by Annie Hawes
No sooner had he spoken than a hail of stones began to rain down upon us. Only the children were throwing, and only small stones – considerate of them, with much larger ammunition lying all around. But still extremely scary. They might easily move on to a bigger gauge. And there was nothing to prevent the adults, who were clearly making no move to stop them, from joining in.
Worse still, there was nobody around for miles to help, or to witness whatever the village might decide to do next. Suddenly terrified, we raced the last few yards back onto the road. And sat for the next hour waiting for a vehicle – any vehicle – to appear, while doing our best not to direct so much as a glance in the direction of the hostile village.
What on earth had happened? How could anyone live in this moonscape? Did they dislike Europeans particularly, or just anybody who noticed the existence of their homes in this unlikely spot? Being Kabyles, they were extremely unlikely to be any sort of intégriste. The Islamists’ insistence on the superiority of the language of the Koran was enough to guarantee that. Were they intentionally trying to conceal their village? They must be. Otherwise surely there would be some sign of human presence – washing hung out to dry, a chicken or two, an attempt at planting some sort of food crop?
Unless, said Guy facetiously, they were living examples of those villagers who had lost all their traditional knowledge, as described by Gérard. They had given up trying to wrest a living from the soil, and these days commuted to work in the nearest town?
Impossible, said Gérard. Where are their donkeys?
We decided that the most likely explanation was that they were a village of djinns – or of djnun, rather, which I believe is the correct plural – whose works are, as we know, invisible. That would cover everything, including their bad tempers.
The driver of the sheep lorry that eventually appeared and got us out of this sinister place could not enlighten us. He had never noticed the village at all, he said, though he was often up and down this road. He was not remotely entertained by our djnun theory. I fear that disrespecting the djinns is not good form in these parts.
Maybe they had only just arrived, he said, on the run from something? Unless they had some sort of hidden valley behind the village where they grew their food and kept their animals? No, really, he had no idea. But didn’t we say that Guy had his head inside the window of one of their outbuildings when the trouble started? Are we sure they didn’t just take us for thieves?
Duh . . .
Still, that only explains half the story. The rest will remain for ever a mystery.
Habib the lorry-driver is going all the way to Bou Saâda, next stop southwards on the road to the desert, and beyond it, to the high plateaux of the Saharan Atlas – still in our direction, if we want to carry on. He has a share in a flock of sheep up there: he’s taking the lorry up to move them to pastures new. He will probably stop the night in Bou Saâda, his home town, though, and head on at dawn, he says, rather than try to track down men, tents and sheep at dead of night, up on that wild land.
The landscape changes amazingly rapidly in this part of the country. Out of the Kabyle hills, we are soon in another area of fertile plains. Now the vegetation starts to change. The land is much drier, the plant life sparser, nothing around us but an endless desiccated-looking plain of stones, our road a long grey snake through infinite flatness. Within the hour, the Atlas mountains are already visible, outlined against a shimmering sky. Reach them, and we are at Bou Saâda and the high plateaux: last bastion before the desert proper begins.
For now, apart from the distant mountains, there is nothing at all to be seen but 360 degrees of endless nothingness stretching to a level horizon all around. Disconcerting, frightening almost, such utter featurelessness, something you hardly ever experience in life. An hour later, although there is a hint of rising ground, the landscape looks identical. Is this desert of stones never going to end?
Habib is going to stop for a break, he says, pulling in next to a small boulder that stands out from the rest. Funny: just the spot I would have chosen myself. As long as it is not Nothingness, any feature will do as a landmark. Amazingly, within minutes of our clambering down from the lorry, a shepherd with his flock of sheep has appeared in the middle distance. But where from? It seems impossible . . .
Not at all, says Habib. We are already on the fringes of the high plateau, and there is plenty of grazing here if you know where to look. The land is nothing like as flat as it seems.
Habib gets out his tea-tackle – a trivet and a bundle of twigs – and starts to make tea, crouching on his haunches. Everyone here seems to be able to do this: they hunker down, rest their elbows on their knees and relax totally, as if they were actually seated – and in a comfortable armchair, at that. I can’t manage it for more than a few minutes, and nor can my companions. We shift and we shuffle, we stand up, we crouch down again, and after a few minutes we give in and sit down properly, inelegantly, bums on the ground. Not clever: if you can manage to hunker down like Habib, your clothes don’t get dirty, you don’t end up covered in dust, and your legs don’t get in the way of whatever you’re trying to do: in this case, drink your tea. We put our legs to one side, get uncomfortable again, shift them to the other, juggling the tea-glass. We try the crouch again, get pins and needles in minutes. Bums in the dust again. The shepherd has turned up by now, and Habib gets up to greet him. They give one another a big bear-hug, and plenty of air-kisses. They know one another from up on the plains, says Habib, and the shepherd now hunkers down beside us in just the same nonchalant way. How on earth do they do it? Habib has lit the fire, boiled the water, made the tea, without needing to shift once. Now, in perfect balance, elbow on one knee, glass held elegantly in the fingertips, he and the shepherd are sipping nonchalantly away and exchanging what I guess must be sheep news.
My theory about this crouching business is that, since everyone here starts training for it as tiny children, they develop a network of alternative veins that allows the circulation to flow even when the knees are tightly bent for ages. As well as more stretchy hamstrings. Why on earth don’t we Westerners use this amazing ability at all? Think how much furniture we wouldn’t need to buy.
The flock has now come to investigate what we humans are up to, and a brown-faced sheep has begun determinedly nibbling at my hair. What a lot of reasons there are for keeping your head covered in this country. I do my best to fight the over-familiar creature off. It hardly looks like a sheep at all, with those big long floppy ears, not if you’re used to the dominant breeds of Europe. I give it a shove; it shoves right back, upper lip raised in a let-me-get-at-that-tasty-hair-again kind of way.
The shepherd, having enjoyed the hair-and-sheep spectacle for a moment or two, hurls a handful of pebbles at the offending beast, which gives a muffled maaaa and shuffles off, looking most dejected. Poor sheep! It wasn’t really doing any harm. Now I want to call it back.
Habib will tell us later, in tones of deepest scorn, that this brown-faced flop-eared type of sheep is a rubbish breed, anyway. It comes from the grasslands of Mali, on the other side of the Sahara, and is only good for meat. The wool is so short it’s almost impossible to spin, so no use for weaving; the yield in milk is low; and he personally wouldn’t touch a flock of them with a bargepole. Some people just enjoy wasting their time!
Never pick up the stones, Habib says all of a sudden, switching back to French and grabbing at Guy’s outstretched hand as he’s about to do so. There is a scorpion beneath every one!
And, relaxing back into his comfortable hunker, switching to and fro between French and Arabic, he tells us and the shepherd the story, or perhaps legend, of a French pied-noir farmer whose land lay somewhere back along the road, who excavated a deep hole seeking water supplies for his crops and struck, not water, but oil. He quickly bought up some kind of purifying equipment, began selling the stuff on the side to passing lorries, tax free, and made his fortune.
Can this be true? Is it even possible? N
o idea.
The bit about the scorpions is certainly true, as Habib now demonstrates for our entertainment, gingerly picking up a few stones, holding them by the top. There really are scorpions under every one – or every fifth or sixth one, at least, which is quite enough for me. They’re not the small black scorpions I’m used to in Italy, either, which have a sting no worse than a bee’s. These are big pale horrible-looking things that, according to Habib, can make you very sick.
Nothing to worry about if you don’t bother them, though, says Habib. It’s no use to them, stinging you, is it? They would much rather conserve their strength!
Cheering news, but still, I decide to give that crouching position another try.
Back in the lorry we hear another strange tale – of the town of In Salah, which the boys will visit after Timimoun, if they take the Tamanrasset route across the desert. There is a massive sand dune creeping slowly right through the centre of the town, covering over the inhabitants’ homes as it goes, filling them with sand, pushing out the people. There is nothing to be done about it but wait: it is unstoppable. It has been moving for many decades now, and can take a generation or even two to clear a group of houses in its inexorable onwards march. But careful records are kept, and when the dune passes on, and the old family homes reappear, their inheritors – who have never seen them in their lives – are ready to take over again, clear out the sand, and move in.
Habib thinks, though, that it’s probably best not to take the In Salah route just at the moment. He’s heard the army’s moving the thousands of arrested FIS activists down that way. There are bound to be road blocks, convoys, lots of red tape . . .
Some hours later we spot, at last, nestling deep green among barren, flat-topped hills, the palm groves of Bou Saâda – ‘the Oasis of Happiness’. Well before we arrive at the town, though, we come across another type of habitation altogether – a nomad encampment out on the plain. Three broad tents of woven wool, striped black and dusty red, supported on bentwood poles, side panels raised to form shady awnings, children playing around them.
People of the Ouled Naïl, says Habib, a confederation of tribes who are mostly only nomads part of the year, when the grazing is good. The rest of the time they return to their villages. The range of hills up ahead – where his own sheep are grazing at this moment – is called after them: the Ouled Naïl hills. The High Plateaux have always been the realm of nomads, Berber and Arab, who have roamed here with their flocks for millennia. The French may have stolen half their pasture and ruined their trade routes, but the tribes themselves have survived. Some have even prospered. In fact, Habib’s present business partners are Ouled Naïl themselves, though his associates are much more modern-minded than those tent-dwellers, who will barely be scraping a living from their sheep. You need a lorry nowadays, like Habib. Then when the fitful rains of this area fall – if at all, inshallah! – you can quickly move your flocks, on wheels, to take advantage of the first flush of pasture. A much better system than walking your sheep over great long distances, only to find, as you often do these days, that someone else’s flocks have already passed, and there is not a blade of grass left on what remains of your traditional pasture grounds!
Surprisingly, given how arid everything around us looks, we find that we are crossing a deep river gorge as we arrive in Bou Saâda. Down below us the river is lined with terraces of fruit and date-palms. Here they grow the luscious Deglet Nour dates, says Habib, which means ‘Fingers of Light’. Oddly enough, though, it was not dates, but the wool trade, according to Habib, that brought the oasis of Bou Saâda into being. A strange juxtaposition, to my mind, a palm-tree oasis and wool, but then what do I know? Clearly a lot less than Habib, who was born here, and has chosen to follow the town’s oldest tradition.
Bou Saâda, though, was once famous for another, much more intriguing industry than either dates or wool. It was, for seventy-odd years, a centre for sex tourism, a trade that flourished from what we British would call the late Victorian period up to the arrival of Algerian Independence, when it was swiftly abolished.
In the late 1800s the erotic dancers of the Ouled Naïl had attracted the attention of a select group of cultured European ‘orientalists’, including a whole array of painters, one of whom, Etienne Dinet, actually moved here to Bou Saâda and converted to Islam, scandalizing the French art establishment and ruining his artistic career. But the orientalist fashion launched by these artists’ sultry images of North African women spread like wildfire, and soon the dancing girls of the Ouled Naïl were being transported across the seas to feature in the Universal Exhibitions and World Fairs of which Imperial nations were so fond at the time.
It was the Chicago World Fair of 1893, and a certain Sol Bloom, entrepreneur, that really made the name of the Ouled Naïl. Bloom, seeking publicity for his exotic dancers, had invented the titillating epithet ‘belly dancing’ to describe the performances of his Algerian girls. At this time in Western culture, of course, any public display of the body was considered positively scandalous; and so thoroughly covered up were the Christian women of the time that even a glimpse of ankle was erotically charged. ‘Natives’ of inferior races, on the other hand, were known to be given to primitive and reprehensible displays of flesh. The charm of these North Africans seems to have been that they were not ‘savages’ by any means, but representatives of a sophisticated and ancient culture that was yet utterly alien to the West. And, of course, comfortingly subjugated. Vast numbers of prurient citizens flocked to the World Fair to witness the dance of the Ouled Naïl. All the more so since rumour had it that, back in their homeland, the girls’ favours were available to the highest bidder.
The reputation of the Ouled Naïl was made. And so, through the combined skills of the Académie Française and a Chicago showman, was born the Western image of the oriental seductress, a dangerous creature of great sophistication but wild primitive emotion, whose diaphanous veils revealed as much as they hid, and whose deepest desire, behind those boldly flashing eyes, was (naturally) to be conquered. And also a new, bowdlerized dance, hitherto unknown in the Maghreb, involving the display of the navel area.
For the next seven decades, the punters would pour in to Bou Saâda, seeking steamy encounters with fascinating oriental females. And the young ladies who entertained them would quickly learn what was expected of them, adjusting their dance, and their attire, accordingly. By 1912, Bou Saâda and the Ouled Naïl were so well known that they featured in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Return of Tarzan. And so powerful was this colonial stereotype that it could still be recycled in my own lifetime, albeit tongue-in-cheek, in a television advertisement for Turkish Delight: Full of Eastern Promise.
And what was the truth behind all this? Several of the tribes of the Ouled Naïl did indeed have a tradition of sending their young women out to earn their dowries by dancing – and by taking wealthy admirers as lovers. Their dance was known here in Algeria by the innocent name of Raks Bladi – blad being your country or village, and raks meaning to dance or rejoice. It involved no display of body parts whatsoever, being a dance mainly of sinuous and fluttering movements of the hands and arms, performed fully clothed. Within several of the Ouled Naïl tribes, neither the public dancing nor the taking of paying lovers was regarded as shameful. Indeed, the men of the tribes would travel with the girls, accompanying them on drum and flute; and any children born of their unions were kept and cherished. Earning a dowry in this way might not be in strict accord with the precepts of Islam, but the girls were devout – their dances had such names as ‘the doves of Mecca’ – and they could later repent. Hopefully, they would save up enough to make the Hadj pilgrimage to Mecca, the fifth of the Pillars of Islam, and become cleansed of their past misdeeds. Now they would return to the bosom of their people, who, unusually for most cultures at the time or since, had no problem with their past, and settle down to make a respectable marriage with one of their own, in financial security. Meanwhile, as far as other local people were conce
rned, the disturbing position occupied by the Ouled Naïl dancers, balancing between the licit and the illicit, made them objects of some superstition and veneration. They were always invited to dance at weddings, where their presence would bestow extra baraka on the proceedings.
World fame soon changed all that. Bou Saâda became a boom town for prostitutes, all now known by the generic name of Ouled Naïl, whether they had ever seen the inside of a black-and-red striped tent or not. There were plenty of young women available for the role; the long, slow process of national beggarization had seen to that. Soon a whole area down beside the river and the palm groves was known as the ‘Street of the Ouled Naïl’, complete with compulsory weekly medical examinations run by the French military, who controlled the trade tightly, issuing identity cards to any girls involved. The women’s services were soon reserved, two days a week, for the occupying soldiers’ use alone. From now on there was a dividing line between ‘decent’ women and card-carrying filles publiques which had never before existed. By the 1930s, the first wave of Islamic puritanism was hitting the respectable sector among the local population. High walls had to be built along all the access roads to the area, screening the depraved partying from modest Muslim eyes. Another colonial imposition: having your town turned into a brothel. More fuel for the spreading fire of Algerian nationalism.
