Moundou

I arrived in Moundou in the middle of the afternoon and the first thing I noticed was the smell: wet grass, cooking palm oil, woodsmoke, and something faintly fermented that I later learned was bili-bili, the millet beer brewed by Sara women and sold in calabash cups throughout the south. After ten days in the dry north — where dust was the dominant sensory experience and green was a theoretical concept — the deep emerald of the Logone River valley was almost disorienting. Trees. Actual trees, with actual shade. I sat under one for twenty minutes before doing anything else.

Moundou is Chad’s second city and its industrial center, home to the Gala brewery that produces the beer that most Chadians north of the Sudanian savanna think about nostalgically and most Chadians south of it drink on any occasion that warrants a drink. The brewery is one of the few colonial-era installations still running at anything like capacity, and the beer is genuinely good — cold, light, slight bitterness, the kind of lager that makes sense in this climate in a way that complicated craft beers do not. I drank mine at a plastic table in an open-air bar near the market, watching a football match on a television balanced on a cinder block, with three men who wanted to talk about France’s chances at the next World Cup and had strong opinions on the subject.

The market in Moundou is the richest I encountered in Chad — not in terms of luxury goods, which are nonexistent, but in sheer agricultural abundance. The south’s longer rains produce an entirely different food culture from the north. Okra piled in baskets taller than the sellers. Bunches of plantain carried on heads. Peanuts sold by the scoop. Catfish from the Logone, enormous, silver-scaled, arranged in rows on wooden tables. The Sara people who dominate the population of this region have a tradition of social gathering around food — meals here are longer than anywhere else I ate in Chad, more varied, accompanied by more conversation, served in portions that assume hunger is a serious condition requiring serious treatment.

The river is the town’s great amenity. In the late afternoon, when the market thins out and the heat starts to soften, people move toward the Logone the way people everywhere move toward water when it’s available. Children swim in the shallower sections. Women wash clothes on flat rocks. Men fish from the bank with long poles, the kind of fishing that is also thinking, the body occupied while the mind does whatever it needs to do. The Logone is the border with Cameroon at this latitude, and there’s a constant low-level commerce across it — dugout canoes crossing with improbable loads of goods, people wading at the shallows with bundles held above their heads.

When to go: October through December is ideal — the rains have ended, the landscape is still lush, and the roads to Moundou from N’Djamena are fully passable. The rainy season from June to September turns the south into a green fever dream but makes travel by anything other than boat difficult. July to August, the peak rains, the Logone swells and occasionally floods the lower sections of town.