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.

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.