The drought ended, and the savanna turned green. Even in the desert near Arlit, in the highlands of the Aïr, there was grass again. In 1989 a new military leader in Niger made peace with Qaddafi and agreed to the repatriation of the now-subdued Tuaregs from Libya. The following year, faced with Islamic revolution in the north, the government of Algeria expelled the remaining refugees. Nearly 25,000 Tuaregs were held on the border at In Guezzam, while officials argued about which country they belonged to. The United Nations got involved. Promises were made for emergency food and supplies, and in January 1990 Niger finally agreed to accept 18,000 of the refugees. Men, women, and children climbed into trucks, and were driven to “transit camps” on the southern edge of the desert, southwest of Agadez, near a village called Tchin-Tabaradène.
The camps already held the returnees from Libya, and conditions there were difficult. The Tuaregs were kept under loose guard, and not allowed to leave. They had little food or shelter. The promised supplies were delivered to Niamey, then siphoned off by corrupt officials, and sold in the commercial markets of the capital—a standard destination for international aid to West Africa.
In May 1990 three young men from the camps stormed the police post in Tchin-Tabaradène. Mano Dayak says that they were unarmed, and wanted simply to protest against conditions in the camp. Maybe. They killed two policemen and a prisoner, ran away, and were never identified. Soldiers arrived within hours. The refugees in the camps panicked and fled. The soldiers went on a violent rampage, shooting Tuaregs on sight, stripping and torturing the elders, raping the women, slaughtering the children.
The campaign lasted several weeks. A few encampments were surrounded and machine-gunned, but the desert did most of the work: having occupied the wells, the soldiers sat back and let thirst drive their enemies into rifle range. No one knows how many people were killed. The army later admitted to seventy, but the real number was many times higher. Government spokesmen officially regretted the massacre, and tried to dismiss it as an “isolated event,” though Tchin-Tabaradène lay like the final stepping stone on a straight path to war.
The Tuaregs rose up in a rage that spread across the Sahara. Many of the rebels were men who had been trained in Libya, and had kept their weapons. They dreamed still of an independent Tuareg nation, but died now more simply for their hatred. They attacked government forces in the Aïr, near Arlit. The army accused the rebels of collusion with Qaddafi, and of trying to sabotage the uranium mine. It did not distinguish between combatants and peaceful Tuaregs. In the towns, it rounded up suspects. In the desert, it simply hunted them down.
Something similar happened in Mali, where in June 1990, only a month after the massacre of Tchin-Tabaradène, a team of international aid workers was ambushed by Tuareg rebels. The rebels took the team’s Toyotas and attacked Ménaka, the Malian town where fugitives from Tchin-Tabaradène had been detained. Fourteen Malian policemen died in the attack. The rebels escaped with weapons and ammunition. The Malian Army arrived and went on a rampage, killing, burning, raping. This time the Tuaregs shot back. In July 1990 fighting broke out on the streets of Gao. In September 1990 the rebels wiped out a force of 200 Malian soldiers on the hot plains of the Tanezrouft.
The rebellion spread slowly to Algeria where the national government was distracted by the Islamic revolution. At first the war in Algeria was fought by foreigners—rebels from Mali or Niger who refused to accept the borders, though in fact they hid behind them. Later, however, the cause was taken up by Algerian Tuaregs as well. The main effect was to make the desert dangerous.
The Algerian government brokered a tri-national truce in 1991, which lasted two months. It brokered another truce in 1992, which lasted three weeks. There were no further attempts. Plans for semiautonomous Tuareg regions in Niger and Mali disintegrate under the pressures of continued killing. Experiments with democracy fail because the democratic majorities refuse to share power. Defeat at the polls is seen by both sides as defeat in battle. The Tuaregs refuse to participate. Dreaming instead of their impractical nation, encouraged by the cheap sympathy of outsiders, they keep fighting. Along its entire southern edge, the Sahara spawns such wars of ambush and reprisal.
22
SOUTH
TO
THE
SAHEL
CLAUDE WAS NOT the type of Frenchman to sympathize with the Tuaregs. He could have settled happily in Arlit and worked his way into a new life as, say, an advisor to the government forces. But Marie was in a hurry. She wanted to get to Agadez before night, and Claude had the habit of obliging her. He checked the Toyota’s tires, and climbed into the driver’s seat. A policeman swung open the compound gate.
Unhappy with our sudden departure, André, the young man who had crawled through the window, said, “You must pay me now for my services.”
Marie turned on him. “What?”
André said angrily, “One must never cheat one’s friends.”
Claude looked stonily ahead. Marie said, “I will call over the police!”
Wisely, André sulked off. Marie instructed us to close the camper’s windows and lock its doors. By the edge of town only children chased in our wake.
We headed south down the Route de L’Uranium, an asphalt ribbon laid on an elevated gravel bed across the desert floor. Claude shared my enthusiasm for the engineering. The blue Aïr highlands rose to our left, but Claude saw only the road. “You’d almost believe this was France!” he said. He drove at ninety miles an hour, stopped for army roadblocks, and got us to Agadez in time for dinner.
Agadez was an ancient caravan center, a poor, hot, mud-walled town dominated by a sixteenth-century adobe mosque with a Sudanese-style minaret rising ninety feet above dusty streets. Dinner was on me. The hotel was a sultan’s palace as old as the mosque. It was dark and dingy, and had thick adobe walls. The Tuareg Kaocen had lived there during his one-year occupation of the town, though this was nowhere written. For dinner we had a stew washed down with good African beer. I said good-bye to Claude and Marie, who went off to their camper for an early departure.
My room was a stifling, windowless cell with a concrete floor, stained green walls, and a bulb hanging from the ceiling. It had a cot with a foam-rubber pad and unwashed sheets. I checked for scorpions, then lay sweating, wishing for the open sky.
In the morning, I walked through town. Agadez once sat on the southern fringe of the Sahara, and prospered on the trade in slaves, gold, and salt. But by the time I got there the desert had moved farther south, and the town ran on a little commerce, charity, and international aid. It had wells and government offices. The population had swollen to 75,000 with refugees from drought and war. They lived in shelters of tin and straw tacked onto the sides of the mud-walled buildings in town, and in large squatters’ camps on the outskirts. The atmosphere was uneasy. People did not approach strangers. I saw evidence of recent fighting in the tension of the soldiers, and in the obvious distrust between Tuaregs and southerners on the street. The two sides mingled at the market because they had to, but even the children’s park had separate swings. The poorest children were too poor to play. They ran naked and stole their food at the market.
When I asked among truckers near the mosque about Ali and his cargo of dates, they grew suspicious, said they knew nothing. A drunken policeman demanded my passport. Wearily, I let him have it. He became friendly when he discovered my nationality, because he thought he should go to America to become rich. He took me to the station house so that I could register and share my wealth.
The station house was an adobe shack with open windows and a verandah swarming with flies. The three policemen there broke off a card game to write my name in a notebook, and to request a transit fee. I had to remind them to stamp my passport.
By the next morning, Ali had arrived. I found his trucks parked on the street near the market. The passengers had disappeared. Emaciated laborers were unloading the cargo of dates, and carrying the sacks into a warehouse. Ali was amused that I had
beat him to Agadez.
Days later I took a bus 550 miles down the paved road to Niamey, and watched the desert disappear. It was a good, clean bus, with air-conditioning and a stereo. It left Agadez with a mound of luggage on the roof, and a full load of passengers. I found a place toward the back, next to a southerner with whom I shared no language. We smiled and left each other alone. The driver sat upright and wore lightly tinted sunglasses. There was drama in the way he drove, flashing through villages, overtaking the cars ahead. He had a multitone horn, and he could make it talk. Thanking, scolding, proclaiming, the Niamey bus was coming through.
Music was the driver’s pleasure. He carried a case of cassettes, among which he chose carefully. Over the sixteen hours of the trip, he repeated not a single tune. Most of his selection was West African pop, with its melodic guitar work. But he also liked American dance tunes with an emphasis on drumming and sex. The passengers listened impassively to this stew, swaying in unison to the lurching of the bus. But after the silence of the desert, the music pleased us all.
We stopped for God and government. At prayer time, the passengers knelt in groups in the dirt, and the driver obliged with recordings of the Koran. At the army roadblocks, illiterate soldiers peered at our identity papers and tried to record our names in ledgers. Some asked for my help. Near the camps of Tchin-Tabaradène, a sergeant made a show of holding up the bus while he questioned me about my purposes. But the other roadblocks were merely time-consuming. At the big town called Tahoua we had to pass through three of them—at the entrance, at the center, and again at the exit.
Nonetheless, we fled the Sahara fast, the changes passing as smoothly as the frames of a movie. The desert by Agadez was a barren land of cactus, gravel, and gully, but then acacias appeared and became more frequent, and the country turned to rolling, eroded grassland, inhabited in the valleys by isolated families. Where the grass grew thicker, the country began to resemble American rangeland, with goats and long-haired cattle. There were villages of round huts and granaries, and the conical thatched roofs, and cultivated fields of hand-planted corn. We came to a reservoir, the first open water I had seen since leaving the Mediterranean at Algiers. It was not a big reservoir, but the wind pushed up lovely little waves that lapped its sides. The land around it was irrigated and farmed. Someone had planted saplings in rock enclosures on the shore.
After dark we drove along the border with Nigeria, through villages with no electricity. The night was moonless and black. In the markets lining the road, vendors lighted their wares with kerosene lanterns, hundreds of them, casting orange light on the milling crowds. The huts were dark masses, some lit by cooking fires in the yards. I had a feeling that everyone was outside, enjoying the softness of the African night. Our driver had turned off the air-conditioning, and we had opened all the windows. Passengers hung their heads outside. We stopped for dinner in Dogondoutchi, and I wandered through the crowds, listening to the constant calling. Sitting at a bench with others, I ate a bowl of rice with a spicy sauce, impossible to see in the darkness.
At Dogondoutchi a crazy woman boarded the bus. She had a torn dress, hair in wild tufts, the slightness and exuberance of an adolescent, but an older face. She pranced to the back of the bus, sat across from me, and in French said “Cigarette?”
It was a request or an offer. I said I didn’t smoke. The passengers watched solemnly. She giggled, then repeated herself because cigarette was the only French she knew. That and “SIDA.” French for AIDS, which also made her giggle. She appreciated the driver’s choice in African music. She started singing along, laughing, singing louder, dancing on the seat. When the driver put on American songs she picked up the melodies, and mimicked the words.
She refused to leave the bus at the town that was her destination. The driver came back to convince her—it wasn’t for the money, he said, this was where she lived. She answered that she wanted to stay up with the music all night, wanted to dance, wanted never to sleep. Passengers in the front turned to smile. Those sitting closer tried persuasion. She debated them for half an hour before the police were called. I saw Africa in the stand-off: in this police state, this oppressive, ignorant, warring, disintegrating nation, the police when they finally arrived were gentle with her too. They tried their own arguments. She argued back as she had before. A few passengers grew impatient and said they didn’t feel it was right that we should all be delayed. They wanted to throw her off. But other passengers had been taken in by the debate, which they followed eagerly back and forth with their eyes. There was no point, of course. Finally the police had to carry the woman off, and she fought them, and screamed and sobbed. But consider the horror of a more efficient Africa.
In Niamey I went to the national museum to find the remnants of a famous tree. It was an acacia, and it had grown in the Ténéré, the sand desert east of Agadez. For hundreds of miles in any direction it was the only tree. Maps showed it. Then, in 1973, a Libyan truck driver collided with it and knocked it down. The trunk was hauled to the museum. Out in the Ténéré a simple metal statue was erected. Someday I will go to see it, a peculiar monument to driving in the Sahara.
PART III
THE EDGE
IS A DESERT TOO
23
NIAMEY
THE SAHEL IS a band of dry grassland, a savanna with no independent identity, the Sahara’s southern shore. The Africans who inhabit it are a desert people. They do not contemplate the tropics to their south, but face instead toward the barren north from which every few years the Sahara surges across them. This has always been true. Instability is part of life in the Sahel—the good years give, and the bad ones take away. The difference now is not that the Sahara surges harder, though it may, or that the Sahel shifts southward, though it has, or that population growth magnifies these effects, though it must. Up close, it all amounts to the same old disorder of local drought. The Sahel has never allowed itself to become crowded. The difference now is mostly philosophical: Sahelians have enough contact with the outside world to know that a better life exists elsewhere, and they are less willing than in the past simply to submit to the weather and die. Some flee drought into the temporary refugee camps where international charity may provide for them. Others make the more permanent move to a city, preferably to a national capital, where by the magic of critical mass almost everyone can survive. That alone explains the new Niamey, now a half-million strong, which stands on the east bank of the Niger River where French colonial administrators happened in 1926 to plant a few buildings and trees.
Niamey is one of the poorest capitals in the world—a scattered, low-rise settlement spreading loosely from the river in an irregular pattern of dirt streets, broken pavement, and crumbling mud and cement buildings. Despite its size, it never quite becomes a city. Patches of savanna remain even at the center, crisscrossed by footpaths like the heavily traveled trails outside a village. The streets are uncrowded, and the few private cars move cautiously among overloaded minivans and buses spewing black smoke. Most people walk. Thin and poorly dressed pedestrians wander about looking for scraps of opportunity, or begging. Those with a little money do some shopping. There is an official marketplace, where established vendors sell their goods in rows, but prices are better on the street, where energetic hustlers offer as much as a person could need, and more than most can afford. The newest buildings, which house government ministries, are ultramodern monuments to national pride, never quite finished, slipping already into disrepair. Inspirational billboards proclaim the eagerness of the people to follow their leaders. One says FOR NIGER, ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS WORTH ANY PRICE. Democracy or dictatorship, it doesn’t matter. You can turn on the television most nights and find some government official getting a medal.
The Niger River, which flows past the center of town, is a trick of nature. It draws its water from the wet tropical highlands of Sierra Leone and Guinea, but rather than flowing directly to the nearby Atlantic, it drains northward across the West African interior, then
flows in a great arc through the southern Sahara, past the old caravan centers of Timbuktu and Gao, to emerge finally from the desert heading south for Niger, Nigeria, and the Bight of Benin. By the time it passes Niamey, about 2,000 miles from its headwaters, it has taken on some of the character of the desert, and is a wide, shallow, and volatile river. In Niamey it is spanned by a modest bridge named Kennedy that has allowed the city to spread along the west bank. Upriver on both sides, people have planted vegetable gardens like little jungles. Fishermen pole dugout pirogues close by the banks. Larger planked vessels known as pinasse carry passengers and a bit of cargo. On the floodplain below the bridge, hundreds of laundrymen scrub clothes in the brown river water. They lay the clothes on the rocks to dry, then fold them and carry the piles away on their heads. It is not a good life. The laundrymen have to lay claim to their tiny scraps of riverbank, then fight off competitors. They live nearby with their families, in miserable mud hovels. The slowly decaying Grand Hôtel stands above them by old shaded houses on a bluff overlooking the river. The bluff is cut by ravines dribbling sewage. Downstream, leatherworkers process animal hides in reeking pits of black slime. I mention this because of what it represents about life in Niamey. People who live away from the river in the less obvious misery of the shantytowns suffer equally to survive. But for all their troubles, they don’t make revolutions. Opportunistic robberies don’t count.
Sahara Unveiled Page 20
