$20 and a Goat

(With my apologies to those who already know it ends, I have recently rewritten what remains perhaps the greatest story that has ever happened in the history of Zachary Asher Mason. The Assassination of James Brown is now my case for why I want to go to law school to study property, torts and international law. At the very least, I'd like to hope that it makes my application a memorable read.)

While I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the African nation of Mali, I found that “property” and “property rights” were very nebulous concepts. Every man in the Minianka tribe with whom I lived had his own plot of land over which he had exclusive claim to farm – but the fields were demarcated only by the whims of the village chief. Every man was the undisputable owner of the millet he harvested – but the Miniankas believe that it is every man’s obligation to share his food with his fellow clansmen. Property rights did exist in Minianka culture, but if one man had it and another man believed that he deserved it then who had the right to use that property was up for debate.

My interest in the law was piqued when a twist of fate required that I argue a case of property rights before the Minianka tribal elders. I came to the elder council believing that the facts of my case were very straightforward; I owned a cat upon which I bestowed the name James, and this cat was my sovereign property. One night my cat ventured beyond the realm of my chain-link fence and scaled the wall of the clinic across the street. At this clinic stood a night watchman armed with a shotgun to deter the theft of the village’s valuable stores of medicine, and he had a history of abusing his position by shooting neighborhood cats and feeding them to his deeply-impoverished, malnourished family. This one night the watchman decided to shoot my cat James, chop its head off, skin it and feed it to his family for dinner.

Upon discovering this act the next morning, I considered myself a victim of great wrongdoing and demanded restitution. In Minianka society it was considered a greater affront than the crime itself for one to press charges with the formal law enforcement agencies, for after 80 years of Colonialism and 32 years of dictatorship this culture has nurtured a deep-seated distrust of the state. Instead, the Miniankas resolve all of their conflicts within the informal system of the chief of the village and the traditional elder council. And so I petitioned the chief of the village for a redress of my grievances. My argument came in two parts.

As for the charge of livestock theft, I based my claim on the facts that my cat was an article of livestock property and that I had paid 10,000 francs for this cat and its vaccinations. I argued that since the night watchman killed the cat and ate it, he was thereby unable to return my cat in its original form and thus he had violated my sovereign property rights. Therefore, I contended, the night watchman should pay me 10,000 francs so that I could buy and vaccinate a new cat to replace the one he had destroyed.

Moreover, I contended that the night watchman had committed reckless endangerment by discharging a Colonial-era musket mere meters from the garden where I was then sleeping in my tent. I was concerned that if he had missed my cat he might have hit me with a bullet from his highly inaccurate musket. I made the case that I would not be content with a mere financial settlement equivalent to the property that I had lost, for I was concerned that on a later date the night watchman might be perfectly content to shoot at another cat and simply pay me after the fact. Since I did not press formal criminal charges before the Commandant, I demanded that the night watchman also pay me a goat in civil damages.

In the traditional Minianka legal system the defendant is entitled to make his argument too, and in this case the defendant asserted a novel defense. The night watchman conceded that he did in fact kill my cat, but he argued that he had no choice. “Evil sorcerers cast black magic spells to curse people with sickness, and evil sorcerers can take the form of animals”, he reasoned, “and so when I saw this cat approach the clinic wall, I had no means of knowing whether or not it was an evil sorcerer disguised as a cat. Therefore, as I was afraid for my own life, I determined that I had no choice but to shoot this cat as an act of self-defense.”

The village chief found in my favor for my claim for restitution for my property, but he acquitted the night watchman under the charge of reckless endangerment; “The night watchman raises a good point; what if your cat had been an evil sorcerer?” I erred in the way that I formed my case because I articulated an entirely Western sense of justice, and I did not consider that the village chief himself was a product of a society that is sincerely afraid of witchcraft.

Despite the fact that my first experience arguing a case resulted in such a disappointing verdict, I came away more determined than ever to pursue a career in law. Knowing what it means to suffer a loss, I want to be able to defend people’s property rights in a modern court of law. Now that I know the true meaning of injustice, I want to be able to right these kinds of wrongs and make such an airtight case that not even the most partial judge could reject it.

In particular, I intend to study international law so that I can represent American citizens and firms conducting business overseas. When Americans are in foreign countries to do work, at some point they are going to have to write contracts and obtain licenses from the pertinent regulatory agencies. As I have learned from personal experience, when disputes arise with host country nationals American firms are going to need legal representation to make their case before foreign tribunals within the framework of the local laws, customs and beliefs. That is why I would like to study the principles of justice as they are codified in the laws of the United States and be able to compare them to the laws of the State of Qatar, the Kingdom of Morocco and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan – as well as the customs of societies like the Miniankas who resolve their conflicts through informal institutions.

I want to pursue a career in law because I hope to be able to use my legal education in countries like Mali not just to protect American expatriates’ property in their beloved cats but to also protect Bambara farmers’ property in goats and Fulani pastoralists’ savings in cattle. The law must protect property rights in order to facilitate business growth and development in countries like Mali not just so that Americans can profit – but also so that people like the night watchman might be able to afford to buy more food, medicine and clothing for their families. I hope that I can use the power of the law to advance the cause of justice, because the sound practice of law should protect the rights of all property owners and foster an economy that thrives to such an extent that no family goes malnourished.

The Assassination of James Brown

Straight-up – being the one non-Bambara tribesman in Sanadougou and being constantly watched and gossiped about and petted and accosted for my bicycle and my underwear all day, every day, 7 days a week is emotionally and spiritually exhausting. And it is even more frustrating and damaging to one’s sense of self-worth when I go walk over for a friendly chat with the dude for whom I just built 3 brand new, cement nyegens complete with soak pits and feeling all bright and optimistic and accomplished and he screams at me for being a “nasty, greedy Tubabu” because I won’t give him U.S. A.I.D.-financed cement to line his entire house and I walk home flustered and fed up and not a single person in this entire town can relate.

But who needs people when James Brown and Snoop Doggy Dogg are waiting at home to play with me? Even on days when my homologue thinks I’m useless and my jatigi thinks I’m lazy and the entire village thinks I’m a stingy bastard, my doggy and kitty think I’m the best person in the whole wide world and Snoop rolls over so we can play the “kick me in the face” game and James climbs up my shoulder and rolls into a huggable, purry furball and at least some creatures on this planet appreciate my existence. And everything is alright.

So the other night I was sleeping in my tent in the papaya patch when I was woken by a deafening BOOM as though a car had backfired just outside my garden. Though I didn’t think anything of it and rolled back to sleep.

The next morning I couldn’t find Jamesy… I went over to my jatigi’s house – James had recently been spending nights with their ladycat – but he wasn’t there either. I was told to go to the house of Seydou Cafa – the night watchman at the clinic across the street. Maybe he knew where James was...

So I stormed in demanding answers when I am greeted by my kitty James – he was hanging from Seydou’s gwa with his head chopped off, skinned to dry for that evening’s sauce. The logic of what had happened that night became all too apparent:

1. I am hungry. (Given)
2. Look… a Cat! (Given)
3. BOOM! (Chain Rule 1, 2)


I went ballistic.

“What’s the big deal?” Seydou asked, “It’s just a cat.”

“That’s not just a cat – that’s my cat you killed!!! You stole my cat and you can’t give it back!!! So now you have to pay up.”

“Whatever – I’m sorry. It will not happen again, insh’allah.”

“No, that’s not going to cut it. You just killed an expensive cat. I vaccinated and treated that cat, and it cost 5,000 CFA. I’ll give you a choice; either you pay me 5,000 francs right now, and while you’re at it give me a goat for good measure so I can kill one of your animals and eat it too – or else I’m going to explain to the Commandant that you’re a lunatic who hunts other people’s livestock with a shotgun on the clinic grounds in a crowded neighborhood 80 meters from where I sleep and 100 meters from where the Commandant and his wife and his children sleep.”

Unlike litigious Americans such as yours truly, Bambaras shy from using the official legal system and instead use their own traditional form of settling grievances. There is kind of an adversarial trial before the dugutigi (the village chief) who resolves both parties’ claims. This was actually a big deal; in an agricultural society, livestock theft is one of the most serious crimes which one can commit. If a Bambara steals another Bambara’s cow or sheep, the thief is usually pressured by his elders to compensate the victim in currency or in kind.

Though unbeknownst to me at the time, even in the extralegal Bambara trial using informal laws and informal procedures, the plaintiff is generally expected to employ an extralegal lawyer. Usually people have the eldest male of each respective adversary’s family do all the negotiating – and so I should have delegated responsibility to my jatigi Karitie Sanogo. For yours truly – former Mock Trial lawyer, material witness for a real-life courtroom disposition and citizen of the U.S. of A. where 23-year-olds are just as full members of society as their real fathers – it never occurred to me that I should employ someone else to redress my own grievances. Thus by stepping into the dugutigi’s gwa to act as my own counsel, I apparently disrupted the gerontocratic social order and already had one strike going against me.

Nevertheless, I put forward an argument based on what I felt was incontrovertible logic:

1. Individuals are granted by their Creator a natural right to Property. (Bourgeois Capitalism)
2. “To steal” is to take another person’s Property without their consent. (Definition)
3. If an Individual steals another Individual’s Property, the Thief must pay the Victim in order to re-establish the State of Nature. (Bourgeois Capitalism)
4. I had a Cat. (Given)
5. My Cat cost 5,000 francs. (Given)
6. I never told anyone that they had permission to take my Cat. (Given)
7. Seydou killed my Cat and his wife is preparing it for dinner. (Given)
8. Therefore, Seydou stole my Cat (Chain Rule [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7])
9. Therefore, Seydou must give me 5,000 francs. (Chain Rule, Bourgeois Justice [3, 5, 8])
10. And a goat. (Revenge)

The dugutigi agreed wholeheartedly with my proposition. However, Seydou had a right to defend himself.

1. I am the Night Watchman at the Clinic. (Given)
2. The Night Watchman is equipped with a Shotgun in order to protect the Clinic. (Given)
3. Therefore, it is my solemn duty to protect the Clinic as well as myself with my Shotgun.
(Chain Rule [1,2])
4. Evil Sorcerers exist, and they wish to do us harm. (Incontrovertible Fact)
5. Evil Sorcerers can take the form of Cats. (Incontrovertible Fact)
6. While guarding the Clinic last night, I saw a Cat. (Given)
7. Therefore, the Cat which I saw could have been an Evil Sorcerer in disguise.(Chain Rule [4, 5, 6])
8. Therefore, there is no way that I could have known that that Cat was not an Evil Sorcerer. (The Law of Epistemological Positivism [6, 7])
9. Therefore, it was my solemn duty to shoot that Cat with my Shotgun in order to protect the Clinic from Evil Sorcerers. (Chain Rule [1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8])

The dugutigi gave much credence to Seydou’s defense. “He’s got a good point there, Madu – what if your cat was a sorcerer?”

“NO!!!!! I know for a fact that my cat could not cast magic spells. If Seydou believes thinks that he should shoot every single kitten that walks his way because it might be a sorcerer, then he is delusional and insane and he should not have a job which entails holding a shotgun at a health clinic!!! Witches and wizards are not real and they cannot be valid reasons for slaughtering other people’s animals!!! You know what? Maybe Seydou’s cow is a sorcerer!!!! I should kill his cow!!! And maybe his goats and his sheep are all sorcerers too!!! If Seydou’s defense is valid, then I should be able to shoot all of his animals and eat them to protect myself from evil spells!!!!

Unfortunately for my case, the dugutigi also believes in witches and wizards – hence he let Seydou’s defense stand.

“The night watchman had good reason to believe that his very life could have been in danger of black magic, he shot your cat out of sincere self-defense. So Seydou must not give you a goat to slaughter as you demand… However, since you now surely want a new cat and you want to vaccinate it too, Seydou must give you 5,000 francs to cover the cost of cat medicine.”

But the important issue to me wasn’t the money; I wanted Seydou to pay 5,000 francs merely to make his reckless behavior really, really expensive and hopefully to deter his assassination of future cats. What mattered to me is that now my life in the peaceful gardens of Xanadu is lacking a huggable, squeezable furball to curl up next to my pillow and purr me to sleep.

Though this tragedy concludes with a happy ending of rebirth and renewal; within hours of this fiasco, in such an insular village where my nail-clipping habits are considered juicy gossip, every man, woman and child in Sanadougou knew about the untimely assassination of my feline friend who would so often follow me and climb up on my shoulder to accompany me around the hood. James Brown was a Sanadougou celebrity in his own right, and his presence was immediately missed. And by the afternoon the community poured out in sympathy and dozens of people offered me brand new kittens to offset my loss.

I accepted one baby kitten, and his name his James Brown II.

Human Sanitation with Feline Inspiration

So I woke up one morning and let my kitten out to pee and set up my solar panel to bask in the rising Sun. Usually I start my days walking down the street greeting everyone in my village and try to get them excited about treating their wells and drinking water. But today I just felt like venting to my kitten.

“James Brown, what’s the point of it all? The people of Sanadougou tell the Peace Corps that they want me to help them with water sanitation, I spend all day teaching people about water-borne disease prevention and they don’t do a damn thing I tell them! Every day I tell people they should drink pump water instead of well water and how they should filter their drinking water with cloth and treat it with bleach and yet they continue to drink worm-infested well water because they say that it tastes better than pump water!!! And I know that they’re not doing anything differently because at night I can smell all the gaseous sulfur from the aggregate diarrhea of everyone in this village! Why do I do this?!?! Why am I here?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?! Why?!?!

James Brown replied, “Get a grip on yo self Madu! You gotta understand! The Bambara people have been living like this for thousands of years! Almost nuthin changes! You been here six months, and you frustrated cuz you ain’t changed nuthin yet? Take a chill pill!!! You gotta learn patience!!!

“You got a point there James. But I don’t understand how people who tell me every day how sick they are and how poor they are can be so resistant to change. It’s just absurd.”

“Put yourself in their position! You’re a Bambara peanut farmer, dig? And some white dude from the suburbs waltzes into your village and tells you you’re doing everything wrong! This honky tells you that diseases come from tiny animals that you’ve never seen! Then he starts tellin’ you that wizards ain’t real! You’d think that punk be talkin' Jive! You'd say ‘screw you, honky!’ You wouldn’t do a damn thing different!”

“But what am I supposed to do? Stop trying to teach people about giardia and amoebas?”

Al – my solar panel – chimed in. “No, Zachary, I would advise that you continue on your current course of action despite its lack of easily measurable achievement. For example, the other day Moustapha told you that he treated his well with liquid bleach like you told him to. I would consider that a success unto itself.”

“C’mon, Al, Moustapha is just one person! There are like 4,427 other people in this village! At this rate they’ll all be treating their drinking water in the year 6224!”

“I would not be so pessimistic, Zachary. When I presided over the first Senate hearings on global warming in 1988 I was received with such skepticism that I was practically laughed out of the committee chamber, for at the time this phenomenon was understood almost exclusively within the academic community. In my 1993 environmental treatise Earth in the Balance I explained the climatological science in relative layman’s terms, and my message reached a substantially larger audience. But it was not until 2006 when I produced and narrated the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth that public opinion was so roused in favor of a national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and only now in the year 2009 does it look like public opinion has shifted to such a degree that the cap-and-trade program which I have advocated has a chance of passing both houses of Congress.”

“Al, you lost me. What does global warming have to do with diarrhea?”

“Actually, the two phenomena are not mutually exclusive, for methane actually constitutes one of the most significant biogenic greenhouse gases – and the amount of methane released by the human digestive system actually spikes due to cases of giardiasis and amoebic dysentery. If we could provide potable water supplies to the population of roughly 2 billion persons currently lacking, then that could make a consequential reduction in the annual tonnage of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However, the point of my analogy between my campaign for sensible climate policy and your campaign for improved water sanitation practices is that you should look into trying new forms of media to broadcast your message to a wider audience. For example, I used cinema and the Internet...”

“No, Al, this has nothing to do with the Internet. The people in my village ooh and ah when I show them how the velcro on my sandals works. Three people in the Mayor’s Office know how to type birth certificates on a typewriter. Just forget about the Internet! If I am going to teach people anything about water sanitation and for them to actually do it themselves it has to be simple enough for a toothless, illiterate peanut farmer to understand. It has to be so simple and so obvious that they can see it for themselves with their own eyes. If it entails concepts that I learned in 9th grade Biology class then it is too complicated.”

“’Scuse me, fellas! I gotta take a pee!”

“You’re excused, James.”

James Brown proceeded to dig a little hole in the sand with his front paws, urinated, and then moved forward and with his back paws pawed sand back on top of his pee hole.

“James, what did you just do?”

“Nuthin! I just got to pee! And when I got to pee I got to dig a hole!”

“I know you dug a hole, but why?”

“I don’t know! I… I… I just got to pee! Every time I got to pee I got to dig a hole! That’s just the way it is!”

Al lectured, “The common house cat covers up its own liquid and solid waste because of its instincts as a carnivorous animal. The scent of feline urine is particularly strong due to its high concentration of urea relative to water and is used among the wild cat population to mark one’s territory; however, potential prey have over millions of generations learned to avoid areas marked by the scent of cat urine. Over time, cats began to realize this as wekk and hence they have likewise developed the instinctive behavior to bury their waste so as to hide the scent.”

“THAT’S IT!!! We need to build a network of rudimentary septic tanks!!! James Brown, you’re the most ingenious talking cat ever!!!”

“Damn straight! They don’t call me the Kitty Cat of Soul for Nuthin!”

So I emulated the ingenious water sanitation infrastructure designed by my kitten and began to build a soak pit. I went out in the back of my nyegen where the wastewater flows out into the garden and plotted out a hole. A soak pit should have a minimum of 1.7 m2 of volume for each person who uses it on an average day, and since I am the only person who lives in the mud mansion of Xanadu that meant that I had to dig a hole roughly 1.2 meters long, 1.2 meters wide, and 1 meter deep. Easy, right?


No. In the midst of dry season – six months since the last rainfall – the dirt is as hard as a rock. Before digging anything I had to take a pickax and smash the ground apart. But even a pickax alone did not do the trick – after smashing the ground for an hour, I would have maybe a couple centimeters of debris to excavate. It was a little easier if I dumped a bucket of water on it at night and came to smash the moistened dirt in the morning, but the water would only moisten about 5 cm below the surface each time. Eventually I was able to sit in my pit and use the ax head to chisel the walls flat. Never was I able to produce enough debris to fill a single shovel – I could only dig this pit with a small garden spade.

The most fascinating aspect of me digging a hole was… that it was so goddamn fascinating. Rumor quickly spread around the village; “Did you hear that Madu is digging a hole?” “Praise be unto Allah! This is the first time since he’s gotten off his fat bobaraba since he got here!” And unless you have been the only white guy living in an African village you’d never believe it, but pretty soon there was a crowd of people gathering around to watch me. Only to a people who enjoy watching shitty Brazilian soap operas dubbed into another Western language they don’t understand could this actually be entertaining. “Holy Goat Meat! Madu is digging a hole! I’ve never seen anything like it!” This actually made my work go significantly slower because every 15 minutes I had to stop and explain what I was doing “Well you see, I’m digging a hole…”

What was actually kind of encouraging is another phenomenon kind of like Tom Sawyer whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence – if you start a project out in public, other people want to finish it for you. Ten year old kids would point out that in comparison to their fathers’ thick, calloused hands hardened after decades of hard labor in the fields, my hands have the soft and delicate skin of an American who has worked in offices clicking buttons all of his life. “You can’t dig a hole!” “You should sit and rest!” and they would try to take the pickax from my hands and do it for me. After having my manhood called into question by ten year olds, I had to lock my gate so they could only watch from outside.

After two weeks of picking and chiseling downward I eventually I dug my 1.7 m2.

And me digging this hole seems to have done its job. Pretty soon everyone knew that I had a hole in back of my nyegen. Word eventually got around to the dugutigi, so he and his crew of old men came to inspect my hole. They thought that it was so awesome that they wanted one in back of every last nyegen in the village, and I was summoned to the gwa of the elders.

(dum dum DUUUUUUM!!!! To be continued!!!!!!)

Get On the Good Foot!

(this story works best when read along with the prescribed musical accompaniments)

There comes a point in every Volunteer’s service between 1 and 4 months after being installed when culture shock finally takes its toll. Culture shock is defined in the Peace Corps Wellness Handbook as “the psychological disorientation people experience when they live abroad for an extended time in a culture quite different from your own.” In a remote Islamic agrarian society on the edge of the Sahara Desert, this was kind of inevitable.

Initially everything in Mali is new and exciting. But once it settles on you that your life for the next two years shall entail communicating in a very different language, being either sick and/or injured, pumping all of your own water by hand, the constant feeling of living under a microscope, being accosted for everything you own, the swarms of children chanting Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu! Tubabu!, donkeys crying, the call to prayer at 5 A.M., the heat, the dryness, mosquitoes, filth flies, sand storms, etc., there comes a point when even the most indomitable of spirits gives way.

The Pollyannaish reaction is to tell oneself “But I’m making a difference!” Though as I walk the dusty, filth-ridden streets of my village each day I realize that the kids with grotesquely distended stomachs down the street are probably going to die within the next year because their mothers will never cook food with any nutritional content and that no matter how hard I try I can only make the tiniest of dents in the poverty and disease which will remain facts of life in Mali for the foreseeable future.

I can’t put my finger on exactly which straw it was which broke this camel’s back. Dealing with all of the above day in and day out eventually led me to lock the gate, hole up in my hut and not want to talk to anyone for a long time.


In a nutshell, that is what culture shock looks like.


The ability to deal with stress in a healthy, non-self-destructive manner is as necessary to human survival out here as is the ability to prepare food and water. Escapism is usually a good remedy, and for that I have the Lord of the Rings trilogy and an impressive collection of Phish bootlegs. But as much I enjoy alternate realities, at the end of the day the streets of Diaramana are still strewn with human waste, people are still drinking from mud puddles, and the sulfurous clouds of giardiasis gas still waft through the air at night.

Thankfully I brought with me a miniature rinkydink guitar and a two year supply of strings so that I can express myself by strumming blues riffs and crooning tales of woe. Even if I cannot rid the world of evil, I can vent by singing about it. I know the whole neighborhood can hear me, so it is to the good fortune of all parties that I am the only one who can understand a word of my crude lyrics.

Even so, spending two years moping in human misery and fantasy novels was a recipe for disaster and I knew it. What I needed to abate my spiritual loneliness was something of this world that would radiate joy and happiness into my life.

During my bad case of the I-Live-in-Mali-and-There’s-Garbage-Everywhere-and-Nobody-Understands-Modern-Germ-Theory Blues I rode my bike to the mud hut of my teammate Nicole. Nicole is a good source of succor for she has been here more than a year and has gone through all the same things I am dealing with and she has been featured on Malian state television for somehow being able to cook gourmet cuisine out of the few things sold in a rural butigi. This time I came over she happened to have acquired a pair of four-week-old kittens.

At Nicole’s house I was feeling abnormally sweaty and disgusting (a level of disgustingness which you can only imagine) and I took off my t-shirt to lie down and bask in the wind. One of her kittens took the initiative to climb up on me and had a joyous time playing with my forest of chest hair and quickly tired himself out and sprawled out on my belly to take a noonday nap. I’ve never really been fond of felines, but as this huggable, squeezable fur ball was purring and making little kitty snores on my belly, I was converted.



“He’s all yours if you want him”, Nicole offered.

And with that, he was mine.

The next week Nicole biked over to my hut with my brand new kitty cat in a basket. For the first and only time in my life (my dad is deathly allergic) I became a cat person.

I reiterate, I’m not really a cat person – never before had I known cats to have anything resembling a personality. But this particular kitten is something else. My kitten wants to climb on my shoulder and accompany me wherever I go. He rolls over because he wants a tummy rub every 15 minutes and he paws me awake in the morning because he wants to wrestle. My kitten likes to start fights with the other kittens down the street and he clobbers the shit out of them every time. He likes to catch geckos and chameleons and smack them until they are just about dead and eat them alive. And yet he too recognizes the tragedy of underdevelopment and cries sad soul ballads every night. I was thinking maybe I’d call him Sam Cooke or Otis Redding…

I walked down the road with my kitten on my shoulder to meet my host family, who promptly picked him up and inspected his gonads. “He is a man cat”, my jatigi pronounced, “All the other cats in the neighborhood are woman cats. One day all of the new baby cats will look like yours.”

Then and there I knew that my kitten’s name had to be James Brown, because he is destined to be a sex machine.