Bamba Laye and the Midnight Tractor

A story of Banjul – Part 1

By Prof. Cernu Umar Barry

Everybody in Half Die knew that nothing good happened after midnight. Bamba Laye knew it best of all, because he had tried every trick there was to stay awake until then.

He was twelve years old in the rainy season of 1974. He had a gap between his front teeth that was good for whistling. His mother said he had bat-like ears and that he used them for everything except listening to her. He lived with his mother, his father, his grandfather, two sisters, a goat called Général, and a great many cousins who came and went in a compound on Hagan Street. Hagan Street sat so low that his grandfather said the river had only ever lent it to the town.

At the back of the compound, behind the bathroom made of corrugated zinc and old krinting, was the kama.

The kama was a small shed with a wooden seat. Under the seat was a bucket. Anyone could tell you what the bucket was for. The mystery was what happened to it.

Every night, when the bucket was full, a man came through the little hatch at the back of the kama. He lifted the bucket out, fitted a lid on it, put a clean empty one in its place, and was gone. Bamba had lived his whole life with this and had never once seen the man do it.

“He is like the Angel of Death,” said his cousin Modou Lamin, who was ten and believed everything. “Except for buckets.”

“He is not an angel,” said Bamba. “He is a daddy kama.”

That was what everyone called them: daddy kama, the fathers of the latrines. You would say it at the market, and people would laugh behind their hands. In the daytime, a daddy kama might be anybody. He could be the quiet man selling kola nuts outside the mosque or the tall one who fixed bicycles on Clarkson Street. At night they belonged to the Board of Health, which every child in Banjul called Botofel, because that was how the grown-ups said it when they were in a hurry and angry about something. And when Botofel was mentioned, the grown-ups usually were.

On the night Bamba finally saw the daddy kama, he had kept himself awake by pinching the soft skin between his thumb and first finger every time his eyes closed. He lay on his mat by the door. He heard the Cathedral clock strike eleven, then half past. Then, from far off towards Leman Street, he heard a sound he had heard a thousand times in his sleep and never while awake.

Tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk.

It was a tractor.

Bamba crept out past Général, who looked at him with yellow, disapproving eyes, and climbed the mango tree by the gate. From the second branch he could see all the way to the corner.

They came walking in a line, five men with buckets balanced on their heads. The lids were pressed down tight, and each man had a folded cloth under the bucket to cushion it. They walked barefoot and did not hurry. They moved the way good drummers keep time, steady and unbothered, as if Banjul were asleep and they were the only ones awake to look after it.

At the corner of Hagan and Grant Street, the buckets waited. The men set them down there, one beside another, in neat rows like pupils at assembly.

Then the tractor came round the corner. It was painted green, though the paint had mostly lost the argument with the rust, and behind it rolled a great round iron tank on two wheels. A single lamp swung from a pole on the front. In its light Bamba saw the men lift each bucket and tip it into the tank through a hatch on top. There was a sound he would remember all his life, a sound like a very large man clearing his throat in the next room. After that came the smell.

People who were not born in Banjul in those years cannot really understand the smell. It was not only bad. It was thick. You could almost lean on it. It came up the mango tree like a cat and sat on Bamba’s face. He clamped his hand over his nose and breathed through his mouth, which his grandfather later told him was the worst possible thing to do, “because now you are tasting it, you foolish boy.”

The oldest of the daddy kama looked up. Bamba was sure he had been seen. The man smiled a slow smile with one gold tooth in it, raised his empty bucket in greeting, and called up into the dark: “Jërëjëf, little owl. Tell your mother the bucket is clean.”

Then the tractor coughed and went off towards Dobson Street and the dump outside the city, tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk. Bamba sat in the mango tree until his legs went numb, feeling that he had been let in on a great secret.

In the morning he told his grandfather.

Maam Njaga was the oldest man on Hagan Street, or said he was, and nobody had the courage to argue. He sat every morning on a low stool by the gate with his prayer beads in one hand and a chewing stick in the other. He took his time with both.

“So you have met Pa Sanneh,” said Maam Njaga, when Bamba described the gold tooth.

“You know him?”

“Everybody who is anybody knows the daddy kama. And everybody who is nobody pretends not to.” The old man pointed his chewing stick at Bamba. “Listen. In 1937 those men stopped working. They went on strike. Sixty-seven of them.”

“What happened?”

“For some days all Bathurst smelled exactly like what it was.” Maam Njaga laughed until he coughed. “The big men with their fine houses and their private kamas found out who was really important in this town. Not the Governor. Not the Colonial Secretary. The daddy kama! They got their raise, too. One shilling and three pence a day.”

Bamba thought about this. He thought about the men walking so evenly under their buckets and the one with the gold tooth. He thought about how every compound in Banjul, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, had a bucket waiting in the back. He decided that the daddy kama were probably the bravest men in the city and that nobody ever said so.

“Maam,” he said, “why don’t we have toilets like the ones in the Atlantic Hotel? The ones that go whoosh?”

His grandfather stopped chewing.

“Ah,” he said. “Now that is a question that has been asked in this town for a hundred years. When you find the answer, come and tell me. I will be right here.”

Bamba did not find the answer that week. Instead, he found that Modou Lamin could keep a secret as well as a basket that keeps water. By Friday the whole of Hagan Street had heard about the man with the gold tooth, and half the children of Half Die were calling Bamba “little owl.” He pretended to mind. He also found that once you stayed awake for the tractor, you began to notice everything else that moved about Banjul after dark. And the first thing that moved, as it always did in the rains, was the mosquitoes.

The mosquitoes of Half Die were not ordinary mosquitoes. Everyone agreed on that.

They were big, patient, and clever. They waited under the beds in the daytime and came out at dusk singing their thin little song, eeeeeeeee, right next to your ear, just when you were about to sleep. Bamba’s little sister Fatou said they could count. “They wait until you’ve slapped nine times,” she said, “and then they bite you on the tenth when your hand is tired.”

So when the Botofel fogging truck came, it was the best night of the month. Bamba now understood that the same Botofel that sent the tractor at midnight sent the smoke at dusk, and he began to think of it as a great invisible giant that did the city’s dirtiest jobs while everybody else was looking the other way.

You heard it before you saw it: a roaring hiss, like a giant snake with a cold. Then round the corner came the Land Rover. In the back sat a machine like a small cannon, and it spewed clouds of white smoke that rolled down the street and filled it from wall to wall until you could not see across the road.

Every child in Half Die ran out to meet it.

“Botofel! Botofel yi nyow nayn!” Botofel is coming!

They ran behind the truck into the smoke, dozens of them, shrieking and laughing, arms out like aeroplanes. Inside the fog the whole world turned white and secret. It smelled sharp and sweet and chemical, a little like kerosene and a little like the inside of a new plastic bucket. Bamba would run until his chest burned and he could not see his own feet. He would hear Modou Lamin somewhere beside him yelling “I’m a ghost! I’m a ghost!”, and then all of them would come bursting out the other side at the corner of Dobson Street, coughing and grinning, their eyes streaming.

“Come back here! Come back here this minute!” Every mother on the street shouted the same thing at the same moment, like a choir.

Bamba’s mother, Yaay Kumba, caught him by the ear one night after the truck had gone.

“You want to be a mosquito?” she demanded. “That smoke is for killing mosquitoes. Are you a mosquito? Do you have wings? Do you sing eeeeeee at night?”

“No, Yaay.”

“Then why are you breathing their poison?”

Bamba had no answer. He could not explain the white world inside the fog, and how for those few seconds you were invisible and nobody’s son.

Maam Njaga, from his stool, was not impressed by the truck either.

“They have been fighting the mosquito in this town since before your father’s father was born,” he said. “First they fined people for having water standing in the compound. Then they put fish in the wells, little fish to eat the baby mosquitoes. You know what happened?”

“The fish ate the mosquitoes?”

“The birds ate the fish!” Maam Njaga slapped his knee. “The egrets and the kingfishers found out that every well in Bathurst was a free restaurant. So, they dug holes at the bottom of the wells for the fish to hide in. Holes for fish! In wells! I promise you; it is true.” He shook his head. “Then they cut down the big trees. Baobabs, silk cottons, all the shade of this town. They said the mosquitoes lived in the holes in the trees. My father cried. The old people said the jinn in those trees would never forgive us.”

“Did they forgive us?”

Maam Njaga slapped a mosquito on his arm, looked at the small red smear, and held it up.

“What do you think?”

He told Bamba there had once been an article in the Gambia Echo calling the mosquitoes “gangsters among the insects.” The paper said that when the American police fought the gangsters, at least they had the law behind them, but the sanitary men were fighting “billions and billions of enemies” who obeyed no law at all.

Bamba liked that very much. That night, lying under his net and listening to the eeeeeee outside it, he gave the mosquitoes gangster names. There was Al Capone, and Baby Face, and one especially loud one he called Machine Gun Musa. It helped a little. Not much, but a little.

And while he lay there naming gangsters, he began to listen properly to the other nation that shared his house. The mosquitoes sang outside the net. But above it, on the rafters, something ran.

The rats of Banjul, Bamba decided, were a nation of their own.

They had roads, the gutters. They had houses, the holes under the floors. They had a government that nobody had elected, and everybody obeyed. At night he heard them running along the rafters over his head, tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki, and he imagined them carrying tiny briefcases, off to important meetings.

Not long after, a big brown one ran straight across Fatou’s legs as she slept, and the whole compound woke to her screaming. Général the goat panicked and kicked over the water pot. Yaay Kumba came out with a broom, and Bamba’s father came out with a torch and a cutlass. Somewhere in the chaos, the rat simply strolled off towards the gutter, as calm as a customs officer.

“Useless,” said his father, putting down the cutlass. “Completely useless. They are cleverer than the government.”

“They are the government,” said Maam Njaga from his mat, where he had not moved at all. “Go back to sleep.”

In the morning, Bamba learned something that changed how he thought about his grandfather forever.

“In 1940,” said Maam Njaga, “I was the Rat Headman.”

Bamba stared at him.

“It is true. Ask anyone old enough. The war had started, and the whole world was fighting Hitler. The toubabs were very frightened about the plague, because in Senegal, just across there, the plague came again and again. People were dying in Dakar, in Saint-Louis. So Botofel said Bathurst would fight the rats. They made a Rat Week.” He said it very grandly, the way you would say Tabaski. “They gave lectures, if you can believe it. A man stood in front of us and told us about ’the dangers and habits of the rat.’ As if we did not live with the rat every day of our lives!”

“And you were the headman?”

“I was the headman of the rat gang. I and three boys under me. Small boys, about your size.” He looked Bamba up and down. “Maybe a bit braver. We went from compound to compound with sticks and traps. And they paid for the rats. You brought a dead rat to the office, and they gave you money.”

“How many did you catch?”

“Ninety a week, sometimes. In Rat Week itself, all of Bathurst brought in more than seven hundred.” He leaned forward. “And do you know what the toubabs were afraid of? They were afraid we would start farming the rats. Keeping them in boxes, feeding them, making them have babies, and then bringing them in for the money. They had seen people do it in other colonies.”

Bamba’s mouth fell open. “That’s clever.”

“It is. And nobody here did it. Not one person. Put that in your head.” He tapped his own. “Banjul people are honest even with rats.”

Then he told Bamba the strangest thing of all, and he told it quietly, as if the rats might be listening.

“The plague never came to Bathurst,” he said. “Never once. Senegal had it, again and again. We did not. Some people say it is because of our rats.”

“Our rats?”

“The plague travels with a certain kind of rat, a black one. It came into Senegal from the north, with all the trade from the Arab countries. But here in Bathurst we had our brown rats, big, bad-tempered ones like the one that ran over Fatou. And a brown rat will not share his house. He will fight any black rat that comes near. So maybe the black rats never got in. Maybe our ugly, rude, greedy brown rats guarded the city like soldiers at the gate. And all that time we were chasing them with sticks and calling them the enemy.”

Bamba thought about this for a very long time.

That night, when he heard tiki-tiki-tiki on the rafters, he did not throw his sandal at the sound, which is what he usually did. He lay still and whispered, “Goodnight, soldiers.”

Then he thought about it some more, and quietly moved his feet under the blanket, just in case.

By then the rains had settled in properly, and something in Banjul mattered more than rats, mosquitoes, and buckets put together. In the rains, Banjul turned into a football town.

(…to be continue.)

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