Later that century, when the French army was spreading the net of Soudan Français, none resisted more defiantly than the Tuareg. In 1894, Tuareg tribesmen charged a French camp, killing the French military chief, 12 officers and 68 African troops – the worst French reverse in the whole of their Saharan campaign. Punitive expeditions were launched, unarmed Tuareg were massacred, crops raised by Tuareg slaves were destroyed, thousands of livestock were confiscated and the severed heads of Tuareg combatants were displayed in village marketplaces.
Summing up the mood in the French camp, colonial officer Louis Frèrejean wrote in his journal of ‘one of those sinister pirates of the desert’, who was tied up and left to burn in the sun, despite his protestations of innocence: ‘Before the column set out, a soldier received the order to kill the captured Tuareg with a rifle shot; and in the abandoned camp, his dead body remained stretched out near the stake to which he was still attached.’ As far as the colonial officers were concerned, it was war. ‘Considering that we will never succeed in making friends with these tribes because of their religious and racial hatred towards us,’ wrote the Governor of the French Soudan in September 1898, ‘and because we have deprived them of their only resource, namely plunder and theft, we have to eliminate them if we can.’ Yet many of the intellectuals who accompanied the colons were more ambivalent.
‘They are barbarians,’ wrote the anthropologist Émile Masqueray in 1890, ‘but barbarians from our race with all the instincts, all the passions, and all the intelligence of our ancestors. Their nomadic customs are those of the Gauls who took Rome.’ To some of the more romantically minded French officers, the Tuareg were the ‘knights of the desert’, as Lieutenant de Vaisseau Hourst wrote in 1898: ‘When I imagine their wandering life, free of any hindrance, their world in which courage is the first among virtues, in which the people are nearly equal, I ask myself if they are not happier than us.’
In the rosy sheen of evening, Ousmane took me to the edge of town to meet his family. Behind the neighbourhood midden and the concrete pile of the Libya Hotel (built by the largesse of the recently deceased Colonel Gaddafi), a ragged canvas tent was pitched on the far side of a dune. Ousmane’s father and a couple of brothers were sitting in the lee of the tent, gorgeted in blue. Slumped across a frayed rug, on a plateau of buff-coloured sand speckled with goat droppings, they were sipping glasses of tea and smoking through a pipe made from antelope horn.
Talking to traditionally veiled Tuareg can be a forensic activity. You’re trying to gauge everything from the tiniest clues: inflections in their voices, the slightest blink or dilation of an eye. I spent a couple of afternoons with Ousmane’s family and was invited to join them for a meal. On this occasion, his brother Haka lowered his veil and ate with us, outside the tent, while his father and several other veiled relatives moved inside. We sat over a metal tray, cross-legged, with our elbows on our knees, rolling the buttery rice into gummy balls in our palms. The menu may not have been as lavish as the one enjoyed by Leo Africanus in the desert, but at least there was no toll, and I was able to enjoy the meal all the more, knowing I was as free as my hosts.
I was thrilled to be dining with the ‘blue men’. As enadan (artisans or smiths), Ousmane and his family are members of a hereditary caste that is credited with access to the spirit world and called on to recite epic poems during feasts and celebrations. Scorned by the noble caste (the imajeren), still they have a huge breadth of utility in Tuareg culture, acting as cattle branders, dentists, matchmakers and apothecaries, among numerous other functions.
The caste system is one of many features of Tuareg culture that has bewildered visitors, along with the vestigial traditions of raiding, slavery and the adanay ritual (by which girls had to drink huge quantities of milk to fatten them up for marriage). What fascinates many Western observers is the tension between the far-out and the familiar. Alongside these more exotic elements are parallels with our own culture, such as the crosses that recur in Tuareg decorative imagery and the relative freedom of their unveiled women (although the traditions of matrilinealism are as alien to European observers as to Arab Muslims). Seeking Tuareg origins in the ambiguous surfaces of their culture, scholars have traced them to the Iberian Peninsula, Crusader armies, ‘cultures babylonienne, chrétienne, mandéenne, biblique, arabe pré-islamique, perse, grecque et égyptienne’ (to cite Jaques Hureiki’s exhaustive list), without pegging any theory down with sufficient proof. The Tuareg became a tabula rasa onto which the most romantic theories could be projected; a nexus of the imagination, linking ‘civilised’ Europe to the ‘savages’ of Africa.
There is, however, one point on which Tuareg at large are in agreement with their Western observers. As a captured rebel declared in 1963, they are ‘nomads of the white race, [who] can neither conceive nor accept to be commanded by blacks whom we always had as servants and slaves’. Behind the enadan’s veils, I noticed flatter noses and darker complexions than among other Tuareg, suggesting closer links to their black neighbours than they wish to admit. But the feeling of separateness was keenly felt, and Ousmane’s relatives expressed it that evening as we worked through the platter of rice.
‘My father is telling Haka he must eat more.’
Ousmane had been talking for a while in Tamasheq with his brother. Now he turned to me.
‘Oh, has he been ill?’ I asked.
‘No, but he was in jail so he is not accustomed to big meals.’
Haka picked up a few grains of sand and held them, pinched between thumb and forefinger. Spinning his head underneath them, he rolled his eyes in mock wonder, before drawing the grains towards his mouth as if he were about to taste some exquisite delicacy. He reminded me of Charlie Chaplin’s improvident tramp, making noodles out of boot laces in The Gold Rush.
‘When they gave us something to eat, those were the lucky days,’ explained Haka, through Ousmane’s translation. ‘And even if they gave you bread you had to eat it straightaway, or someone would take it from you. A Tamasheq in the Malian jail is a rat in the nest of a snake.’
It was hard to establish what crime he had committed. Haka insisted he had been stitched up by his employer, a Koro-Boro (a member of the town’s majority Songhay ethnicity), who had taken on a construction job without the correct licences.
‘The government thinks Tamasheq people don’t need to eat.’ Haka dipped his fist and patted the rice into a ball. ‘Maybe they are confused by the tamelgoust. They think we only need the sand. We can eat the grains and we can sleep on the dunes.’
A born satirist, Haka bristled with dark humour. When the uprisings began a few months later, I kept thinking of him rubbing the sand between his fingers in angry pantomime, and wondered if he had taken up arms.
As the historical accounts testify, the Tuareg were never on easy terms with their settled neighbours, so joining them together was always going to be a challenge. ‘Know that the Tuareg race was entirely self-reliant and self-governing until the coming of the French,’ wrote a Tuareg chief to Charles de Gaulle in 1959, ‘… it should not disperse them between different peoples with whom the Tuareg people [do not share the same] race, religion, or language.’ Speaking in 1962, just two years after Mali’s independence, the governor of the Niger Bend region communicated this awkward union, declaring that ‘nomad society, as it is left to us by the colonial regime, undoubtedly poses us problems in light of the objectives of our socio-political program’. Marginalising pastoralists, the new regime pursued a policy of aggressive agricultural development, asserting ownership of all Malian land, leasing out pasture and planting rice paddies in place of nutrient-rich bourgou (echinochloa stagnina, or ‘hippo-grass’) that had sustained flocks along the Niger river for centuries. It was only a matter of time before the first insurrection would flare.
That was launched the same year, by a renegade called Alladi Ag Allal, who attacked a pair of camel-mounted policemen near the northern stronghold of Kidal. But Ag Allal and his comrades were armed only with a f
ew Mauser rifles and some curved swords; their campaign was crushed by the Malian army’s superior firepower and the ruthless tactics of its commander, Captain Diby Diarra, known as the ‘Butcher of Kidal’. Wells were poisoned, cattle slaughtered, women raped and civilians executed without trial. President Modibo Keita might have been a fierce critic of the colons, but his regime had certainly been paying attention to them.
Decades would pass before the launch of another full-scale rebellion. By then, the Tuareg had been driven to desperation by a wave of catastrophic droughts and the government’s failure to engage with the issues that had been raised: notably the lack of development and the independence of a culture that refuses to be shackled to regulations invented by, and for, its sedentary neighbours. And another factor had emerged, overshadowing the Tuareg movement into the present calamities: Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.
As the only African leader to engage with the Tuareg – however dodgy his motivations – Gaddafi earned the goodwill of a people who were treated by other African leaders as parasites. They provided manpower for his army, and in return he supplied training and munitions (later, he would also offer regular salaries and amnesties for those who found themselves on the Malian government’s ‘Wanted’ list). In 1990, a group of Tuareg soldiers recently returned from Libya attacked a police post at the desert outpost of Menaka. Although their impact was deflated by infighting, they excited enough concern to draw concessions from Bamako, including a pledge for limited self-rule in Kidal. This ‘National Pact’ was marked by a spectacular ceremony, known as the ‘Flame of Peace’, in which 3000 guns were incinerated in the sand north of Timbuktu, a short walk from the house where I was staying.
Yet many of the terms were left unfulfilled, and resentment continued to simmer. During the 1990s anti-Tuareg paramilitary groups were formed with names like Ganda Koy (‘Masters of the Land’), who distributed pamphlets exhorting their followers: ‘Let us drive the nomads back into the sands of the Azawad.’ Inevitably, the pressure cooker exploded once again, with a new uprising in 2006.
Armed with machine guns from Libya (where, under Gaddafi’s eccentric tutelage, they mixed with IRA paramilitants, Basque Separatists and Germans from the Baader-Meinhof group), the Tuareg insurrectionists now represented a more substantial challenge. Between periodic ambushes they were able to disappear in the desert, hiding out in the hills around Kidal. The Malian government conceded to peace discussions, in which various rights were stipulated, including recognition of the Tamasheq language, investment in the north and the formation of security units consisting of local Tuareg. But again, there was little evidence of the promised investment.
Mohammed Ag Ossade, director of a Tuareg cultural NGO called Tumast, outlined Tuareg grievances to me when we met beside a ceremonial tent in Bamako.
‘What people want’, he said, ‘is not independence. What they want is an improvement of their life and conditions. A minister will say there is money being invested, then he divides the money with the project director and there is nothing left to put it into effect, and another big villa appears in Bamako, while the rest of the population remains poor.’
So many villas sprouted in one suspicious neighbourhood in Bamako that it was known as Quartier de la Sécheresse, ‘Drought Quarter’, after the embezzlement on which it had been built. No wonder frustration was growing. That gentle afternoon, it was hovering on the horizon, ready to unleash the next bloody chapter in Timbuktu’s history.
3
White Man’s Grave
TIMBUKTU IS NOT A BOASTFUL CITY. IT DOESN’T THRUST UP PROUD TOWERS, or bristle behind defensive parapets and bastions. Instead it sprawls, low lying and shy, hunkering down against the sandy bed that eats away its edges. Few cities are so evidently of the desert: in Timbuktu, you can never get away from the sand.
This environmental cohesion expresses itself in the architecture. Tents and huts made from woven reeds are just as common as houses in some quarters, especially those where the recently sedentarised have bivouacked, their possessions stored in saddlebags rather than trunks. Even the grander establishments betray elements of nomadic life. Delicate pargetting and fretwork echo the patterns on Tuareg jewellery and nomadic carpets, while the layout matches the functions of a tent. Occupants loll about in sprawling yards, like they would on their dunes; but high walls and gates protect their privacy, performing the same role as the vast distances of the desert.
Some of the finest architecture of Timbuktu appears in the homes of the explorers. Next to a loitering donkey and a pair of palm-reed tents belonging to Bella (former slaves of the Tuareg), a plaque commemorates Major Alexander Gordon Laing, one of many ill-fated pioneers of the search for Timbuktu. Keyhole shapes draw shadows over benippled grids in the pretty wooden shutters, above a heavily bossed door with a rusty swollen knocker. Now inhabited by a calligrapher, the house is an elegant contrast to Laing’s torrid experience.
Travelling in the twilight of the Georgian era (that golden age for daredevil explorers), Laing was determined to ‘rescue my name from oblivion’ by becoming the first modern European to record his impressions of Timbuktu. The myths had swollen over the centuries,fn1 while a religious prohibition made the city all the more enticing for cravers of fame, like trying to break into Raqqa in 2016.
On 14 July 1825, Laing married the daughter of the Consul of Tripoli. Two days later, he kissed his wife goodbye and set out in full military uniform for Timbuktu. Robbed at every turn, attacked by bandits, living off desiccated fish moistened in camel’s milk, he carried on despite losing his luggage and his money, not to mention all the wounds he received. ‘I have five sabre cuts on the crown of my head,’ he wrote after one ferocious attack by Tuareg bandits, ‘and three on the left temple … one on my left cheek which fractured the jaw bone and has divided the ear … one over the right temple … A musket ball in the hip … Five sabre cuts on my right arm and hand … Three cuts on the left arm … One slight wound on the right leg … to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up. I am nevertheless, as I have already said, doing well, and hope yet to return to England with much important geographical information.’ The sterility of the desert spared him infection and against all the odds he made it to Timbuktu – a bloody wreck strapped to his camel, as immobile as a slab of salt. He was the first known European to cross the Sahara from north to south. Nearly six weeks later, he hurried out of the city, his ‘situation in Tinbuctu rendered exceedingly unsafe by the unfriendly disposition of the Foolahs of Massina … whose Sultan has expressed his hostility towards me in no unequivocal terms’. But it was not the ruling Fulani who brought about Laing’s demise; he was betrayed by a sheikh of the Berabish tribe, who, according to one of Laing’s local hosts, ‘ordered his negroes to seize the traveller in a cowardly manner, and to put him to a cruel death’.
Others, such as Laing’s fellow Scot Mungo Park (drowned when his canoe capsized on the Niger river) and Major Daniel Houghton (who disappeared without trace near the village of Simbing), were equally unlucky. Jean Louis Burckhardt, who had been planning a trip for years, fell to dysentery in Cairo before he could launch his expedition. And Joseph Ritchie, dispatched from Tripoli, was a victim of insufficient funds and fever. But one success story (the term is pretty relative in this context) was Robert Adams, an American sailor shipwrecked off the African coast and sold into slavery in 1812. According to his account, Adams was dragged to Timbuktu, bartered to a group of tobacco merchants, hauled back across the Sahara and freed at last by the British Consul in Mogador. When his story made it to print in 1816, it was dismissed by sceptics, and for all its authenticity never caught on.
By the 1820s, Timbuktu had snacked on so many ambitious adventurers it had earned the nickname ‘White Man’s Grave’. Yet that did not stop René Caillié. This remarkable traveller had dreamed of visiting Timbuktu since childhood. Overcoming his lowly birth and the indifference of French officers in Senegal, he mastered Arabic and passed himself off
as an Arab heading home from Christian captivity. Succeeding where so many others had failed, he stole into the forbidden city in 1828, scribbling notes whenever he had a moment to himself. His reward for being the first European to reach Timbuktu and report back on his findings was 10,000 francs from the French Geographical Society. Like Adams’s account, Caillié’s had its doubters. How, they asked, could such a landmark achievement possibly have fallen to the son of an assistant boulangier? That, surely, was a far greater enigma than any of the mysteries enclosed in Timbuktu itself.
The house where Caillié stayed is round the corner from Laing’s. Delicately rendered, with pilasters projecting from the walls and a roofline threaded by copings, it looks like a pioneering work in mud-Palladian. Further away, past the Sidi Yahia mosque and the library of the Wangara family, is the house that hosted Heinrich Barth (unusual among Timbuktu explorers of the nineteenth century in that he travelled across the Sahara for primarily scholarly purposes) in 1853.
Wandering between these houses, I was struck by the different geometries of space and time. The travellers may never have met, but Timbuktu brings them together: its first three European visitors of modern times. Strolling down this ‘Street of the Explorers’, I could see them in my mind’s eye – sharp-nosed Caillié, sidling past Laing’s house en route to peruse some manuscripts; the groaning major cleaning his wounds on his stoop, or starting one of the hundred letters he tried to write to his wife, straining with his lesser-wounded left hand; Barth pottering by with a thermometer, performing one of his three daily temperature readings. Ghosts of the past, unexorcised from these streets that have changed so little since they visited.
I was staying on the brink of the desert, in a gated villa with solar panels on the roof and delicate star patterns incised on the walls. You could trace the daily movements of shadow by the indentations left by people’s backsides, as residents sought the most durable shade. Towering over its neighbourhood, it was like a feudal keep, fringed by a motley band of tents and palm-reed huts. It was owned by a Berabish family – members of an Arabic-speaking tribe that has been pitching its tents in this patch of the Sahara since at least the fifteenth century. Originally Berbers, descended from the indigenous North African population, the Berabish mixed with Arabs, adopting their language and culture. Leo Africanus writes of Arabian tribes in North Africa who ‘lead a most miserable and distressed life’ and ‘use commonly to exchange camels in the land of negros’.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 3
