The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  ‘But they come back,’ Mansur pointed out. ‘They always come back.’

  ‘Only because you’ve trained them.’

  ‘Exactly. All of us are trained, by our fathers, our mothers, our teachers. And that is why we always come back. Even you. You will travel a long time perhaps, and see many things, but you will come back.’

  ‘To Fez?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. To here.’

  He was about to pour another glass of tea. But before he did, he showed me what he meant, by tapping his heart.

  The School for Nomads

  Lesson Two: Riding

  OUR SECOND DAY’S TROT BRINGS US TO THE FEATHERY SHADE OF AN ACACIA tree. Thank God for their taproots, snaking down to reach water tables that other trees are too stubby to channel. My camel drops to his brisket pads so I can dismount, and Lamina passes me the halter rope to lead him to refreshment. We have been walking for most of the night, but now in some ways is the harder part: 12 hours of lounging around. Conserving our energy, like a miser protecting his gold.

  When the baggage has been arranged, the camels watered and their fetlocks hobbled, we retreat under the acacia. There, we nap and pick the burrs of cram-cram from each other’s trousers and feet. Lamina is particularly fastidious about this. He has a pair of tweezers, specially procured for the task. He runs a hand over my ankles and rubs my sides. When he finds a rogue burr, he plunges and holds up the offending thorn for inspection, shaking his head, like a schoolmaster who has found a mischievously placed pin just in time.

  ‘Now,’ he announces, ‘we must see if you are studying well.’

  The time has come for my first test. To be specific: I have been called on to make the tea.

  I dig a rut of sand, pile some sticks on top and light a fire (helped by Abdul-Hakim to get it going). I scoop sugar and tea into the glasses, half fill the pot with water and wait for it to boil. The end result – aerated by enough outpourings to satisfy a Tuareg – is deemed a modest success. Although, Lamina points out, it could have done with more froth on the second glass.

  Lessons now come thick and fast. In the laboratory brightness of daytime, there is no excuse to miss the details of saddling. I try my best to take it all in: the slinging of the ropes, the girthing of the saddle, the lay of the covers, the water skins balanced on either side. But there is so much to absorb, and red-hot vertical skewers of sunlight are jabbing my skin, so some of the lessons go straight through me like laser beams.

  ‘Every camel must have water on the journey to Taoudenni,’ explains Lamina, ‘because the wells are not easy to find. It is important to know how much water is left in the guerbas (the goatskin water containers), and how far to the next well.’

  To make the camels sit, he calls out a long, rasping ‘ooooosh!’ It has the effect of a sorcerer’s incantation. Legs buckle, bellies plunge, heads remain steady on rickety necks. Lamina nooses the camel’s neck, fitting the headrope over the snout, cinching it on the lower jaw, fastened with a small stick. He tells me my camel’s name – ‘Naksheh’ – offering the word like a reward. I press a foot on the nape, trying to be gentle now we’ve been introduced, but also trying to be firm because I don’t want to screw it up.

  ‘Now,’ says Lamina, dropping the headrope, ‘you must ride him yourself.’

  I feel like a rookie about to perform before a packed stadium. Tugging left or right to steer direction, I click my tongue between my teeth and flute my lips: ‘oooshhhh-oosh-oosh-oosh!’ To help spur Naksheh, Abdul-Hakim perches on the back of the cantle. His whispering voice is a magic wand. The camel bounces and shudders, his lumbering walk turns to a trot, growing steadily, alarmingly, into a gallop. Whenever I feel I am losing control, I grab the nape fur in a panicky hold and yank him to an awkward deceleration, like slamming the brakes in fifth gear.

  Naksheh is not the only new name of the afternoon. ‘Nicholas’ sounds too outlandish on the Berabish tongue, so I am asked to choose something more suitable. My answer is instant: ‘Yusuf!’

  The dream interpreter and colourful coat wearer – Joseph in the Bible, whose story is as vivid in the Quran as in the Old Testament. While I was living in Fez, there was a mini-series about him on the telly, and I was hooked.

  Lamina’s eyes gleam between his kindly crow’s feet: ‘God protect you, this choice is a good one.’

  I just hope my new name won’t encourage my companions to throw me down a well. My cameleering isn’t exactly a strong recommendation in my favour.

  ‘You must speak to him more,’ urges Lamina.

  I am finding the sounds hard to master. They start low in the belly and come out as delicately as the notes from a flute, soft but tremulous. For Lamina they are second nature, so he doesn’t drill me with technical tips and procedures. As for the riding, he is still cautious with me. On steep downhill stretches, he tells me to couch. When the ground is flat enough, he gestures for me to mount, advising a slow pace and a backward lean. The camel’s legs are well designed for insertion and extraction, like surgical needles excavating pliable tissue, but on gradients they are vulnerable.

  A flat plain spreads towards the well of Aketkod and blast debris rings under the camels’ tread: shards of iron castings, splinters of shell. The patinated karst of the hammada (the crust where the sun has hardened the desert surface) vibrates through Naksheh’s legs, shockwaving my diaphragm and echo-locating every major bone in my body. The surface fractures, sandy grains thicken, and for a few minutes I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. What a joy to be out here, out in the Sahara, the heat of a beast warming your thighs, wind dancing in the stubble-grass, dunes cresting in the distance, the earth and sky exchanging one another’s light, melding in a pearly, lemony tapestry of graduating horizontal bands. This is life … this is nature … this is IT!

  Has any domesticated animal been more cruelly maligned? John Ruskin dismissed the camel as ‘disobedient and ill-tempered’. Edmund Spenser made it his image of ‘Avarice’ in The Faerie Queene. More recently, in Arabia through the Looking Glass, Jonathan Raban declared that ‘no animal is more stolid, stupid and utterly unresponsive’. But the most withering put-down is surely the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti’s: ‘They put me in mind of elderly English ladies taking tea together, dignified and apparently bored but unable entirely to conceal the malice with which they observe everything around them.’

  I cannot disagree more passionately! Leo Africanus spent a fair amount of time on camels, and he called them ‘gentle and domesticall beasts’. I don’t always find them the easiest creatures to ride, but I am right behind René Caillié, who declared: ‘What a masterpiece of nature’s workmanship is the camel!’ Ungainly they might look, as if a giraffe had mated with a put-you-up, but few animals are so perfectly designed for their environment.

  Without camels, the desert would have remained as mysterious to nomads as it is to the town-dwellers on its rim. ‘Once the North African nomads became acquainted with this highly useful animal,’ writes Nehemiah Levtzion, ‘they lost no time in adopting it. Mounted on camels, the nomad tribes, roaming beyond the limes which protected the agricultural population of Roman Africa, began to move southwards into the Sahara. They settled the oases in the middle of the desert, and reached its southern fringes.’ They represent a watershed in the history of the Sahara, transforming the desert into what Labelle Prussin calls ‘a habitable, controllable region that could support nomadic populations’.

  Now, as we trek north, I am juddering on top of 900 pounds of muscular grace: the perfect desert vehicle, able to consume 120 litres at a single watering, to modulate his body temperature according to the heat, to reflect sunlight off his coat and pee backwards (which may not be so good in a caravan, but is certainly useful in small numbers); endowed with a third eyelid, a tripartite stomach and muscular nose flaps that keep out the sand. What a masterpiece indeed – René Caillié was right!

  That said, I can’t wait to get off the bloody thing. My thighs are absolutely killing
me. The skin around the top of my legs is so tender I am pretty sure it will soon peel off. I can only ride a few more miles; the rest of the night I walk, a cumbersome weight lolloping through powder. Lamina is walking as well, and he advises me to watch him, because even leading a camel on foot can be fraught. We slow down on downhill stretches, stopping every few moments so the camels don’t trip; I have to yank Naksheh away from the bunch-grass, because he over-ate at the last stop and now his breath is as odorous as a tannery at dusk. A few days ago, the smell would have made me want to gag. Now it is weirdly addictive: a new, camelesque sensation that binds me to my stinky steed. And hey, it’s not like I’m smelling of Bleu de Chanel these days!

  I look into the distance, where Jadullah is riding so tight to his beast they seem to be centaurised. Oh, if only if only if only I could ride like that! Right now, there is nothing I want more, nothing in the whole world, than to handle a camel as brilliantly as Jadullah. In the school of nomadism, to ride as one with your steed – that would be a sign of real distinction!

  Part Three

  Mountain

  You shall find many among the Africans which live altogether a shepherd’s or drover’s life, inhabiting upon the beginning of Mount Atlas, and being dispersed here and there over the same mountain.

  Leo Africanus, The Description of Africa and the Things Therein Contained

  7

  The Sultan’s Road to Azrou

  THE HEAVENS WERE WEEPING. WATER THREADED THE WINDOWS OF THE BUS, a liquid veil over the suburbs. By the time the rain cleared, we were in open country. The muscular roots of pines and cypresses entwined with moss-clad oaks whose wrinkly branches tickled the maize and barley stubble. The bus climbed higher up the Atlas and cloud enshrouded us, muffling the fields behind the pines like curtains at the back of peristyle courtyards. It felt like some transitional stage: the sterile whiteness of limbo, a process of cleansing before entering a new world.

  I was on the slow road to Timbuktu, riding Route No. 24. More grandly known as the Sultan’s Road, it was cut through the mountains in medieval times to link Fez to the trans-Saharan trade. Outcrops of shale threw back the light and volcanic cones shouldered between ranked cedar, nudging the boles of the holm oaks.

  The Middle Atlas is Morocco’s reservoir. Sinkholes and caves tunnel under the limestone plateaus, licked by some of the country’s most important river systems. But natural irrigation is not enough. The soil is poor and the harsh climate is scribbled on the faces of the villagers you pass. The Middle Atlas is no bread basket – it has always worked best as grazing land. It was here, in the hills around Azrou, that I hoped for a meeting with mountain nomads.

  A few miles south of the hill station of Ifrane, an arc of wooded slopes shielded a black volcanic outcrop, like bodyguards flanking their king. Flat-roofed houses rippled out from a green-tiled mosque. Texting teenagers darted between men in hooded gowns and shawled women with tribal spots on their chins. I had arrived in Azrou.

  ‘This is very unfortunate.’

  The owner of my hotel was sitting under a deep-pile rug and an embroidered burnous, tipping his head gently. I had asked where I might go in search of nomads. He clasped his hands together for the prognosis, like a doctor delivering bad news: ‘It was better if you came some years earlier.’

  This was not my first journey to the Moroccan highlands. A couple of years before, I had rambled in the Rif with friends from Fez, tramping through marijuana groves and swinging our legs from a rooftop while ceremonial horn blowers roused the dancers at a village wedding. The beat of timpani and the rhythms of Berber poetry chimed at a festival in the High Atlas. And the fierce winds of Mount Toubkal buffeted us on the ascent of Morocco’s highest peak, before we plunged downhill, bending our knees and following our guide’s lessons in ‘Berber skiing’.

  The people I met on those trips were Berbers – Amazighen in their own language (a name meaning ‘free’ or ‘noble’, which is related to the Tuareg imashaghan). Crawling out of the lush swamp and forested highlands of Neolithic Africa, long of hair and pointed of beard, the original Amazighen mastered the horse and made a name for themselves among the classical Mediterranean superpowers. They were chariot-riding Garamantes, unruly Gaetulians and wily Numidians, whose chiefs were decorated with ivory sceptres and purple cloaks when the Romans cast favour on them. They were also witty thinkers like Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass (the mad, bawdy tale of a man who slavers himself in a magic potion and metamorphoses into an ass – the only novel in Latin that has survived in its entirety), who also concocted a treatise on daemons that was criticised by his fellow Berber, Saint Augustine of Hippo.

  Apuleius and Augustine, along with later luminaries such as the traveller Ibn Batutta and Saint Adrian of Canterbury, rip a big hole through the name foisted on their people. It was coined by the Romans from the Greek word for outsiders, barbaroi. Awkwardly enduring in English as ‘barbarians’, it was adopted by the Arabs, when they established the province of Ifriqiya in the late seventh century, because it tallied with their word for babbling. This, Leo Africanus tells us, is because ‘the African tongue soundeth in the ears of the Arabians, no otherwise than the voice of beasts, which utter their sounds without any accents’. Not that the language gap mattered: Berbers weren’t being rounded up for their conversation. Their women were sent to Arabia as slave-girls, their men were enlisted. They were a boon for any army – the inclement mountains had bred them tough, muscular and barrel-chested. But this made them a pain in the butt when they refused to play ball.

  Ibn Khaldun tells us they launched 12 different rebellions during the early years of Islam.fn1 So indomitable were they that an Arab governor wrote to the Caliph: ‘The conquest of Africa is impossible. Scarcely has a Berber tribe been exterminated than another comes to take its place.’ The most iconic of all the rebels was the Kahina, a priestess with streaming hair and the gift of second sight, who drove the Arabs all the way back to Egypt in the 690s. ‘The Arabs search for towns,’ she proclaimed, ‘for gold and for silver, but we only seek for pasturage.’ She was a devoted nomad, but a terrible tactician. From Tangier to Tripoli, she promoted a policy of burning cities, smashing down walls and uprooting fruit trees. Town-dwelling Berbers were appalled, and when the Arab army returned the Kahina’s under-motivated force was easily vanquished.

  The history of the early Berbers attracted nobody’s study more than Ibn Khaldun. It is to him that we owe so much of our knowledge about them. His familiarity with the tribes made him indispensable to the courts of the Maghrib, and Berber history was a major focus of his Kitab al-‘Ibar (‘Book of Lessons’), which expanded into a universal history. Its introduction, the Muqaddimah, is a seminal work in global historiography, pioneering the concept of history’s cyclical nature.fn2 Ibn Khaldun was a city boy, nomadic only in the sense that he saw service with seven different royal masters (from most of whom he was forced to leave in a hurry – he was a great scholar, but a hapless schemer). It was during one of his flights, holed up in the Algerian highlands under the protection of the Berber Kabyles, that he wrote the Muqaddimah. The Berbers, in his view, were the acme of rural toughness, yoked together by asabiyyah (which is usually translated as ‘solidarity’ or ‘tribalism’). It was this solidarity that made them such a formidable force against the heterodox town-dwellers; and applying Ibn Khaldun’s theory more broadly, it was asabiyyah that enabled so many of the region’s nomadic tribes to defy the city governors who would enchain them and build powerful kingdoms of their own.

  The Amazighen roar through the history of medieval North Africa – whether hillmen like the puritanical Almohads or desert Berbers, such as the drum-beating Almoravids who thwarted the Christian armies of eleventh-century Spain. But over the centuries, road building and centralised rule started to make their mark. By the time Leo Africanus travelled across the region, the mountain people were in the doldrums. Occasionally, Leo came across a chieftain wealthy enough to send slaves and exotic beasts as tribut
e; but more often they were like the ‘base and witless people’ he met in the High Atlas, who refused to let him go until he had judged ‘all the quarrels and controversies of the inhabitants’. He was rewarded for his pains with a cockerel, some onions and garlic, a pile of nuts and a goat: a frugal reward, ‘by reason that there was no money in all the said mountain’, which underlines the indigence so many Berber communities were suffering at this time.

  It was an afternoon for pastries and café-sitting. The hotel owner had lent me a regional map, and I unfolded it at a chrome table in a smoky café, grazing on a slab of millefeuille. A silver-framed photograph of King Mohammed, looking plump in a cream burnous, hung above me, squatting over the pastries like an advert – eat these cakes and one day you too could be king – rather than the state propaganda it actually was.

  While I was poring over cartographic cross-hatchings and contours, I felt the sunbeam of other people’s attention. Three men were eyeballing me from a neighbouring table. With their bronze faces and high cheekbones, they looked as if they had been hewn out of the nearby limestone. One of them spoke French, which was fortunate, because I couldn’t understand a word of their Arabic. It was heavily aspirated, as if to save wasting too much breath on it. They only spoke it, they told me, when there was no alternative. Their mother tongue was Tamazight, the language of the Middle Atlas Berbers.

  The Francophone was called Jagha. Lean and tight-coiled, with sharp cheekbones and sunken eye sockets, he had the haunted look of someone fresh out of prison. He told me he had been living in Casablanca, but had given up because it was impossible to find work.

  ‘Le chômage, quel dommage! Unemployment, what a shame!’