Nouakchott, Mauritania
The heat really does wake you up in this deserty city. Yesterday was independence day or some birthday or something, and I got so, so, so boozed up, I don’t know how or when I got back to my beachside hotel, and blessedly in one fine, albeit almost naked, piece.
My room was no big deal and a good deal of wind usually reached my window, which was a luxury in itself for a room with unreliable air conditioning. This is Africa and I can’t be mad at the hand I’ve been dealt, as we have a fundamentally flawed history of power supply.
I look out the window at the yellowy landscape of the city, at the grainy atmosphere and at the dusty hue of the horizon and I instead want to be mad at the goddam Sahel. Why does it have to be so close and vice versa? I feel a gripping desertification anxiety for this city.
But I know better, I’ve seen the data and I’m here to gather even more. Desertification of that magnitude isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes. If Mauritanians can be chill about that fact, then so can I. Now I feel a great emptiness in the pit of my stomach, the kind that comes well after getting stoned.
I head out to the food stall I eyed downstairs, because they have more queues than the one in-house. Queues probably mean quality. There’s a pay-per-view newsstand nearby that I glide to once I’m done eating. To access the news the old-fashioned way. Then I realize I might’ve left my phone back in my room, if my sobriety is to be trusted.
They say the press is not so gagged over here, so I hope to see get an uncensored view on world events with the papers. The papers are filled with corporate and political grandstanding, nothing interesting. Above me is a white one-storey building I initially don’t pay much attention to. It has a large glass window at the fore and a walled roof; pretty common sight and comes in different colors.
I hear voices in the corner of the street. The tone is earnest and I’m curious. The language is Arabic, which to my shame, I’m hopelessly backwards in grasping. I make a mental note to hire a live interpreter later on. A couple of men appear and follow the Arabic voice and they all look like they’re going to do a breaking and entering upstairs.
I try to put things together in my head and move to alert the food stall guys, but my head randomly moves upward and I catch a scene: a lanky brown girl, all fretful, backs up in the lower corner of the large glass window. My eyes flicker to the men making their way up there. At once I know it can’t be good. I make a move.
My inner knight flares and I dash up to intercept things. I arrive at the vacant room almost the same time as the men, to find out what’s really happening. It is not a savior complex thing, I am only just trying to be a decent human. I’m as curious as I’m confused about what what’s to happen, are they robbers or rapists? Maybe both.
The men, all of them stringy, are different shades of white, as white as Mauritanian men come. From their poise one can tell they’re bidhan or the more so-called elite ethnicity. The girl is a browner shade than I thought, black even, and a hartanian or hereditary slave. So I start to get a firsthand sense of the social situation here. But I play dumb and run to her side of the window where she’s curled up and afraid.
They’re throwing tantrums and what I take to be insults in Arabic, complete with threatening expressions, at both of us. They try to reach for her, but I beat their hands off. I calculate: how many of them can I take on at once before my knighthood wears off? The odds are that pacifism is better. “Gentlemen,” I test, in a faux accent to mask my foreignness, “what did she do wrong?”
Quickly, one of them brings out a newspaper and points to a headline in it, mumbling something in Arabic. My first thought is, are they mobbing the hartanian for autographs because they saw her in the news? That in itself would be news. I look back at the girl in her white hijab as she cowers and sweats away her composure and I can’t help but wonder if she’s influencer material.
One of the men angrily pulls out a phone, dials a number and yells into it. Clearly I’m being reported. But to whom? I’m too concerned to hazard a guess, so I stall instead. The men now seem more laid-back and spread out to secure the exit; they literally have our backs against the wall and glass window. This leaves me with a fragile choice, which is as good as none.
Downstairs a white pickup emblazoned with the darkish insignia of the national police arrives. Four gendarmeries jump out. I actively sift my memory to recall where the country sits on the global corruption index and how to brace for what comes next. It’s all predictable when they meet us upstairs. I get cuffed and taken away along with the girl. The bidhans go scot-free.
We drive around the city and they pick so-called defaulters up, mostly for flimsy reasons. Taking the form of the many palm trees we pass by, the shadow of late midday starts to creep up on the road like a giant ant. Along a narrow street, the gendarmeries note that electricity suddenly zaps off. The blackout zone increases as we drive. A gendarmerie slaps the radio on.
I can’t help having these visceral images in my head where I receive ideas on how to escape. I could hit the back of their head till it is bloodied with my cuffs, or if I pick their pockets and uncuff myself, I could maybe find a twine and have their necks absorb it through strangulation, etc. Of course, I could never bring myself to do any of that stuff, but given the circumstances, oh well.
The vehicle slows down as we approach a blue two-storey building with a walled roof, somewhere nearly at the outskirts of town. Standing outside is a rotund, bidhan man of average height in a turban with a mischievous mustache. We learn that our fate lies in his hands. Someone has probably treated him to a spa today and he’s still reeling from the novelty, and so in his elation he decides to let some of us go, myself not included.
The rest of us who remain unfreed follow him inside. Far as I can tell, the place is a sort of data center. It’s filled with learners in their teens and the turban guy goes round to inspect things. The Internet abruptly goes off, classic African move. Turban guy is flushed with anger; he must’ve just come in from the Middle East or Asia.
Apparently this is a new center and things like this should not be happening. Then the light trips off. A technician runs around under the yelling of turban guy. Only to come back and inform him that the cables are fried, no, chewed. “Chewed you say?” he asks incredulously and maddeningly and stomps to the back with the technician to go see things for himself.
Learners are advised to go outside and receive some fresh air since the rectification at the back is going to take awhile. Students file out, but not all. The staircase is far down and would take some traffic. I still have no idea why we’re being held here, but I start to suspect something in the route of manual labor. A gendarmerie prods me to shuffle forward.
An outburst of voices reverberate across the walls from downstairs and over the staircase to us. Accompanied by these primal outcries. The police instinctively clutch their weapons and move ahead. This is followed by a sharp shrill voice forced from the throat of a very freaked out girl. Everyone’s about to freak out, and we who are upstairs don’t even know why. The ignorance is scary.
Pandemonium. People are trying to push downstairs. Some aren’t. Some from the fore are running back upwards. I push through the wall of learners, shoulder-to-shoulder with the police, to see what’s happening at the staircase, which is the no-go area. I’m as curious as I’m scared. I don’t want to see magic or voodoo or some insane human rights violation ritual.
Like the police, I follow the trail of the piles of bloodied clothes on the staircase, adjusting my expectations to a suicide scene at the base of the stairwell or beyond. What we see are more and more pools of blood. Some of the screaming teens move past us, too shocked to say what they’ve seen below, piquing our brittle curiosities even further.
“There, there,” he gendarmerie calls out as the tip of the hind leg of something curves away from the staircase. Guns are swiftly pointed in that direction as we go down slowly, very slowly. Then we hear it, the rasping, crunching sound. I start to receive ideas of unheard of cannibalism. A tidy concept travel blogs never warn you about.
At this point I’m sure we don’t want to go any further, we’re only being motioned involuntarily. And so our feet brings us face-to-face with, I don’t know, the material form of our fears. What I think I see are huge ants, almost kid-sized, with armorlike exoskeletons and mandibles the size of a small rod.
What they are doing is dismantling and disentangling the body parts of a person under their mouth cavity until they disappear from their clothes. Then they’ll go to the next one, a bit who is held in place by one of their forelegs. Right now I’m sure I am the main character in a really wild nightmare, before the ringing out of bullets brings me back to reality.
Pow! Another bullet finds the thorax of this abnormal creature. Then comes the banging gunfire. The creature doesn’t flinch, only slightly distracted by the sounds as it keeps munching on the person. Now done with its meal, it moves to the one trapped by its hind leg. By now we realize we’re helpless against what it wants to do next.
It brings the boy to its head, passed on by its forelegs and forcibly holds the boy’s head so that it clips him in the right spot for its mandibles to have their way, his legs flailing on the ground. With one powerful move, it descends on the boy and chows down his body before our very eyes in less than thirty seconds, leaving the clothes behind.
Just as it is done, another one bursts through the entrance. Our presence becomes palatable. The whole sight roots my goosebumps to my bone. My eyes find the ability to flicker and find the nearest window, which I dive towards and kick through. I am followed by a few others. Two of the cops with the most proximity to those creatures aren’t so lucky.
Behind us I hear the gnashing and smashing sound as the cops thrash about and shoot aimlessly while they’re being gnawed to nothing. Outside, we’re flooded with the view of a field spotted with the unbreakable march of those antlike creatures. They’re suddenly so many of them, I want to believe this is all a trick and I’m still very stoned.
I lead the crossing to the opposite side of the field, noticing sparsely moving ants too as we run haphazardly and frantically, literally expecting to die at any second. They keep swarming and streaming into the city en masse. Colony after colony of these devastating creatures making for an attack on civilisation as we know it or will know it from memory.
I hear a beautiful griot in the distance, from the heart of the city, and I know too well that it is about to be replaced by wailing as the national sound.