The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  The children are both Lamina’s and Jadullah’s. I would like to identify the women (ideally, I would like to talk to them), but Lamina is evasive when I ask about them, and I don’t want to cause offence. Whenever I turn towards them, a head turns or a veil lifts across the face, a process of concealment so automatic it barely disrupts their chores.

  ‘You are a wonder for the children,’ says Lamina.

  The mothers may avoid eye contact, but the children are under no such restraints. They stand around and ray-gun me with stares. I pull a silly face and one of them explodes with laughter; another bursts into tears and a little girl hides behind her brother’s legs, poking her head round when her courage is up. Lamina is more familiar territory. They throw themselves around him with glee, bouncing on his knees, turning his legs into a mobile climbing frame.

  Jadullah, characteristically, is more reserved. He pats a couple of toddlers, but he’s in need of sleep. After spending most of the day under a blanket, he wanders to the fringe of the camp, to pick at the grass and peer at the sky, where harriers swirl like tea leaves seen from under a stirred glass.

  ‘Is Jadullah watching out for something?’ I ask Lamina.

  He has already warned me not to stray too far from the camp. When I try to go to the toilet, he sends Abdul-Hakim to follow me. I remember the white tent I saw Jadullah peering at yesterday. I sense Lamina is nervous about something.

  ‘There is an encampment near here.’ The creases thicken on his brow. ‘They are strangers.’

  To Lamina, the desert is no wilderness or labyrinth, but a village where he knows everyone and is on good terms with most of them. But new arrivals are multiplying around the dunes. ‘They are ishumar,’ he tells me. Tuareg exiles, traditionally uncommon in this part of the Azawad; war veterans from Libya, returning to their homeland after the demise of their patron, Colonel Gaddafi. What their arrival augurs is for the future to decide.

  I am thinking of the Tuareg when I wander away from the camp for a pee. ‘What has no arms or legs but can still make a hole in the ground?’ A favourite Tuareg riddle: the answer is carving a shallow runnel in the sand between my legs. Suitably relieved, I retie my pantaloons and go back to Abdul-Hakim. He’s standing on duty a few yards away, assigned by Lamina to make sure nobody sees me who shouldn’t.

  ‘Come, Yusuf,’ he says, ‘we drink dukhun.’

  This is a staple of desert diet, described in the fourteenth century by Ibn Battuta as ‘water containing some pounded millet mixed with a little honey or milk’. We sip it from a common bowl, passed around the tent. Later, I am offered a handful of dried dates – the travel sweets of the desert caravan. They taste, lavishly, of honey and pepper.

  I like these communal rituals. They help connect me to everyone else and are much easier to master than the dialect or the camel riding. When I get something right for the first time, Lamina gives me a smile, whether it’s a complicated task like saddling or a no-brainer like sipping dukhun. The schoolboy in me is thrilled by these marks of approval: each smile is like a big tick on a test paper.

  This far from town, the nomads have to be self-sufficient. They have a few sacks of rice, which the women start boiling for lunch, but the rest of the menu is homemade. The most delicious item is the khubz ar-ramla (literally ‘sand bread’). I’m intrigued to watch them prepare it.

  A pit is dug under the embers of the fire and a paste of millet flour dropped down the bore, covered with the embers until it cooks on top. After half an hour, the dough is turned over. Finally, it is scooped out of its warren and shared out with the rice and a black bean sauce. The crust has a bitter, charcoal taste, but the pith is rich and chewy, mealy as sourdough fresh off a griddle.

  We eat the bread with rice, but my fumbling efforts leave plenty of flecks on the sand. No wonder the goats are eyeing me so attentively. As soon as I’m up, they dive in to swipe my remains, like conscientious waiters clearing the table for the next customer.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say to the wife I have identified as the maître d’. She doesn’t reply, but she does look at me, and that feels significant. Her face is laced with wrinkles; she looks older than the others, strands of grey trickling under her scarf. Lamina relays my compliments and she opens her mouth, revealing half a dozen pointy black teeth between wide, blank spaces.

  ‘She is happy,’ says Lamina.

  Part Five

  Plateau

  Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

  Of moving accidents by flood and field;

  Of hair-breadth ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach;

  Of being taken by the insolent foe

  And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence,

  And portance in my travel’s history:

  Wherein of antres vast, and deserts idle,

  Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

  It was my hint to speak.

  William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

  13

  Iron-Ore Train to the Adrar

  BORDERS ARE THE GROINS OF NATIONS. IF ALL IS GOING WELL, THEY ARE jammed together like a couple of happy honeymooners. But when the frost sets in … that’s when the chastity belts come out. Kuwait is sealed from Iraq by electrified fencing; India and Pakistan tease each other with silly walks and fanned turbans; Israel holds off Palestinians with 8-metre high slabs of concrete fitted with electric sensors. As for Morocco and Mauritania – bitter rivals since the 1975 war over Western Sahara, routinely shutting down their embassies, accusing each other of supporting their insurrectionists – they watch each other across 3 kilometres of landmined no-man’s-land. Sandblasted truck cadavers, fleeced of their coats by the solar paint stripper, twisted piping and blistered body mouldings: it’s an automobile graveyard. Some of the vehicles have been ripped open by landmines, their gunwales battered out of shape, their dashboards springy with mechanical entrails. Others have been abandoned by frustrated drivers mid-trip (their conditions suggested by flat tyres or bonnets still open for inspection) or dumped out of Morocco to avoid import duties.

  I set out from Dakhla in Iselmu’s Merc, one of four passengers. Palm trees and sand; tyre-grooved pistes; Atlantic breakers sapping the dunes like miners in a siege. At the checkpoints, light sparkled off epaulettes and collar studs and five-point star cap badges. Surrounded by the entropy of so much dead machinery, I could feel my confidence waning – should have got a berth in one of the 4WDs, you fool! – so I was relieved when we rolled onto asphalt at the back of the queue for the border. The cars bottlenecking at the front were shimmering in heat haze, bonnets quivering like jelly, as if the barrier had some supernatural power. A few trucks hovered among them: open-top Isuzus, stocked with freezer compartments to fill up with fish in Nouadhibou.

  Most borders feel artificial, terrier efforts to piss a line on the sand. This one was different. Outside the tin-roofed customs hut, one of my companions took a couple of banknotes out of his wallet and handed them to the clerk, like a cloakroom ticket. He noticed my expression and his lips curled, the wry smile of a veteran.

  ‘This is Africa.’

  Over the coming weeks, I would hear this phrase many times. But what is it? A hardboiled shrug? Submission to pragmatism? A refusal to let dirty reality grind you down?

  The name ‘Africa’ was given by the Romans. It refers to the Afri, a Berber tribe near Carthage. It has also been linked to the Phoenician word for dust. Leo Africanus traces it to ‘the word Faraca, which signifieth … to divide’ or an Arabian king ‘who is said to have been the first that ever inhabited these parts’. Whatever its derivation, there is an emotional heft to the word, lifted by those stressed vowels at either end. It means a thousand things to the people who claim it, but I do wonder if the spell it exerts is benign. What power those three potent syllables hold to pull people back, crushing them on centuries of thwarted hopes, shackling them to the cruel expectations of history.

  Nouadhibou is Mauritania
’s second largest city, although it feels more like a village that keeps going. The lack of tall buildings, the single high street, the young men loitering: here is where the African Wild West begins. I sat in the hotel gatehouse, sipping tea with the security guard. ‘Don’t go on the street,’ he warned, adding in a stagey whisper, ‘Al-Qaeda!’ But I was already cross with myself for not talking more to my neighbours on the car ride.

  Outside, I wandered among men in flowing wide-sleeved boubous, plantain grillers and mobile phone credit sellers. I kept peering over my shoulder, too fresh in Mauritania to be trusting. There was warmth in the people I met, and after an evening of light conversation, snack chats and tea tattle, I was ready to plunge into a part of the journey that had excited me ever since I started planning it.

  As part of their many grand plans for the Sahara, the French colonialists dreamed of a trans-Saharan railway. Steam was at its peak when they spread their conquest, and what better way to underline their authority than by dissecting the desert with tracks and signal points? The idea is irresistible. Sometimes, hugging my knees in buses or shared taxis, I thought wistfully of a railride across the Sahara. The French dream came to nought: investment faltered, profit calculations missed their targets, maritime trade routes were too dominant; and when Colonel Paul Flatters set out to chart a route in 1881, he and his men were slain by Tuareg tribesmen.

  The French did, however, manage to lay 437 miles of track in Mauritania, linking the iron mines in the desert with the Atlantic Coast. The line still runs, conveying ore and supplies, as well as hundreds of passengers who pile into hoppers and cram the single passenger carriage. As a fan of rail travel, I couldn’t wait to give it a try.

  The station was a single hut on the dunes. People camped on suitcases and hessian sacks, rolling them over the sand to get in position. Waiting under the peeling blue plaster, a refuge from the sun, I watched the women presiding over their snack tables – wooden planks set on tyres, loaded with bottles of lukewarm water, packets of biscuits and cheese. A pneumatic-armed vendeuse punctuated her cheery monologue with puffs of squirrely laughter, while a wiry girl, wrapped in gauzy pink, counted the change. Floating behind them was a thick-bearded tea seller, bare chested under a cagoule. He was carrying a brass théière on a tray, pouring glasses from so high up you had to gulp several fingers of froth before you reached fluid – the sign of a really proficient pourer.

  ‘Allaaaah-u akbaaar! God is great!’

  Across the desert, the men gathered to pray, packed together like a wedding photo. Apart from myself, there was only one male who didn’t join them. He was a twentysomething in a stiff-collared shirt, his face long and hollow cheeked, his nose a lordly beak, and I found him talking to one of the snack sellers. The vibe coming off him was haughty, possibly even hostile, but something encouraged me to approach him. I think it was the wing tips on his collar, which were as pointy as the ears of a fennec fox.

  ‘Dhalik al-makan huwa harr li as-salaat!’ I said. ‘That’s a hot spot to pray.’

  His eyes moved right to left: first the top of my head, then my face, all the way down, then back again.

  ‘Isma, listen!’ His voice was low: the sort of tone you’d expect from a fellow seditionist if you were hiding in a cellar waiting to blow up parliament. ‘You must not trust anyone. You understand? You are a white man. It is very dangerous for you.’

  His name was Yisslam and he came from a village in the Adrar, although he wouldn’t tell me its name.

  ‘I am going to watch out for you,’ he said.

  Was this a pledge of protection, or a threat? Before I had a chance to find out, he drifted away, apparently to join the end of the prayers.

  The freight train to Zouerat is an electromotive diesel, constructed to carry up to 84 tonnes of iron ore. Although preparations for the line started in 1940, the standard-gauge track was not laid until the 1960s, so the colonialists reaped little benefit. Negotiations repeatedly broke down with the Spanish to share resources and cut across Western Sahara (proof the colonial powers were just as snarky with each other as African states are today). As a result it is a curious hybrid, a fruit of colonialism that has proven more profitable to the postcolonial state (which has a 78 per cent shareholding). Today, it was scheduled to arrive ‘some time in the afternoon’. We heard its first roar an hour after sunset: a mile and a half of cast-iron wagons on screeching, sparking bogies. Bolts rattled, doors clanked, people hurled themselves against the sheet-metal side.

  According to James Joyce, travelling by train is one of the easiest things in the world: ‘you get into those waggons called railway coaches,’ he wrote to his friend Frank Budgen, ‘which are behind the locomotive. This is done by opening a door and gently projecting into the compartment yourself and your valise.’

  Joyce, of course, never made it to Nouadhibou.

  A man with a hessian sack biffed a small girl out of the way. A woman passed her son through a tiny hatch. A behemoth built like a heavyweight carried his wife over his shoulder like a rag doll, face-palming anyone who came near him on the stepladder. Blinded by torch flash, deafened by the roars of competition, I was resigning myself to failure (would it be safe to spend the night in the station hut? Or should I jump into one of the hoppers, along with some of the other stragglers?) when my wrists were seized and my boots clattered on the edges of the steps.

  ‘You want to sleep on the sand?’ Yisslam hauled me through a mash of shawls and boubous, elbows in our ribs, tails of turbans brushing our ears, and parked me in the train’s only seated compartment. ‘This is Africa – you have to fight!’

  Over the hubbub in the carriage, you could still hear fists slamming at the sides, slowly drowned by the racket of the train’s departure. I was relieved, and a little humbled; I would never have made it under my own steam. Not that Yisslam was claiming any credit: with only one space left in the compartment, he left me there to join the sardines in the corridor.

  I caught up with him later, but first I got to know my neighbours. A veiled lady beside me tried to empty her son’s potty through the window, but the wind was feeling generous and threw it straight back. Perfumed in toddler pee, we did at least all smell the same, and it didn’t stop my neighbour on the opposite plank from asking if I would like to marry his daughter (having softened me up for the deal with some delicious dates and a Winston). My excuse that I hadn’t met her was countered by the presence of a taciturn-looking girl beside him. ‘Look,’ he said, shining his phone light, ‘she is very beautiful – and fat!’ I rallied back that I was already spoken for. But that didn’t deter him either, so I made a tactical retreat to the corridor and sought out Yisslam.

  He was standing in smoke fug and crowd mesh, his mouth plugged to a crack in the window. He reminded me of the caged market sheep in the Middle Atlas, panting in their buyers’ trucks.

  We talked for most of the night, about politics, Hollywood movies, laptop manufacturers, but mostly about money. Yisslam complained about the cost of study books and lessons, the extortions of his landlord in Nouadhibou, the inconsistent rates for electricity and food.

  ‘Everyone wants to cheat,’ he moaned. ‘This is the problem in Africa, everyone wants to screw up everyone else.’

  There was only one cost he didn’t complain about. ‘If you go back to Nouadhibou, you must ask for the Chinese one. She’s the best. But be careful – when they see you are a white man, they will want to charge you double. Actually, it’s better if you don’t go on your own. You will call me and I can take you there.’

  It sounded like a fascinating subject to learn more about, but any further insight would have to make way for refreshment: a tea seller was approaching. He squeezed through the crowd, balancing his glasses with astonishing dexterity. If anyone ever decides to launch a Mauritanian national circus, he’s got to be a shoo-in. While we sipped our lukewarm glasses, another, less welcome figure was circulating, although calling him the ticket inspector makes him sound far more formidable than h
e really was. Sunk in his studded jacket, he looked overwhelmed – not only by the morass of ticketless passengers, but also by his jacket, which was several sizes too big for him.

  ‘Why must I pay him?’ Yisslam thrust his nose at all the limbs entwining us. ‘I must pay for this?’

  The inspector didn’t have the spirit to muster a counter-argument. With each refusal his shoulders sagged a little more and he continued on his way, as if the whole process was some tortuous penance and he couldn’t wait to get to the end.

  Later, I squeezed back into the compartment and huddled down on the boards, inhaling the ammoniac smell of the blown-back potty. Most of the passengers had managed to close their eyes. Snore blasts harmonised with the melody of the couplings and the clacking of the wheels on the joints. How strangely soothing the mantra of a train can be, when all other transport comes off as such a cacophony. I suppose it has to do with the rhyme between train sounds and the human body. Close your eyes and it feels like you’re inside some gentle mother giant, listening to her heartbeat and the pumping of her blood.

  Unfortunately, on this particular train closing your eyes required the sort of concentration I had to apply to the pronunciation of the most awkward Arabic letters. Yisslam’s knees cantilevered under my back and someone’s head rocked against my knees. So distended was the journey – 14 lurching hours, at a speed never more than 30 miles an hour – that by morning I only had the haziest memory of a time when I hadn’t been entangled in this matrix of interlocking bodies. It was as if we had metamorphosed into some kind of giant amoeba from which it required a concentrated effort of will to extract oneself.

  Inside, the train was a contortion of limbs worthy of Hieronymous Bosch. Outside was its opposite: a pale golden void. The colours of boubous and robes, the sparkle of gold teeth and silver necklaces, the hoarse morning cry of newborns and men arguing over deals thrashed out in the dark – they were all pounded to insignificance by the sheer scale of that smooth, untrammelled sand. I tried to count how many freight wagons there were. Standing next to Yisslam on a bank of sand, I made it to 126. Yet against the backdrop of that unimpeded desert, every single one of them was tiny. The train was a caterpillar towing itself through a cornfield.