This is a story about one Muslim man who changed – and saved — my life. No, not Zorhan Mamdani, the dynamic young Muslim mayor-elect of New York City, which was my home for twenty years. The Muslim man of this true story, Youssef Tounkara, was someone I met while serving in the Peace Corps in Gabon, Central Africa, nearly thirty years ago. He was the first Muslim friend I’d ever had, the first Muslim person I’d ever really known. His impact on me was and remains profound.

Youssef, a Malian born and raised in  Côte d’Ivoire, was a self-described “adventurer,” just passing through Gabon for a while on his life’s larger African adventures. He was single, tall, slim, and soft-spoken, a freelance photographer twenty years younger than I.

One afternoon, while visiting my home, he told me about his religion, explaining to me the five tenets of Islam; but he stressed he wasn’t evangelizing. He’d been one of eleven children brought up in a strict Muslim family; he referred to his brutal father as “the Ayatollah,” someone he had no intention of ever emulating. Like me, Youssef was steeped in the religious morals of his youth but no longer adhered to his religion’s manmade dogmas and strictures. 

 (Youssef in Gabon, 1998)

Because we both enjoyed cooking – I’d been a caterer in New York, and he’d been a chef at a small restaurant for a while in his travels – we began making lunch together from time to time and sharing our midday meal at my table. He would tell me about his travels –we spoke in French, a second language for both of us – as well as his early life at home, his beloved saintly mother, his hopes and dreams and photographic ambitions. We created our own little ritual: Before eating, we took turns asking God, the same God we found we both believed in, to bless our food and use the energy we derived from it for good.

One day in late November 1997, when Youssef arrived for a visit while I was preparing for a Thanksgiving feast for eight friends, including Youssef, I could see he was very ill. As I described this day in greater detail in my Peace Corps memoir HOW TO COOK A CROCODILE:

“… Youssef had malaria – le palu, the Africans called it – when he arrived at my house unexpectedly the day before Thanksgiving. So I led him to the spare room I called my office, with the makeshift desk and rudimentary daybed I’d made. … ‘Please lie down here,’ I told him, and then I covered his shaking body with a blanket.

“He complained of fever, chills, painful joints, headache, dizziness, weakness. I took his temperature, which confirmed a high fever, gave him some malaria meds from my personal, Peace Corps-issue medical kit, and told him I’d make some chicken soup for him for lunch.”

Already the poultry stock – destined for my Thanksgiving menu’s first course, pumpkin soup — was gently simmering in a huge stockpot on the front burner of my new, small stovetop and filling my home with its homey fragrance. I had plenty of stock bubbling on the stove, so I knew I could spare some of it for Youssef’s healing soup.                                                     

“I walked down the short hallway toward my kitchen at my usual, brisk, Manhattan-pedestrian pace. When I turned the corner hurriedly into the kitchen, I didn’t see that something had spilled on the floor. Water? Oil? Whatever it was, it was slippery for my bare feet on the terra cotta tiles. The heel of my right foot skidded on it. I lost my balance. I reached wildly for something to grasp to catch my fall. My left hand fell on the handle of the tall stockpot sitting on the stovetop at the entryway to my kitchen. Without knowing, without thinking, without seeing, I pulled the heavy pot toward me, pouring the boiling liquid down onto my bare left thigh [I was wearing tennis shorts], knee, shin, and foot.

“I was on the kitchen floor, rocking and screaming in pain when Youssef appeared at the kitchen door, wide-eyed, shaken. ‘Qu’est-ce-que se pas?!’ (What’s happening ?), he said as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Or ears. We had always been so quiet together. He had never heard me raise my voice, much less scream.”  

Youssef then ran to get the head of the hospital, Dr. Christophe Djimet, who lived not far away:

“Youssef found Dr. Djimet at his house, further up the hill from mine, directly across from the hospital where I worked, having lunch with his family. When the two men returned, they lifted me up and put me between them in the cab of Dr. Djimet’s pickup truck and rushed me to the hospital’s surgery room, where Dr. Djimet treated my burn. Youssef stood beside me. He gave me his hand, and I squeezed it with all my strength, to counteract the pain.

“ ‘Youssef a le palu’ (Youssef has malaria), I told Dr. Djimet, gritting my teeth, trying to be brave, as brave as I imagined an African would be under the same circumstances, as I lay there on the operating table and Dr. Djimet tore the layers of burned and blistered skin from my entire left thigh. But he was concentrating on the task at hand. He ignored my words. The meds I’d given Youssef, though, must have worked their magic because his palu seemed to have vanished.”

In the days that followed, my condition worsened. I had a violent allergic reaction to the mercurochrome Dr. Djimet had used liberally to dress my wound. I experienced high fevers, cold chills, and gushing sweats for days. But Youssef never left my side. He cared for me, night and day, doing everything he possibly could to comfort me and ease my pain. He fed me, took me to the bathroom, changed my drenched shirts and sheets, washed my face, brushed my hair. 

“One night, when I was delirious with pain and fever, I thought I saw two women – one white and resembling my mother, the other black and unknown to me – reaching out to me from the next life. I wanted to go with them. I wanted so much to go. Wherever these women were, I knew there would be no pain.”

“I want to die,” I told Youssef, who was sitting beside my bed.

He responded softly, “God has sent me to tell you, you cannot go now. Pas encore (not yet).  This is not your time. You have more work to do … .”

To me he was an angel who had not only saved my life – I might well have died from burn shock had he not been there and acted so heroically – but he was also doing his super-human best to keep me alive.

When my postmate Morgan arrived by motorcycle a few days later from her village many miles away and saw my condition and Youssef’s exhaustion, she swung into action.  She found a phone in town that actually worked and eventually got through to the Peace Corps Medical Officer in Libreville, who arranged for my evacuation on the next scheduled flight to Libreville out of Lastoursville. I asked that Youssef fly with me, and the Peace Corps agreed.

This was the first time Youssef had never flown.  All of his previous travel-adventures throughout West Africa, he’d told me, had been by land, in trucks or by bush taxis. 

The Peace Corps arranged for me to have a private room in an excellent clinic in the capital city of Libreville, where I received superb care. Youssef stayed with me at the clinic, sleeping in a reclining chair beside my hospital bed at night, attending to my needs all day for the three weeks I was there. Except for his afternoon forays to the marché to buy fresh tropical fruit for me while I napped, Youssef never left my bedside. 

No one in my life, either before or since – not even my own mother, whom I know loved me – has ever given me such selfless devoted care. Youssef and I were friends at the time; he was not my husband, my boyfriend, nor my employee. He was not being remunerated in any way for his time and effort.       

When I would ask him, “Why are you doing this?  Why are you so good to me?” he would always answer only, “C’est normal.”

Normal? I thought.  Normal for whom?  For him and other selfless Africans, perhaps, for whom human connectedness, worth more to them than gold, is the rule.  But not so much where I come from, where money, more than kindness, too often rules. As one former boyfriend, a financier in New York, used to express this ethos, “He who’s got the gold makes the rules.”

When my Peace Corps service ended the following year, Youssef and I traveled to Muslim-majority Mali and stayed for a while in the compound of his cousins and their families in Ségou. As Youssef had told me I would, I fell in love with Ségou, the kind, generous, good-hearted Muslim people there, their creativity and eagerness to learn and grow.

Ultimately, Youssef moved on, on his wider African adventures; but I stayed in Ségou. On my own I created ecomonic development projects for women and girls. Like my two-year Peace Corps experience, my three years in Ségou were life-changing for me. 

I’ve lost touch with Youssef over the years, but I’m still in close communication with members of his extended family in Ségou. One of Youssef’s cousin’s sons, who was just a young boy when I lived there, is now a married man with little children. He named his baby daughter after me. He sends me photos of my darling namesake regularly on Facebook. Here is one:

(My namesake in Mali, 2024)

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To learn more about my relationship with this one Muslim man, both in Gabon and in Mali, see my Peace Corps memoir HOW TO COOK A CROCODILE and its sequel HOW TO MAKE AN AFRICAN QUILT (https://www.bonnieleeblack.com).