As desiccation and drought made life harder for the townsfolk, it was these desert tribes who flourished. By the time the nineteenth-century explorers were stumbling to Timbuktu, the Berabish had an ambiguous, elastic reputation. They were blamed for the murder of Major Laing, among other fatalities, although one of my host’s ancestors had protected Heinrich Barth in the 1850s. But they were well established as kings of commerce, running monopolies on salt and bulk goods that continue to this day. The most successful Saharan tribes were not always the mightiest warriors – they were also the ones who could adapt to market interests, exploiting loopholes, answering public demand. The Berabish, widely considered to be masters of frud al-haram (or ‘forbidden fraud’, the local term for the black market), are the exemplars of this principle.fn2
Lapping the desert, the broad gated house was an ideal meeting point for nomads from the dunes, most of them traders fresh off the caravan trails. I was intrigued by these people: caravaneers and agile border hoppers, some of them smugglers. They rubbed their hands over a brazier in the yard, discussing price differentials between Mali and Algeria, fuel dealers who filled your tank with sand, a government plan to build military posts all the way to the salt mines of Taoudenni (they had mixed feelings on this, because it might restrict the movement of goods) and other matters my Arabic lacked the subtlety to follow. Many a night I sat there, sharing a platter of noodles with them, trying to untangle the chatter.
‘Isma, listen.’
One night, a trader lit a couple of cigarettes off the brazier and passed one over. ‘You have a satellite phone?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘A memory card?’
‘I … yes, but I kind of need it!’
He leaned closer, and I felt the strap of his digital watch on my arm. ‘Listen, friend. I have Marlboro Red. Best price in Timbuktu. Come on, we can pick them up now.’
‘Toubob, white man, come and see!’
One morning while I was having my breakfast, there was a rattle at the gate. Standing there was a boy who lived in one of the nearby tents. He may not have been a fully operational merchant, but he had a super bargain for me. Because there, at the base of a dune, a short walk from the house, was a caravan of salt. It was a scene so timeless, I half expected to turn around and see Jean-Léon Gérôme or Eugène Delacroix bending over an easel.
Light crackled on the slabs – eighty-pounders, as long and wide as tombstones. They hung from the sides of the camels, shackled to their saddles with braided ropes of grass, pronging the air with darts of incandescent light. The animals looked broken, scarred across their bellies and sides, their eyes teased by flies. Their legs buckled and their bellies slammed into the powder. They gave the impression they might never rise again. As for the men, they busied themselves with the grass ropes, untethering their salt slabs and carrying them like cut-glass chandeliers across a tiled floor. The slabs were gathered in pairs, forming trestles across the sand, as if the men had been appointed to erect a banqueting table for the chiefs of the desert.
That night, the house played host to the salt merchants, who gathered in the yard, smoking, pinching snuff from boxes of beaten tin, scooping spaghetti from the communal platter.
‘It is too hard,’ one of them muttered. ‘Thirty-six days, walking all the time. It is too hot and Taoudenni is hell.’
‘So why do you do it?’ I asked. ‘Does it make a lot of money?’
Another salt merchant laughed. ‘I would thank God for that!’ He picked up a twig and stirred the fire, gazing into the embers. ‘Someone who doesn’t travel, his head is like a watermelon.’
The men spent six months a year on the azalai, the seasonal salt caravan, and the other six resting, when the heat was too strong. They cut the salt themselves (and sometimes bought it from the miners), carrying as much as they and their camels could manage, on 10-hour night-time marches, all the way back to Timbuktu. It sounded magnificent and horrific in equal measure. But how could such an austere system endure? Surely these days it would be a lot easier – and faster – to go by truck? ‘By God!’ one of them snorted. ‘Do you not understand the price of gasoline?’
‘There are many trucks these days.’
His companion shook his head, pitying such foolishness. ‘We pass them on the journey, and many are broken down or they run out of fuel. But camels can give themselves fuel in the desert, and if they are lame we kill them and thank God for the meat. We think one day no more cars will go to the salt mine because they lose too much money this way. Our way is the better one.’
For centuries, salt has been the ‘white gold’ of the Sahara. The precious metal came from the forests, the riverlands of Guinea and Ghana; but salt was a true product of the desert. As a result, the caravaneers who traded it became some of the richest nomads in the region. In Leo Africanus’s time, a single camel’s load of salt fetched as much as 80 ducats (a phenomenal sum when you consider that he bought a sword in Fez for half a ducat). Later, in the nineteenth century, Mungo Park saw slabs of salt for sale for 8000 cowrie shells. Like the cowries, salt could be used for currency (hence our word ‘salary’), and it proved a more effective instrument of barter, since you could weigh it directly against gold. Historians judge the condition of the slave industry according to the amount of salt that was sold in exchange for a slave – a piece no bigger than a slave’s foot in more wretched times, a whole bar at others.fn3 Not until French colonisers introduced paper money in the 1880s did salt recede as a form of currency, although it never lost this role entirely.
‘It is still really important today,’ said Dr Habibulleye Hamda, an expert in the salt trade whom I met at Timbuktu’s top academic centre, the Ahmed Baba Institute.fn4 ‘It can be used for medicine, animals, human consumption.’
‘But it can’t be as big as in the past?’ I asked.
‘Well, of course it has problems. Young men don’t want to go on the azalai any more. They find it easier to stay in the town and sell other products. And in the south you have sea salt, which erodes the activity here. But people still prefer the salt from the mines because it is sweet. It’s the best salt. Sea salt is bitter, and the camels won’t eat it, they prefer the salt from the north.’
The salt traders were some of the first nomads I met, and these encounters had the feeling of First Contact. I might as well have been on an intergalactic space station, stretching my hand towards the bug-eyed ambassador from Alpha Centauri. But I craved something less corralled, more intimate.
On previous travels in the Middle East, I had experienced tantalising glimpses of nomadic life: Bedouin in scrappy tents among the terraced hills of the West Bank, Iranian Bakhtiaris on the summer trails of the Zagros. Yet I was always looking through a picture frame; my focus was elsewhere. Now I wanted to break through that frame. I wanted to sit around the evening fire with them, walk the trails with them, hold the bowl while they milked their camels.
Nomads are obsolete – or so our century decrees. When books and documentaries pay them attention, it is framed in doom-laden titles, like The Last Nomad or The Last Caravan. More often they are pushed to the side, a spam narrative that is easily deleted. Pasture trails are dismissed as ‘marginal land’ ripe for cultivation if only someone would take the effort to develop it; and the people making these observations rarely hang around long enough to witness the people using the trails.
Even travel writers tend to shun such communities these days, as if the nomadic world is being punished for Bruce Chatwin’s inability to reconcile it with his own pathological restlessness.fn5 The great British tradition of travel writing cut its teeth on adventures with nomads – from Richard Burton and CM Doughty in the nineteenth century to Wilfred Thesiger’s peerless explorations of mid-twentieth-century Arabia. But Thesiger’s fears came true and the ‘abomination’ of the motor car shovelled Arabia’s nomads to the sidelines. In the late 1970s, Jonathan Raban reflected the tilt in perspective, arguing in Arabia through the Looking Glass that Bedouin cu
lture was most dynamically expressed in the adaptation to urban life. For Raban, nomad camps (and the desert itself) were sideshows to the energy of the cities. This pattern prevails to this day, when time and again the totems of travel writing ignore the nomads they pass, like social high-fliers looking over the shoulders of the shabbiest, least-connected people at parties.
I don’t presume to change this pattern. I was looking for a subject, something other people weren’t writing about so much. The nomads of North Africa are such a thing. I wasn’t sure in those first days in Timbuktu what was drawing me to them. I was responding to a sensation in my heart and guts, more than my head. But I knew they weren’t irrelevant; and I was pretty sure they weren’t on their last legs, despite what anthropologist Anja Fischer calls ‘the apocalyptic sentiment at the forefront of nomadism discourse in recent decades’. I had already been travelling for months, and at last I knew why. Quite simply, I wanted to learn what it is like to live as a nomad today.
Spurned by the rest of the world they may be, but it is this separation that is the nomads’ greatest strength (arguably, it is their greatest weakness too). They are independent and largely self-sustaining. Sure, they have to pop into town occasionally, to pick up a sack of rice or sugar (and latterly, pay-as-you-go mobile phone scratch-cards on the ‘nomadis’ roaming tariff). But they are still more independent than people in towns. If anyone is going to survive the eventual Apocalypse, it won’t be the all-American action man of Hollywood movies. It will be nomads like the ones I met in North Africa.
‘Lamina? Yeah, he’s a good man. He’s really serious, he knows the desert as well as anyone.’
My friend Mahmoud, a spiky black Tamashek who swung me round town on his motorbike, gave a solid thumbs-up. Lamina was an azalai ‘pilot’, a caravan leader with a ‘gift’ for orientation in the desert, and he had a gap in his schedule. He couldn’t take me on the caravan – I wasn’t proven yet – but he agreed to show me the ropes. He would teach me some of the critical skills, such as saddling your camels and riding them, tracking, navigation, pitching camp, drawing water. I hoped that if I spent long enough with him, I would learn what you need to be a nomad today.
‘If you go with Lamina,’ said Mahmoud, ‘there’s one thing you can be sure of. You won’t get lost!’
I imagined a stately figure in long robes, throwing up his hands at all my errors, then breathing a sigh of relief when (if!) I managed to get the knack; slowly moulding me from unpromising raw material into something more substantial, someone who could sing, like the Tuareg rock band Tinariwen, ‘I know how to go and walk/ Until the setting of the sun/ In the desert, flat and empty, where nothing is given.’ When I think back to it, I realise there was something a little fable-like about it all. I thought I was learning for the azalai; but the lessons would have a different, wider application.
That evening, my last before my journey with Lamina, I climbed up to the roof and embedded myself between the solar panels. A hazy mass of dust was rising off the dunes, like smoke blown out of the mouth of the earth. In the falling light, the sand was turning a gentle shade of rose. Its kindest, most approachable colour. Somewhere out there was my teacher, and by tomorrow evening I would be alongside him.
I couldn’t wait.
The School for Nomads
Lesson One: Baggage
MY TEACHER ARRIVES SHORTLY BEFORE DUSK. LAMINA LOOKS EVERY INCH A man of the desert, short and wiry with a high sagacious brow and hair like tangled thorns. He smells it too, with a natural aroma of dust and camel skin. I offer my hand, but his furtive expression is fixed on the sand. I try to speak to him: ‘Ana bi’l haqiqa saeed li’l-rihlah ma’ak, I am by the truth happy for the travelling with you.’ He offers no response; he mumbles something to my host, then bolts for the gate, eyes scouring the ground beyond the threshold, like a restless animal too wary to stay put.
So this is the man I am entrusting with my safety, the man who will protect me from the outlaws at large in the Sahara. By the time we leave the house, eye contact has yet to be made. We cross the dune without a single word being exchanged, joined only by the melding of our shadows. I think of Paul Bowles’s short story ‘A Distant Episode’, in which a philologist ventures out to the desert to learn its dialects, only to be stripped of his clothes and his tongue, doubled up in a sack lashed to a camel and carted around the desert, tinkling with tin cans to entertain the local tribespeople.
My disguise, at least, should keep me from drawing too much undue attention. I am wearing black pantaloons, a light blue smock, black gloves, plastic slip-on sandals and four metres of indigo-blue cotton wound three times around my head. Only a strip of skin is exposed (a postbox slit above my nose) and a pair of sunglasses wipes it away. My skin is an instant giveaway – hence the gloves. But close-ups aren’t really the point. This disguise is for the desert, a silhouette to ward off second glances. Although the context in which you feel compelled to conceal yourself is a little unsettling, it is at least tempered by the childlike fun of dressing up. It’s an echo of travellers from the past, who really did have to disguise themselves for any chance of survival: Richard Burton, playing the part of a Pathan quack to steal into Mecca; TE Lawrence, wearing his friend Ali’s headcloth and cloak, ‘that I might present a proper silhouette in the dark upon the camel’. I am hoping my disguise will achieve something similar.
The dromedaries are couched in a hollow at the base of a dune. Two others are waiting for us: a child and a man, the latter a head taller than me. They are Lamina’s 10-year-old son, Abdul-Hakim, and his brother Jadullah, who has the sinewy, intimidating look of a Dothraki chieftain from Game of Thrones. They exchange whispers with Lamina, and throw cautious glances at me, but nobody addresses me until my first lesson.
‘Shuf!’ they chime. ‘Look!’
The camel’s saddle is a pad of palm fibres wrapped in rawhide, rigged over a wooden vice. A wooden palanquin girths a folded coverlet, which hugs the camel’s belly. At the back of the saddle, the rear pad forms a perch above the rump. Heavy guerbas (inside-out goatskins turned into water containers) dangle from the pommels of the palanquin, slurping at the camel’s shoulders, obscene and sweaty as the bladders of monsters. At Lamina’s instruction, I set a foot on the camel’s neck and lever myself up, grabbing a fistful of fur for balance. I am riding in front of the hump, in the North African tradition, making the most of the camel’s powerful shoulder muscles. As Lamina explains later, it’s the ideal position for ‘control’. A skilled cameleer can manipulate his steed by digging his toes into the animal’s neck, like a gamer working a joystick with his thumbs.
‘Nibda!’ calls Lamina, which translates as ‘we begin’ or ‘we go into the desert’, depending on the context. In this case, it means both.
At the last moment, Abdul-Hakim jumps on, resting on the back-piece of the palanquin, clinching the rump between his legs to reduce the impact on his bony perch. A child, I figure, should be more receptive to my attempts at social interaction, so I call out in desperate Arabic: ‘Ya allah! Hey, isn’t this great! Beautiful camel!’ But all I get in reply are a few puzzled exhalations.
‘La atakallam ajnabi,’ he replies primly. ‘I don’t speak foreignish.’
Our departure has been timed deliberately late in the day, to avoid attracting attention. This means we have travelled just a couple of miles when the sun abandons us, like a scout whose responsibility ends at the edge of town. Bending in the silvery wasteland, acacias and doum palms probe the sky on trunks as bowed as the necks of the camels. Burrs of cram-cram skitter over the bunchgrass, spiking our clothes and the skin of our fingers whenever we dismount. I am not trusted to ride yet. Lamina holds the head rope, orientating the animal in a mixture of stage-like whispers and sudden wordless commands: ‘Ooooooosshhh-ooooooshhh-oooooshhh! Khirrrrr-khirrrr!’ The camel bunches to a scuttering halt, magically in thrall to Lamina’s exhalations, or the occasional cry lassoed by Abdul-Hakim. Strange, elongated sounds, they hover somewhere between
war cry and babytalk. Listening to these gnomic utterances, I realise that Arabic is not the only language I need to master.
A sweet breeze is skimming the earth. Along with the gentle gradient, it makes for a mellow lead-in. We have been enveloped in the smoky blue of dusk, a balm after the raging furnace of day; and latterly in night’s tarry black, when you start to hear the howling of wild donkeys and other desert animals, and you wonder how deserted the desert really is. Four hours in, Lamina chooses a resting place, a shallow amphitheatre studded by wiry acacia bushes. No need to give the camels the go-ahead: they are onto dinner as soon as we dismount. Prehensile lips wrap around the thorny branches, loud munches and grunts wafting around them. They are like hungry strangers in a dead-end bar, each intent on his own meal and minding his own business.
The new moon is only a couple of days old, so I am leaning on sound for any sense of my whereabouts: the low basso chomping of the camels, the ghostly bray of wild donkeys, the soughing of the wind in the bushes. I am feeling utterly useless – I want to be allotted a task. I try helping Lamina with the baggage, but I don’t happen to be a cat, so when he points out the ropes I have no chance of seeing their knots in the dark. He nudges me back to Jadullah, who has dug a pit in the sand and is stoking a fire.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 4
