I knew nothing about millet, not even what it looked like, until I spent a day on assignment interviewing millet farmers. There was nothing to look at; the harvest is over, and the fields are covered only in straw. Try as we did, we could not find anything much to photograph, although the old farmers I met were full of tales of their hardships. One, predictably, asked me if I could bring him a water pump the next time.

The striking thing about the villages we went to was that they all had areas, covered over in corrugated metal, with long concrete benches. This is the man's meeting area, where the elders gather to discuss, enjoy the shade and quiet of their special zone, play chess. I am used to seeing old wooden versions in Malian villages, but here they were about the only modern construction in the otherwise tired village. Even the market happened on the ground; noisy women selling their dried fish and cockles on rice sacks laid out on the shelly street, in the full glare of the sun.

One area of activity was the millet-grinding shed in the centre of the village. A young guy stood all day long waiting for girls to bring their calabashes of millet, when he would tip them into the machine and give them their powder out the other end. The machine looked almost human to me, like a Giacometti sculpture, and as dusty as we all felt after an hour in that shed.



Visiting the onion gardens made me realise how hard it all is. The millet doesn't grow anymore because there's not enough rain. The sons have all fled to the cities. The fathers are left to work onion gardens instead, hoping they can make a couple of hundred dollars to keep them going until the next millet harvest, which may or not yield. One farmer we met watered his entire garden, violent patches of green in the scrubby landscape, with a bucket whose bottom flapped open.