Abandonment in the desert had made me sensitive. From my perch atop the dates, I kept a careful watch on Ali’s truck. It rumbled close, wandered off, rumbled close again, then became the merest glint to the west. Finally I lost sight of it altogether. The other passengers did not seem to care. We kept driving. After another hour I noticed that we had strayed into a part of the desert without tracks. I thought this was unusual. So apparently did our driver. He stopped, killed the engine, and without a word, climbed a nearby hill where he stood looking. I followed him. The land was empty. I returned to the truck, and sat, and waited. The desert was calm. I had hours to remember the worst. Somewhere out here the Belgians had been lost. Sit, wait, you will find your orientation.
Ali drove up after several hours. He had been stuck in sand over his wheels. We had not been lost at all. But afterward we stayed closer together. The roughest terrain lay behind us. The desert became a gravel plateau. Late at night, in blackness, we came to the border settlement called In Guezzam. We made camp deep in the desert in the middle of town.
HERE IS SOME practical advice: To find In Guezzam, go to the end of the earth and keep driving. Ignore the maps. Ignore the guidebooks. Arrive at night, because darkness will soften your impressions. Sleep soundly before morning, because the border crossing will require patience.
The dawn spread over a plain where nothing grew. A rooster crowed. In Guezzam was a sad settlement of concrete and adobe—a police station, a shuttered café, a government gas station, a dirt runway, a few houses, and at least one rooster. I guessed a thousand people still lived there.
More had lived there before. During the Sahelian droughts of the 1980s, the town had accommodated 25,000 Tuareg refugees from Niger who had lost their herds. The Tuaregs settled in tents and zeribas, required little, and clung to their remaining possessions. The odd part is that despite the trickle of international aid, In Guezzam could find no way to squeeze money from them. When Algeria finally expelled the refugees, In Guezzam was so poor that it hardly noticed the loss.
The international boundary line lay just over the southern horizon. We left In Guezzam and drove south to the crossing point, where the Algerian customs post stood alone in the desert, like a door without a wall. It was a whitewashed concrete building, stained orange with dust and ancient rain. It had a flag, a hand-painted warning sign in Arabic and French, and a patrol car. For a thousand miles in each direction, the border lay open, yet travelers leaving the country were expected to stop here, humbly to request permission. And permission was not gladly granted. Addoun had warned me that the commanding officer was as cruel as he was corrupt.
We were lucky. The commander was sleeping late that morning, and the inspectors on duty were merely sullen. The low quality of our dates did not put them in a better mood. Ali was insulted because one of them called it “monkey food” and refused the gift of a sack. Ali knew and hated these men. They told him he was lucky that the border was open again. He had to listen. They made a show of going through my notes. We spent the morning filling in forms and answering their questions. Around lunchtime they released us, and we drove off into the braided no-man’s-land between the two countries. Somewhere out there we crossed the map into Niger. And life did change.
The customs post in Niger was called Asamakka, as if it were a village. It lay an hour south of the Algerian post, on the same infernal plain. A line of fifty-gallon drums stood in the dirt, like a roadblock without a road. On the other side stood a collection of tin and mud hovels, a single tree, and a barracks. The soldiers were black-skinned southerners, strangers to the desert. They emerged from the barracks wearing jungle camouflage, sandals, and sunglasses. The captain among them packed twin pearl-handled revolvers. The sergeant wore an Australian bush hat and carried a bare-bladed knife under his belt. They were backed up by an edgy private cradling an automatic rifle as if he expected us to attack. I counted a dozen other soldiers, coming over slowly, and I wondered what they had done to be banished here. They seemed discouraged by fate, and resentful at waking from their midday stupor. There was a war going on, but they had been shackled to the Trans-Saharan.
The captain ordered us down from the trucks, and he made us line up in the sun. He looked each of us over, while his blank-faced soldiers stood behind him. Some of the passengers grew anxious. Others seemed relieved, as if they found themselves on familiar ground. I took my cue from Ali, who looked bored and unruffled.
The captain collected our papers and ordered Ali to have the trucks unloaded, every sack, for inspection. He said the border was closed, and would remain closed until later. He did not specify the hour or day. He assigned two guards to us, and returned to the barracks. The other soldiers drifted away.
Asamakka had traditions. The squatters, who had watched from their hovels, came over to offer assistance, and Ali hired two crews to unload the trucks. Despite the heat, they set to work immediately. I sat in the dirt beside Ali. He said that the laborers worked for the soldiers, and would give them a cut of their wages. The guards’ real job was to keep track of business.
Ali said, “We could have unloaded the trucks ourselves, but the captain would have found other ways to make his money. These soldiers have not been paid in six months. So don’t expect to go anywhere today. The captain will take everything he can before he lets us leave.”
We sprawled under the trucks through most of the afternoon. We made tea. The offloaded sacks grew in mounds in the dirt. Children moved among us hawking cigarettes, soft drinks, and chickens.
Two Ethiopians approached me for help. They had been deported by Algeria, but refused entry by Niger. For weeks they had been stuck between the countries, living on donations from passing strangers. They were thin and hungry and sick. I gave them my blanket and oranges. Imagining that I might have the influence to pluck them from their misery, they handed me a crudely written letter to the United Nations Committee on Refugees. I promised to deliver it when I got to the capital, and I eventually did, although to an unimpressed official who had heard many such stories before.
The soldiers emerged again from the barracks late in the afternoon, and with help from the laborers began to probe the burlap sacks one at a time with sharpened steel rods, searching for weapons. Ali was amused. He said quietly, “And if we were smugglers why would we come through this checkpoint? It is a big desert.”
Those soldiers not probing the sacks rummaged through our personal luggage. They did not steal. When they found something that pleased them, they had the manners to ask for it as a gift.
“Cadeau?”
“Bien sûr.”
From me they took the small stuff—pens, batteries, rolls of film. They did not ask for money. We spent the night. The search continued the following day.
A bearded man in a police uniform approached me and said simply, “I am the constable.” I gave him only a solar-powered calculator, which did not please him.
By the second afternoon, when the soldiers saw that Ali could outwait them, they allowed him to have the trucks loaded. The captain called me to his office—a room full of flies, with a cot in one corner, and a high open window through which the smell of stale urine drifted. The captain sat at a wooden desk. He had red eyes and beer breath. He stamped my passport, but said I could not continue with the date trucks, which would head directly for Agadez across the desert. I said that Agadez was my destination as well. He shook his head: I would have to go first to Arlit, Niger’s northernmost town, and register there with the police. Arlit lay 150 miles to the southeast. I asked how I would get there. He said he didn’t know; maybe I would find someone going that way. I thought he wanted a bribe, and asked what would be required to allow me to accompany the trucks. He insisted that nothing would change his mind. I asked why. He looked somber and said, “Because the direct route to Agadez is not safe. The Tuaregs are bandits, you know. There have been attacks.”
Ali looked worried when I told him. He was carrying Tuareg passengers, and had a Tuareg dri
ver, and in the minds of the southern soldiers was, as an Algerian and Saharan, probably a rebel conspirator. Now that the only Westerner had been removed from his convoy, he had to wonder if he was being set up for attack. The Tuareg war has been marked by just such misguided killing.
He left me bread and water. I told him I would find him in Agadez. He said, “God willing.” We embraced without emotion, and I watched the trucks rumble slowly out of Asamakka. I trusted Ali’s judgment. If he sensed danger, he would double back that night across the unmarked border. If the passengers gave him trouble, he would find some way to abandon them. I had my own worries.
FINDING THE RIDE to Arlit required no special talent. I simply waited. And I was lucky. The next day, a four-wheel-drive Toyota camper appeared across the no-man’s-land, south from Algeria. It was driven by a tough old Frenchman and his leathery wife, who treated the soldiers like houseboys, and blustered through the entry formalities in less than an hour. Their names were Claude and Marie. They had retired from somewhere in southern France. I don’t think they had quite gotten the word about the Islamic revolution or the Tuareg rebellion—or for that matter about the independence of Niger. When soldiers inspecting the camper tried filching their pastis and refrigerated cheese, Claude threw them out. He did this with an explosion of French vowels. Marie slammed the door. They were the last trans-Saharan tourists, operating on a hair-trigger of indignation. They liked me because of my race.
The rebels weren’t ready for tourists who moved this fast. The way to Arlit was marked by black barrels filled with rock, one every kilometer. They led across a bare stone plain. The camper was nimble; Claude ran it full-out and did a lot of unnecessary swerving. He assaulted the sand pockets. He swore prodigiously. Sweat soaked his shirt. When he worked up his emotions, his neck swelled and his face turned red. Marie sat primly beside him with her seatbelt on. I sat in the back, braced against the sink. There was no time to talk.
That changed when we stopped for the night. Claude unrolled an awning, and set up three lawn chairs and a folding table. We had pastis mixed with bottled French water. Marie made a tidy dinner of cornichon and canned sausages. She regretted the lack of bread, but offered up a plate of cheese with crackers. Under her surveillance, I cut a thin slice for myself. She took the plate away. I did not begrudge her this stinginess. She and Claude were headed to Abidjan, and the beaches of the Ivory Coast, and had brought along just enough of France to last them. She mentioned that it was their final trip to Africa. I asked if they had made others. “Oh oui,” she said, and pushed back her hair in exasperation. Claude enjoyed these trips. They gave him an opportunity to indulge in dissatisfaction.
Claude was what the French call a gueulard, which is difficult to translate into English because it is a particularly Gallic type, a mixture of the loudmouth and the grumbler. I liked him. He was a social fellow. He sought confirmation with the French nasal “Non? Heh? Non?” and little pokes to the shoulder. He said he had been a sergeant in the army, and afterward had gone into the construction business. He wanted to talk politics. The conversation turned to Indochina. He deplored the French and American defeats there. He said, “Everyone is against torture, non? In principle torture is something bad. But you have to be realistic too, non? You have to admit that from time to time torture is necessary. Sometimes you ask questions and you need the answers.”
The lawn chair was luxurious. Between the food and company, the evening felt like summer holiday on the coast of Brittany, only lacking beach tents and the toy shovels. The alcohol spun my head. I was glad to have escaped from Asamakka. Claude seemed admirably stupid. Rare is the man who does not grow cautious with age.
They slept in the camper. I slept on the ground wrapped in a jacket, because I had given away my blanket to the Ethiopians, and Marie did not want to lend me another. Claude would have lent me a blanket, but he did not want to quarrel with Marie. I got the impression she worried about skin lesions, parasites, and perhaps the transmission of venereal disease through polyester and wool. I had neither shaved nor bathed since leaving Tamanrasset, and I was dusty.
In the morning we drank Nescafé au lait from bowls, then rolled up the awning, folded up the lawn chairs and table, and got back to the furious driving. At noon we left the plain and sped across an undulating desert where scattered bushes grew in the depressions. The bushes were stunted, thorny, small-leafed plants, edible only to goats. Their speckled shade was hardly enough for snakes. But to me they looked as lush as tropical trees. I shouted this forward to Claude as he smashed over one.
“The tropics?” he called back. “These bushes are nothing! They’re useless! They’re getting the hell in our way!”
In the afternoon we came to Arlit, a new town built since independence around Niger’s only national resource, a uranium mine. The town appeared abruptly out of the desert—a black African colony deep in Tuareg land. The main street was noisy and energetic, and so dense with pedestrians that even Claude had to slow. Despite the fierceness of the sun, the men wore no hats. They were sinewy southerners in tattered shorts and short-sleeved shirts. The women were more dignified with the print dresses and turbans and their perfect posture. Ragged children ran in bands.
The people besieged us. Claude kept advancing. The crowd grew to a hundred, young and old, trotting beside the camper, competing for our attention with laughter, shouts, and general good humor. They wanted to sell, buy, and provide, or simply to talk. Faces appeared and disappeared. Arms snaked through the open windows offering cigarettes, candy, matches, peanuts, and small thick-skinned oranges. By hooking both elbows through the window above the sink, one young man managed to get his upper body into the camper. The effect was unusual, as if he had suddenly dropped into the privacy of our kitchen. It seemed to surprise him as much as me. He hesitated for only a moment.
“Bienvenu à Arlit,” he said.
“Merci.”
He squirmed the rest of the way through the window, and picked himself off the floor. The crowd shouted its approval. “You’ve come from far?” he asked. He smiled.
I laughed in relief, feeling I had been too long in the desert. Arlit was an old and familiar delight. In its kindness and celebration, in its acceptance of life, Africa can feel like the most human place on earth.
Marie was worried again about disease. She rolled up her window, pulled in her elbows, and looked stiffly ahead. “Do something!” she said to Claude.
Claude didn’t hear her. He had leaned his head outside, and was palavering with the crowd in pidgin French, what the French call “petit nègre,” a caricature of native grammar performed in a generalized African accent. No one in Arlit seemed to mind. Claude and the crowd got along famously. He drove with one hand and bargained with the other. During the short trip to the central police station, he bought a pack of unfiltered cigarettes, an unopened jar of Nescafé, and a cheap camel-skin wallet.
At the police station we pulled into a compound enclosed by high mud walls. The crowd stayed back, and the police shut the gates. Having squirmed through the window, our passenger stayed with us. He introduced himself as André. We got out of the camper. Claude had the sense to drop the pidgin talk. The guards at the gate were heavily armed. The men who searched the camper were unnaturally efficient. They stole nothing, and after their inspection led us into the station to see their commander. André started acting important. The commander ignored him. He was a hard-eyed man. He verified briskly that we were headed south for Agadez, and for our own safety, he forbade us to travel at night. He stamped our passports, and let us go. For this he demanded no payment.
Marie approved. “Très correct,” she said afterward. “He was a gentleman.”
Claude agreed. “He has respect for France.”
But there was a closer explanation. Arlit stands as insult to the Tuareg rebels. The commander guarded the mine. He did not have to extort money, because he was paid on time. He did not have to invent enemies and spies, because he was surrounded by r
eal ones.
20
A
POLITICAL
PARABLE
THIS IS A story told among the sedentary people who live to the Tuaregs’ south in Niger, about a time when animals could cultivate the earth. A certain mother goat had a magnificent garden in which she grew crops of onions, manioc, potatoes, and all the other good vegetables necessary for her children’s meals. The garden was protected by a fence of spiny branches. Nonetheless, one morning the goat discovered that a gazelle had gotten into it, and was calmly eating up the crops.
“You!” she said. “Gazelle! What are you doing in my garden? Do you think it is just another place in the desert where wild grasses grow? Don’t you see that the garden is fenced?”
The gazelle answered scornfully, “We nomads, we desert creatures, we recognize no fences. Everything that is green we will eat. The earth and everything that grows on it belongs to our God, and he created it so that we could use it.”
“Get out of my garden or I will fight you!”
“I’ll get out only when I’ve had enough to eat. Nothing proves to me that you own this place!”
The goat charged the gazelle and the two animals began to fight. Just then a jackal passed. He stopped and said, “Why are you fighting like this? Stop, and tell me what the problem is.”
The goat and the gazelle explained their disagreement, and decided to accept the jackal as a judge.
The jackal said, “Mother Goat, go home to your children and come back tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning I will make my judgment, and not before.”
Sahara Unveiled Page 18
