The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  The Spanish had been loitering in the area since the fifteenth century, when they made a deal with the Portuguese to split the Atlantic African coast and launched slave-hunting missions from the Canary Islands. So successful were they that a Saharan jihad was launched against them. In 1517 and 1524, tribesmen besieged the Spanish fort, and a plague in the Canaries helped to keep the Christians out. Preoccupied with their discoveries on the other side of the Atlantic, the Spanish would establish no further settlement until 1884. Even then, they paid so little interest that by 1952 there were only 24 subscribers to the Spanish Saharan telephone service and only 130 wells across the whole territory by 1960.

  It was the discovery of phosphate reserves that changed the narrative. Now the ‘Spanish Sahara’ was a colony worth pulping. Profits from the mines, investment and cheap credit from the Spanish government began to fund development. But resistance was evolving. The old nomadic skills turned out to be well suited to guerrilla tactics. Raiding missions put lighthouses out of action, outlying Spanish posts were sacked and Spanish officers were kidnapped. The guerrilla campaign fizzled out in leadership disputes and a 1959 drought. Yet a Saharawi political identity had been moulded, and the United Nations gave it a jolt of motivation with a call for decolonisation in 1965. In the run-up to the Spanish withdrawal, a new pan-tribal organisation emerged, replacing the old jamaa or gathering of tribal leaders: the Polisario. Independence was within reach.

  Except that 226,000 square kilometres (an area roughly the size of Britain), not only rich in phosphate and fishing but also uranium, titanium and iron ore, was never likely to ease into a smooth independence. Not with its recently liberated neighbours (Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria) all licking their chops for a taste of the other side of colonialism. Ignoring a UN Resolution guaranteeing Saharawi self-determination,fn1 they all made a lunge. Morocco came out on top, thanks in part to the Green March: a spectacular mass ramble, inspired by King Hassan’s pledge to ‘reunite’ Western Sahara ‘with the motherland’. Driven by patriotic zeal and the promise of subsidies, 350,000 Moroccans hauled their national flags, copies of the Quran and portraits of the King across the desert.

  The ploy worked. Fighting raged on, but Morocco was able to chain its gains with military patrols and sow the borders with landmines. By the time a ceasefire was declared in 1991, more than 100,000 Saharawis had been driven from their homes, forced to languish in an area of Algeria so inhospitable it was known as ‘the Devil’s Garden’. Living off international aid and using car batteries for electricity, they were separated from their relatives across the border by the berm – a 2-metre high, 1500-mile long sand wall (the world’s longest continuous minefield, framed in an estimated 5 million explosives – around 3000 for every mile). The terms of the ceasefire pledged a referendum to be held among the indigenous population – a pledge that, two-and-a-half decades later, has yet to be honoured.

  I heard an eye-witness account of the war when I joined a Spanish charter flight to Algeria to visit the Devil’s Garden. There I met several veterans of the 1975 conflict, including a middle-aged Saharawi called Hajji Hodud. Grey bearded, sallow featured, with a sharp look under his heavy eyelids, he took me by the hand, leading me between the tents and mud huts of his rugged camp.

  ‘I was just a boy of 12,’ he said. ‘The Moroccans were in the north and the Mauritanians were attacking in the south. They were flying French Jaguars and dropping napalm bombs on us. My family was in a place called Oued Modraiya. It was surrounded by mountains so they thought it was safe. About 40,000 people went there to escape from the Moroccans, people from Smaara, Laayoune, from all over Western Sahara, as well as some of our fighters who were travelling in a big lorry. Then one morning, we saw the surveillance plane and we knew we were in trouble.’

  It came in the form of napalm and phosphorus bombs, dropped by the Jaguars. The attack lasted three days and hundreds died.

  ‘Our family tent was burned and some of my relatives were killed,’ Hajji Hodud continued. ‘There was panic everywhere. People went around distributing food and trying to help the others, but by the third day our resources were finished and we had very little to eat. We had run out of equipment so we had to use traditional medicine – plants for stomach problems, camel fat instead of bandages for people who had to be amputated. After the third day, we climbed into the Polisario lorry and drove to this place.’

  He waved a dismissive hand. Goats were scrambling around solar panels, under mud huts shaped like tents. Hajji Hodud had lived in the Devil’s Garden for three-quarters of his life, but still he thought of the dunes around Laayoune as his home.

  ‘There was nothing here,’ he said. ‘We had to live on aid, and we still do. I stayed with my mother, and we used the soil to make bricks and build houses, while our fathers went back across the desert to fight.’

  Laayoune is a paradise compared to the camps. Linked to the phosphate mines by a conveyance pipe, with the fishing ports only a few miles to the west, it shines with the glitter of development. But once you’ve rubbed the sand out of your eyes, the military presence is hard to ignore. Every corner produces another wooden military kiosk, and I was perpetually warned against crossing the road by the roar of another artillery-loaded truck. With a garrison of 160,000, there are nearly half as many Moroccan military personnel as there are Saharawis.

  The most telling details were the seemingly innocuous ones: uncracked roads, the lack of young men loitering around street corners, unpeopled public squares, with their immaculate bougainvillea. Sometimes more specific signs of the political situation seeped through – gated compounds festooned with flowers (the property of rich Moroccans at the top of the food chain); pink Lux minivans, with taped signs on their back windows from the UNHCR Saharawi Family Visits Programme.

  Unsurprisingly, the people I met on the streets were edgy and evasive. But my contacts in London had put me in touch with a group of underground activists. I was hoping they would peel back Laayoune’s surface for me. So I made my way down a sun-drained street of rosy-pink hardware stores, where the air pulsed to the heat of the sun and the beat of jackhammering.

  ‘You chose the right day.’

  Firas was a stocky graduate, with hooded eyes deep in their sockets, mismatched against the rounded warmth of his face. Like most of his peers he was unemployed, despite being fluent in five languages.

  ‘There’s a demonstration this afternoon, so you can see what goes on here.’ He looked at his friends, before adding, with a wry puckering of lips: ‘But it would be the same if we met you tomorrow. Most days there’s a demonstration.’

  This one took place on Avenue Smaara, one of the longest roads in the city. I sat in the back of a scuffed Renault driven by Firas’s spiky-haired brother Abdullah. The rear window was splintered and foam was bubbling out of cracks in the vinyl. The passenger beside me was called Maimuna. Intense eyes flashed under spidery lashes and strands of nut-brown hair leaked out of her midnight-blue melhfa. She fitted a pair of gloves over her hands and tightened the cotton around her face, so she wouldn’t be easy to identify.

  ‘Wrap your turban better,’ she said, in the tone of a mother telling her child to buckle his seatbelt.

  I had been given a black headcloth to hide my face and told to keep my giveaway white hands away from the window. Lining the road around us were a dozen dark blue police trucks; the white vans of the auxiliary forces were parked in the side alleys. Helmeted officers held plastic shields and batons; plain-dressed policemen mingled in the crowd, giving themselves away when their back pockets crackled with static. All around us, jaws were stiffening, lips were clamped tight, brows were creasing.

  ‘You see the men on the motorbikes,’ said Firas, ‘that’s the secret police – watch out. If they find out about you they’re gonna give you hell.’

  We drove past a group chanting slogans, but Firas didn’t think it would be wise to linger with a foreigner in the car.

  ‘That’s the guys at the front,�
�� he said, tapping his phone. ‘Our friend Malainin just got his arm broken.’ He turned to Abdullah and told him to take the back streets, changing direction when we heard a motorbike gunning behind us.

  It was some relief to get back to Abdullah’s house. I sat back against a bolster and sipped Coca-Cola while Firas filled my lap with snaps. They were bright polaroids, vivid with the blues and reds of dara’a robes and women’s melhfas, as well as the blues and reds of bruised legs and bleeding heads. There was an old man with a split lip whom I had met in the house earlier; a woman’s bare back, ridged with welts; a crowd of women, clapping their hands defiantly in front of a line of soldiers; a youth with a gash on his forehead from a stone thrown by a policeman. The pictures were intense and unsettling. Yet there were so many, along with the flipcam footage playing on a laptop, that I found them hard to digest. It was only when people told me their stories that I felt I was stepping into the Saharawi abyss.

  ‘For us as women,’ said Maimuna, ‘it is really important to take part in the demonstrations.’

  She knelt beside me, arms folded across her chest. She wanted to make a point, not friends.

  ‘It is our land,’ she said, ‘women’s as well as men’s. And a lot of the men can’t take part because they lose their job if they are seen at the demonstrations, or maybe they are already in prison. You must understand, we are different from women in Morocco. We have respect in society. In Morocco, their husbands beat them all the time and they cannot complain. But in our culture, if a man beats his wife it is shameful. She will return to her family and the man must do a lot to get her back.’

  She had taken part in countless demonstrations, always careful, always wearing her melhfa tight, but never holding back from the front line.

  ‘Once, I stood in front of 50 policemen. We were demanding freedom, work, the opportunity to bury our martyrs. They shouted back at us. They said “you are mercenaries”, and the deputy police chief struck me with his baton. I fell to the ground and they kicked me and pulled off my melhfa. You know, in our society, this is very shameful. They surrounded me and dragged me away from the others. They pulled me by the hair and threatened to rape me.’

  ‘Does it ever make you nervous?’ I asked.

  ‘Never! When 50 policemen are facing you and I am only a single woman, I don’t feel scared, I feel hatred for them.’

  She looked straight at me as she said this, eyes burning with righteous defiance.

  Many of the demonstrators shared Maimuna’s intensity. They moved thriftily, cautiously, used to sliding round corners; speaking in carefully modulated whispers, then raising their voices to the level of protest chant. That afternoon, and several others, I heard dozens of stories. Some people sought me out, desperate for a link to the outside world. Others sat more quietly, cosseting their stories until they were ready to unfold them.

  An activist friend of Firas’s described being picked off the street, just a few months before, to spend several days in a cell, ‘strung up like a chicken’. Families told how they were forced to leave their villages in the fighting of 1975. A student called Ahmed showed me the scars on his leg from driving over a landmine, travelling with a nomadic herder who was inspecting his flock. The herder’s feet were ripped open and a toe had to be amputated. As a result, he could no longer walk steadily and had to sell his flock; another nomad taken from the land.

  One of the most emotive subjects was the protest camp of Gudaym Izik. It took place in October 2010, predating the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi by a couple of months. Although the camp attracted little interest from the Western media, several observers have credited it as the first spark of the Arab Spring.fn2 It took place about 12 kilometres into the desert and at its peak numbered an estimated 20,000 people.

  ‘It was a utopia,’ said Salim.

  He was crouching over a gas stove, preparing the tea: lanky and dark skinned, frizzy haired, with a look of acrid intensity. While he talked, we could hear the water chuckling on the stove.

  ‘Before the camp,’ he said, ‘I was unemployed and unhappy. But I found freedom there. Living in those tents … it took us back to our roots as a society. We wanted to show the world we can live on our own, we can live away from civilisation, we belong to the desert.’

  All over the world – from Tahrir Square to St Paul’s Cathedral – protesters use tents, broadcasting their campaigns from makeshift camps. Protesters are always nomads, pitching camp where they can, hoping their voices will be heard, holding on until the authorities kick them on. For the Saharawis this analogy goes deeper, protest merging with heritage, the very act of defiance drilling back to their origins. No wonder the protesters talked about the camp as if it were a primordial idyll.

  ‘It was a protest against social marginalisation,’ said Salim, ‘the lack of jobs, decent housing, legal rights. We showed we can make our own society. There was no crime, no complaining. I was in the security committee, I was like a sheriff.’

  Twenty-eight days after the camp was established, everyone was awoken by the sound of the army: helicopters whirring overhead, tanks roaring over the dunes, military orders ringing the camp like a cordon.

  ‘You could smell gas,’ said Salim. ‘You could hear gunshots – bang, bang! I saw two policemen picking up an old woman and beating her with batons, dragging her by the hair. I saw them grab a woman with an infant and throw her into a truck. They were shouting at us: “You dirty Saharawis.” They called the women bitches. They used shameful words, they didn’t care, they kicked the women with their boots.’

  ‘How did you get out?’ I asked.

  ‘I ran. There was a Land Rover heading out, so I jumped inside. We were packed together, so many of us, and we were angry. When we got to Laayoune we marched on the police station. They didn’t care, of course. We shouted outside the station, and you know what they did? Bang, bang! Bullet in the shoulder! Five other guys got hit too. I went to the hospital but they refused to treat me, so I had to use traditional medicine to ease the pain – sheep’s fat and maggots. Have you any idea how much it hurt? I could barely move my arm. I didn’t get a doctor to look at it until a few weeks ago, when I went on the UN programme to the camps in Algeria.’

  For centuries the Moroccan sultans ignored the Sahara. They wanted gold to mint their coins and revenue from the caravan trade, but they didn’t want trouble from the tribes, so they left well alone. Occasionally a chief would pledge allegiance in return for the title of caid, to bolster his status within the desert jamaa. But such pledges were rare, and usually short. Before the era of colonialism, only one Moroccan sultan had much success in taming the desert – and even then he had to suffer plenty of reverses before his famous victory.

  That was Sultan Ahmed Al-Mansur, ‘the triumphant’. Emboldened by the ‘Battle of Three Kings’ in 1578 (at which the King of Portugal, a rival claimant to the throne and his own brother all died), he sent a force towards the Niger, hoping to secure the fruits of the trans-Saharan trade. However, the desert was at its most capricious, preying on the entire Moroccan army and justifying the warnings of the Sultan’s advisers: ‘There is an immense desert, which is devoid of water and vegetation, and so hard to traverse that the very birds lose their way there.’ It was only after he seized the salt mines of Teghazza that Al-Mansur decided to brave another crossing, sending 3000 men to subdue the Kingdom of the Songhay in 1590. This was the ‘event collapse’ that tore Timbuktu to shreds. From the Moroccan point of view, this was a victory not only over a rival power, but over the desert itself.

  Yet the tribes of the Western Sahara were less easily corralled than the Songhay. Mobility remained their chief asset: as long as they could run away and raid, they were impossible to subdue. Many of their origin legends emphasise their independence, often by contrasting them to the sultans whose powers they evaded. Take the Arosien tribe, for example, which derives from a preacher called Sidi Ahmed al-Arosi. According to the story, he was accused of sorcery
in Marrakesh and thrown into a dungeon. In the way of such tales, a long-dead saint came to his rescue, spirited him out of his cell and carried him over the desert by the belt of his trousers. Eventually the belt gave way and Sidi Ahmed crashed into the sand. The spot where he landed became the heartland of his tribe.

  Similar tales bolster other tribes (the Aït Lahsen, for example, say their founder was threatened with the amputation of his hand unless he paid off the sultan – heaps of gold magically appeared and he was able to ride away to freedom). Such stories not only appeal to deep, atavistic feelings of independence, they frame tribal identity in terms of its opposition to the central Moroccan authority. Literally, Saharawi means ‘from the desert’; in narrative terms, it also means ‘not Moroccan’. No wonder Saharawis have developed such an astonishing capacity to resist and endure, sometimes against the most appalling privations.

  Imagine a man of middle years. Soft brown eyes, pallid behind bifocal lenses, a dark moustache brushing over his thick grey beard. His dara’a robe hung loose around his tight-drawn frame, because 20 years of freedom hadn’t been enough to recover his former vigour. His name was Mohammed Fadl and, of all the stories I heard in Laayoune, his was the one that sucked me deepest into the Saharawi nightmare.

  ‘It was 1975,’ he said, ‘and I was doing my baccalaureate in Tan Tan. That’s when they abducted me. There was a bad atmosphere in the town. The Moroccan forces had invaded and some of us would gather to discuss the issues. I was only 15 but the Polisario leaders were young too, so they figured I was part of the movement. My mother was anxious about the surveillance and told me not to go out, there were curfews and patrols and we saw a lot of our neighbours’ houses being raided.