The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  Except, this wasn’t quite the road to Chinguetti. At a turn-off, the pick-up came to a juddering stop. The bleating of the sheep vocalised their relief: good riddance to Mr Big Fat Intruder.

  ‘Where is Chinguetti?’ I asked the driver.

  He was impatient to be moving on. ‘There!’

  It was only visible after the dust cloud of the truck’s departure had dissolved: a flicker of electric light, 10 miles across the horizon.

  Perhaps a car would stop … I’d meet some tardy 4WDer rushing home for Eid … I’d be invited to a feast! I trudged along the road hopefully, but an hour’s stagger was as much as I could manage. The truth might as well have been scrawled across the sky: your luck’s run out. Banking down in the sand, I opened my backpack to release the boubou Yisslam had given me. It made a pretty decent mattress. With my Moroccan djellaba as a coverlet (the same one I had bought for the camel sacrifice in Fez – there were still a few brown bloodstains on the hem), I lay down for the first of many nights under the stars, praying there wouldn’t be any hungry hyenas doing the rounds tonight. Or vipers. Or deathstalker scorpions. Or bandits.

  I can’t say it was the best night’s sleep I have ever had.

  15

  Libraries in the Sand

  IN JANUARY 1833, AN UNUSUAL VISITOR APPEARED ON THE ROCK OF Gibraltar. His name was Sidi Ahmed and he was (according to the Gibraltar Chronicle and Commercial Intelligencer) ‘the Tributary King of Changuiti’.

  ‘The African King landed’, the report informs us, ‘under a salute, at the Ragged Staff where a Guard of Honour and Band were in attendance.’ Carried around Gibraltar in the Lieutenant-Governor’s official carriage, Sidi Ahmed visited the Grand Arsenal, attended the Guard Mounting on Alameda Parade, and was guest of honour at a soirée held by the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife, as well as a ball at which he ‘expressed his unbounded admiration of the beauty and gracefulness of the ladies’. So warmly was he received that he was reported to declare ‘that Gibraltar was the wonder of the world’.

  The joke was on Gibraltar: Sidi Ahmed was no king. He was just a humble scholar from the Adrar, heading back home after the hajj. Like many Mauritanian scholars, he had been picking up books along the way (in Tunis, the stepson of the Bey gave him more than 60 volumes because Sidi Ahmed said, ‘There is nothing I love better than books’) and he would add his own to the collection: The Pilgrimage of Ahmed, Son of the Little Bird of Paradise. One of the most mercurial travelogues of its period, it spins from audiences with the Sultans of Morocco and Tripoli to encounters with clairvoyants, visits to the tombs of Sufi saints and a pilgrimage to Mecca under the shadow of a plague. Along the way, Sidi Ahmed is visited with bundles of luck (in Cairo, he manages to retrieve his impounded goods from the ‘Tithing House’; in Algiers, his brig is loaded with provisions by the French consul), all of which he attributes to ‘the Baraka of the Messenger of God’ – the blessing necessary for the success of any journey.

  Sidi Ahmed is not unique. That is what makes his story so intriguing: he bears the standard for a wider phenomenon, lifting the lid on the little-known world of Saharan bibliophilia. While in Chinguetti, I hoped for a glimpse of the harvest.

  After a straggle of homesteads half swallowed by sand – iron-domed enclosures with stone walls – a giant sandpit sweeps across the valley. Teetering up the dune are reddish-grey drystone walls, precariously balanced like a giant domino set. Here is Chinguetti, pearl of the Adrar and the seventh most sacred city of Islam, the hub from which pilgrims in the region used to set off on the hajj.

  There was barely a soul knocking about: a girl with a sack of rice on her head, a small boy with a toy car ingeniously made from twisted wires and drink-can cut-outs. A group of 9- and 10-year-olds invited me to join their game. They had a small pile of coins, which they hid under the sand, taking it in turns to strike the sand with their flip-flops. Once the coins had been uncovered, the winner was the one who knocked the coins out first.

  ‘Mabruk, well done!’ they yelled, slapping the sand when – after a dogged run of defeats – I finally emerged triumphant. I decided to retire at my peak, and wandered into the stone maze with their congratulations ringing in my ears.

  I wondered that coins were all they uncovered from a sweep of the sand. I half expected the last sally to reveal the tattered fringe of some ancient manuscript; for Chinguetti is the great library town of the Moors, the place that bears out Leo Africanus’s assertion about their ‘learned professors’ and men ‘devout in religion’.

  ‘The reason we have so many books here’, explained Ahmed Mahmoud, ‘is because of the caravan trade. Thousands of caravans used to pass through, because we are one of the holiest cities in Islam and the chief place on the caravan trail in this part of the desert.’

  Mahmoud was one of the town’s best-known librarians: tidy of beard, high of brow, with the ramrod spine so common among the beidane. I met him by appointment in the doorway of his family’s limestone house, and he led me across the courtyard, holding a block of wood pierced by six nails. It looked like a toothbrush for a steel-fanged giant. It was a suitably mythic key for his collection, which was locked behind a thick acacia door. He jammed the key in the hole and twisted open his ancestral heirloom. Sunlight spread around us like a stain, filling up a tenebrous chamber roofed with palm trunks, as dusty and book crammed as a wizard’s study.

  Chronicles. Quranic commentaries. Grammar books. Works on mathematics and astronomy. Property deeds. Dictionaries. Shelves sagged under lever-arch files, leather portfolios and stuffed manila folders. A large wooden case hovered beside them, containing the showpieces: a goatskin copy of the Hadiths of Bukhari, a crinkly tome by an eighteenth-century Andalusian astrologer, a poetry anthology in which different coloured inks (iron oxide for red, indigo for blue, charcoal for black) indicated the different authors, their verses threading the deckled pages like singers’ voices in a trio. I was standing in a time capsule, peering into an era when books were so precious that a single dictionary could be exchanged for two horses and the average book fetched a higher price than a slave.

  ‘Our family has 700 books in total,’ explained Ahmed. ‘They collected them on hajj or on trading journeys. It was unusual to come back from a journey without something new.’

  It wasn’t nomadism in the pastoral sense, but it followed the same principles: intellectual grazing, coming back to the old watering holes richer than before. What is more, these collections were gathered by men who were trading in salt, camels and other merchandise (in another room at the back of the house, Ahmed showed me camel-milking boards, cassiawood inkpot carriers and amesh-shaghabs for women and children to sit on top of the camels, similar to the ones I saw in Bert Flint’s house in Marrakesh). Books were one precious feature among the many traded across the desert.

  Over several days in Chinguetti I visited many of its libraries: drystone homesteads where the termite-nibbled tomes looked like cabbage patches after a caterpillar rampage. The guardians were used to visitors, so they had an eye for quirks and celebrities: a Quran written by ostrich feather; judicial scrolls kept in bamboo stalks; a fourteenth-century astronomy tome that shows Arabic scientists engaging with a heliocentric solar system two centuries before Copernicus; a volume of verse elegies to the Prophet, recited by an egg-headed custodian in a voice as low and musty as the shelves from which he picked out the book.fn1 Although the dryness of the desert has helped to preserve the paper, few of the books have survived without blemish. The edges of the pages were jagged, the binding wax dry, the leaves as brittle as onionskin. The books were like Chinguetti itself, battered and sunk in the desert sands, barely surviving against the odds, its character intact even if its hinges are loose.

  In his Pilgrimage, Sidi Ahmed tells of his encounter with the Sultan of Morocco. Asked ‘Is there scholarship in your land?’ he replies: ‘My lord, all the sciences are to be found there, both exegesis and principles of law, logic and rhetoric and the study of Arabic, its grammar a
nd its rules and its syntax.’ This could be taken as a catalogue for the genres contained in Chinguetti’s family libraries.

  What both the Pilgrimage and the libraries underline is that intellectual pursuits have never been exclusive to urban living. Al-Mutannabi, the classical Arab poet, honed his craft among the Bedouin of the Syrian desert; Ibn Khaldun wrote his Muqaddimah in a mountain cave. In Mauritania, for centuries itinerant teachers have moved along the pasture trails, integrating Sufi tariqas with the nomad encampments. As the nineteenth-century Saharan scholar Mohammed Wuld Buna sang, ‘We have taken the back of she-camels as a school where we expiate God’s religion.’ Deserts have long been famous as places for contemplation and intellectual retreat; Chinguetti reminds us they can be hives of scholarship as well.

  I stayed in Chinguetti for a week, taking a mud-walled room in a guest-less guesthouse, where sand lapped at the painted camel on the façade, swallowing it up to the knees. I wandered between the drystone houses in the old town, chatted to boubou sellers and store owners, who sat below lonely shelves of Weetabix and Casa Italia peas, and I marvelled as my underwear steam-dried in the sun in a matter of seconds.

  When I wasn’t burrowing into the book collections, I went on trips around the Adrar. A cameleer called Ghazi, who was friends with the hotel owner, took me out for a couple of days. Riding a snarling bull-camel, whose grunting sounded like Chewbacca with a poker up his arse, I crested sharp-ridged seif (‘sword’) dunes, leaning back on the downhill runs. Bouncing to the camel’s grumblings, shuddering when his narrow legs jackhammered on the crusty hammada, I thought longingly of Naksheh, the lovely camel I had ridden out of Timbuktu.

  One morning, we hobbled the dromedaries near an old French fort at the Amougjar Pass. The odd skeletal bush groped the black rock as if to suck out the minerals, and crag martins made careful study of the gaps between them. Above a locked gate, we levered ourselves over a limestone bluff, and dropped in on an astonishing menagerie.

  There were horned cattle, an antelope, even a spotty giraffe. Inches from my fingers, a lion swung its tail and a crocodile snapped its jaws. They were Neolithic portraits, fashioned out of mineral pigments and animal fat, so pale in parts, absorbed by the crust and colouring of the bruised rock face, they seemed to be emanations of nature. It was as if we were witnessing the mountain’s dreams – or, more precisely, its memories – bleeding to the surface.

  Although not on the scale of the Sahara’s most celebrated rupestral art (such as Tassili N’Ajjer in Algeria or the Cave of Swimmers in the Gilf Kebir), they articulate the same point. As Lloyd Cabot Briggs wrote in Tribes of the Sahara, ‘Long, long ago, during the prehistoric ages before the dawn of written history, the Sahara was very different from what it is today, for much of it was fertile and relatively thickly populated.’ Oak, elm and alder furred the mountaintops, bone harpoons were fashioned to catch freshwater fish and mud-turtle shells enthroned tribal chiefs. A shift in the earth’s orbit, the melting of glaciers in northern Europe and the subsequent retreat of the monsoon rains withered the landscape, already pressurised by large, voracious herds. It was in the wake of these dramatic climactic changes that nomadism became the primary mode of survival, and the sedentary black populations fell under the lordship of horse-riding and cattle-droving tribesmen – the ancestors of the Berbers.

  ‘Ajib,’ said Ghazi, his leathery face swinging across his rounded shoulders. ‘A wonder.’ The same word Yisslam’s grandmother had used for Chinguetti. When we left, he pressed a cheek to the rock, as if to kiss it.

  I saw the rock paintings as something ancient and remote, almost magical in their antiquity. But for Ghazi, I think, their importance was mnemonic. They reminded him this area was not always so arid. That, even in his own parents’ lifetimes, the land around Chinguetti had been kinder. Sitting in a grove of date palms, making our evening fire, Ghazi told me about the drought that brought that time to an end – the nightmare of the 1960s and 1970s, when Saharan nomads lost their last foothold on prosperity.

  ‘I was not born at this time,’ he said. ‘But my father and grandfather told me about it. There were many different kinds of grass and we had hundreds of camels. Life was so much easier then. Now we cannot say we even have 20 camels.’

  The drought was a blitzkrieg, stripping thousands of nomadic families of their animals. There have been other droughts in more recent years, as the Sahara continues to suffer the effect of increased greenhouse gases and associated feedback mechanisms, but none has been as devastating as the drought of 1968–74.fn2 Globally, it was the worst drought of the twentieth century, killing around 100,000 people through famine and disease, and slashing livestock numbers by at least a third.

  ‘I know many people who lost all their herd,’ said Ghazi. ‘Not in a year – in just a few days. Even now it is happening. When there is no rain and people lose their animals, some of them go to the town and take work in a shop, or they go to Zouerat to work in the mines. And usually, they don’t come back to the desert.’

  Statistics bear out what Ghazi was telling me: the decline of nomadism in Mauritania is one of the most dramatic in the world. At the dawn of independence in 1960, 85 per cent of the population was nomadic; by 2000 that figure had slumped to less than 6 per cent. Like any demographic mutation, it is an amalgam of different factors – the loosening of the tribal system under the French administration; the development of a bureaucratic class; the growth of the agricultural and mining industries. Arguably, the abolition (or more accurately, reduction) of slavery has had an impact too, preventing nomads from exploiting free labour for food. Yet the drought is paramount among all these factors, one of those periodic events when nature bares its teeth and shows how deep it can bite.

  From the Neolithic to the nineteenth century: another day took me with a cold drinks merchant to Ouadane, one of the most historically significant towns on the plateau. We rolled across plains the colour of burnt umber, shadowed by tangerine cliffs and the vermiculated wings of falcons. It was a furnace world, where valleys misted in the distance and pools of watery light glistened near the ground; and when we stuck our hands out of the windows, we could feel the same dragons-breath winds that sculpted surreal fan shapes on the crests of the cliffs.

  Built over an oasis of green sward and date palms, Ouadane’s walled town cascaded into the valley, biscuity and piecemeal, like ‘a colony of barnacles on the bottom of an upturned boat’.fn3 It is a genuine ruin, uninhabited among the arches and watchtowers of its old town, arranged by archaeologists in tantalising patterns that hint at the lives once lived there. It was founded in 1141 by a group of religious scholars, after whom its most famous street is named. I walked down this crumbly alley, ‘the Street of Forty Scholars’, peering inside the drystone huts. Palm trunks straddled pits that functioned as toilets; triangular niches signified dressers. Now, the principal inhabitants are rock hyraxes and ruminants who have marked their territory with dung; but a couple of centuries earlier, that wonderful scholar Sidi Ahmed (the ‘son of the little bird of paradise’) lived along this street. I sat down in one of the houses and imagined him here, poring through the books he had amassed on his travels, scribbling the tales of his Pilgrimage.

  That night in Ouadane was one of my wildest so far. I was staying at another guest-less guesthouse. The owner, Zayda, invited me to join her and some of her friends for the evening – they were off to a wedding. We rattled into the old town and joined the crowd gathering in the floodlit courtyard of a large stone house.

  A band of roaming, hereditary musicians (members of the iggawen caste) set down a couple of goblet drums and plugged their electric guitars into a generator, while the yard bubbled with blue and white boubous and a rainbow’s spectrum of headscarves. As the night progressed, the music swelled, hypnotising the crowd with its coaxing measures. Men quivered at the edges, eyes on stalks and arms in loops. Women’s hips jerked and swayed, wrists and elbows tracing elegant shapes in air that prickled with henna and perfume, sc
arves melting in the glare of the downlights, like thumb prints on sand-coloured card. It reminded me of the dancing at Yisslam’s camp on the night before Eid: it was the women who performed, while the men’s role was mainly to watch.

  The musicians made up for the inactivity of their sex. One of them was playing a tidinit, a Moorish lute with four strings and a soundboard made of sheepskin. Raw notes thrumbled, pegged to the beat of the drums … deeper, louder, growlier … a song of exaltation and celebration … inflamed and sexy and sweating with life. At the climax, the lead singer strutted like a Moorish Mick Jagger, jamming the microphone to his crotch, pumping his pelvis in fast spasmodic wrenches, drawing enough trills and screams to drown a hen night with the Chippendales.

  ‘Mmmmm …’ Zayda made a diffident moue on the way back. ‘Actuellement, c’était trop tranquille ce soir.’

  The plateau may be dry – in every sense – but its people sure know how to party.

  The School for Nomads

  Lesson Five: Study and Play

  ‘YUSUF! OH, YUSUF, YOU NEED TO KEEP STILL! DON’T MOVE, YUSUF! KEEP still!’

  Abdul-Hakim and his friends are conducting an experiment: they have found a scarab beetle and they are taking turns to set it down in the sand, trying to predict whose legs it will pass under. I feel like a croquet hoop.