The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  At Mansur’s bedsit, we were in the right setting to conjure these songs. Visitors often stopped by: sleepy-eyed wide boys wielding keef pipes like sorcerers’ wands, rattling out prices from the underworld supermarket (‘One fifty and she’ll give you the massage of your life!’ ‘Give me a hundred and I’ll fix you up: super-duper, zero zero, whatever you wanna smoke!’). Sometimes they unsealed herbal sachets known as ‘chocolate’, which Leo Africanus also mentions, noting that it causes people to ‘fall laughing, disporting, and dallying, as if [they] were half drunk’. It goes very well with baklava and a glass of mint tea.

  On evenings in the Ville Nouvelle (the ‘New Town’ laid by the French during the colonial era), Mansur took me to a bar that called itself – wincingly – Le Progrès. A surly barkeeper handed out bottles of Spéciale beer to sad-looking men who sat around the wood-panelled bar. Keef smoke curled in the gleam of electric red, dancers lifting gartered legs in cheap prints of the Folies Bergère. There were no dancers tonight, but a whiff of feminine glamour was supplied by a couple of women in the back corner, wearing the vampish uniform of the Moroccan prostitute (black eye-shadow, black jacket, black heels, black scowl). Mansur gave them smiles and small talk; they worked their jaws on the sunflower seeds. Sometimes, when the going was slow and we turned up late, they offered special rates. One of them occasionally gave us a smirk. I rallied with my politest phrases, explaining I had someone back home, and they detonated the most contemptuous laughs I have ever heard.

  ‘This one speaks like a child,’ rasped the smirker.

  ‘Sedentary people’, noted the great fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, ‘are much concerned with all kinds of pleasures. They are accustomed to luxury and success in worldly occupations and to indulgence in worldly desires.’ Nomadic people, on the other hand, are interested in ‘wordly things’ where they ‘touch only the necessities of life and not luxuries or anything causing, or calling for, desires and pleasures.’

  Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa casts an intriguing light on the town/country dynamic – if only because there is no comparable account of North Africa at the time. Leo doesn’t dispel the binary division. His Fez is lusty and vicious, as appetite driven as 1920s Berlin or twenty-first-century Las Vegas. Charm sellers con the public, dervishes force kisses out of unsuspecting wedding guests, fortune tellers ‘commit unlawful veneries among themselves’ and ‘from the twentieth hour you shall see none at all in their shops, for then every man runs to the tavern to disport, to spend riotously, and to be drunken’.

  But Leo is committed to impartiality, ‘to describe things so plainly without glossing or dissimulation’. In the towns, he depicts gatherings of learned men and secret sects, hospitals, courtly pomp, the full range of merchandise. As for the countryside, he shows us idylls as well as dystopias: from a prince of the Drâa whose tribute to Fez includes 100 slaves, 12 camels, a giraffe, 16 civet cats and nearly 600 skins of addax antelope, to squalid villages where the ‘houses are very loathsome, being annoyed with the stinking smell of their goats’. Yet occasionally Leo alights on something more complicated. In a camp north of the Atlas, he notes a ‘greater quantity of cloth, brass, iron and copper, than a man shall oftentimes find in the most rich warehouses of some cities’.

  These contrasts and parallels intrigued me, and I was keen to learn more. One opportunity arose during the moussem of Moulay Idriss, the holy day when the guilds processed down the streets of the old town. I persuaded Najib to take me along, to see a ritual that punctured the barrier between town and country, deflated it with a bloody knife, just as it bridged the gulf between Leo’s time and my own.

  6

  Death of a Camel

  HE WAS DRESSED FOR CELEBRATION, BUT HE WAS GOING TO HIS DEATH. HIS lips flung apart, swinging cords of spittle. Two turbaned stewards were struggling to keep him out of kicking range. They criss-crossed their hands in the air, trying to hold back the baying crowd, lest anyone be knocked down by the animal’s jerking legs, which flickered across the prayer hall like fur-clad switchblades.

  Some had climbed up the pillars: small boys balanced on their fathers’ shoulders, clawing at spandrels to keep themselves steady. Others were pitched together, backing against the walls. A little girl in a pink tracksuit peered at the camel, her tiny nose aligned to the same diagonal plane as its enormous snout. There were old women gripping the edges of their robes between their teeth, businessmen in creased suits and teenage girls with fake eyelashes; although the largest number – and the most voluble – were the young men, mobile phones ready in their hands. They were all glued together, as if by some invisible resin, pressing forward as one insistent, unified mass.

  ‘Hold the phone for me,’ said Najib. ‘Go on, Nicholas. You’re taller! Press the red button. My mother’s gonna be really happy when she sees this.’

  I could hardly say no – after all, it was Najib who had slipped me in. He had also arranged my djellaba, after warning me that everyone would be wearing the traditional gown tonight. I chose a cream-coloured one with stripy grey banding on the cuffs; I was quite pleased with it. So far, apart from Najib and myself, I had counted just three djellabas in the entire prayer hall. I was starting to wonder if Najib had some kind of secret deal with the tailor.

  ‘Go on, make sure you get this part – this is the best.’

  The cameleer was dragging the beast into the heart of the prayer hall, guiding him by a harness rope around his jaw. Hind legs dug in. Front legs paddled at the air. An eerie, agonised noise – a moan, I think, long and weary but pitched with the urgency of panic – barrelled over our heads, only half-drowned by the murmuring of the crowd. If you had come here simply out of a detached interest in sound, you might have drawn a telling conclusion about which animal – camel or human – has a greater capacity to communicate through its voice.

  As the crowd drew closer, the camel keeled. The ‘ship of the desert’ was sinking in the storm. His roars were drowned by the goading of the crowd and he collapsed, to a rolling cheer as loud as the cries of alarm. Several men jack-knifed back to avoid being crushed by his weight. At their head was a barrel-chested goliath. Blood trickled down his arm and a knife stuck out of his fist. His expression – cracked open by a toothy flash of pride – could have been the same kind worn by champion gladiators when the Romans were driving North Africa’s animals to extinction in their colossea. A gang of tyros leaped around him, grabbing at the knife, as if it had become some kind of talisman – an Excalibur that would ennoble anyone bold enough to hold it.

  Now the camel was felled, the atmosphere shifted: still frenzied, but trimmed of fear. Breaking the banks of the twitching stewards’ arms, the crowd flooded the carcase, hands and feet sliding around in the blood. Boys pasted their faces and shirts in the fluid, strutting about in masculated packs, faces glowing with a sense of belonging, being part of some transcendent, unifying experience.

  ‘It’s so good!’ Najib grabbed a fistful of my arm, his brow gleaming with a scintilla of blood.

  I wanted him to tell me more. ‘Good’ in what way exactly? But this was no time for drawn-out analysis. The first ripple of excitement was dying. The crowd was losing its firmness, its glue was drying up. Others moved into the slack: small boys with Disney logos on their zip-ups, old women in tightly knotted headscarves, young men who stripped down to their vests and smeared the blood across their bare shoulders like sun cream. I had been to other communal gatherings in Fez, such as the bath-house and Friday prayers, but this was the first one that brought the sexes together: gender division overlooked for the sacred cause of dromodocide. It reminded me of hot days in Trafalgar Square, when you see people mucking about near the fountains, mindless of the spray as it varnishes their shoulders.

  ‘You know why we do this?’

  One of the men took my hand, thumb-printing it with camel ichor. His face was a rouged mask; his eyes were pools of afterworld certainty.

  ‘It is the tradition for our city. The
camel is the favourite animal of our prophet.’

  ‘And that means you have to kill it?’

  ‘Of course. But we distribute the meat to the poor. The camel comes from the Idrissi family. They are the first dynasty of Fez, so it is a blessing for God. We do this for God, not for us.’

  There was no time for further explanation. I could hear rumblings behind me, too fast to untangle the Arabic. I didn’t want to outstay my welcome, and the cloying smell of the blood was driving me outside, back to the surface, like a diver running out of oxygen.

  It was later in the evening that I heard a more detailed analysis of the event. I was sitting with Najib and his friend, Yusuf the pastry seller. The air around us was thick and spicy, scented by pistachio and rosewater, hot bread and the marijuana leaves Najib was chopping on the terracotta tiles of a medieval street fountain.

  ‘You are confused,’ said Yusuf, using the technical term for a sacrificial camel. ‘This is because of your Western mentality. You see things too literally. You have to remember, the camel is symbolic.’

  ‘It didn’t look very symbolic.’ My voice hung in the air, more shrill than I intended. It was the first animal sacrifice I’d seen, and I was feeling a little stirred. ‘It was bleeding all over the floor!’

  ‘It represents the desert.’ Yusuf had a customer, so he was wrapping a kilo of walnut-filled kataif while he talked, weighing each sugary pancake on the scales. ‘It is a symbol of us as Arabs. We are nomadic people. We built cities like Fez, but we never left the desert.’ He taped down the box and handed it over on a flurry of well-wishes. ‘Our biggest families must show us their camels at important events, like the moussem and Eid. And God appreciates this. When we sacrifice a camel, it pleases Him and He gives us many blessings for the coming year.’

  Later, in a tea-house, Mansur showed me a verse in the Quran that aligned with Yusuf’s words: ‘Their meat will not reach Allah, nor will their blood, but what reaches Him is piety from you’ (sura 22, 37). This verse might illuminate the theology underpinning the sacrifice, but it doesn’t necessarily explain the ritual itself. Like many features of Islam, camel sacrifice long predates the faith. Among the early witnesses was Saint Nilus in the fourth century. Observing Arab nomads in Sinai, he tells us the camel ‘is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound … and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw.’ More brutal than the event I witnessed, still it felt an awful lot closer than a gap of nearly two millennia. As with so many Christian rituals, it is moments like this, when a religion wormholes back to the roots from which it sprang, that it becomes most engrossing for the outsider.

  Fez truly is a magical place. After a hard day at the tannery, I felt like I had been farted out of the arse of the giant from the third voyage of Sindbad. Cocooned in my pigeon-shit miasma, there was only one way to conjure myself back to a respectable condition: every few days, Najib and I purged our odours at the Qariwiyya hammam.

  The building dates back to medieval times and the system isn’t much different from the one described by Leo Africanus. Like Leo, we had to ‘pass through a cold hall, where they use to temper hot water and cold together’, followed by ‘a room somewhat hotter’ and finally ‘a third hot-house, where they sweat as much as they think good’. The main differences were that instead of wearing ‘a linen cloth’ to cover our ‘privities’, we stripped down to Y-fronts and boxer shorts; the water was no longer heated by fires ‘made of nought else but beasts’ dung’; and in the absence of slaves we had to ‘cleanse and wash’ ourselves.

  Today, we passed by Mansur’s gimcrack store and towed him along.

  ‘Yes, I’m coming, but you go ahead.’ He pinched his nose, waving us forward. ‘You guys have no idea how much you stink!’

  While Mansur picked up some fruit from a street stall, Najib and I carried on to a marble tiled passage at the back of the market. Inside, we stripped off our clothes and entered a barrel-vaulted room where light funnelled through holes in the ceiling, spotlighting the washers passing through the fug of steam. The slurp of water muffled the chatter, splashing our bodies and hissing on the stones, carrying our sweat and the yellow slick of saffron dye down the runnels at the side of the hall.

  One of the regulars was the hammam’s official masseur, a man as formidably built as my old nomad companion Jadullah. At a nod from Mansur, he came over and treated me like a rundown machine in serious need of maintenance. He yanked my legs like draw-pumps, kneed me in the stomach, nearly snapped my coccyx and smeared black soap across my skin like axle grease. At the end of the procedure he slapped his hands, as if to say ‘and don’t think I’ll ever let you do that to me’, and left me alone.

  ‘You will sleep like a baby tonight,’ said Mansur. He was right.

  What most appealed about the hammam was the social side of it. People sat in groups, offering grapes and beakers of juice, rubbing each other’s loosened flesh with soap. I’d bought my own bar at the henna market, beside the old asylum where Leo Africanus used to work. Nobody approached us directly, but there were flutters of chatter with the men upstream. I enjoyed those interactions, but mostly I enjoyed talking to Mansur and Najib, who were quite merciful with their Arabic constructions and kept their vocabulary to a level I could follow. Since translating hip-hop lyrics for Najib, my Arabic was starting to take off. At a book stall on Big Street, I had picked up a bilingual copy of Gulliver’s Travels and was enjoying it hugely. Somehow, the experience of reading it in Arabic felt even more authentic than Swift’s original: hammering away at all those complex verbal constructions was a sure way of empathising with Gulliver, lost in a world where his most basic assumptions no longer made sense.

  ‘You like the hammam?’ asked Najib.

  We were sitting with our backs to the mould-stained wall, around a five-point star with soap scum frothing at the edges.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘it’s kind of essential, isn’t it? My host mother won’t let me back in the house when I’m smelling of pigeon turd.’

  ‘I come here at least twice a week,’ said Najib. ‘You know, in Fez every mosque has a hammam near it, and it is good to do these things with others. If you pray with others, God gives you a higher recompense.’

  ‘So you go to the mosque to clean your soul and the hammam to clean your body?’

  ‘Exactly. And God likes us to be clean. That is why we have the ablutions fountain in the mosque.’

  ‘But it must be a challenge to keep clean when you work at the tannery?’

  ‘Of course. But the tannery is part of God’s work too.’

  I remembered the boss pointing out the moon and the sun, linking them to the colours of the hides. For my friends in Fez, everything was linked through faith.

  From hammam to hamaameh – or bath-house to bird-keeping. Later, we bought some millefeuille from Yusuf the pastry seller, and squeezed up a narrow stairwell near the Kairaouine mosque. On one side of the terrace was a wooden coop with a mesh grille, warbling with a dozen hamaamat – pigeons. Most were adults, but a few squabs were tucked under their mothers’ purple-tinged feathers. Up here on the city’s shoulders, the smell was less striking, and once Mansur lit his pipe our noses were otherwise occupied.

  ‘This is for my free time,’ Mansur explained, setting aside a couple of sticks tied with rags. ‘I want to teach them to fly, but I have to take lessons from the old pigeon keepers. When I started this, I never thought it would be so hard!’fn1

  Among the challenges were the frequent cleaning of the coop and the damage the pigeons wreaked around the terrace.

  ‘My landlady gets angry,’ said Mansur, ‘because they put marks on the laundry and she finds their shit all over the roof.’

  There was some consolati
on: the boss occasionally paid him a couple of dirhams for a kilo of dung, which was used in the hair-extraction process at the tannery.

  Leading me over to the coop, Mansur pointed out the different colours of the wings. There was a couple, brown and grey, with tighter faces and more streamlined feathers, bred as voyageurs – descendants of the carrier pigeons who used to deliver the sultans’ mail. Mansur was hoping to enter them one day in an intercity racing contest.

  ‘You see how they beat their wings? But they cannot fly. A wing has great power but it cannot open a door.’

  My smile was bittersweet. I could see where this was going. I had told my friends about my plans to move on. Najib, whose social life I had been funding for the last few weeks, had not taken it well. We sat down for glasses of tea, while Mansur produced a BIC lighter and a sachet from his back pocket, rolling a ball of keef on the table. For my friends, there was no contradiction between piety and pipe. Like many of the Muslims I know, they recognised and accepted the tension between reality and religious ideals. In this case, the keef was burqadi: the best shit in town. The BIC glowed and Mansur’s fingers rubbed together at the head of his pipe, then a gasp of smoke and the stem hovered under my nose.

  ‘I want to ask you something.’ Mansur leaned back, resealing the bag with his lighter. ‘Why do you travel?’ His eyes flickered with curiosity. ‘Don’t you love your family? The people at home?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ The directness of his question threw me, and I could feel my voice cracking slightly. ‘Yes, I do, very much, but … Well, I guess I love travelling too, and if I don’t travel for a long time then I think I become a bit of a pain.’

  He nodded, but his face flattened with incredulity. It was a good moment to change the subject, so I turned my attention back to the pigeons.

  ‘If Nicholas was one of your pigeons,’ said Najib, looking at me crossly, ‘he would fly away as soon as you opened the cage.’