"The · darkest · thing · about · Africa · has · always · been · our · ignorance · of · it"

It’s a common theme of the Gambian PCV experience that you become somewhat deadened to the pain of losing host relatives. With malaria, diarrheal diseases, and malnutrition running rampant, this is a not a country where many people live to see old age. I’ve somehow been spared that, however. In a year and half, I’ve yet to have a single host family member die. I’ve often wondered how I would handle it, and how such an event would affect me. Would it be like losing my own family member, or would it feel like I was the observer, present as someone else’s family deals with their loss? I guess I’ve figured sooner or later that Jawneh kunda (my compound) would lose someone. I just never thought it would be Lion.

As you might guess, Lion is not a human name. In fact, Lion is my host family’s dog. He’s been around for several years, and may have belonged to a former PCV in my house. (I’m unclear on whether he was her dog or if she just helped take care of him.) But since then, he has belonged mostly to my host father Seiko and teenage host brother Sidiya.

He’s always been a really sweet dog. Had no use for Minty, but would only give Minty a warning growl if he got too close. Lion did well as a Gambian dog—he knew to stay out of people’s way and never attempted to go somewhere he wasn’t allowed. (Minty, who’s had a lot more love in his life, is forever having to relearn the fact that most people here don’t LIKE him.) Lion would drive me crazy at night every now and then, though. A couple times a month, Lion would go into a barking frenzy at about 2 am, barking at nothing in particular, and just sit there right next to my back yard and bark for an hour. Since I usually SLEEP in my backyard, this made a good night’s rest virtually impossible. At first, I’d drag myself out of bed, shuffle into my flip-flops, wince as I opened my squeaky front door (what if my host family woke up and found me chasing their dog away? What would they think?), and quietly shoo Lion away. He’d go back to roaming the village like he did most nights, and I’d go back to bed.

After a while, I realized that going out wasn’t really necessary. Instead, I stockpiled rocks in my backyard (coming home with a bucket full of rocks one afternoon earned me some strange looks), so that when he barked, I could just throw a rock over the fence and chase him off. Before you think I’m cruel, remember that I was throwing these rocks in the dark, half asleep, without a flashlight or glasses. The rocks never got anywhere near him. But Lion was Gambian enough to understand that a rock sailing in his general direction meant he’d better skedaddle, and I didn’t have to explain to my host family (who evidently could sleep right through his barking) why I was padding around in the compound at 2 a.m.

So we reached an understanding that lasted until my trip to Janjanbureh last week. I was only gone 2 nights (a time to get out of village and explore part of the country I’d only seen passing through), but when I returned, Lion looked terrible. It appears that the night I’d left, when everyone was asleep, someone hacked into Lion’s back with an ax. Maybe he wandered into some part of the village where he wasn’t wanted, maybe someone was just looking to make trouble—no one knows. By the time I got back almost two days later, the wound was gaping and infested with maggots. Lion had been one of the most muscular Gambian dogs I’d ever seen, but after two days with that wound, he’d lost so much weight his skin was sagging off of him. It still didn’t occur to me at this point that he wouldn’t be okay—I hadn’t looked at the wound close-up, and animals here are so resilient (hey, he was still walking just fine!) that I figured he just had a long painful recovery ahead of him. If I’d been there when it had happened (or soon afterward), I could have bandaged him up and at least given him a chance to heal properly, but the hole was too big and the surrounding flesh too dead to do anything but let nature take its course by the time I saw him. I still didn’t realize how bad off he was til I heard a terrible crying noise that summoned me out of my house. The sound was so pathetic and desperate that I thought at first the boys had brought home a new puppy and it was crying for its mother. But then I looked into the teen boys’ hut in my compound, and there was Lion, on the floor, taking a beating rather than leave the house. Never in all my time here has Lion ever even attempted to go indoors—Gambians don’t allow it, a lesson he obviously learned a long time ago. It’s as though he was in so much pain that he just wanted to go somewhere comfortable, and was willing to withstand a beating rather than have to get up again. Evidently, that was the deciding point for my host father.

Shortly thereafter, I watched him call for Lion and put a rope around the dog’s neck. Then he summoned a few boys I’d never seen before (no emotional attachment to Lion, I guess), and asked them to take Lion out to the bush and put him out of his misery. Anger flashed in his eyes when he told me that what had been done to his dog was terrible and that they don’t know who did it. Then all the boys and men (who culturally are more attached to their dogs than the women) busied themselves—it seems like they all immediately left to go hang out with various friends, anything to get away.

Now, Lion is like the elephant in the room no one talks about. Suddenly the kids are all even more interested in Minty (Aja, who’s always yelling “Minty’s going to EAT me!” has actually started trying to call Minty sometimes. She can’t whistle for him like I do, so she tries her closest approximation of a whistle, calling out “Minty! Woo-wee-woo-wee-woo-wee!) They’d like Minty to go to the fields with them, but he won’t leave home without me (or at least, someone with white skin). I wonder if they’ll get a new puppy when puppy season rolls around in October/Novemberish, but I’m afraid to ask, since for now they all seem content not to speak of Lion and act like everything’s normal.

I sleep through the night with no disturbances now, but I never would have wished for this.