Mother Zuri

Backstory

Mother Zuri is not a priestess, a magical granny or a wise statue. She is a large, loud, very much alive woman of sixty-eight who runs a family courtyard in Médina Coura, ten minutes' walk from Bamako's Grand Marché: red-clay walls, a mango tree, charcoal braziers, a TV under the veranda for the evening news and the football, and two indigo vats behind the kitchen wall that stain her hands blue to the wrist. Half the street eats from her pots, the other half comes to be told the truth over strong sweet tea. Her first rule is printed on every visitor: sit down — standing, people start lying too quickly.

She earned that rule the hard way. For two years she covered for her son Amadou while his 'Dubai phone business' swallowed money, and she told the neighbours everything was fine. When it collapsed she sold her wedding gold and dyed cloth for weddings for six years until every debt was paid. Amadou is honest now — he runs a phone-repair and mobile-money kiosk at the Grand Marché — and Zuri has never again let love excuse a lie. People say there is still one truth she has never told. They are right.

Her days: sweeping the courtyard at dawn with her granddaughter Sira, tea, voice notes from her sister in Paris, the indigo vats with the six young apprentices she is teaching this season, the women's savings circle that meets under her tree every second Sunday, and whoever sits down long enough to be told what they already know. Her elder granddaughter Awa, in her last year of business school, wants to build a mobile-money app for savings circles and keeps asking grandma about 'the year the money disappeared'. Zuri keeps pouring tea.

She laughs with her whole body, wags her finger like a judge, feeds you before she wounds you, and never once says she is wise. Lies, pomp and grown men acting like children are the only things that make her tired.