night. Crickets and distant hyena howls accompanied their long ride over rutted paths. When they arrived, finding neither the electricity nor the trained nurse they were seeking, they lit two candles and assisted Fatou to push Little Sutay out into the world. It was the first childbirth in which Tay had ever participated and as they rode back under a warm, cloudless sky of stars, bathed in the magic of new life, she realized what she wanted to do with her life.
Tay went on to train midwives and traditional birth attendants across The Gambia and, after returning to the U.S., became a Registered Nurse specializing in labor and delivery in one of the preeminent hospitals in the world. Going from natural-by-necessity, dirt-floor deliveries of The Gambia to the West’s dependence on machines, tubes, and drugs is one of the strangest, most intense things she has experienced. Finding Little Sutay ten years after delivering her, is another. The lively little girl is a walking, talking, giggling confirmation of the time that has passed.
The sky continues to lighten, the stars are gone, the sun still unseen. Bathed, dressed, and packed, we emerge from the house and walk through the dawn to Baba’s, the largest hut, located in the center of the compound.
Before reaching Sara Kunda, we had no idea who would be alive and who we would find had moved away or died. As we approached the village, there was every possibility that Baba would be gone, the family moved, or that Little Sutay would not have survived, since infant mortality in this part of the world is a part of life. But they were all here, and Little Sutay did survive, and she is beautiful and playful and strong, her hair braided in diagonals across her head, her gap-toothed smile radiant under almond eyes.
Tay met other children whom she helped deliver as well, but it is with her Toma that she bonded the most, especially when Fatou fell ill with malaria yesterday. Little Sutay took up the burden of caring for her brothers, her bed-ridden mother, and us, her mother’s guests. After starting a fire and pounding grain, she ran to the bittiko to buy tins of fish and bouillon cubes; she carried a huge bucket of water on her head; cooked our meal over a stick fire, and as we ate, cooled her mother with a wicker fan—until Tay took it and placed Fatou’s head, screaming with fever, in her lap. Relieved of her duties, Little Sutay jumped up to sing and play with her friends, bright fanos wrapped around skinny hips, shirtless, heads topped in cotton tikos, performing Mandinka paddy-cake games and laughing whenever somebody got the motions wrong.
We walk with Konko to Baba’s house, enter, and exchange formal morning greetings.
“Isama!” we say, entering the house. “Sumolu Le?” Where is the family, our equivalent to How is the family?
“Tana Tela.” They are fine.
“Kairabe?” Do you have peace?
“Karia dorong.” Peace only.
The greetings continue, a string of pleasantries which, when finished by the greeting party, reverses itself as the greeting is returned. “Sumolu Le?” “Kairabe?” And so on. Finally finished, we sit down on short, worn wooden stools.
Baba did not come to our party last night. After slitting the goat’s neck while Konko and three brothers held down the writhing body, his role was finished, and he retired to his quarters from where he listened to the singing. He tells us how I, his new toubob son, “brought joy to his people,” referring to the moment in the drum circle when I sang and everybody responded with laughter. The real words to the song, “Sutay ben-doli-do-lah, Lamin ben-doli-do-lah,” mean, “Because Sutay is here we are dancing, we are dancing because Sutay and Lamin are here!” I added a verse about Sutay’s dog, Danjung, who we were amazed to find not only still alive, but living the royal wuolo dog’s life in Baba’s house. In a society that mistreats animals as a national pastime, people actually bragged to Tay about feeding her dog, or allowing him to sleep on their porch, always adding that Danjung made them think of her. So I had sung, “Danjung ben-doli-do-lah! Because Danjung is here we are dancing!”
There is light talk with Baba about how delicious the goat was. The cooked liver had been brought to me in a tin bowl before anyone else was served, my reward for purchasing the animal, served with a hunk of baguette and covered with fried onions. I shared it with Konko and a few of our lip-smacking, greasy-chin brothers.
Tay tells Baba that when we have our own ding-dingos (”Inshallah!” he prays, God willing!) we will bring them to Sara Kunda. He will give our children a Mandinka naming ceremony, he says, then prays that we have a strong child, and Tay and I answer, “Amin.”
One month ago, in a village in northern Ghana, a local chief gave us a paper sack of guinea fowl eggs, which we were to eat “so that the blood of our first child would be strong.” Six months before that, we reached together to touch a famous lingam, or fertility-giving phallus of gold, in a temple in Bangkok. This trip has indeed been kind to our reproductive karma. Inshallah.
My reverie is broken as Baba grows serious, his eyes hard and the creases in his face awash in morning light that is streaming through the open door. Miriama joins him at his side. Baba rises and gestures that we approach. We are standing close, the four of us. Baba takes my hands in his, opens them upwards, bends over, and lets forth a quiet stream of prayer which ends with a puff of air blown into my palms. He does the same for Tay. The air feels like light in my hands as they fall to my sides.
Miriama points to Tay, says her name, then squeezes her own breast, a gesture that says, “I am Sutay’s mother.” She points to me, “Lamin,” she says, then squeezes her breast. She points to both of us, then sweeps her hand toward Baba, indicating our relationship with him.
“Beh keelin,” she says, and repeats it, “beh keelin.”
“We are one,” Tay translates in the silence that follows.
This moment, this instant of daybreak—this is something that is here, and now it is passing and now it is gone, as we step outside together. Baba, Miriama, Konko, Little Sutay and Danjung accompany us out of the compound, our bags lighter than when we arrived, relieved of the required silafondo we’d carried from Ghana.
Before reaching the ancient traveler’s tree at the crossroads, Baba and the rest take their leave. There are more tears and pressed hands, then soft, dirt-crunching footsteps as we part ways. Tay and I walk to the tree on our own. We place our bags on the ground among the other travelers. We stand with a Wolof border guard, in brown uniform, on his way to work; with a Fulo woman, tribal-scarred infant tied to her back; with a wizened marabout, or medicine man, leaning against his staff. Silent in the morning light, Tay and I stand with them in the center of the crossroads, and wait for a vehicle to appear.
Joshua Berman is an award-winning guidebook author and freelance writer. His website is stonegrooves.net.
