The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  ‘You know my name,’ I said after a pause, ‘but you have not given me yours. Will you not do me that courtesy?’

  ‘Some call me the Fennec, for the desert fox; others the Tachelt, the horned viper,’ he said, which did nothing to ease my growing fears.

  ‘Don’t you have a more personal name?’ I asked, remembering that I had read somewhere how important it was for hostages to make some form of emotional contact with their captors so that they were seen not simply as prisoners but as human beings, and were thus less likely to be murdered in cold blood.

  ‘I do not give out my Kel Tamacheq name; I have had no use for it in a long time now.’

  ‘You sound ashamed of it,’ I said boldly; maybe too boldly, for I saw him bristle and his chin came up sharply.

  ‘Ashamed? Never. A Targui’s pride in his ancestry is unassailable: and we carry our ancestry in our names. My pride is intact, no matter the indignities that have assailed our people, but I will keep my name and my heritage to myself. My tribe has suffered enough; I would not have them persecuted further because of my association with them.’

  I had obviously touched a raw nerve. ‘Persecuted?’ I wondered in my naivety – who could possibly persecute a nomadic desert race, never in one place for any length of time, providing, one would have thought, an impossibly moving target? I looked to him for clarification, but his eyes seemed distant, pained and bitter, and then he turned away from me and called out to his men to bring me some water.

  A few minutes later we were back in the car and shortly after this were joined by two other vehicles with which we drove in convoy, flying over the sands like ships in full sail, their path bounded on all sides by towering waves.

  It was nightfall before we stopped again. I had been dozing with my head pressed awkwardly against the window; when I came properly awake it was to the sight of full darkness punctuated at intervals by small glowing fires. This seemed to be an entirely different sort of camp to the one we had left that morning. Dogs ran towards me barking cheerfully, and there were people everywhere, especially, it seemed, children, still up and running about at what felt like a late hour. There were women too, I noticed curiously, though they kept their distance. I heard the plaintive sound of baby goats calling out for the mothers from whom they had been separated in order to conserve their milk. How I knew this – which I did with utmost certainty – I had no idea, but it sent a shiver up my spine.

  The Fennec’s guards shepherded me into an outlying tent and at its entrance exchanged greetings with the inhabitants; then they stepped away and ushered me inside. I went in almost on hands and knees, not the most dignified way to meet the first Tuareg women I had ever encountered. I stared at them and they stared at me, each taking in the strange appearance of the other. I had become used to seeing the women of Tafraout wound in their black robes from head to toe, coyly hiding their faces from strangers, never looking me in the eye. But these women regarded me with frank curiosity, and when I caught them staring grinned and chattered so that their jewellery swung and caught the candlelight. They sat in a row like figures representing the Three Ages of Man in a medieval painting: one young and strikingly pretty, one comfortably middle aged and a crone with the beaked face of a grand hawk. I wondered if they were related, as they seemed so relaxed in one another’s company; I wondered what they made of me, in my creased and no doubt filthy linen shirt, designer jeans, expensive sandals, Longines watch and discreet-to-the-point-of-invisibility earrings. Their own earrings were vast and impressive, great chunks of silver in uncompromising geometric shapes that looked extremely uncomfortable to wear; yet the women carried them as though they were as light as feathers. And all of them wore, in a dozen variations, amulets like my own: pinned on their dark robes, on their bright, embroidered blouses, on their elaborate head-wraps, or, like mine, around their necks on strings or plaited thongs.

  My hand went to my own necklace, safely tucked away under my shirt. I could feel my heart beating beneath my fingers as if something inside me knew before my conscious brain did that I had stumbled on something truly significant, something that was going to change my entire life. I had the ineffable sense of having been brought by a conspiracy of fate and circumstances to a crux point, to the heart of the mystery; and yet now that it trembled on the brink of revealing itself I found I was afraid to know what it was. Part of me wanted to take my amulet out there and then and show it to these iconic women, but something made me hesitate. It would have been a graceless gesture, too sudden and abrupt, for this first meeting, at this late hour. Instead, I let them make room for me on a rope-strung bed raised a few inches off the ground and mattressed with colourful woollen blankets, and before I knew it I was under the covers. I was slipping over into sleep almost before my head came to rest, my mind going fluid and my muscles melting, leaving me with just that quiescent perceptiveness that is sometimes the most acute of all. For a moment I was aware only of their lowered voices like whispers of sound carried on the wind, a susurration of leaves or of wavelets lapping on a beach, and then the sounds seemed to coalesce and I heard the word Lallawa, over and over.

  32

  When next my eyes opened the air was full of light and I was alone in the tent. I stretched luxuriously, feeling a strange languor in my limbs. I could not remember having slept so well in years. I went outside and stared around. We were in a dry valley in which the non-existent river had carved a wide plain and everywhere on this plain were people and tents; dozens of tents, and maybe hundreds of people. Old men whose billowing robes and swathed turbans did little to disguise their stick-thin ankles or the stretch of thin skin over prominent bone. Children with swollen stomachs and huge eyes, their heads shaved except for one or two long pigtails. A group of old women tending cooking pots over open fires; younger women rhythmically pounding something in large wooden mortars.

  I heard a rumbling sound behind me and saw a line of dust-shrouded trucks come into view. As they drew up, the women threw down their pestles, gathered up their robes and walked towards them, very slender and straight of back, dignified in their refusal to run. Men handed sacks of food down to them – grain and rice, it looked like; a sack of vegetables; cooking oil; dates – and the women waited their turn for their share.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Fawcett. I hope you slept well.’

  I looked around to find the Tuareg chief beside me, and with him Taïb, his eyes locking immediately on to mine and shining like stars. ‘How are you, Izzy?’

  I was so happy and relieved to see him I could hardly speak. I found I wanted to touch him to reassure myself he was really there, but the presence of the Fennec restrained me. I hoped what I felt was in my smile. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Our eyes lingered on one another’s faces. At last I dragged my gaze away and composed myself. I turned to the Tuareg chief. ‘What is this place?’ I asked him. ‘It looks like some sort of refugee camp.’

  ‘You could call it that. These people are certainly in need of refuge.’

  ‘They have lost their homes?’

  ‘They have lost everything. Everything, that is, except their lives and their dignity; but famine and drought threaten even those. Come, there are people I wish you to meet.’

  He took us to one side of the camp where a woman of maybe my own age sat carding wool, using one hand and one foot. Her other hand ended in a stump, the brown skin there rendered down to an obscene and shiny purple. Puckered scars seamed what I could see of her face and neck; one eye was squeezed closed. The Fennec knelt and exchanged greetings with her and she lay down the wool and extended her one hand and they touched fingers to one another’s palm, a gesture both formal and tender. Then she gestured to Taïb and me to sit down with a sweep of her hand, a queen accepting court.

  ‘Kella will tell you her own story,’ the Fennec told me. ‘Our people are raised never to complain or to display weakness, so she will not elaborate. I will leave it to you to read between the lines.’

  Kella began to recite in lo
ng rhythmic sentences that sounded close to song, her single hand tapping the ground for emphasis as her voice rose and fell, and the Fennec’s voice made a low counterpoint to her fluting words. ‘I come from a tribe that has ancestral pasturage rights around the area of Tamazalak. The soldiers came one day and took all our camels. They said they had papers that gave them the right to requisition them. Some of the young men protested; so they took them away in their trucks. We never saw them again. When the soldiers came back, there were only the women, the children and the old men who were left, but that didn’t stop them beating us. They said rebels bred like scorpions in our village, and they threw two of the children down the well. They were the sons of my cousin Mina. We heard their cries as their bones broke; I hear them still when I go to sleep. Those of us who survived this attack fled into the desert with the animals that were left. But there was drought, and the animals died one by one. At last I came here; alhamdulillah.’

  I sat there stunned as the Fennec thanked her and Taïb touched her hand, obviously moved by her story. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Merci bien, and shokran,’ and she smiled serenely, nodded once as if dismissing us and went back to carding her wool.

  He took us next to meet a young woman in a bright head-wrap, amongst a group of other women in dark robes. Greetings were exchanged, and then the Fennec translated as she told how her husband had been taken away from their camp and killed on suspicion of being a member of the rebels. ‘It is happening all the time,’ she finished with the hint of a shrug, but for all her assumed nonchalance I could see the pain in her dark eyes as she spoke of her dead husband, left hanging from a tree in the shadow of Mount Tamjak.

  We made our farewells and the Fennec led us away. ‘C’est l’enfer,’ said Taïb, his face taut with repressed emotion. As we walked behind the Tuareg chief, he reached out and brushed the tips of his fingers against the back of my hand. It was the slightest, most surreptitious of touches, but my whole arm felt as if it was on fire.

  As we crossed the encampment the Fennec pointed out others as we passed: ‘Khabte is an orphan – his family was killed in the Adagh des Iforas; Nama was taken by soldiers and raped at their barracks – she was in a coma for three weeks. They dumped her in the desert, but the desert took care of its own; we found her and brought her here. Moktar is a member of a tribe whose ancestral grounds were taken over by the French when they found uranium at Arlit; that tribe has dispersed far and wide, unable to support itself. Some fled into Algeria and were later expelled from there; now they beg on the streets of Bamako. Many people there hate us. They say their ancestors were our slaves and that now that they are running things the boot is on the other foot. And they are using that boot with unbelievable malice.’

  On the other side of the trucks he pointed out a one-eyed man in dusty combat fatigues and a black turban. ‘Elaga was a survivor of the massacre of Tchin-Tabaradène.’ He turned to us, his eyes gimlets. ‘Do you know about Tchin-Tabaradène?’

  Taïb looked sick. ‘I know a little,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I never before met anyone who was there.’

  I shook my head and leant up against one of the vehicles, feeling both hot and cold at the same time.

  ‘If you are to write an article for us, Isabelle, you had better know the history,’ the Fennec said, looking not at me but at the line of women with their arms outstretched for food. He took a deep breath. ‘We used to be the freest people to walk the face of the earth; now we are amongst the poorest and most oppressed. Our pasturage has been taken from us and we have been driven from pillar to post. When famine and drought ravaged our people, the food that aid organizations sent to save us was stolen and sold on the black market by the authorities. So now I prefer to provide my own aid. Uranium and oil have been mined all over our ancestral lands, the desert raped for her riches, and yet we have been given no compensation for this hurt; instead foreign guards patrol the boundaries of the Arlit mines and shoot anyone who comes near. And out of all the vast profits that have been made by this exploitation of our lands, has any money come in our direction? Not one sou. No schools or hospitals have been built for our people; no jobs made available to us; we had no representation in the governments of either Mali or Niger. Our young men were either interned or went into self-exile, so that whatever there was to eat went to the old and the children. Elaga and I became ishumar, the unemployed and unwanted: the uprooted. Ill advisedly we took up Gadhafi’s invitation to go to Libya to prepare for the future of “the Tuareg republic”. This was in the 1980s: Elaga was still young then; I was old enough to have known better. But I harboured a dream, the dream of my forebear Kaocen: that one day all our tribes would unite and create the Azaouad – a republic in which all could roam freely and follow the Tuareg life. Gadhafi’s promises were no more than illusions; but for a time I believed in those illusions. To earn my keep I fought in his army in the Western Sahara; in Chad; in Lebanon – I was so angry with the world I would have fought anyone. It was nothing but vanity on his part: he liked the idea of sending his private army off to aid his Arab cousins in their struggle, but in the end it all came down to money and favours, neither one of which was coming back to the Tuareg. The promises evaporated into thin air, which was no surprise. I should have remembered that Kaocen always said the Tuareg have no allies in this world.

  ‘We were expelled from Algeria in 1990, along with the rest of our people; but no one else wanted us. Mali claimed the problem was Niger’s, Niger that it was Mali’s. In the end a deal was done and Niger was prevailed upon to take eighteen thousand of its people back. We thought we would return to our homelands in the Aïr and the Tamesna, but instead we were interned at Tchin-Tabaradène.

  ‘It was a terrible place: filthy, crowded, full of disease and brutal treatment. The military loved having the famous, feared Tuareg at their mercy at long last. There were many beatings, rapes and ritual humiliations: old men stripped naked in the streets, their veils removed for the first time in their lives; adolescents made to crawl like dogs for the amusement of the soldiers.’

  He looked me in the eye. ‘When I hear the outcry in the West about the atrocities at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, I laugh. If the West had witnessed one tenth of what happened to us at Tchin-Tabaradène, it would have wept for shame that such a thing should happen in the so-called civilized world. But Africa is the forgotten continent, and we are amongst the forgotten people.’

  I found myself clutching the amulet beneath my shirt, feeling as if I had stepped into some sort of minefield, words exploding around me with the power to kill and maim.

  ‘They would not let us leave the camp or school our children. At last, some of the younger men protested outside the police station. A soldier was killed with his own gun. It was just the excuse the authorities had been waiting for. We were unarmed, exhausted, dying of disease and malnutrition: but for the death of one soldier they called down the might of the entire army upon us, declared a national emergency, sent in battalions, tear gas, parachutists. Camps were annihilated; wells were poisoned or blocked up. They came in the night with machetes and cans of petrol …’

  His voice hitched suddenly and I saw with a quick sideways glance that his eyes were glittering with anger. Taïb stood like a statue, waiting to hear what came next.

  ‘I escaped, along with some others. I feel guilty to this day that I did not stay; but I had seen such scenes before and I knew what was coming. Elaga stayed: he had a wife and three children. I had no one: it was easy for me to run. Fight like jackals: that was what Kaocen always said, and it was what I urged them to do. It is better to attack and run than to fight like lions, face to face; but some of our people have trouble with this concept. To them it represents cowardice, not pragmatism; but these were the men who revered those who rode their camels against the tanks of the Malian Army in 1963 and were cut down like corn. It was a magnificent gesture; but a gesture only: doomed and pointless. I was not thanked for saying as much. Those who stayed died or were grievously
wounded. Elaga lost his family, his eye – and very nearly his life. Many were killed in the initial outbreak of violence; then the formal extermination began. They even talked of a final solution – yes, they used those very words – the need to cull the Tuareg, to expunge us from society. Hundreds of us were loaded on to trucks and driven into the desert towards Bilma. We knew this route well: in the old days we called it “the salt road”. Most of those who took the old caravan route as prisoners in their military vehicles were never seen again.’

  ‘My God,’ Taïb said in a whisper. ‘I never knew.’ He wiped a hand across his face and I saw the sun catch the sheen on his fingers as they came away wet.

  ‘We lost nearly two thousand people, but the authorities claimed the number was only sixty. Those of us who escaped formed a coalition. We made a formal protest to the old colonial powers, but France turned its face away from us. They were in too deep with the providers of oil and uranium to want to involve themselves in the mêlée, even when the UN took our part. Under some diplomatic pressure, the Niger government staged a trial, but it was no more than a sham. When the chief torturer at Tchin-Tabaradène took the stand he boasted of how he had strangled one old man to death with his bare hands, and the onlookers in the courthouse cheered. We have tried to use diplomacy but to no avail. Direct action became our last and final hope. For some years I led a rebel faction in the mountains, but our raids had no more effect on our enemies than mosquito bites.’ He took a long, deep breath. ‘Since then there have been uneasy truces and ceasefires, attempts at assimilation, but in essence nothing has changed. Now I try to do what little I can to aid my people and bring their plight to the attention of the world.’