MAURITANIA
Day Twenty-Two
ZOUERAT
One significant change since we crossed the border is the appearance of baguettes and croissants at the breakfast table. For the first sixty years of the twentieth century, first as a protectorate and later as a colony, Mauritania, land of the Moors, was a neglected part of the French empire in Africa. La Mauritanie, as big as France and Spain put together, with a population barely that of Paris, became a place of exile, a dustbin for troublemakers, sidelined from the real French interests in Senegal and Morocco. But the French brought their boulangeries and the Mauritanians kept them when they became an independent Islamic republic in 1960.
It’s interesting to see what survives of the colonial presence in these countries. In Western Sahara the Spanish legacy lives on in the Polisario, in their education and their political allegiances, and yes, I did have some chorizo with my camel one evening, but that’s about it. Here in Zouerat, the French influence seems superficially stronger, extending beyond baguettes to lycees and gendarmeries, pastis in the bar and French news on the television.
After breakfast I walk outside to take a look at the town. Seeing me coming, a gauntlet of salesmen rise effortlessly from their haunches to enjoin me to buy this or that ornament, scarf, ring, necklace, leather pouch. I smile widely and appreciatively and do not stop. When I reach the gate, I pause for a split second, which is long enough for a young man to enquire solicitously about my health before showing me some postcards. I make for the street. Before I can reach it two young boys leap off a donkey cart stacked with charcoal and race towards me, all big smiles and outstretched hands.
‘Donnez-moi un cadeau. Donnez-moi un Bic!’
When I decline they scamper off and leap back onto their cart, aiming a couple of wild blows at the donkey.
Zouerat is a frontier town, with all the mess and brutality that goes with the sniff of money. In the cluster of jagged peaks to the south of the town is enough iron ore to last 200 years, a resource that has transformed this corner of the desert into a multi-milliondollar asset, supplying 40 per cent of Mauritania’s foreign earnings.
All the jobs, houses, public transport and associated support trades are in the domain of SNIM, Societe Nationale Industrielle et Miniere, the once French, now Mauritanian-owned company that mines the ore. Without SNIM Zouerat would be no more than a collection of tents.
Which, in the poorer parts, it already is.
The backstreets of Zouerat are open rubbish tips, lined with low, shabby buildings, but when the doors are open, business spills out everywhere, like the desert after rain. Barbers, garages, telephone points and lots of quincailleries (ironmongers). Cutting, fabricating and panel beating seems to be going on in every corner. I watch a middle-aged, red-robed man, using only an axe, hammer and his own sandaled foot for purchase, transform a BP oil drum into a 6-foot length of fencing in less than five minutes.
The reason why ironmongery should be the growth industry here is all tied in with desertification and the influx of nomads. Three years of drought have brought thousands in from the desert, desperately in need of shelter. We go to meet a family living in ‘tin city’. Their home is a tent within a compound fenced with recycled metal. The outside of the tent still bears the manufacturer’s imprint, ‘Mining Explosive. Product Of South Africa’. Inside, the sacks are lined with strips of patterned cloth, and the woman who has invited me in indicates a rug. Her mother fiddles nervously with a row of beads. I slip off my shoes and squat down. Both of the women are in black. Others of the family, all women or children, gather around and regard me curiously. Tea is prepared, as in Western Sahara, with much ritual. They speak in Arabic and Cassa translates their story.
They came in from the desert five years ago and still have no mains water, relying on the irregular visits of the water cart. Nor do they have electricity, though a neighbour has recently let them have a lead off their supply. She proudly points out an uncovered cable snaking across the sand from the fence next door. They have a goat and live mainly off rice and couscous. A younger sister makes some money clearing sand from the railway line. One of her boys goes to school; the other doesn’t, because he is mentally handicapped and there is no provision for him. There is, in all this, not a trace of selfpity. They simply hope the rains will come and turn the desert green again and enable them to return to the life they know best. Meanwhile, home is a tent of explosive sacks behind a fence made of oil drums.
‘What makes you happy?’ I ask.
Even mother, nervously twisting her beads, smiles as this is translated to them. They don’t even have to think of the answer.
‘Whatever God gives, makes us happy.’
Outside in the street, the gang of children following us down through the rubbish in which the goats graze doesn’t look as if much makes them happy. In too many of their eyes is the flat, unresponsive blankness of poverty. In the livelier ones there is something more, a sullen resentment looking for an outlet.
An interesting incident on our way back to the hotel. Despite the present government’s desire to keep it quiet, it’s well known that Mauritania was one of Saddam Hussein’s staunch allies, so much so that Saddam sent his wife and children to the town of Atar, 100 miles south of here, for safekeeping during the Gulf War. Roger has noticed a painted sign portraying Saddam, looking dapper and suave in suit and tie, above a tyre shop. When he asks if we can film it, not only is the answer no, but Abdallahi, our man from the ministry, makes a personal visit to the shop and demands that the sign be taken down instantly.
Day Twenty-Three
ZOUERAT TO AZOUGUI
The iron ore that is the bedrock of the Mauritanian economy is shifted from the desert to the coast on a single-track railway line, which is as important to the country as the iron itself. The Polisario knew this, and their repeated attacks on the line are what eventually forced the Mauritanians to abandon plans to occupy Western Sahara back in 1979.
It’s not surprising therefore that we have to negotiate two or three increasingly serious roadblocks as we drive 9 miles south and east from Zouerat to the Guelb mine.
With the storm still howling across the desert, sand-ploughs are out keeping the road clear, and our first sight of the boxy superstructure of the mine buildings is through a spectral cloud of rasping stinging dust.
At Guelb, the desert has been transformed into a dark satanic world of noise and movement. Caterpillar trucks grind up and down, bringing freshly mined material to the crushers. From there, conveyor belts carry the pulverised rock to a hopper, which fills railway wagons at the rate of 100 tonnes a minute. Today, the wind is catching the iron ore dust between hopper and wagon and sweeping most of it out across the desert in billowing black clouds. Through this mad screaming tempest of wind and dust, yellow and blue diesel locomotives, bells sounding dolefully, keep the wagons moving slowly forward.
Groups of maintenance workers pass by, faces muffled against the blackened sand, dark glasses covering their eyes, looking like mummified escapees from some experimental hospital. Everything about them is threadbare apart from their gleaming new shovels.
Three iron ore trains run every day, seven days a week, between the mines and the Atlantic port of Nouadhibou. The good news for us is that one train a day also carries passengers.
Just after midday I find myself at a platform-less halt known cryptically as ‘Arret TFM’. There must be a couple of hundred people gathered here as the monster of a train shuffles slowly towards us. For what seems an eternity, 163 wagons, piled high with rock and black dust, roll past before the two passenger coaches at the back reach the station.
When they do, and the train has shuddered to a halt, there is pandemonium. Passengers don’t mount the train, they storm it, scrambling up the steep embankment aiming for two narrow doors, both of which are manned by railway officials whose sole duty seems to be to repel them. They shriek at the crowds and the crowds shriek back. Enormous women with huge bundles lea
p onto the ladders and force their way past. A pair of arms emerges from a window and a baby is tossed up into them. A man with a roll of carpet on his shoulder turns, Laurel and Hardy-like, one way and then the other, thwacking people on either side. Human buttresses are formed, leading from the embankment to the train doors.
Casting all human decency aside, I elbow my way past old women, children and blind men and grasp the rail, shouting above the noise that I have a Premiere Classe ticket. The guard shakes his head and bars my way. I’m about to lose what little control I still have when I realise the guard is directing me to the last car on the train, a box-like wagon with circular holes in its side that looks suspiciously like a recycling container. This, it turns out, is Premiere Classe.
Once inside the container its appearance begins to make sense. It’s essentially a guard’s van, with a central raised section like a ship’s bridge, from where company operatives can survey the length of the train, which today is roughly a mile. From up here I can see that those who were not able to get aboard the coaches have scrambled onto the goods wagons and are settling in on top of the iron ore. One wagon is entirely occupied by a herd of goats.
This ship of fools moves off southwards at a steady 25 miles per hour. Alongside us the tarmac road falters and merges with the sand. This line is now the only man-made route across the desert.
It is not pretty desert. Grey dust blows over a scruffy plain of rocks and rubble, enlivened occasionally by the detritus of a derailed train or the bleached corpse of an abandoned pick-up truck. I lie down and try to read, but it’s not easy, as the slightest change in speed convulses the train.
After several hours of extremely slow progress the train rumbles to a halt at a small town called Choum. Scarcely has it done so than Choum station is transformed into the scene of a major disaster. Passengers getting off the train claw at half-open doors as passengers getting on the train hurl themselves at the same half-open doors like soldiers entering a besieged city. Babies are thrown about, the carpet man is cutting his own swathe through the crowds and the low hum of diesel engines mingles with the pathetic falsetto of ore-stained goats.
This is where we get off. If we can.
From Choum the train turns west to reach the Atlantic coast sometime tomorrow. We pick up the vehicles and head south and east, into the interior of Mauritania, away from the long arcing border of Western Sahara, which has held us like a magnet these past ten days.
As if reflecting the change of direction the landscape changes too. A long escarpment wall has risen up from nowhere and dominates the eastern horizon until the light goes down and it blends into the general darkness. Our convoy rattles on, twisting and turning until the track tackles the escarpment head-on. For the first time since crossing the Atlas Mountains we are climbing, steadily, if not spectacularly, following the thin dusty plume of the vehicle ahead.
We level out on a plateau of splintered rocks. It’s a bare, dispiriting place.
Night falls, and with it comes that vague anxiousness I’ve felt many times since we left Morocco. A feeling that we could go on like this for days and nothing would ever change.
I wake from a bumpy back-seat slumber to find we’ve stopped. Ahead of us figures in veils flit away from our headlights into a large, crisply flapping tent. Cassa has got out and is striding off into a grove of trees. We disembark. Stretch legs, yawn, drink some water. It’s nine o’clock by my watch when Cassa returns with furrowed brow and motions us into the vehicles.
Apparently, a friend of his, who was to put us all up tonight in his ‘Typical Nomadic Tent’, has disappeared into the desert, as nomads do, and not come back.
So, off we go again. Back into the night.
Half an hour later, dots of light flicker in the distance. They prove to belong to a small encampment outside the little town of Azougui, which bears unlikely signs of tourist facilities. As we turn into the compound our headlights pick out a painted board, the name of an auberge and the reassuring words beneath it, ‘Pres de la Ville. Loin du Son Stress‘.
It’s not where we were meant to be, but no-one’s complaining.
Day Twenty-Four
AZOUGUI TO ATAR
Pass the night in a thatched hut, shared with Basil, with barely room to stand up straight. Woken in the small hours by the sounds of a ferocious cat fight. The ensuing trip to the loo is quite tricky. The door of the hut is tiny. I crawl out like a bee leaving a hive, to be rewarded with a massive and magnificent night sky. In the absence of moonlight the definition and abundance of the heavens is overwhelming, and I find myself praising my Maker for giving me such a weak bladder.
The morning reveals a number of similar straw huts, shaped like igloos and set around a large tent, over 30 feet square, and two whitewashed stone buildings with gabled roofs which look incongruously like Welsh chapels. Looking beyond the camp, I see a much less inimical landscape than the rest of the western Sahara. Palm trees and long grass fill in the empty spaces between the acacia trees and dry-stone walls border the tracks that lead up to the quiet, laid-back little town. Over a breakfast of fresh-baked bread and bananas, Cassa tells me that Azougui was once a trading post on the edge of the desert, where gold and salt and slaves changed hands. It was from here that a particularly aggressive dynasty of Berber peoples known as the Almoravids set out on a quest for more land, which led them north, to found Marrakesh, before moving across the Strait of Gibraltar and into Europe.
Cassa, a youngish man, elegant and rather aristocratic, runs tours into this part of Mauritania, and I would not dream of questioning the validity of anything he says were it not for his playful but confusing habit of hopping from intense seriousness to hooting laughter in the same breath.
On our way south and east we pass through a remarkable landscape, where the constant, unblinking process of disintegration and decay that characterises the Sahara takes rich and varied forms, from spectacular, Rio Grande-like mesas to soft sand dunes, crumbling escarpments and moon-like rubble-strewn plains. In the midst of this austere beauty is the small town of Atar, neither austere nor beautiful. But today and tomorrow Atar will be in a world spotlight. The Paris-Dakar Rally is coming to town.
The Paris-Dakar arouses mixed emotions. For the organisers, it is the most gruelling event on the motorsport calendar, pitching man and machine against one of the harshest environments on the planet. For opponents, like the French Green party, it is ‘colonialism that needs to be eradicated’, costing sums ‘equal to the annual health budget of some of the countries the race crosses’.
In 1999 it was held up by bandits whilst crossing Mauritania. In 2000 threats from Algerian fundamentalists forced the contestants into an air-lifted leapfrog over the country, and last year the driver of a back-up vehicle lost a leg after hitting a land mine near the Moroccan wall.
But the Paris-Dakar, now commonly known as The Dakar, as Paris is no longer its obligatory starting point, has, since its inception in 1978, survived wars and rumours of wars, fatalities and serious accidents, to grow and flourish, carried on by its own obstinate momentum and man’s insatiable urge to do things the hard way.
Somewhat ironically for a town surrounded by desert, Atar suffered from catastrophic floods in the 1980s and all buildings of character seemed to have been washed away and replaced with nondescript concrete and breeze-block. One exception to the overall dusty brown of the narrow streets are the Total gas stations, which are a riot of liberally applied red and white paint. Total, it turns out, are the sponsors of the Dakar Rally.
We find accommodation, albeit modest, at the Auberge El Medina, on a corner where four sandy streets meet. An unattended donkey trots past as we push open the heavy metal doors into a courtyard bordered with pink oleander and yellow hibiscus. Mats are laid out for communal eating and two large tents stand at one end of the yard. Privacy is not a characteristic of desert life. The idea of a room of your own is alien to a country whose traditions are nomadic and gregarious, but the proprietors of the Aube
rge El Medina have judiciously spread their cultural options. On the other three sides of the courtyard are five rooms with locks on the doors. However, each room has at least six beds in it.
Walking outside after we’d settled in, I had expected to see a town gripped by Rally fever, with banners, bunting and bars open all day. There are, of course, no bars in the non-alcoholic Islamic Republic of Mauritania, and the lack of bunting and banners is explained later in the afternoon when the Rally finally hits town.
It comes, not along the road, but down from the sky. A series of distant rumbles heralds a steady flow of cargo planes, amongst them a Hercules and three or four high-winged Russian Antonovs, descending to the south of the town. They bring in the Rally, keeping it as exclusive as any travelling circus, a self-sufficient unit effectively isolated from any reliance on, or interaction with, the local people.
Atar airport is in very good condition. The Rally organisers have seen to that. It stands on the outskirts of town, an immaculate collection of domed and arcaded buildings standing out from the surrounding half-built houses and empty walled compounds like a Christmas present on a rubbish tip. A small city has sprung up on the tarmac, huddled around a dozen planes and half a dozen helicopters, all of which, apart from an elderly cream Dakota belonging to the Mauritanian air force, are only here for the Rally.
One Antonov freighter is fitted out as a hospital, another as a catering store. Still others belong to the big works teams, whose riders bivouac in matching tents pitched in the protective shade of the wings. Striped marquees have been erected for the administration and the press, lap-tops cover trestle tables, mobiles are constantly in use (though it’s impossible to get a mobile signal anywhere else in Mauritania), fridges full of cold drinks hum away in the desert sun.
Sahara (2002) Page 8
