Walking with Abel

Starred review from June 15, 2015
After years as a war correspondent, Badkhen (The World Is a Carpet) came to Mali in 2013 to live with the nomadic Fulani as they walk across Mali’s savannah. This lyrical account of that journey eloquently describes the culture of the Fulani and is laced with ethereal sketches that reflect transitions in the author’s life at the time. Badkhen combines journalistic observation with deep feeling as she grows to respect and then love the clan led by patriarch Oumarou. At first, her observations are refracted by her own emotional experience. “Every footfall begets a separation.... To spend a lifetime walking away. To bid farewell over and over...” However, as the year of herding the cattle across Africa progresses, Badkhen learns that the Fulani see their journey as a circle. The outside world intrudes in the form of unconnected cell phones that the boys use for music and videos. Overhead, French military planes go to bomb the rebels. But Oumarou leads his family through the timeworn route. The Fulani are individuals, not archetypes. Their journey is both beautiful and difficult. Soon the author believes that she will find no epiphany, only “stronger legs, skin sore from the sun, and thicker calluses.” But she does find respite, which she tenderly renders in this exquisitely written book. Agent: Felicia Eth, Felicia Eth Literary Representation.

May 15, 2015
A journalist records her impressions of living with a group of nomads as they travel with their herds of cows back and forth across Mali. Badkhen, who was born in Russia and has often written from war zones (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, 2013, etc.), embedded herself with a Fulani family in West Africa whose members are still walking with their cows as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. On her journey, the author shared their lives, sleeping on a plastic tarp on the ground (sometimes with a child or a goat curled up next to her), cooking over a manure fire, eating millet and fish paste, churning buttermilk, bathing in a river, and learning their language. The measured pace of Fulani life, basically unchanged for millennia, served as a kind of balm for Badkhen, who was recovering from a recently ended, unhappy love affair. The Fulani cannot read the printed word, but they can read the sky, they know the seasons, and they cherish their cows. They told the author their stories and their myths, and she told them about the Big Bang and the long-ago migration of humans out of Africa. In lyrical and evocative prose, Badkhen writes of the beauty of the land and the sky and the grace and wisdom of the people. This is no Eden, however, for war planes fly overhead, climate change has brought long droughts, farms have been planted across the Fulani's traditional travel routes, and modern technology is luring young men off to urban centers. The Fulani seem mostly unruffled by these threats to their lifestyle, however, adopting what suits them-e.g., plastic pails, flashlight batteries-keeping their faith in their cows, and synchronizing their lives with the seasons. Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen's prose demands that readers slow down and savor her gentle, elegant story.

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July 1, 2015
Badkhen's lyrical, off-the-beaten-path travel memoir also serves as a trenchant sociological study of one of the planet's largest remaining group of nomads, the Fulani, of West Africa. Embedding herself with a Fulani family, she thoroughly immerses herself in their culture and their lifestylea curious hybrid of the primitive and the contemporaryas they, together with herds of cows, trek their way across the Mali savannah during their seasonal migration to the grasslands. Inevitably, the journey is dotted with incursions of modern life. Still, the Fulani display a remarkable ability to adapt to certain new realities while honoring centuries-old traditions. Badkhen, a seasoned reporter and author (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, 2013), vividly captures and communicates an increasingly rare and wondrous experience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

March 15, 2015

The queen of the new media--she created and starred in the hit web series The Guild and launched a YouTube channel called Geek & Sundry that now claims more than 1.3 million viewers--tracks her life.

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June 1, 2015

Journalist and author Badkhen (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village) recounts her experience with a multigenerational family of Fulani cattle herders during their annual transhumance migration to greener grazing across a stretch of the Sahel, a grassy region between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanian Savanna. Joining the Fulani in Mali, Badkhen presents vivid descriptions of day and nighttime sky, land and water, and the nomads' cattle and customs. These all contribute to the author's success in making Fulani culture come alive as she follows the herders' daily efforts to cope with drought, disease, and death in an often unforgiving landscape. Badkhen draws on references to travelers' writing throughout history--as distant as ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia--to contribute context to the traditional life of these 21st-century nomads whose young are tempted by the modern attractions of settled life and threatened by armed conflicts in the Sahara. Gray-scale illustrations of people and animals enhance a feeling of immediacy. VERDICT Recent books on present-day Fulani are for scholars or children; Badkhen makes intellectual and emotional connections that will appeal to anyone interested in Africa's nomadic peoples and readers of memoirs such as Cheryl Strayed's Wild. [See Prepub Alert, 3/2/15.]--Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015

Award-winning reporter Badkhen (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village) chronicles a family of Fulani herders, nomads of Mali's Sahel grasslands, as she joins them for their annual migration across the savanna.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.