The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  Not that modern Fassis (people of Fez) were any more positive. ‘Why do you want to go there?’ Mansur had asked me. ‘People go to Marrakesh to relax, not to learn.’ Still, I had heard about an octogenarian scholar who might be able to teach me what nomads do leave behind, in the place of grand palaces and towering mosques.

  Behind the Djemaa al-Fnaa, moped fuel mingled with the stench of donkey shit. Trolleys and pack beasts carried freshly tanned skins, jars of spices and plastic figures of President Obama in cardboard boxes. In a narrow alley, a bossed wooden door creaked open and tiled steps swooped up to rooms stacked with nomadic clobber. Light peeled off the display glass, tugging you around the exhibits for the best angle of observation; smudges on the explanation cards made you lean a little closer. Sometimes there was a click and a flash, and instead of looking at a wooden sugar hammer or an antelope-horn pipe, you saw the reflection of the photographer beside you. So it goes with museums – they rarely suck you in.

  Yet the deeper I found myself in Bert Flint’s cavern, the more the display items inched forward, pulling loose from their plinths and shelves. Tassles hung from a tobacco bag that had once been the scrotum of a goat; jagged suns wheeled across camel-leather bags designed for Tuareg brides. Zigzag stitching corkscrewed up the slit robes worn by Wodaabe herdsmen for the Gerewol beauty pageant in Niger, next to sky-blue Mauritanian boubous (wide-sleeved overshirts on the pattern of a poncho) and ridged doors from Timbuktu, etched with the intricacy of literary texts waiting to be deciphered.

  ‘I have sold the museum to the university,’ explained Mr Flint, guiding me along the covered rooftop to his dining salon (I had emailed in advance and he invited me for lunch). ‘I don’t mind being a refugee in my own home – if it is my own choice!’

  He had the clear blue eyes of a man half his age, sparkling with adventure in a patchwork of wrinkles and liver spots. We sat down on a pair of goatskin saddle covers, drinking bowls of sweetened buttermilk and spooning couscous from a large clay bowl.

  He was born in Holland, but had lived in Marrakesh since the 1950s. He had taught Spanish, run his own clothing line, set up the museum, and he told of his experiences with the meandering rhythm of a true magpie. It was hard to keep up. One moment he was narrating an ox-cart adventure from Mali to Burkina Faso; the next we were debating the eighteenth-century Dutch–British rivalry over the East Indies. No question had a simple answer. When I asked if he thought nomadism was on its last legs, he tilted his earpiece, nodding to the amesh-shaghab at the back of the room – the wooden frame of a nomad’s baggage carrier, built on two round crossbars, which was acting as a side table.

  ‘You know,’ said Flint, ‘I thought these amesh-shaghabs went back centuries, but I have learned they only began to make them in the 1950s. And now they are changing again, because the people who use them are settling in the towns. But instead of adopting the furniture of the people around them, they adapt their own. So now you have amesh-shaghabs that are used exclusively in people’s houses.’

  ‘As a sort of trunk?’

  ‘Exactly. And because they have no need to move them, they make them bigger. So the new kind of amesh-shaghab is no good for a nomad – because you wouldn’t be able to fit it on a camel!’

  He chuckled over the couscous, gleaming with a scholar’s delight in muddy waters. Nomadism was evolving, the pure pastoralism of the past interfusing with aspects of sedentary life. I thought of the housing blocks I had seen in Azrou, the billboards inviting country folk to join the urban utopia. These were the kind of people Flint was talking about: the first generation of ex-nomads, amphibiously caught between two ways of life.

  When Flint shuffled off for his afternoon nap, I wandered back through the house, sucking up the beauty of the artefacts like a child gargling every last drop through a straw. I stopped for a moment beside an amesh-shaghab – scrolled motifs and diamonds, fringed at the neck seams with ribbons of kidskin; a pungent whiff of old leather. A voluptuous nude, girdled with cowrie shells, torpedoed her acacia breasts towards it. There was a shock of chiaroscuro: these two cultures side by side, expressions of the desert and the land that hugs its belly. I felt as if I were being bombarded by premonitions of my journey, fragments pulled out of the future, whispering of what to expect along the way.

  The world was changing. A couple of hours south of Marrakesh, signposts and hoardings faded away and the roads tapered into gullies of dust-powdered tar. We were well beyond the reach of celebrity golf courses now. The air was sharpening, biting through the windows of the bus. I was leaving the cliffs and cataracts of the Atlas for the ‘River of Sand’, Solitudines Africae, Pliny’s ‘torrid zone … where the sun’s orbit is … scorched by its flames and burnt up by the proximity of its heat’.

  In my Arabic–English copy of Gulliver’s Travels, the hero found himself marooned on the island of Brobdingnag, lifted 20 metres high on a giant farmer’s palm. Surrounded by the vastness of the desert, I felt dwarfed myself; I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Brobdingnagian leap over the hilltops towards us. After all, this was the land of magic, a depository for all the wildest chimerae of the medieval fabulists: howling quadrupeds, hominids with eyes in their chests, basilisks who could stare you to stone. It is any wonder that Aladdin’s sorcerous nemesis was ‘a Moorman from Inner Marocco … a magician who could upheap by his magic hill upon hill’? Or that Musa Ibn Nusayr, the governor of North Africa, searched the Sahara (in another tale from The Thousand and One Nights) for the Valley of the Ruby, the City of Brass and the Tower of Lead? My travels among the dunes and wadis would teach me more about these supernatural powers; but for now, the world seemed to be losing its youthful enchantment – a Faust in reverse. The freshness of the north was giving way to a boiled lethargy, receding hair and the liver spots of baked earth.

  My neighbour on the bus was a travelling salesman from Senegal. Tall and smooth of scalp, he had large, soft hands and a caramel warmth in his eyes.

  ‘I want to sell a few things in Dakhla,’ he said. ‘There’s a good market for mobile phones. I’ll pick up a few things, then I’ll go back to Agadir.’

  Here was the old merchant’s way: exploiting demand and seeking out local commodities to sell for profit further along the road.

  ‘That’s a lot of travelling,’ I said.

  ‘I like it this way.’ He nodded at the broken plastic rubbish holder in front of him; we were too close for eye contact. ‘I used to work in a hotel in Agadir. Can you imagine how boring it is? Sitting in the same place every day. I hated it!’

  He seemed happy-go-lucky enough to get by. Seated on plastic stools at an Afriqiya petrol station (one of the Libyan-run fuel stops dotted around southern Morocco), we stretched our legs, enjoying relief from the cramp in the bus. Next time, we declared, we would both go with the more capacious Supratours, although we knew the cheaper price of Satas would keep reeling us in.

  ‘I like this life,’ said Mohammed. ‘I’m free. I go and come back, I see things, I make friends in many places, I do what I like.’

  ‘You’re a nomad,’ I joked.

  But after we had said goodbye, I thought: he is! An intercity nomad, carrying his leather holdall instead of livestock, taking it wherever the grazing is good.

  I had arrived in Goulmime, the so-called Gate of the Sahara, where Berbers and Arabs from the north have been mixing with Saharawis (literally, ‘people of the desert’) from the south for centuries. A sprawl of low buildings (their rooflines suggesting the tents in which their owners used to dwell), it still handles plenty of trans-Saharan merchandise, including thousands of smuggled livestock (according to anthropologist Mohamed Oudada, 3600 Malian and Nigerien camels passed this way in 2006–07) from well-worn routes along the Drâa Valley and the Anti-Atlas.fn4

  Contraband was not my focus today – I had already picked up a Mauritanian SIM card from Mohammed. I wanted bards rather than bootleggers. I had stopped here on the advice of an activist in London, a Saharawi ex-pat who tol
d me: ‘You will find many of our best poets there.’

  Yusuf Ibn Tafshin wasn’t fond of poets. When he heard the sycophantic rhymes in the courts of Andalusia, he muttered, ‘All I understood was that their composers were in need of bread.’ But his antipathy is uncharacteristic. For those nomads who aren’t packing all their energy into battle, poetry is the glue of life. Leo Africanus (a skilled rhymer in his own rightfn5) was charmed whenever he encountered verse. Writing of the Numidian Arabs, he tells us, ‘they take great delight in poetry, and will pen most excellent verses; their language being very pure and elegant. If any worthy poet is found among them, he is accepted by their governors with great honour and liberality.’ I wondered if such rewards were to be met by poets of the Sahara today.

  A breezeblock house on a street of rubble and hardcore. Inside, a lush carpet, tendrils the colour of stewed damsons. A pair of poets in gowns of wide-sleeved homespun – the dara’a, the formal jacket of the Saharan gentleman. We were all sprayed with perfume (a Saharawi custom) and refreshed with glasses of milk, while our intermediary, a kindly friend of one of my Saharawi contacts in London, brewed the tea.

  The poets’ names were Jaghagha and Ga’in. They both hailed from the same tribe, the Aït Oussa,fn6 but the similarities did not stretch much further. Jaghagha, with his suitcase and toothbrush moustache and horn-rimmed spectacles, had something of the schoolmaster about him. Ga’in was earthier, his face as rimpled as the folds of his dara’a, his voice heavier and crisper.

  ‘Poets,’ said Jaghagha, ‘are the blood of our culture. I speak about everything – religion, social justice, the situation for Arabs in the world. I write when I travel. Poetry comes to me when I see the mountains and the sea and the desert.’

  He recited several pieces, in a voice that popped and trilled with classical precision. Among these was a poem about nomadic life: a 150-line qasida (ode) written in three-foot rhyming couplets, depicting the life of the encampment – from the games played by children using painted stones to the faqihs (Islamic teachers) giving Quranic lessons in the tents.

  ‘I wrote this one for the moussem at Tan Tan,’ he explained. ‘The organisers asked me to write about our nomads. So I wrote the poem and went to the competition. There were more than 800 people in the municipal hall – men, women, young and old, people from different states. Because of the moussem, a lot of people had come to Tan Tan and they all wanted to see the poets. There were 30 poems that day, but some of the poets didn’t make it so they sent their poems by fax. When it came to my turn, the people responded with delight. They clapped, they shouted “bravo!”, many of the women trilled.’

  How else could the result have gone? Jaghagha won the competition, of course!

  Ga’in was harder to draw out. Unlike Jaghagha, he had grown up entirely in a nomadic encampment, and he believed this was crucial to his poetic identity.

  ‘To be a poet,’ he said, ‘you need to come from the desert. There, you can see all around you, but in the city your vision is limited by four walls. I grew up in a camp near Assa. I write about the land, the grass and cold water, all the things we want from this life.’

  He was less technical than Jaghagha, more earthy and instinctive. He illustrated this by telling how he had responded to a severe drought.

  ‘It was the day of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday and I saw the situation was not good for our people, so I went up the mountain behind Assa and recited a poem. I felt scared, but I was hoping for mercy. And thank God, after that day the situation became better.’

  Ga’in didn’t need any papers to recite. His voice was deep and bristly, quivering high notes plunging to long-drawn semibreves, wheeling to a circular rhythm. It was emotive and shamanistic, and I could well imagine its capacity to mediate between God and the earth. This was hardly the kind of poetry Ibn Tafshin scorned at the Spanish courts. It was rugged and pure, poetry as a way of marking one’s connection to the earth.

  This rootedness, this rapport with nature, is a common thread I witnessed in every nomadic community I visited. We are mistaken when we think of nomads as rootless – for isn’t it by walking around a place, rolling in its dust, branching out and returning, that you grow to know it, to love it? Hence tariqa, a way or path, is the Sufi tariqa, ‘the Way’ to communion with God, the beloved.

  11

  The Last Colony in Africa

  ‘I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING.’

  I turned from the window of the bus. I had been watching the world strip itself down, slinging off its furs like an ageing beauty at the end of a long night. The mountains had shrunk early on. The trees fell soon after, and before the inkspots of night had swallowed up the land, the buildings sank to blisters on the wounded earth. Other than the goats, gathering like gangster squads to see off the last patches of vegetation, we could have been sliding over the surface of the moon.

  ‘You come here for the Saharawis,’ said my neighbour, between mouthfuls of fried chicken, ‘you want to know about their situation?’ Globs of greasy sauce splattered his hands, and he rubbed irritably with a tissue. ‘They will tell you they don’t have jobs, they don’t have money, “this is unfair, help us please …” They are liars! Who has developed the land? Did the Saharawis find the phosphate mines? Of course not! And now they want to enjoy the benefits of it.’

  I thought about the nomads of northern Morocco, driven higher and deeper into the mountains. Was the same principle in operation here? Sedentarists claiming the benefits of ‘development’, ignoring the disadvantages heaped on the people who used these lands for pasture? Far from damaging the land, nomads were victims of the lightness of their footprints. They had left no marks – no mines, no cultivated fields – to which a claim of ownership could be pinned.

  Around Laayoune, signs of the development appeared. A wind turbine sliced the air near a cement factory. A road-building machine tooled up the highway like a giant tarantula. A cow – not an animal likely to thrive in this pastureless landscape – was painted on the wall of a dairy farm. More suited to the world around us were the camels, skulking beside acacia groves and farmsteads built from the abundant local stone. They matched the tawny colours around them, unlike the deceptively welcoming pink of the ever-recurring military kiosks.

  I stepped inside one of these cabins, following the beckoning finger of a shiny gendarme royale. Gold stars decorated his shoulders and a holster at his waist reeled a thread of sunlight. He dropped onto a cracked plastic chair behind a tatty ledger and a tea tray buzzing with flies, to scribble down my details.

  ‘Coochy-coo-coo,’ I said – not to the soldier but to a tiny puppy sitting in a corner of the kiosk. After the snarlers of the Atlas, it was nice to meet a gentler canine, although I was only using the puppy for my own ends. It gave me a chance to look at the ‘rechercher et arrêter’ posters, in which local ‘miscreants’ were depicted in grainy black and white above brief descriptions of their crimes (‘terrorisme’, ‘deux actes de violence contre l’état’). Mugshots drain the personality out of people, stripping them to thuggish jaws and hollowed eye sockets. They were a cipher of the political tensions shimmering across the Western Sahara, visible but opaque, like the midges of dust lit across the doorway by the slanting sunbeams.

  On the outskirts of Laayoune, red and green starred flags tussled with the breeze to flaunt Moroccan sovereignty. Seashell patterns grooved the spandrels of an archway, hovering pink and welcoming above the dry Sakiya al-Hamra (Red River). White Sûreté Nationale vans and green military trucks rattled around us, the noses of their artillery probed by sun rays like giant needles to clean out the dirt.

  I was travelling light. Flinging my backpack over a shoulder, I tilted down the pavement, between watchful soldiers with twitching helmets and women in wraparound melhfa drapes, carrying bags of fruit from the early-morning cart stalls. I didn’t have to search for long: tucked above a downtown café, a drab little hostel had rusty metal doors and bedbugs. It was perfect for my budget. There was a crow
d in the café on my first night, jammed around the television to watch Chelsea take on Barcelona, and the stubbly hotelier asked me which team I supported.

  ‘Um … Barcelona?’

  ‘What? You must support Chelsea!’

  I only found out later why he was so passionate about the blues. It wasn’t that he wanted Chelsea to win, more that he was desperate for Barcelona to lose.

  ‘All Moroccans in Laayoune like Real,’ a Saharawi activist told me the next day, ‘because Morocco has a king and “Real” means “royal”. And Saharawis all support Barcelona, because we have sympathy for the Basques. They are fighting for independence, just like us.’

  In almost every teahouse I passed, a match was playing. Young men huddled over heaps of fag ash, fists pumping at the glimmer of a goal. Football had become a parallel to political reality, a valve through which they could pour their allegiances with passion and impunity. It was one of many examples, communicating Saharawi identity through a secret code.

  The Western Sahara was the crucible from which Yusuf Ibn Tafshin’s drum-beating Almoravids emerged. Sanhaja Berbers like the Tuareg, their men wore veils and looked with contempt at the uncovered ‘fly catchers’ around them. In the centuries after the birth of Islam, as Arab tribes emigrated across the Sahara, they raided, traded and intermarried with the Berber natives, forming a network of more than 120 tribes, which today range from the Berber-descended Reguibat to the Oulad Delim, who claim the blood of the Prophet Mohammed.

  The latter were described by Leo Africanus: ‘They have neither dominion nor yet any stipend, wherefore they are very poor and given to robbery: they travel unto Dara, and exchange cattle for dates with the inhabitants there.’ Although many of the tribes developed monopolies in trans-Saharan commerce (the Oulad Bou Sba became specialists in tea and gunpowder, for example, while the Aït Lahsen were the people to talk to if you were after tobacco or wool), they remained difficult to subdue, rugged products of the terrestrial furnace in which they were bred. The Moroccan sultans never managed it (one of the reasons why independence is so passionately claimed today) and labelled the area Blad as-Siba – ‘land of dissidence’. Not until the Spanish colonists started mining for phosphate in the twentieth century was any kind of administrative control imposed.