« End of the Line for Djibo FM | Main | Sofie en de Witte Kameel »

May 01, 2007

Burkina Faso census

Samba Normé and Idrissa Cisse came round this afternoon and argued with each other. Samba Normé is a Fulani man who scrapes a living in the bush by selling wood and dodging forestry rangers. Idrissa Cisse is a townie, currently working as a door-to-door inquisitor for the nationwide census. We sat outside in my yard making tea on a small charcoal stove.

It was Samba who started the argument. He downed his shot-glass of tea (traditionally ‘bitter like death’) and turned to Idi. ‘Onon yimbe resonsmon mbooda,’ he declared. ‘You census people are evil.’
Idrissa looked hurt. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘You come and tire us out with hundreds of questions and you don’t give us anything in return. You ask us lots of impolite questions like how many cows and goats and sheep we have in our herds. And you ask us if we own a mobile phone when you can see full well that we don’t even own shoelaces.’

The census-taker shook his head. ‘You bush folk are the ones who tire us out,’ he said. ‘You lie about everything. You even lie about how many children you have, because you think that if the desert djinns overhear they might come and steal one.’
‘I told the truth about my children,’ said Samba haughtily.
‘What about employment?’ said Idrissa. ‘Did you tell your census-taker what you do for a living?’
‘And have the forest rangers knocking on my door in the middle of the night? Of course I didn’t. I said cultivateur. Everybody knows that cultivateurs get left in peace.’

‘There!’ cried Idrissa. ‘Liars, all of you! Burayma Gorel in Jawjaw told me to write him down for two cows, and when I got up to leave, his cows came home. I counted thirty-five.’
‘That’s because Burayma Gorel knows what you people are like! You’ll come back next year and announce that the government is introducing a special bovine tax: a thousand francs per cow.’
‘We’re census-takers,’ said Idrissa. ‘You can trust us.’
‘Oh really?’ Samba wagged his index finger in front of the census-taker’s nose. ‘You obviously didn’t hear about Al Haji Abdulsalam.’
‘What about him?’
‘His census-taker asked him to give three examples of what he says to his wife when they are making love at night.’
Amusement and professional solemnity chased each other across Idrissa’s face. ‘He shouldn’t have asked that,’ he said at last. ‘That wasn’t in the questionnaire.’

Samba took the second shot-glass (traditionally ‘sweet like love’) and downed it in three indignant slurps. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter what you ask, does it? When you go home in the evening, you make up all your results.’
I expected Idrissa to deny this accusation hotly, but he did not. He drained his glass of tea and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Have you seen how long those questionnaires are? If we filled out one for each family in the bush we would still be doing the census when Isa calls Muusa.’ (Fulani slang for ‘a very long time’).
‘So Samba’s right,’ I said. ‘You fake the results.’
‘Not all of them. Every day we do the first three or four properly, then for the rest we just write the head of household’s name and whether he looks rich or poor or very poor. We can pad it out later.’

For a long time no one speaks. The teapot hisses on its charcoal stove. It is Idrissa who finally breaks the silence. ‘You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’

Posted by sahelsteve at May 1, 2007 11:20 PM