The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  We were on a granite spur of the Adrar (‘the mountains’), a tableland of dunes and sandstone cliffs that spawned the Almoravids and raised caravan towns on the trans-Saharan trade route, luring Portuguese merchants as early as the fifteenth century and holding off the French throughout most of the nineteenth. I jumped alongside Yisslam into a Toyota Hilux, carving a path through the dust to Choum, a warren of mud-brick houses and children skipping with broken wires. I was figuring on some haggling time to fix a ride to Atar, the regional hub; but Yisslam reeled me back from the drivers with a curved finger.

  ‘You will stay with me.’ His tone suggested less an invitation than a carefully studied forecast.

  Conical thatched huts mushroomed between jaundiced tufts of grass on hard rocky hammada. Open-shirted officers leaned out of checkpoint huts, their hands embedded in bowls of rice and goat offal. We arrowed between the high grey cliffs of a gorge where vegetation flashed momentarily, a squall of green, before reverting to the greys and browns of the crusty hammada and the halogen gleam of shell-rock. We were up in the highlands now, where scarps scissor the plains into broad sandstone plateaus, curdled like overcooked custard.

  ‘You know we have our festival tomorrow?’ asked Yisslam.

  Back in Fez, my friend Najib had invited me to join his family for Eid. I would have loved to take up the invitation, but I had to keep an eye on the calendar. To spend Eid with a family after all – what a prospect! Although, when I asked Yisslam about his background, he was curiously unresponsive. He spoke only in broad terms, informing me he was a beidane, a ‘White Moor’.

  ‘We are the chief people of Mauritania.’ He flicked a finger towards one of the huts, pointing out a couple of darker-skinned men standing nearby. ‘You see, those are haratines (Black Moors), they are not as handsome as us, or as clever.’

  He might be haughty, but I was delighted to be in the company of a Moor. They were the main reason I was visiting Mauritania – the land of the ‘Mauri’, or Moors. Although the term ‘Moor’ is associated with colonial identity labels (their own term beidane simply means ‘white’), there were people calling themselves Mauri back in Roman times. They were the Berber tribespeople who dominated northwest Africa when the Romans invaded, mentioned in Strabo’s first-century Geographica and the ‘obnoxia Mauris’ of Calpurnius’s Eclogues. Sometimes vassals of the Empire, sometimes allies of Carthage, they kept their independence when military means allowed, succumbing only sporadically to Arab rule.

  These days, a ‘Moor’ is typically a Hassaniya Arabic speaker of Berber extraction, mostly confined to Mauritania (with small populations in Mali, Morocco and Senegal) and living further south than the ancient Mauris. But the term has been used more widely in the past. Employed as a catch-all for the Arabic-speaking populations of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, it has been applied to philosophers and thinkers like Averroes, Ibn Tufail and of course Leo Africanus, whose adventuring and cultivated reputation may have inspired the most famous Moor of all (at least, from the perspective of Western literature): that ‘honourable murderer’, Othello.

  Before Shakespeare’s extraordinary tragedy made its debut in 1604, representation of Moors in English culture had been one-dimensional, ‘black in his look, and bloody in his deeds’. So why did Shakespeare invest Othello with so much depth and nuance? ‘We have still’, wrote the literary scholar Lois Whitney, ‘to explain not only the simplicity, frankness, and nobility of the character of Othello in spite of his sudden fit of passionate jealousy, but the whole colourful background of Othello’s past: his connection with “men of royal siege”, his wanderings from country to country that made it possible for Roderigo to describe him as “an extravagant and wheeling stranger Of here and everywhere”; his conversion to Christianity; and his captivity and “most disastrous chances”. Is there any source for all this? I think there is.’

  In 1600, three years before Shakespeare wrote Othello, John Pory’s English translation of Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa was published in London. Like Othello, Leo was captured, sold into slavery and later converted to Christianity. Like the Moors in Leo’s account, Othello is ‘valiant’, but also ‘credulous’, ‘proud and high-minded’ and, ‘by reason of jealousy’, Leo tells us (like a plot spoiler at the Globe Theatre), ‘you may see [the Moors] daily one to be the death and destruction of another’. Given that Leo was known to so many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (Ben Jonson references him in his Masque of Blackness), the bard’s voracious reading and his familiarity with Richard Hakluyt (the preeminent Elizabethan publisher of exotic travel narratives, who encouraged Pory to translate Leo from the Italian), it is highly probable that Shakespeare was familiar, in some form, with Leo’s Description.

  Yet there is a significant difference. Leo’s account of the ‘white, or tawny Moors’ is much more complimentary than Shakespeare’s rash hero. They are ‘steadfast in friendship,’ he tells us, ‘as likewise they indifferently and favourably esteem of other nations, and wholly endeavour themselves in this one thing; namely, that they may lead a most pleasant and jocund life. Moreover, they maintain most learned professors of liberal arts, and such men are most devout in their religion. Neither is there any people in all Africa that lead a more happy and honourable life.’

  Remembering Leo’s description, I thanked God for my luck (or, as it would be defined locally, my baraka, the divine blessing necessary to all travellers). Bring on the pleasantness! Sprinkle me with jocundity! Basalt ran down the sandstone cliffs, as if molten pitch had spilled down the fissures. The huts behind them were dwarfed by geology: bungalows of mud, squatting in swamps of sand. I climbed down behind Yisslam, wondering what kind of home a modern-day Moor might have.

  We were standing in a film set for the Book of Genesis. Granted, there were no cameras or dolly tracks or clapperboards, but in all other respects it was perfect. In a rocky combe stripped of all but the last few tufts of bleached grass, around 400 livestock were holding pow-wows with high-pitched bleats and whines. Men in dust-stained robes leaped out of pick-up trucks and 4WDs, picking out the healthiest-looking animals and handing over 20,000 ouguiya (about €50) per beast. There were no tea marquees, no walls to pen the herds behind, no contracts. It made the livestock market in the Middle Atlas look like a state-ofthe-art department store.

  ‘My driver will meet us here.’ Yisslam scanned the scene with narrowed eyes. ‘But he is late.’

  There was reason for his impatience: the plumpest of the goats had already been snaffled. When his driver arrived at last – tall and bow-legged, dust spilling from his turban – they set to work at once. Gliding down the hillside, they grabbed a pair of legs each, slinging the fattest goat they could find into the back of a pick-up. Particularly close attention was paid to the pendulous scrotum and the rigidity of the ears. Four animals were secured, under the watch of a boy with a swollen lip, before the introductions were made.

  ‘This is Abidine.’ Yisslam slung an arm across the tall man’s shoulder. ‘He is my slave.’

  The man who brushed his hand against mine was beaming, a single yellow tooth poking from his gummy mouth, a look of laid-back warmth in his small dark eyes. He was a member of a notorious club – half a million Mauritanians still in bondage (the highest per capita slave population in the world). Abidine’s family had been retainers to Yisslam’s for so long that neither could tell how many generations were spanned. Yisslam tipped his head back – an instruction to get moving – and Abidine swung over to the driver’s seat.

  The relationship between white and black (definitions that draw on ancestry more than appearance) is a knotty feature of Mauritania’s modern history. Although French armies marched across the Adrar, the colons only made a superficial impression on the area’s long-standing social structures. Administering the colony from the comfort of Senegal, unable to impose agriculture on a land dominated by rocky plateaus and sand dunes, they never dug as deep as in their other African colonies.

  As a
result, Mauritania was an exception to the prevailing postcolonial rule: it was the traditionally nomadic beidane who held the reins of power, and for more than half a century, despite increasing sedentarisation, they haven’t let go. Of nine heads of state, only one has been black, and he was an interim president who held the post for just four months.

  Nevertheless, events outside the corridors of power suggest a popular will to break this status quo. In 1979, discrimination against blacks in government posts led to widespread unrest and the fall of Colonel Ould Salek. A decade later, a dispute over grazing rights on the Senegal river unleashed a storm of bloodshed (characterised by shootings, arson attacks and several beheadings) and a blitz of oppression from the Mauritanian government, leading to a population shift of around 170,000 people. More recently, in 2011, seven black protesters were shot in a march about citizenship rights. In Mauritania’s hierarchical, Manichean system, race remains a tinderbox. Yet what made the relationship between beidane and haratine (former slaves, many of whom continue to work for their ‘masters’ on terms little changed from those imposed on their ancestors) so disturbing to me was the lack of antagonism; the phlegmatic acceptance. Colour-coordinated social status was so deeply entrenched that I found myself questioning my own right to evaluate it.

  We rattled over to Yisslam’s pied-à-terre: a mud-brick hut squatting in a yard where the sand was so high it blocked the door and had to be cleared. Abidine and the boy with the split lip crouched around the doorway, shovelling the sand with their hands. It was going to take a while, so I stepped forward to help. I think I made it about halfway across the yard before I found myself stalling. I still don’t understand why I couldn’t move. It felt like an invisible wall, a barrier mortared by anxiety … a fear of displeasing my host … cowardice, I suppose. I was conscious of being an alien, in a culture I had scarcely begun to know. But how I wish – when I think back to that moment – how I wish I could have broken down that invisible wall and got down in the dirt with Yisslam’s slaves.

  Inside the hut, sunlight swamped a cellophane window, fuzzing the air around the boy with the swollen lip. He never spoke, and when I thanked him for the tea, he kept his eyes resolutely on the mat. It was a wonderful glass – generously frothed and poured from an astonishing height. I never heard him speak. Yisslam moved across him, received a glass from him, but never acknowledged him. It was only when we were leaving that the boy looked up. His eyes were limpid, grey-brown pools, impossible to read because I never knew him; but I can still see them, gleaming with what I think was an unsatisfied curiosity.

  We boarded the pick-up truck to drive to Yisslam’s village. The boy strapped a couple of plastic water bidons over the running board to collect the overflow from the radiator, and lowered himself into the back with the goats. Whenever we stopped, I turned and looked his way; but he was well trained and didn’t lift his eyes again. Abidine’s status was more ambiguous. He had his own house (a ‘gift’ from Yisslam’s family) and was not required to show deference all the time. When we climbed out of the car for breaks, he dusted the sand from Yisslam’s cloak; but he also took cigarettes from Yisslam’s pack without needing to ask; and when his master made a joke, he low-fived him as loudly as a boon companion. He drove with his turban tucked over his nose to keep out the dust and his left foot, bare and bunioned, slung over the lip of the window. It was a posture that would have given me aches and pains for weeks, but Abidine was clearly well used to it.

  Slavery has been active in West Africa for centuries, if not millennia. Still rife in Mauritania and Mali, the trade has a devious capacity to evolve and adapt. Not every slave is aware of their rights. As a campaigner for Anti-Slavery International told me before my trip, ‘It can be very hard for slaves psychologically. They have to break the chains themselves, otherwise they can never be free.’

  Religious tradition offered justification for apologists: the sin of Ham, whose descendants were traditionally cursed with blackness after he saw his father Noah naked and drunk. Ibn Khaldun dismissed this argument in a forceful passage in the Muqaddimah,fn1 but that did not shake the idea off its stubborn perch; and for those seeking alternative justifications, others were available. ‘You know’, wrote Ahmad Baba in the sixteenth century, ‘that the cause of enslavement is unbelief … whoever is enslaved in a state of unbelief may rightly be owned.’

  Leo Africanus sheds some light on the practicalities of the trans-Saharan slave trade, enumerating the value accorded to black slaves in inventories of tribute. In Bornu, you would need 15–20 slaves to cover the price of a horse; but by the time they had crossed the Sahara, they had earned a little VAT. Inventorying the tribute sent to Fez by a prince of the Drâa valley, Leo tells us male and female slaves retailed at ‘twenty ducats a piece’, compared to 50 for a camel. Even at their most costly, slaves were rarely considered more precious than a manuscript, or a bar of salt.

  The numbers of the medieval slave trade are hard to estimate, but they were sufficiently gargantuan for Ibn Batutta to be unfazed by a caravan with 600 female slaves in the fourteenth century. By the time René Caillié crossed the desert half a millennium later, slave raiding was on the wane, although he saw plenty of slaves on his travels and was appalled by the treatment of the child slaves: ‘Exhausted by their sufferings and their lamentations, those unhappy creatures fell on the ground, and seemed to have no power to rise; but the Moors did not suffer them to continue there long when travelling. Insensible to the sufferings which childhood is so little fitted to support, these barbarians dragged them along with violence, beating them incessantly, till they had overtaken the camels.’ These days it is rare to witness such public abuse, and the most vicious treatment tends to take place in the walled confinement of cities. The term ‘slave’ drips with so much emotional baggage that many anthropologists insist on using more specific local terminology. I would discover more about slavery in Mali, and the more I learned, the murkier the subject appeared.

  We were driving along the Adrar escarpment, flanked by scrub desert where acacias and balanites offered intermittent shade. Knuckles of granite gripped the plain, grouted with sand, while desert larks skittered over the scrub in search of insects, and the pointy ears of a fennec poked out of a narrow dugout. People were scarce, although the odd low-lying tent grazed the sky. So even without such bright clothing, the hitchhikers would have stood out. They were waiting under the raggedy parasol of a balanite, he in a white suit as shiny as sharkskin, she in a multicoloured headdress decorated with coins. Recently married, they were on their way to celebrate Eid in his family’s tent. The man looked really proud. When they disembarked a couple of miles down the road, I guessed why from the way his wife’s hand curled over her stomach.

  Soon after that, we left the blacktop. Rock jolted the wheels and played havoc with the suspension. You could hear the scraping of thorns and the rattle of acacia branches whipping the gunwales. There was only one way for Abidine to make progress: fly with open throttle, gripping the steering wheel with all his might. A couple of times, I thought we might topple. Once, we slid over the edge of a well. The window beside me was jammed open, so I was stung by the sun, lashed by gusts and pelted by dust at the same time (Abidine had to use the windscreen wipers to clear his view), but thanks to the mesmerising sight ahead, it was possible to ignore all that.

  Tapering skywards in the windscreen was a jagged black pyramid. Sand cascaded around its base in smooth glassy cliffs, under fluted walls of coppery rock and lone-standing yardangs that provided lookout posts for falcons. It would be an exaggeration to compare Mount Zarga to the great wonders of the earth, but it had something of their brute majesty – a landform you could revere.

  Yisslam had said little about the village, insisting: ‘You will find your answers when we arrive.’ But I had naively assumed, when he spoke of a village, that he meant a place with houses. It was only now that I realised …

  Squatting ahead of us, webbed with rope, ringed with thorny palisades, w
ere dozens of tents. They were black and peaked, as if in homage to the mount. Goats loitered between them, feeding out of bisected car tyres. All that talk of laptops and movies and Chinese prostitutes had misdirected me. Without even being aware of it, I had stumbled on an invitation to a nomad encampment!

  We pulled up beside one of the tents. Around 30 logs, some forked, others bent to form arches, lifted a roof of stitched goatskins. Rugs and palm-reed mats stretched across the ground, ridged with utensils – a steel bowl with a sieve on top, a pile of lambskin blankets, a Dunlop tennis ball tube filled with herbs. More tools and bric-à-brac hung above us, from a pair of trestles lashed by leather thongs. Seen from a distance, you might have sketched the dwelling with three straight lines. Close up, it was an intricately layered hive.

  Several women were sitting inside the tent, gathered round a kettle. The younger ones had knotted plastic around their fingers to protect their henna decorations. At their centre was a moon-faced woman with dark tattooed lips, in a full red gown, presiding over a double-tiered tray with a bag of tea leaves and several thimble-shaped glasses. Given her posture and position, I assumed she must be important, but I was still taken by surprise when Yisslam introduced her.

  ‘Mr Nicholas,’ he announced, ‘this is my wife.’

  14

  Dancing with Nomads

  SOME LESSONS ARE SO PARTICULAR YOU CAN NEVER USE THEM OUTSIDE of their immediate context; others are adaptable all over the world. Among the nomads of North Africa, one lesson had a wider application than any other. No wonder it was one of the first lessons Lamina had taught me. Because, until you have this string to your bow, how can you even call yourself an apprentice? Now was my opportunity to show what I had learned.