The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  From the rooftop, however, something very different could be witnessed. I was in luck: today was the moussem (holy day) of Moulay Idriss, the city’s founder, and the old town was clamouring with processions. Helped along by a cheery bra seller, I picked my way between freshly cleaned horse saddles, crossed a couple of wobbling sheets of corrugated iron, and stood on the rooftop, taking it all in.

  Underneath us paraded members of the city’s long-standing guilds, laden with gifts for Moulay Idriss’s mausoleum. The bra seller pointed out the candlemakers, the blacksmiths, the shoemakers (although, he admitted with a grin, his own trade was unrepresented – ‘maybe one day we will have something for the cheap goods from China!’). Barrel-sized poles of wax floated beneath us, striped with bright colours; banners stitched with Quranic verses; a black bull heading for sacrifice, skidding against the tiles. Most distinguished of all were the silk weavers. Gowned in red and white burnouses (the hooded cloak common in the Maghrib), heads bound in tight yellow turbans, they stood in an archway and beat the air with the rattling of their frame drums. The chant was winding and circular, matched to a comical degree by the wiggling of their leader’s backside, which pointed rhythmically towards the crowd. Borne ahead of them, raised by men in pure white djellabas (the traditional Arabic male robe), was the centrepiece of the procession: a four-tiered catafalque, inscribed with gold Quranic verses over a red silk background, freshly woven to adorn Moulay Idriss’s tomb for the coming year.

  The parade was intricately coded, but I found it all rather cosy. The flickering candlelight, the gleam of metal under muffled cloth, the gnomic chanting: I spent my teens in a monastic boarding school, so it reminded me of Sunday mornings in the abbey. This kind of procession – give or take the Arabic lettering and the odd turban – used to take place all over the Mediterranean world. Europe’s guilds have been replaced by unions, campaigns for wage increases and decent pension plans; there is less ballast in the Moroccan artisan’s career. Yet the procession of the guilds illustrates how time in Fez wraps around itself. How history isn’t something solid, to be locked away in storage, but fluid and adaptive; and if you can find the cracks, you might see it pouring through.

  ‘Come on, Nicholas! If we do this fast we have longer for the sitting time!’

  Najib was on a mission. He led me through the streets, bearing a pile of pelts on his head, the yellow pleats dangling over his shoulders like a lion’s mane in a pantomime. I was never allowed to carry the hides myself. He knew people who had been picked up by the police for ‘hassling’ foreigners, so we moved in well-spaced single file. Najib shuttled forwards, hands up to steady the load, rushing to meet the babouche makers’ deadlines. When we reached them, they exchanged only skeletal greetings. Monastically bowed in their work cells, they were grizzled, busy men, scissors flashing over dusty moustaches in acrid bubbles of solvents and glue.

  All around me was the buzz of life – men cutting, dousing, spinning, scraping; as physical and hard-working as the nomadic society I had encountered in the Sahara. But it was different from that world – because it was urban. The tannery and its workshops were a factory, a stable environment, pulling men together to produce goods that could be sold in the streets around them. You saw it in shops lining the main streets and alleyways, from saffron-dyed babouche slippers (Najib’s team’s speciality) to rawhide belts dangling from the canopies; handbags and satchels piled at the front; sandals slotted in neat rows; purses, wallets, wide-brimmed hats, cushion covers, sequin-dotted camel toys, pencil cases, covered bellows, shagreen diaries and Qurans bound in classic ‘morocco’.fn3

  ‘Now’, said Najib, ‘we have the sitting time!’

  Keen for a smoke without the boss breathing down his neck, he picked out one of the medina’s numberless arteries, weaving a path between the cages of battery chickens and carts of Barbary figs, simultaneously rolling a joint from a ball of keef the shape of a chickpea. By the time we reached his target – the shop of his friend Mansur – he was ready to light up.

  ‘Nicholas! You never buy anything from me!’

  Mansur was from the south, taller and darker than most Fassis. Usually to be found at the back of his store, he tucked himself into the shade like a napping cat, his turban dangling over his brow. The merchandise around him was a treasure trove of desert-ware. Silver bracelets inscribed in Tamasheq reflected light off gazelle-horn bracelets. Keef pipes made from alfaca alloy perched above walking canes with camel-bone hilts and saddlebags painted with the same vegetable dyes used at the tannery. Much of it was tourist tat (and it really plumbed the depths with the blue-veiled Tuareg fridge magnets), but I still loved Mansur’s store for the headrush of the desert it gave me.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve forgotten.’ I pointed out a brass and camel-bone ashtray I’d picked up a fortnight ago. ‘We haggled over it for at least half an hour!’

  ‘Two weeks ago doesn’t count!’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother Nicholas,’ Najib called from the back. ‘He’s got no money, he’s like us.’

  He tugged on his joint so it glowed, the seeds popping and ash feathering down between the trinkets.

  I knew I had to be careful. A whiff of fancy and we’d spend all afternoon spiralling round a price. Besides, I wanted to hear about Mansur’s family.

  He was full of stories about them – wealthy Bedouin uprooted from seventeenth-century Palestine, who had travelled the breadth of Africa with their camels. He was particularly proud of his grandfather, a notable caravan guide in the days of the French protectorate.

  ‘My grandfather could never live away from the desert,’ said Mansur. ‘So when my father moved to the city, he was really mad. He said the Sahara purifies the soul, just as water purifies the body.’

  One of his grandfather’s greatest feats was to find water when his caravan had fallen off its track.

  ‘It’s the most important thing in the desert, you have to know where the wells are. But the caravan leader was a fool and they went more than three days without any new supplies. They were in a dangerous situation: if they didn’t find water soon, they would run out. So my grandfather knelt down and prayed to God for help. While he was praying, he had his face to the ground, and he could sense something. The smell of the water! So he carried on, walking on his knees because he didn’t want to lose the scent. He had to climb over many dunes, but he found the source, and saved all the people who were travelling with him.’

  Mansur was like a watercourse when the sluice gate has lifted: sit back and watch him flow. I wondered if he envied his grandfather’s more adventurous life. But when I asked him, he whisked the idea away like an irritating fly.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, how can I survive in the desert? I’m a son of the city. To be a true nomad you must live all your life in the desert. There’s no other way.’

  My reply was something like ‘hmmmmm’. Mansur could certainly teach me a lot, but I wasn’t sure he was going to do my morale any good. Sometimes, it’s best to keep your travel plans under your turban.

  One morning, when the sky was still cowling the city in an indigo veil, I drove out with Najib to collect skins for the boss. Rutted tracks braided the smooth roads out of Fez, past cornfields where olive trees shimmered above the hayricks. On the roadsides, goods were tied down under hessian sacks. Sitting on ledges of rubble and smoking on the hardstanding were men in greasy overalls and dusty shirts, waiting for transport into town. This is the best time to visit a market – when the produce is still as fresh as the air.

  In the little town of Ein Nukbeh, rubbish banked the roads in slushy piles and stains splattered the sides of apartment blocks, like children’s shirts after bowls of bissara soup. Behind a metal gate the colour of dried blood, tufts of wool drifted like tumbleweed and salt sparkled on the crusty earth. Pick-up trucks charged towards a steel overhang, where tarpaulin sheets battened down the piles of skins, held in place by bullhorns and stones.

  ‘Come on, I know this man – he always does a
good price,’ said Najib’s colleague Tamar, striding between the vendors.

  There were skins everywhere, wrinkled and rubbery on the undersides, shaggy on top, spilling the grains of salt rubbed into the hair. Standing by a mound of lambskins, I counted more than 200 pelts – and that was just one pile! The wool was tough and dry, the undersides riddled with cracks as intricate as the writing on a palimpsest.

  ‘We’re the butchers.’ One of the sellers turned round from a heap. ‘We buy the animals in the nomad markets and carry them to the abattoir. We sell the meat to the big hotels, then we bring the skins here.’

  He had nearly a thousand pelts to flog. The most valuable cattle hides fetched €44, while ‘low-quality’ goatskins only raised €3 or €4.

  The traders were practical, bristly chinned men. They laughed at my questions and rattled out flinty answers while slinging the skins into their vans or emptying them out of plastic buckets. They reminded me of Najib’s colleagues at the tannery: robust alpha males, who would welcome you warmly and offer a draw on their keef pipe, but wouldn’t hold their punches if a quarrel broke out. They were the middlemen, the hinge that joins the nomadic herders to the industries of the towns.

  ‘We’re from Marrakesh,’ one old-timer told me. He was standing on the tailgate of a jeep, working on a cliff of cowhides so precipitous the men had to swing the skins over their heads. ‘We’re taking five hundred. We’ll sell them to the tanneries in Marrakesh. We get a good price there and it’s not short of craftsmen.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of skins,’ I said, to a round of laughter as dry and tough as some of the hides.

  ‘This?’ One of them threw back his head. ‘This is nothing. You should come here around Eid (when sheep and goats are slaughtered all over the country). That’s when you see the real trade!’

  Pragmatism hung around the place, like the flies confabulating over the pools of animal blood. Najib was just as direct – by the time I made it back to the overhang, he was already calling for me.

  ‘Ya’la, come on, I was afraid they’d turned you into a goat!’

  Heaving a pile of skins onto his back, he shuffled towards the gate. Before I followed, I turned to the dealer, a twentysomething in a ‘Fxxk Police’ T-shirt. He was tipping more skins out of a bucket, fresh blood trickling over the crusty stains on his trainers.

  ‘We’ve got four buckets to empty,’ he said, ‘it’s about 50 skins altogether. We collect them from the markets round Taza, then bring them here to sell. In the past we went to the Guissa Gate in Fez, but now they’ve set up this place and it’s the biggest market in the country.’

  ‘I guess it’s hard work?’

  ‘Sure.’ He flicked his brow, a ready smile on his lips. Blood spat around the falling skins, dribbling into a fly-misted puddle. ‘We used to have our own animals, but my father sold them and bought the car. Machines are easier, aren’t they? Now we only deal with the animals when they’re dead.’

  There was one last hide in the bucket, caught against the rim. The dealer shook the bucket but the skin wouldn’t fall, so he thrust his hand inside and pulled it out. The blood smeared his fingers and sprinkled thick red gouts that gleamed in the sun like rubies.

  5

  Learning to Love the Glottal Stop

  ‘OPEN YOUR THROAT, NICHOLAS! IT’S EASY! YOU ONLY HAVE TO OPEN YOUR throat and make the sound.’

  ‘Ugh … nghh … aaaaaarghhh!’

  ‘No, no, that is completely wrong! You’re not opening your throat!’

  Sitting in a tea-house near the Kairaouine mosque, Mansur was losing patience with me. I had asked him to help with my Arabic. As a speaker of Hassaniya (the dialect spoken in southern Morocco and Mauritania, and among the Berabish in Mali), he was an ideal tutor. But he didn’t have the patience of his desert forefathers; and to be fair to him, his pupil was no model.

  I was like a tanner trying out for a job at a perfume counter. When it came to the tricksier letters – the throat-scraping khaaf, the hard ‘d’ and worst of all that dreaded glottal stop, the aieeeeeen (which ‘should sound like the bleating of a sheep’, as Peter Mayne’s teacher advised him in 1940s Marrakesh), I was hopeless. I came from a language in which your epiglottis is out of the picture; a language in which moving your lips as little as possible is a sign of good breeding. Now I was showing my gums to the flies, gagging and spluttering and plugging my epiglottis to my posterior pharyngeal wall. And for what? So Mansur could tell me to ‘try again, that was nearly right!’ I did wonder sometimes if Arabic was really a language at all. Trying to learn it was like squirrelling away at a strategy for Snakes and Ladders. One mistimed glottal stop and it’s back to square one.

  ‘Maybe you are thinking too much.’ Finally accepting defeat, Mansur retreated into his tea-glass. ‘Maybe you need to … leave it a while.’

  My synapses were experiencing the neural equivalent of a desert storm. How to get on top of it all, all those unfamiliar rules? The gendering of numbers, for example, which never agree with the associated noun; the ditching of plurals for the numbers eleven to a thousand (but not three to ten). I was confused by the distinction between the dual and the plural; by the way some plurals split open and stuffed themselves with unexpected new letters; by the way pronouns and prepositions attached themselves to the edges of words, like stowaways clinging to the back of a train.

  Fans of Arabic extol its mathematical, musical order, likening it to a Bach motet or a Gödel metric. For myself, I could hardly imagine a more intractable system. Except … oh yes, there was a perfect fit … and it was right under my nose. Because if anything matched the inscrutability of Arabic, it was the city where I was trying to master it! There was the division of gender; the tendency for building compounds out of apparently disparate materials; the rootedness, which you find in Arabic’s tendency to form groups of words around a cluster of base letters, echoed in the clusterings of Fez’s neighbourhoods (each mini-community built around a mosque, bath-house and fountain). And there was another, even more striking parallel. In both cases, one careless mistake (whether mispronouncing a soft seen for a hard saad, or taking the first right at the Brass-Makers’ Square when you meant to take the second) and you’re screwed.

  At dinner, in the sprawling house where I was staying, I would compliment my host mother on her cooking – ‘The taste of honey is strong in this delicious meal!’ ‘More succulent is this tagine than a piece of fruit after a long journey in the desert!’ I certainly made the family laugh: teenager Fathin sniggered into her hand, while her younger sister Sawsan (not yet house-trained for weird, Arabic-mangling foreigners) splattered her couscous across the table before running out to guffaw in the courtyard. At the tannery, Najib and his colleagues sometimes cracked up so violently that a single mispronunciation had potentially lethal consequences. I lived in constant fear they would fall off the walkway and crash into one of the limepits – all because I’d failed to harden my ‘d’.

  The sixteenth-century philologist Guillaume Postel (who studied an Arabic grammar written by Leo Africanus and probably knew the traveller) picked up Arabic so fast his teacher thought he might be a demon. In that respect, I was proving myself all too human. If I was going to lift my Arabic to the point where I could actually talk to people, I needed help. And sometimes, just sometimes, if you wish hard enough …

  The beat was all around us – shaking the walls, quivering the stools, vibrating in the tiles under our feet. Najib had plugged his phone into a speaker to give us his dance moves.

  ‘Nicholas! Tell me, tell me, what does it mean?’

  It was amazing how much leverage he managed, considering that Mansur’s walk-up was too small to swing any of Fez’s innumerable cats. I was sitting under swags of electric wiring, watching Najib by the light of a candle, through the mist of a joint smouldering in an empty tea-glass.

  He had worked out the dance steps to dozens of Busta Rhymes’s tunes. Gliding across the floor with rapid switches between toes and heels, he
popped out his elbows and chopped the air with his arms, whirling to the turnaround with spasmodic wrenches of the hips. I was doubling up with laughter, but it was laughter of wonder and awe, when you find out a friend has a talent you never imagined. The level of difficulty was clear enough when I tried to join in and had to pick myself off the floor before the end of the first verse.

  ‘Your job is to tell me the words.’ Najib wagged a finger and hooked it towards the rug. ‘Please, Nicholas, sit down!’

  I tried my best. I had enough vocabulary at this stage, and it’s amazing how you can make yourself understood to somebody who really wants to know what you’re saying. Although Busta wasn’t the easiest subject for a first-time translator. How to convert ‘def squad’? Or ‘flip-mode’? Or ‘camel-toe groupie’? Not knowing the Arabic for ‘crib’ (as in a rap star’s home), I rendered it as beit, or house. I was similarly stuck on ‘acid’ and felt I needed something closer to Najib’s experience, so I turned it to keef. But I feared I was doing injustice to Busta, failing to conjure the particular coding of his language. Eschewing the stodgy offerings of my dictionary, I sought out alternative translations on online forums and wrote down new words culled from friends in the medina. My translations were a long way from the slickness of the original, but they were slowly becoming more ingrained in the texture of the world Najib had asked me to evoke.

  This was progress – of a sort. My Arabic was proving useful to someone, and if nothing else … well, at least I knew how to say ‘al-hara’ laysa shi’ gheir al-‘ushb baad e dhaalik al-madagh/ wa tilka hiyyeh kurah as-sawdah min mu’khrah al-baqarah’, or in Busta’s idiom ‘Bullshit ain’t nothin’ but chewed-up grass/ And that’s a black ball that came out of a cow’s arse’.