The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

There are plenty of other games. We play a version of Connect Four, with divots in the sand and counters of camel dung. We kneel to watch dung beetles processing a donkey turd, like state employees tidying up for a presidential visit. We pass my compass like a ‘hot potato’ and play variations of peekaboo (for which our turbans are well designed). Abdul-Hakim is having a super time, mucking about with his cousins, whooping and arm wrestling and looking for animal tracks. Occasionally, Jadullah warns him to keep his voice down. Later, Lamina calls him over to help with the baggage. His head sinks a little under his shoulders, but his father rubs his head and they stand together for a moment, molten to a single silhouette. It is impossible to tell whose hands are untying the knots.

  We are staying with a kinsman of Lamina’s called Salih, who wears a double-breasted woollen jacket over his djellaba, pioneering a look that could be branded ‘Saharan Piccadilly’. There are a couple of chickens, a troop of goats, two boys with spiky mohawks and amulets around their necks, and a headscarved wife with jauntily bare shoulders. She approaches me when I’m digging out my diary and shows me a Mauritanian banknote. ‘Do you have this?’ Her expression is flat, the lines so tight around her eyes it’s impossible to guess her age. Later, as we are about to leave, I put a couple of banknotes beside her, and the look of gratitude on her face is heart-breaking.

  The children are fascinated by anything I pull out of my pack: my diary, my phone, a compass with a verse by Robert Burns inscribed on the base. It was a present for my trip, but I try not to look at it when I’m with other people. It makes me float a little out of my journey, imagining the features I long for: soft brown hair tickling my cheeks, eyes so close I can drink up their blueness, and a voice I can only hear on the crackling, irregular line in town. The children take it in turns to hold the compass; they tap the dome and place it against their ears like a seashell. I try to play along, but looking at it makes me grumpy, so after a while I put it away.

  How easy it is to get swept away by the outdoorsy freedom of nomadic life. I hear no tiffs between Abdul-Hakim and his cousins. I think of panicky op-eds in British newspapers about hyperactive attention deficit disorders, neuroscientific research about chemical imbalance, outbursts against computer games, laments to the death of nature walks. Hardly problems for parents to worry about round here; and nobody can say these kids are missing out on Vitamin D.

  I think of my own childhood on the edge of a wood in Hertfordshire. Running between gnarled oaks, turning their branches into climbing frames. Decorating stones and sticks, and the oddest-shaped objects my brother and I could forage, pitting them in a long-running adventure with a tribe of mischievous plants. Nomad children like Abdul-Hakim are basking in nature, literate in the languages of tracking and star mapping, as multilingual as Dr Doolittle. If camping outdoors is one of the treats of childhood, these are surely children to envy.

  Moments with children in the Sahel. Throwing stones at a jujube tree with Fulani kids in the bush, each falling fruit as thrilling as a goal. Climbing out of a canoe on a holm in the Niger, to the boggle-eyed dancing of boisterous Bozos. Watching a Tuareg boy sitting on a dune in Timbuktu, pretending to ride a camel, holding a couple of rice straws for reins.

  It would be disingenuous to say nomad children miss nothing from a structured education (and for this reason, schools have been built in many of the larger fixed camps). There are choices they will never have, ideas they will never learn. Nobody who loves books can truly envy a child who is unlikely to have meaningful access to the pleasure of reading. And the number of protective amulets some of them are wearing (one of Salih’s boys has three leather pouches slung over his chest) reminds me they have limited recourse to scientific medicine. Yet hanging out with Abdul-Hakim and his cousins does make me wonder.

  I remember a study I’ve read, conducted in 2005 by the anthropologist Elliot Fratkin in northern Kenya. Among the communities he visited, Fratkin concluded that the nomadic children enjoyed significant advantages over their sedentary neighbours, because of their access to fresh milk and a cleaner environment. As a result, they had lower rates of malnutrition and stunting, diaorrhea and respiratory illness. But this was mitigated by the sedentary children’s access to health care, food security, education and physical security. It is hard to know which way the scales truly tip.

  The advantage of a rural childhood is a theme in one of Arab literature’s most enduring tales: the philosophical fable of Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan, written in the twelfth century. Hayy (whose name means ‘Awake, Son of Alive’) grows up on a desert island, raised by a gazelle. When his foster mother dies, he dissects her body, performing an accurate autopsy and setting off on a journey of ‘scientific speculation’. Although he is a little confused to note that he doesn’t have gazelle horns of his own, he slowly teases out the answers to his questions, from the cultivation of plants and the tending of animals to more ‘sublunary’ matters; all without any need for language. When his travels carry him to the city, he is shocked to learn that most men ‘are like irrational animals’, driven by ‘riches to collect, pleasures to partake of, lusts to satisfy’. Spurning their materialism, he determines to return to his desert island and ‘his previous sublime station’.

  The story was written by an Andalusian vizier called Ibn Tufail. Iconic in the Arab-speaking world, it has also had a huge impact in the West, where it is cited as an early Bildungsroman and an influence on Robinson Crusoe. Yet there is a telling difference. Daniel Defoe’s hero is a townsman surviving outside the protective shell of civilisation. Hayy is coming from the other side: a feral child nurtured at nature’s bosom. For Ibn Tufail, education is subjective, depending on the individual’s ‘natural curiosity to look for the truth of things’.

  ‘It should be known’, writes Ibn Khaldun, ‘that the storehouse of human science is the soul of man. In it, God has implanted perception enabling it to think and, thus, to acquire.’ The tale of Hayy gives fictional expression to this idea, which is borne out by the sparky curiosity of nomad children like Abdul-Hakim.

  I am getting into the routine: our twilight departures, riding across the plains, gentle conversations around the evening fire, the childlike pleasure of life under the stars. Life feels purer, stripped of clutter and distractions. Perhaps Roger Deakin put his finger on it when he wrote, ‘There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in … a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.’

  I am always ready to sleep as soon as the opportunity comes – exhausted mentally as much as physically, from the linguistic challenges and all the lessons I am trying to absorb: strapping the luggage, hobbling the camels, tying the ropes around their legs (always keeping yourself behind to avoid a lethal kick), fastening the rope inside the camel’s mouth, tight over the gums, locked with a small twig under the chin.

  Today, we set off well before sunset, so I have a good opportunity to see the land we are crossing. Bunchgrass and mimosa show up like smudges on a sheet of paper. Sometimes the wind thickens and sky and sand interfuse in a wheezy brown haze, before cleaving, allowing us to continue. It is hardly the glorious desert promised by Hollywood – Tatooine’s golden swathes or Lawrence’s sculpted barchans. Rugged, unpristine, this is an honest desert that few would bother to photograph.

  Eventually, Jadullah calls out. He has spotted a tent. He calls it an imbar, as opposed to the khaymah we stayed in last night. An armature tent, built around a frame, it pokes the sky like a lone tooth in an elder’s mouth. It looks only a short trot away. But we still haven’t reached it an hour later. Its promise of rest and food tantalises, like a neon-lit motel on the brink of a highway.

  ‘Who lives there?’ I ask.

  A rattle of laughter: something has tickled Lamina.

  ‘Oh, Yusuf, tonight is a special one for you, God willing!’

  We gallop into an ashy tunnel of dusk. Trying to keep up with the others, I dig my heels into Naksheh’s flanks, slapping the reins against his neck, li
ke a cowboy. The wind lashes our sides, raising will-o’-the-wisps around the camels’ hooves. The sand churns beneath us.

  At last, we couch and climb up a dune. A stooped, raggedy figure emerges from an awning of goatskins. His face is cracked and mottled, his chin filigreed with light beard like fonio grass, his eyes sunk in deep-ribbed sockets. He looks at least a hundred years old.

  ‘I praise God a thousand times! Oh, what a blessing! God is great, God is great, God is great! Truly, this is a blessing! God is great, God is great, God is great!’

  We have arrived at the home of Lamina’s chatterbox cousin, the mercurial Ismail.

  Part Six

  Urban Nomads

  The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

  16

  Fishing and F***ing

  LOW SLUNG AND DUST CHOKED, NOUAKCHOTT HAD THE ATMOSPHERE OF an open-air warehouse, spiced with the reek of sewage and cooked fuel. I stayed for a few days, revelling in the luxury of a guidebook-recommended, French-run hostel. A guard toted his machine gun at the gate; the storekeeper suggested the best insect repellent; a concierge printed out routemaps under a smoothly reeling fan. Rocking on a wicker chair in a yard that smelled of freshly watered bougainvillea, I chatted to a French couple I’d bumped into weeks earlier, queuing for visas in Rabat. Like most of the guests, they were shiny and happy and on their way to the beaches of Senegal.

  ‘Allez-vous au Mali?’ The girl puckered her lips in disapproval. ‘Ouf! You must go by plane, it’s too dangerous to cross the desert.’

  ‘Don’t you know about the jihadists?’ asked her boyfriend.

  ‘Oh, I’ll just take the bus.’ I made breezy, laissez-faire strokes in the air. I was sure I was very convincing. ‘I figure the jihadists won’t attack the locals, so it should be fine really.’

  But as I spoke, the incredulity in their faces became airborne. I could feel their doubts breaking through my defences like a germ.

  Anxiety makes its nest in the belly. It stretches its claws across the stomach and pulls everything tight around itself, like a rodent keeping itself warm. I needed a distraction – and what better way to relax than an afternoon at the seaside?

  Slewing past a string of brick depots, a taxi rattled along dusty unpaved lanes where men were kneeling to pray outside their shops and women in shimmering dresses were balancing trays of mullet on their heads. The salty breeze did the job of signposts, guiding us through the wreckage of Nouakchott’s outskirts, towards a bustling market on the last dune before the sea.

  What a wonderful place! The Port de Pêche is Whitstable meets Brighton Pier, boiled in the pith of Africa. Red mullet spilled out of a pick-up truck, dribbling over the gunwales, while men in sweat-stained vests heaved it through the golden sand, bannered in a smell of tar and fish scales. Women in cotton prints flashed past bearded men in grand boubous orchestrating the sales. There were so many vivid colours in the pure, gloopy light before dusk that I sat there mesmerised, like a toddler bewitched by Teletubbies or Tombliboos.

  Along the strand, women were chatting and haggling over sardines on sand-furred nets. Behind them was a band of rippled mercury, hardening near the horizon to fresh-cast lead. I edited the sun with a hand on my brow; the glare slid back, revealing a row of dinghies, flaking rinds of ebonywood, like babouche slippers fashioned for Brobdingnagians. Men with brine-cured faces shouldered them against the tug of the tide, like Lilliputian workmen. Veterans clambered over the prows and tightrope-walked down the hulls. Apprentices waded in the shallows, towing the nets back to shore, skipping over salty turf and bladderwrack.

  ‘Hey, blanc, you want to join us?’

  Mohammed was a 21-year-old fisherman, his bare, drum-tight chest varnished by seawater and sweat. His face wore the serene calm of recent activity, lips pouting around a tooth-cleaning stick. He sat on a hummock of seashells, telling me about his latest trip – working the lines for a week, poling south towards Senegal.

  ‘Are your arms tired?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m used to it.’

  He shrugged, picking a soggy pack of Winstons out of his shorts. I offered him a dry one.

  ‘It’s my back that hurts. You can’t sleep on those boats, there’s no space and the bottom’s too curved.’

  Still, he had pulled in a good haul, and wasn’t planning on going out again for a few days.

  ‘We wanted mullet,’ he explained. ‘You get more money from mullet, but they’re hard. Sometimes we go for the sardines. They’re easy, you catch them in the net, but if you want something more expensive, you need to use the lines. It’s easier in the summer. That’s when the hake come along. They swim up from Senegal, but in the winter they go back because it’s too cold for them here.’

  This was the nomadic instinct – seasonal migration. Rich in nutrients, ‘upwelled’ from the depths of the ocean, the North African Atlantic is one of the world’s last great fishing zones. Its annual catch (which ranges from octopus and squid to shrimp, black hake and tuna) is worth an estimated $14 billion a year.fn1 But the fishing industry is being sucked dry. Leviathans from thousands of miles away hover near Mauritania’s coastline. Armed with sonar equipment, mid-water trawls and sophisticated freezing compartments, they hoover up the best of the catch, breaching the 12-mile zone reserved for local fishermen, who are left to trawl the shallows, like down-and-outs picking through the bins. The sweatshop crews crawling inside these trawlers (such as 200 Senegalese fishermen sleeping on cardboard mattresses in a Korean vessel searched in 2006) are too desperate to notice the terrible irony of their underpaid, dangerous employment.

  ‘My grandfather used to go to sea for half a day – and he caught enough fish for a week.’ Mohammed’s eyelids drooped in bitterness. ‘Life was so easy in those days! Now we have to travel three days or more, and even then we don’t find as many.’

  I thought of the Berbers, hedged into the least hospitable corners of the Atlas; I thought of Lamina and his fellow caravaneers, competing with trucks and the lower prices of sea salt. Why was it always the same equation? Local, traditional techniques competing with internationally funded big business. Well, maybe the answer is not so hard to fathom; but that doesn’t make it any less depressing. We muddy the water with talk of ‘modern life’, ‘competition’ and ‘progress’. Yet in the end there is one stark and frankly dirty word to explain why so many traditional lifestyles are falling away: capitalism.

  The bus station at Nouakchott: seashells crunched under my boots. Hessian sacks, cardboard boxes and strapped-up bags tumbled over each other in shapeless mounds that were slowly deflated by the baggage boy, a marker pen between his teeth to scribble down the ticket numbers.

  The shells were a last whiff of the sea. From now on, I would be gnashing at Africa’s interior, riding the Route d’Espoir. Forget the French couple’s warnings – when the road’s called ‘Hope’ you know you’re in danger! Sliding southeast, my route should carry me into Mali, to follow the Niger river all the way to Timbuktu.

  I slumped in my seat, flicking through my Arabic–English Gulliver’s Travels. The journey to the South Seas and the green fields of the Houyhnhnms did not exactly chime with the dust-rinsed streets I was passing through. As for my erratically progressing Arabic, it would be even less useful with Mauritania at my back. I dropped the book on the seat beside me and focused on the view.

  ‘Hey, man!’

  Square shoulders strained against a dusty linen jacket. A lantern jaw and frizzy hair boxed in a pugilist’s face. A silver crocodile was gleaming on his belt buckle, almost as shiny as the cocky glint in his eyes. He looked like Lennox Lewis dressed up as Toad of Toad Hall.

  ‘You’re English, man? Hey, I don’t mind, English or French. You see, I’m from Cameroon.’

  His name was Fred
dy. He plonked himself beside me, picking up Gulliver’s Travels and using it to fan himself. I was still waking up after tipping out of bed at half past four, but Freddy shook me out of my torpor. Within a few minutes, it was like we had been travelling buddies for weeks.

  ‘See that – that’s Mauritania!’ He snapped a wrist at the colourless scrub through the window. ‘I can’t wait to get out of this place. Man, I’m from the forests, you know what I’m saying? All this desert, it’s killing me.’

  His story was an unlikely one (although he told it consistently over the next couple of days). He had been living in China, working as a judo instructor, and had come back to Africa to visit his mother in Cameroon.

  ‘I was only gonna be here a few weeks. Once you leave Africa – man, you never want to come back!’

  But he had lost his passport, and with it his Chinese visa. He had already been to Algeria, squeezed in a pick-up on the old caravan route, down to Benin, across to Nigeria, all in the hope of securing the elusive visa to magic him back to China. He had been mugged in Lagos, broken a rib in a car crash outside Ougadougou and nearly got stabbed in the neck after sleeping with someone’s girlfriend in Algiers. His journey sounded like a horror-comedy Odyssey, with Algerian thugs taking the role of the Cyclops and a brothel in Burkina Faso stepping in for Circe’s lair. His Penelope was back in China – although in Freddy’s case it got complicated, because there were two sons by different mothers and he wasn’t 100 per cent about which way to go.

  ‘That’s the crazy thing. I thought my problem was choosing between them – now I don’t even know if I get to choose!’

  This thought seemed to sap his spirits. His face melted into sunken cheeks and puppy-dog eyes. Maybe looking out of the window wasn’t the best idea. There was a patch of sorghum, some acacias, and we did pass some toxic Sodom’s apples. The rest of the country was as bald as a prisoner’s scalp. We averted our eyes from the sand-clogged villages to tell each other stories from our travels; and if there were any more exciting details in the landscape, I’m afraid they were lost in Freddy’s detailed description of a five-times-in-one-night romp with a Nigerian pizza waitress in Porto-Novo.