Mali is about buying and selling. Whether it’s haggling for tomatoes, making a deal with a taxi driver, triumphantly negotiating a good price in a back alley for a Harry Potter book on the black market, it’s all about the Benjamins (or whatever) here in Mali. Small, like four-year old, children will ask you to take their photo in exchange for “cadeaux”, and their older brothers (not much older, mind you) are happy to show you to an off-the-beaten-track restaurant for a slightly more impressive cadeau.
In Mopti, I said to myself, and whoever else was listening, something like “I’m over this iPhone. I don’t miss it at all, I’m ditching it”. John said, “You should sell it!”… I said “Who would want this? Aside from it being a soul-sucking waste of brain and phalange power, it’s all cracked and the battery lasts for like four minutes”. “Trust me”, he replied.
And so we went to the bar, and I casually put the phone on the table. I kid you not, six seconds after it hit the table, my friend Mohamed said, “Is that an iPhone? Do you want to sell it? I’ll give you a sheep for it!”… I ignored the I-told-you-so chuckle coming from John’s corner of the table.
And so went the parting of ways between me and my faithful, impossibly hip electronic secretary. I’m pretty sure the mouton would have been the sweeter deal (I could have sold it in the black market sheep trade), but I went with cash, 35,000 CFA, which is about $85.
So it’s me and my never-fail $20 Nokia now. I’ll see how much I can get for it in Lesotho.
On a side-note, I ran into Mohamed again in Bamako, by which point he’d managed to unlock AT&Ts proprietorial code and was happily “sliding to unlock” every five seconds and blissfully ignoring all surrounding conversation, of course. Here’s his first iPhone photo, a Tuareg boy in Mopti. I wonder how much he had to pay him for it???
"Cadeau??"
