Crocodiles

This weekend, Kevin and I went on an adventure. And by that, I mean that the two of us helmeted up and took off on the motorcycle to the village of Borko, tucked into one of the hills on the long way to my village. Borko is a little terrestrial paradise. Unlike the arid land around it, there are several natural springs there, so it stays green all year long. In those streams lies Borko’s biggest claim to fame: crocodiles.

Now, before I went, I wasn’t certain what these reptiles were going to be. They call them “caimans” in the local French, and I thought they might just be Nile monitor lizards, but I assumed that would be interesting anyway.

The whole trip was like an exam of everything I have learned since I got here: driving the motorcycle, finding a village, greeting the chief, navigating in Tommo-So, and I passed on all accounts, I think. The first half of our time there, I didn’t speak any French at all. Borko is actually in the Najamba zone, but the language is closely related and a lot of people speak/understand Tommo-So, since it’s the next zone over.

Anyhow, we pulled up to the village around 11 AM and parked the motorcycle under a tree a little walk from the village itself. Walking up, all of the people saw us and smiled, then I would greet them in Tommo-So and they would give a little “Eh!” of surprise as their faces lit up. Half the time, the greetings were an incomprehensible mixture of Najamba and Tommo and I probably botched a lot of it, but it’s the thought that counts.

We came up to the first village and I asked some kids where the chief was. Tromping through a harvested millet field, we arrived in their streets, and I conversed with this man for a while about where I was from, what we’d come to do, where the chief had went, etc. Turns out, the chief had gone to the fields, but he showed me his three wives (“the red (=light-skinned) one, the dark one, and the other one”) and they gave Kevin and I both big handfuls of peanuts.

Somehow, throughout the course of this, it became clear that we were in the wrong village. Borko is comprised of three little villages, and we needed to walk up to the next one to see the crocs, which we did. There, we gave the chief a bag of kola nuts and 1000 CFA as a gesture of goodwill, then negotiated with the actual village guide (who spoke to me only in French and was much less friendly than everyone else—perhaps a by-product of too much tourism?) to show us the crocodiles for another 5500 CFA ($11).

That covered the cost of the hunks of raw goat meat we picked up with the butcher to feed to the crocodiles. Having done that, the guide ushered us through a little bamboo gate to an open area, where already one large crocodile was sun-bathing, some little water plants stuck to its scaly head. I was startled. Here I was expecting monitor lizards, and three feet in front of me is a legitimate crocodile or alligator or something of the sort.

The guide started clucking and grunting; out of the bushes, one, then two, then three more crocodiles scrambled in for the feast. Two of the them were rather small, probably about 2-3 feet long, but the other two were probably closer to 5 feet. I thought at one point one of them was going to bite my foot off, since it was getting a little close and curious for comfort, but I stepped back and it became more interested in the meat the guide was throwing into their jaws.

These animals are the village’s totem. The guide told me that back in the war with the Mande several hundred years ago, when the Dogon were driven up into the cliffs for safety, the crocodiles helped them cross the river, and ever since then, they’ve been their totem. They don’t hurt the crocodiles—doing so would be hurting the village. In fact, he told me that if anyone killed a crocodile, he would be killed. He also said the crocodiles slept with people at night, but I’m not certain what he meant by that. Finally, if they find a dead one, they bury it as if it were a human.

So because they are so protected and just get fed meat all the time, they are rather tame. We even got to touch one! I wasn’t sure I was going to leave with both my hands, but I did, and the whole experience was rather magical.