The Clown

THE CRUCIAL moment in Jean-Louis Bourgeois’s training as a West African clown occurred during the annual post-Ramadan festival, when two dancing women, themselves clowns, burst into his house in the ancient Malian city of Djenné. The visit in itself was not unusual; a wide variety of people drop by Bourgeois’s house daily. But on this occasion, one of the visitors had a wooden phallus on a string dangling from her waist. Bourgeois thought this was very funny and persuaded her to sell it to him. A few weeks later, Djenné’s foremost clown, Tabacily Coulibaly, came to visit. Coulibaly was Bourgeois’s teacher; his lessons had consisted mainly of the trading back and forth of Malian jokes. Now, after a year of practice, Bourgeois was ready to show his teacher that he had mastered this very particular brand of humour. “I had an inkling that Coulibaly was not stopping by just to say hello,” Bourgeois recalls. “He wanted to check what progress I had made as his apprentice. He was giving me a clown exam.” Bourgeois fetched the phallus from his room and dangled it before Coulibaly, who laughed and anointed him as an official Malian clown.

In Western society, clowns are relegated to the circus and the comedy club; in Djenné, they play an important role in everyday life. Clowns are generally members of the Woloso caste, which is comprised of the former domestic slaves of various West African tribes, such as the Fulani and the Songhai.

Despite their low social status, Djenné’s clowns, like the fools and jesters in Shakespearean drama, are permitted to do or say almost anything. According to some anthropologists, the antics of the Woloso clowns help to relieve stress in a highly formal culture. Woloso clowns also play an unofficial role in helping to resolve disputes and conflicts in Djenné’s stratified society. One way they do this is to tease both the opponent parties mercilessly. But, if need be, they will also strip off their clothes and dance naked to defuse a hostile situation.

It is unusual for someone who is not of West African descent to become a Woloso clown. (Typically there is no formal education; one learns by observing one’s elders, and lineage and a sense of humour are the main criteria.) But, with his sense of adventure and his cultural pedigree, Bourgeois is better suited to the task than most. His father, Robert Goldwater, a renowned art historian, was the director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York and wrote seminal treatises on African sculpture. His mother, the world-famous sculptor Louise Bourgeois, has something of a Woloso sense of humour herself, according to Jean-Louis. One of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most famous photographs shows her smiling, with a huge latex phallus tucked under her arm. (She titled the phallus “Fillette,” French for a young and inexperienced girl.)

Bourgeois was already something of a clown before he became a Woloso. His leathery skin and intense blue eyes give him a distinctive appearance, though it is his attire that really stops traffic. The pony-tailed sixty-three-year-old wears a fantastic array of Malian adornments around his neck, including a leather Tureg wallet, a silver chain with an enormous blue stone, and a cowrie-shell necklace. His favourite outfit consists of printed indigo tunic and pants. His preferred accessories are an out-sized blue-foam cowboy hat and a Winnie-the-Pooh tote bag. When he attended an environmental conference in Brazil, he was asked by a schoolgirl if he was still in kindergarten. (Bourgeois answered, “Yes, but I have been going for quite some time.”)

Bourgeois first travelled to Djenné in 1980 as part of a decade-long trip he took with his wife, the late Carollee Pelos, to research a book on adobe architecture. Bourgeois had studied architecture and literature at Harvard University (he enrolled in 1958 and graduated in 1978) and worked for the prominent arts magazine ArtForum. He decided to focus on adobe after reading Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects, which argues that architecture should not dominate Nature and should be treated as a craft rather than as a profession.

Bourgeois and Pelos’s odyssey took them through Asia, Africa, and the American Southwest. Their book, Spectacular Vernacular, which presents a cross-cultural history of adobe architecture, was well received, and established Bourgeois as an authority on the subject. He now divides his time between Djenné and Taos, two of the most significant adobe communities in the world, and both World Heritage Sites.

To visit Bourgeois in Djenné is to leave the modern world. The town is thirty kilometres from the narrow, two-lane road that is one of Mali’s major highways. Bourgeois’s rustic, two-storey house has uneven adobe floors and no flush toilet. Scrawny chickens run about in the small courtyard. Looking out from the terrace, one can observe a way of life that has changed little over thousands of years: fishermen cast their nets from long, slim canoes that ply the Bani River; herds of cattle graze on the nine-feet-high aquatic grass.

One of the oldest cities in sub-Saharan Africa, Djenné dates back to 250 B.C. It has the world’s largest adobe structure – a mosque capable of holding two thousand people – and many tall adobe buildings with bulging, priapic finials, saw-toothed roof decorations, and intricate, latticed wood windows. Most of the city’s winding dirt streets have open sewers for “grey” water (as opposed to “black” water, which contains sewage), and are too narrow for Djenné’s few automobiles.

The lack of modern amenities appeals to Bourgeois, but so does the region’s complex social structure, which dates back several millennia and has survived a number of African empires and colonization by the French. The idea we encounter in history books in the West, says Bourgeois, “is that civilization equals empire. Now we know that in the Niger and Bani river basins there is instead another civilization, where different groups co-operated.”