Love at the Bogolan Table.

Readers of this journal may recall that Dembele, my first friend in Djenne and the young man who taught me bogolan five years ago, used to be in love with Nana.
Nana married her cousin who lives in America. The sad thing is that she married him in absentia. He was supposed to come and pick her up, but he never did. There are rumours that he is already married to an American woman- she would clearly not take it in her stride to have a bride arriving from Bamako…So Nana is still waiting, two years later, in Bamako. I said recently to Dembele: ‘You know, if you still love Nana, I think there is a good claim to be made that her marriage is not valid. If you want to, I will support you.'
But Dembele told me that he no longer loved Nana, and that he wanted to marry someone else: someone I knew! It turns out that there has been a romance blossoming at the bogolan tables between Dembele and Baji Fitini!
I can quite understand the attraction from Baji’s point of view: Dembele was teaching her, and of course one always has a crush on one’s teachers, at least I always did, including my driving instructor AND my diving instructor...