The labyrinth of alleyways opened onto a small square, where I parked under the shade of a neem tree. From the outside, the bar looked like any other house fenced in with straw mats, but once I walked through its corrugated tin door, I realized this place was different. Four black cauldrons bubbled over wood fires in the center of an open-air courtyard. The ground was littered with large pans, coals, and yellow calabash bowls.
A stout, middle-aged woman with her hair tied up in a colorful kerchief presided over the scene. The clientele on this sleepy afternoon was a cross-section of Niamey. Beneath a straw mat canopy, students sat on benches made of recycled wood discussing a text in Zarma, a local Nigerien language. A businessman in a tie read a French newspaper, and some housekeepers sat huddled together, their lively chatter punctuated by laughter.
Some of the customers held calabash bowls, while others let theirs rest on handmade tripods of thin rebar kept near their feet. Despite being lukewarm, there was something refreshing about the punchy bite of the beverage, cloudy and full of millet sediment.
As we chatted under the canopy, neighborhood children ran in and out of the dappled shade, stealing sips here and there from customers who were generous enough to share what was in their bowl. Several weeks later, I made my way back to the cabaret to buy another bottle of chapalo.
It was close to sunset, and the alleyway — flanked on either side by single-storied mud buildings — had the flat, shadowless quality of an unlit street in the fading light. I stepped into the courtyard and headed towards the canopy, where I saw the daughter still sitting amongst her paint buckets. She poured chapalo into a freshly rinsed calabash and handed it to a young man wearing tight jeans and aviators, despite the waning light. Men, young and old, loitered under the canopy and spilled out into the courtyard where the embers of the chapalo fires glowed beneath the blackened bottoms of the cauldrons.
