ABDOU THIAM IS THE VILLAGE CHIEF of Gandiol. This was determined by traditional law. Abdou Thiam detests my father because my father, the old man, made him lose face in front of everyone. Abdou Thiam collects the village taxes and one day he convened an assembly of the elders, which was soon joined by all the people of Gandiol. Inspired by a king’s envoy from Cayor and incited by a governor’s envoy from Saint-Louis, Abdou Thiam said that we needed to follow a new path, that we needed to cultivate peanuts instead of millet, peanuts instead of tomatoes, peanuts instead of onions, peanuts instead of cabbage, peanuts instead of watermelons. Peanuts meant more money for everyone. Peanuts meant more money to pay taxes. Peanuts would give new nets to the fishermen. Peanuts meant new wells could be dug. The money from the peanuts would mean brick houses, a permanent school, corrugated metal roofs for our huts. The money from the peanuts would mean trains and roads, motors on our canoes, clinics and maternity wards. Those who farmed peanuts, Chief Abdou Thiam concluded, would be exempt from their corvées, from mandatory labor. Those who didn’t would not.
So my father, the old man, stood up and asked permission to speak. I am his youngest son, his youngest child. My father has worn a helmet of white hair on his head since Penndo Ba left us. My father is a soldier of everyday life who only lived to protect his wives and his children from hunger. Day after day, in the river of time that is life, my father filled our bellies with the fruits of his fields and his orchards. My father, the old man, made us, his family, grow stronger and more beautiful just like the plants he fed to us. He was a grower of trees and fruits, he was a grower of children. We grew tall and strong like the seeds he planted in the loamy soils of his fields.
My father, the old man, stood up and asked permission to speak. It was granted, and he said:
“I, Bassirou Coumba Ndiaye, the grandson of Sidy Malamine Ndiaye, the great-grandson of the grandson of one of the five founders of our village, I am going to tell you, Abdou Thiam, something that you will not like. I will not refuse to dedicate one of my fields to the cultivation of peanuts, but I refuse to dedicate all of my fields to peanuts. Peanuts cannot feed my family. Abdou Thiam, you say that peanuts are money, but God’s truth, I don’t need money. I feed my family with millet, tomatoes, onions, red beans, with the watermelons that grow in my fields. I have a cow that gives me milk, I have a few sheep that give me meat. One of my sons who is a fisherman gives me dried fish. My wives extract salt from the soil all year long. With all of this food I can even open my doors to a hungry traveler, I can perform the sacred duty of hospitality.
“But if I only grow peanuts, what will feed my family? Who will feed the passing travelers who deserve my hospitality? Money from peanuts can’t feed them all. Tell me, Abdou Thiam, would I not be forced to come to your store to buy food? Abdou Thiam, you will not like what I am going to say to you, but a village chief should concern himself with the people’s interests before his own. Abdou Thiam, you and I are equals and I do not want, one day, to have to come to your store to beg for rice on credit, for oil on credit, for sugar on credit to feed my own. I also do not want to close my door to a hungry traveler because I myself am hungry.
“Abdou Thiam, you won’t like what I’m going to say, but the day when all of the villages in our area only cultivate peanuts, the price of peanuts will go down. We will earn less and less money and you yourself will end up having to live on credit. A shopkeeper whose clients are all debtors becomes himself a debtor to his suppliers.
“Abdou Thiam, you won’t like what I’m going to say. I, Bassirou Coumba Ndiaye, remember the year we call ‘the year of hunger.’ Your late grandfather might have spoken to you about it. It was the year after the locusts came, the year of the great drought, the year the wells dried up, the year the dust blew down from the north, the year the river was too low to irrigate our fields. I was a young child but I remember that if we had not all shared everything during that infernally dry year, if we hadn’t shared our stores of millet, of red beans, our stores of onions, of cassava, if we hadn’t shared our milk and our sheep, we would all have died. Abdou Thiam, peanuts wouldn’t have saved us then, and the money from peanuts wouldn’t have saved us either. To survive the devil’s drought, we would surely have eaten the seed peanuts for the following year’s crop and we would have had to buy more on credit from the same people we’d sold our crop to at whatever price they set. From that moment on, we would have been poor forever, beggars forever! That is why, Abdou Thiam, even if you won’t like it, I say ‘no’ to peanuts and I say ‘no’ to peanut money!”
My father’s speech didn’t please Abdou Thiam one bit—he was very, very angry, but he didn’t show it. Abdou Thiam didn’t like it that my father said he was a bad chief. Abdou Thiam didn’t like it one bit that someone had mentioned his shop. So, the last thing in the world that Abdou Thiam would have wanted was for his daughter Fary to get together with one of Bassirou Coumba Ndiaye’s sons. Fary Thiam gave herself to me in the small ebony forest before I left for war in France. Fary loved me more than the honor of her father, who had none.