This no doubt was what the airport policeman had in mind when he saw my visa. He scowled and ordered me to stand aside. He went to fetch his lieutenant. The other passengers stared at me as if they had not noticed my presence earlier. They now seemed equally upset.
The lieutenant was a shrewd pockmarked Moor with a sharp nose. He escorted me into a side room, held me there for an hour, and accused me of course of being a spy. I denied it. He said, “I do not believe you.”
Having grown used to this elsewhere, I made no demands, volunteered nothing, and did not complain. I waited. Flies bathed in our sweat. Since the lieutenant did not pick up the phone, I suspected he was bluffing.
He asked, “What are you writing about?”
“The desert.”
“What is there to say about the desert?”
“How dry it is.”
“I do not believe you.”
But he was softening. His underlings came in and searched my luggage. He impressed them with his command of the situation. “Monsieur says he is writing about the desert.” They smiled at the idea. Later he impressed them with his generosity: he stamped my passport, and said I could go. He added, “But if you are caught taking photographs, you will be arrested.”
“Understood,” I answered.
“Here, we do not like spies.”
“Understood.”
Outside the terminal, the night was black. A crowd milled about. I caught a ride to the hotel through the unlit streets of Nouakchott. Our car lifted clouds of sand and dirt. At the hotel, French aid officials sat sullenly at the bar. Alcohol is prohibited in Mauritania. The Frenchmen drank Fanta.
IN MAURITANIA THE savanna has turned to sand. Erosion has cut the land. The river runs lower every year. There are places now where the desert extends right to its banks. And the drought has done more than damage the savanna; it has deepened the desert itself. Dunes have buried whole villages. Wells have gone dry.
In theory, there are solutions. You can drill deeper wells, irrigate crops, stabilize dunes, and plant trees. You can teach people to use the land more carefully, not to overgraze, overcut, or overpopulate. You can balance indigenous and imported technologies. You can preach hope that agriculture in the south might someday feed the country’s two million people. In the meantime, you can ask them to stop killing each other.
In fact, there is little reason for optimism. Only rain can threaten the desert, and in recent years there has been mostly drought. The power of weather dwarfs human effort. In the past decades, the pluviometric limit of six inches of annual rainfall—the minimum for grazing—has moved south sixty miles. Nouakchott, once surrounded by grasslands, is now swept by blowing sand.
The Sahara is mercurial, and does not attack in regimental formation. It sprouts in barren patches here and there, perhaps a hundred miles ahead of the absolute desert, and bypasses the greenbelts planted to block its advance. Greenbelts are trees, Maginot lines in a losing war against the climate. If they survive, they protect only themselves. Farther on, around a well, near a village, for miles outside a city, the land goes bad. People steepen the decline once it has begun. There are more of them than ever before, wielding better tools. But it is hard to blame them. They cannot wish themselves away, and they must eat. The land cannot support them. The rains have stopped. This is the process now called desertification. It is an old story.
NOUAKCHOTT IS A political creation, planned in 1957 as the coastal capital of the soon-to-be nation. It is a dispersed, low-rise city of boulevards and block-house architecture—a place that speaks of the Mauritanian expanse. Goats wander the alleys. Donkeys haul loads of precious firewood to be sold in small bundles. The buildings are concrete, crumbling, dirty, and hot. There are few cars, and fewer trucks. Scant downtown traffic lights regulate the flow of Toyota vans packed to the limit with thirty or more passengers. There is a large African-style market, where women do most of the selling. Once there were two grocery stores, but during the riots of 1989 the largest was looted, and it has not reopened. Beggars, many diseased or physically deformed, cluster around the remaining store. Despite the penalties imposed by the sharia, theft is a problem. Many people are hungry. The better households employ guards. The wind blows constantly, carrying the desert with it. Sand is everywhere. Slowly it is turning even the busiest streets into tracks. Inside the buildings, workers sweep it, shovel it, and take it back outside.
The most surprising fact about Nouakchott is its size. Downtown, you might guess it at 100,000 inhabitants. The actual number is closer to 800,000—more than a third of the nation’s entire population. Most of the people are Moors. They live in the squatters’ camps that ring the city, and are discouraged from coming downtown by government policy and lack of transportation. Many are seminomadic: if the summer rains come, they leave with their goats for the open desert. When the season changes and the land can no longer support their herds, they return to the capital where there is electricity and water. The goats graze on refuse, at times on cardboard alone. The people have more elaborate needs. They suffer from sickness, but in Nouakchott, at least, they may stay alive. Nouakchott is the most efficient distribution center for the grain and medicine sent to Mauritania by the United States and Europe, and managed on the ground by an array of international charities.
I drove out to the squatters’ camps with a Moorish businessman who explained his work as “sometimes import-export.” We went to the animal market, which stood in a sea of tents and flimsy shacks. Pencil-thin nomads crowded around us. My host said, “They are not as miserable as they seem. They think that by living like this they can force the government to give them housing and land. It is mostly fakery.” And these were his fellow Moors. I did not ask what he thought of black Africans.
We bought a struggling lamb at the market, forced it into the trunk, and drove home. The businessman lived in a two-story concrete house with a large parlor. It was too hot inside, so we sat out back on a rug in the sand, and drank Coke and traditional Saharan tea. Nearby, a slave slaughtered and skinned the lamb. I write slave without being sure. He was a Haratin, and had a peaceful face. He wore no chains. If I had asked, he would have been called a friend of the family. He was clearly more than a servant.
It was the week of the tree. On the television news we watched a government minister plant a sapling in the desert. There was no mention of world events. The businessman sneered. “They are confused and afraid, and don’t know what to say. So they say nothing.”
We went to his office, in a shabby building. He sat in grand style behind a large desk. On the wall hung the mandatory portrait of the President Colonel—a handsome man with a mustache. I sat at a coffee table. We talked business about the economic potential of Mauritania, the iron deposits in the north, and the rich fishing grounds off the coast. We talked imports and exports. He argued that American magazines needed permanent representatives here. He discussed the strategic importance of the country. He was like a man on dry ground pretending to row a boat. The room had not been swept, and sand was accumulating in the corners.
INSHALLAH. GOD WILLING. You hear it again and again in conversation, a sort of cultural reflex, a constant reminder of faith. We will meet for tea, God willing. The weather will change, the rains will come, and our herds will survive, inshallah. And if none of it happens, that too is God’s will.
Westerners accuse Islam of excessive fatalism, but fatalism is just the ingredient necessary to function in such a place. I talked to the director of the Peace Corps in Mauritania, who said the American way is to take action today for a better life tomorrow—which is equally a statement of faith. In Mauritania, the Peace Corps has proved largely impotent. The desert twitches, and sweeps aside good intentions. If nature has been subdued in the industrial West, in the Sahara it, or God, remains the primordial power. You live here as a guest. After a while you learn to think like others, and find yourself even in your most private thoughts saying, inshallah.
THE AMERICAN EMBASSY called
a security meeting. New troubles had erupted in the Arab world, and there was fear of riots and reprisals in Mauritania. The Americans in Nouakchott formed an isolated, tight-knit community—members of the embassy, USAID, the Peace Corps, and Christian relief organizations. Perhaps fifty of them came to the meeting. They gathered at the American Center, a private club where alcohol is served. The mood was quiet and attentive. People greeted each other across the room with nods and quick smiles. There had been anti-Western riots before, during which cars had been burned and windows broken. No one had been hurt. But as unpopular guests in a radically Islamic land, the resident Americans did not dismiss the threat.
The chargé d’affaires was a strapping blond-haired man fresh in from an easier posting in Paris. He stood in front of the group and spoke in a measured, reassuring tone. He summarized the news, and repeated official policy. He said he had spoken to Mauritanian officials, and had demanded proper security. Nonetheless, he expected demonstrations. He mentioned as a worst case that everyone could be accommodated at the embassy, but that getting to it might be dangerous. He talked about an established “buddy” system for warnings and evacuation. He recommended that the Americans travel in pairs, and that they avoid the beach and the mosques. He urged calm. He smiled. His lovely wife smiled. It was a competent performance.
Several days later the rioting broke out, more as official policy than as an outpouring of genuine sentiment. The rioters were awkward and self-aware. Groups of chanting, flag-waving men circulated downtown. They carried unloaded guns. They chased one American, but he outran them. They hit a Frenchman in the head with an egg. They slaughtered a camel, stoned a window, and set fire to a few cars. I walked around town and watched. By evening Nouakchott had returned to normal.
The Westerners did not bother to feel offended. They had come to Mauritania to fight the desert, but had grown weary and realistic. At the American Center, a distinguished gray-haired man in a suit and tennis shoes introduced himself to me by saying, “I’ve been associated with every major foreign policy disaster of the past thirty years.” His wife and children lived in Falls Church, Virginia. He was charged with reducing the American donations of wheat. I asked how he felt about such a duty. He said, “This office is pretty far removed from feeding people anyway. My problem is, I can’t keep up with the acronyms.” He may have worried about how he sounded. Later he came up to me and said, “But what are you going to do about a country like this?”
KIFFA IS THE capital of a region called the Assaba, 300 miles to the east of Nouakchott, on the paved road that crosses southern Mauritania. The road is interrupted by frequent security checkpoints. Immediately to the south, there is trouble on the river; immediately to the north, there is desert. The law is as capricious as the weather. The soldiers are uncertain. I went by air to Kiffa, and overflew their scrutiny.
Once a fertile savanna, the Assaba has come under full assault by the Sahara. The airport at Kiffa is a dirt runway scraped through the brown scrubland outside of town. I waited to disembark while an old woman tried to descend the airplane’s stairs. She was a backcountry Moor, a nomad from the open desert. For minutes she hesitated in the doorway. She gripped the rails, and surveyed the angle. Her problem was not physical inability, but lack of understanding. These were her first stairs: she had climbed them to get on the airplane, and now she had to figure a way down. A crowd at the bottom shouted advice. She turned one way, then the other, and finally started down backward. Halfway down she ran out of ideas, and froze. She looked anguished. Men came from below and lifted her to the ground.
It was summer, the end of the rainy season. A single cumulus cloud towered in the haze and humidity. No one dared hope for a storm; for months the sky had been full of false promise. The land was sparse. The people at the airport looked idle and unhealthy. I was carrying messages from Nouakchott, and caught a ride with an aid worker into town.
Kiffa looked like a town of 10,000, and probably held three times more. Still, it seemed dispersed and uncrowded. Stone houses lined empty dirt streets. Groups of young Moorish men in white and pale blue robes walked abreast. They were haughty and unwelcoming. Relations between the races were difficult. The few European aid workers had naturally taken sides with the blacks. A weary Englishman, a nurse, said to me, “We are the new slaves here. We even pay our own way.” There was a market run by black African women where the heat was magnified by the confines of airless alleys. There were a few small groceries with butane refrigerators to keep bottled drinks cool. There was no electricity. There were no telephones. There were few cars. During my visit there was no gasoline. People dug individual wells and drink tainted water. There was no sewage system. There was no hospital. There was a medical clinic with no medicine. Cholera, polio, measles, tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid, hepatitis, parasites, and probably AIDS thrived. One death was hardly distinguished from another.
I stayed in Kiffa with a Peace Corps worker named John Stingely. At age forty, he was a wizened, balding man with a full beard and a cautious expression—hardly the poster image of an enthusiastic volunteer. Stingely was a sometime rock musician and forester from coastal Oregon. His last job there had been as a low-paid technician, trudging the rainy slopes and counting saplings. He told me he joined the Peace Corps out of frustration. He said he wanted to dry out his boots.
But he was idealistic, too. With three years of forestry school behind him, and a lot of practical experience, he thought he could do the world some good. The Peace Corps sent him here to fight the Sahara and plant trees. He was a better soldier than most; near the completion of the two-year tour only fifteen of his original group of forty-one volunteers remained. The others had quit because of sickness and discouragement. Stingley himself had lost thirty pounds, and gained back only fifteen. He lived in Kiffa utterly alone, with little backup from the Peace Corps headquarters in distant Nouakchott. His relations with the local authorities were poisoned by corruption, mistrust, and racial politics. Stingley stayed on, but he no longer believed he could help. He had grown his trees and watched them die. He blamed Mauritanian neglect and the weather. Now he was only counting the days until the end. It is not easy to fight a hopeless war.
The Peace Corps rented his house from the biggest landlord in town. It was a two-room bungalow at the center of walled dirt yard. With the exception of a scraggly tree by the porch, the yard was bare. This embarrassed Stingley, who said he would have planted shade trees and vegetables except for the herds of neighborhood goats. They were the bane of his existence. They bounded over the walls and wandered the yard at will. Goats are the worst culprits in desertification. They eat even spined plants, and destroy young trees by cropping them down to their roots. Stingley hated them with professional vigor, but would have missed them if they were gone. Together he and the animals danced a mad ballet. When he spotted them in his yard, he stepped threateningly off the porch and waved his arms. They watched, and pretended not to care. He started after them, and they thundered around the house in mock fright. He was nimble and sly, and doubled back to catch them by surprise. They thundered the other way, just out of reach. He threw stones; they pranced. If he cornered them, they escaped over the wall and returned later to test his vigilance.
We drew water from a deep well at the front of the yard. It was a laborious job of hauling up buckets hand over hand, and filling plastic jerricans. Stingley did not mind. Preparing the water was the kind of ritual that had kept him sane. He filtered and sterilized it with the patience of a castaway. His housekeeping was immaculate. He cooked on a campstove and ate simply. He weighed himself daily. He kept himself clean. He kept an evening journal in tight handwriting. He was proud that he had not been sick for months.
At night we sat outside to escape the heat of the rooms, and we drank his homemade bush wine—a grapeless concoction that smelled like an experiment in fermentation. We mixed it with Fanta, and listened to the BBC through the static of a shortwave radio. We talked about rain. Stingley had a gau
ge in the yard, and had measured only two inches for the year. We talked about the Sahara—an enemy he fought yet had never clearly seen. We slept on straw mats in the dirt, thankful for the slightest breeze.
In brilliant morning sunlight we went to the nursery, where a crew of Africans cared for seedlings under Stingley’s direction. The laborers were employees of the Mauritanian forestry department, to which Stingley was attached as a sort of extension agent. They had not been paid in months, and were growing weak from malnourishment. Stingley said that the bosses were stealing their wages. He could not bear the suffering of his men, and had loaned them money from his own meager salary. In return, they treated him as their friend and protector. He had protested on their behalf, to no avail. He was frustrated by his inability to help.
Still, he brightened up among his seedlings. There were some 40,000 of them in the nursery, grown in sacks for transplantation. He led me through the nursery, bending over the young plants, cupping their fragile leaves in his hands, discussing the attributes of the different species. Mostly he raised mesquite, which roots well in difficult soils, finds water, grows fast, and can be cropped to the ground and survive. The other seedlings were acacias and desert bushes, a local tree called tikifeet, and another called the neem, which was his favorite because of its resistance to goats.
Within the confines of the nursery, the project was successful: after several reseedings, Stingley had achieved a 90 percent germination rate. I asked about the longer term prospects of survival. He shook his head. In the United States the survival rate is roughly 80 percent; he guessed survival in Mauritania to be at the most 8 percent, depending on the project. He described walking through old projects in which every sapling had died. He described watching his own saplings die.
We discussed the current crop. Most of the trees were intended for planting along the roads leading out of town. The idea was to fight drifting sand. But there were no trucks or crews available, and already the planting season was ending. Stingley had heard rumors that in reality many of the trees were destined for the yards of the governor and the chief of police. He shrugged. “At least they might get watered.”
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