The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  ‘Man, there’s nothing in this whole country as juicy as that chick’s ass!’

  In the looser definition of nomads, Freddy was a classic case: nomos – ‘roaming’. Swooping across West Africa in search of a visa, he was a twenty-first-century neo-nomad, hurled from land to land to recover his identity. His body language underlined this somehow – his steps were loose and there was a roll in his shoulders when he moved. He floated, like many of the nomads I met. But his charm and ready smile, his regular knuckle crunching, his crocodile-skin belt and his slick chat-up techniques, all marked him out as a townsman. An urban nomad, currently of no fixed abode.

  Air rushed through the open windows, hot and gritty like invisible smoke. When we stepped outside on the periodic rests, you could feel it rolling over you like lava. In this punishing climate, dusk is a reprieve. I was grateful for the cooler air, the paring of the sun’s teeth. Yet the darkness brought trouble of its own: a sinister atmosphere, laced with all the bogeymen I had been imagining since Dakhla. Eighteen hours after leaving Nouakchott, slowed down by the endless gauntlet of checkpoints, the scouring of passports and ID cards and details triplicated on tea-stained ledgers, we arrived at the frontier.

  Night dropped, soon after our arrival, like the scrim at a play: dark and velvety, announcing an interval until the new scene would be revealed in the morning. People climbed out of the bus to bed down in the sand, where the multipurpose nature of Mauritanian couture was turned to account: turban pillows, boubou sleeping bags, veils that doubled as sleep masks. I was one of the few to stay in the bus. Stretching across a row of seats, I counted rivet holes in the roof to lull myself to sleep.

  Borderlands are to bandits what unclean sheets are to bedbugs. I dreamed of them all through the night: smugglers, kidnappers, thieves and murderers – the reason for all the checkpoints we had passed through. Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, the Sons of the Sahara, the Masked Men Brigade … Experts in ‘doublethink’, who can profit from cocaine smuggling and bootleg cigarettes, while preaching abstinence and holy war at the same time.

  I dreamed especially of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed bandit king nicknamed ‘Mr Marlboro’ for his role in the trans-Saharan fag trade. In 2003, he masterminded the kidnapping of 32 European hostages, for which he earned $6.5 million (even more than the $5 million American bounty on his head) and started the craze for kidnapping tourists in the Sahara. Since then, a spate of lethal attacks had swollen his notoriety, including the murder of 5 French picnickers near Nouakchott in 2007, the slaughter of 38 hostages at the Algerian gas facility of In Amanas in 2013, and the killing of 27 westerners in a Bamako hotel in November 2015. He was often mentioned by people in Timbuktu – ‘he only has one eye, but it sees everything.’ Yet he was such a volatile character that he couldn’t even keep the peace with his fellow jihadists. Falling out with Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, he founded his own group in 2013, naming it Al-Mourabitoun, after the nomadic warriors led by Yusuf ibn Tafshin to blood-soaked glory in medieval Spain.

  Belmokhtar epitomises the dark side of twenty-first-century nomadism. Born to an Algerian herding family, he used clan connections and desert know-how to help him up the ranks of the region’s jihadist hierarchy, recruiting disenfranchised nomads to his cause. Raiders and robbers, smugglers and thieves: if Belmokhtar had his way, Saharan pastoralists would start to look like the tribesmen pilloried by the French colonialists more than a century ago.

  The vulnerability of nomads to jihadism – and their significance to tackling it – has been illustrated in the heartbreaking misfortunes of Iraq. In 2006, an embryonic Islamic State infested the tribal region of Anbar, muscling in on long-established smuggling networks. The tribes were provoked, and succeeded in driving out the jihadists. But the sectarian bias of Nouri al-Maliki’s government (a legacy of US policies in the country) drilled into tribal hegemony, opening fracture lines through which the jihadists were able to pour their influence. Revitalised, Islamic State returned to a more porous Anbar, overwhelming the area and co-opting its sheikhs with deadly effect.

  The same principle is visible in the Sahara. With militant groups like Boko Haram pledging bayah (allegiance) to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s so-called Caliphate, and Middle Eastern jihadist groups active in Libya, the knotty connections between North Africa and the Middle East should never be underestimated. In Iraq and Mali, an analogous situation can be observed: disenfranchised nomads, and recently sedentarised, out-of-work ex-nomads, co-opted by shady organisations offering self-worth and salaries that are tantalisingly elusive elsewhere. This calamitous dynamic would be spelled out for me, on my return to Timbuktu, when a schoolteacher told me the tragic tale of his nomadic ex-students who had been lured to battle.

  Ideology and identity rarely make snug bedfellows. The links between nomadism and jihadism are thornily inconsistent. North Africa’s jihadist leaders hail from a range of backgrounds (the ‘emir’ of Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb at this time, Abdelmalek Droukdel, was a mathematics graduate from the Bay of Algiers; while Hamada Ould Khairy, leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, grew up in Nouakchott). When it comes to jihadism, town and country know no border. It is their ubiquity, their fluency in the many networks of North Africa, that makes the jihadists so dangerous, and that is why they loomed so large in my darkest dreams.

  ‘Hey, man, have some breakfast.’

  Sunlight clawed my eyes open and I jolted upright. In spite of the limited sleep, Freddy’s eyes had lost none of their swank, although he had taken off his linen jacket and was dusting it down with a tissue. Sitting on a bench beside the bus, we breakfasted on a plastic beaker of Nescafé and a Styrofoam tray of dates.

  If you were to compile a list of highlights from any African journey, I doubt border crossings would feature high up. But today I was in luck. After my bag had been emptied into the sand, I was signalled through with a shake of the hand and a ‘profitez-vous au Mali’. For Freddy, the process was significantly more gruelling. Half an hour after me, he staggered under the shade below a locust-bean tree, looking like he had just played touch rugby with a team of wildebeest.

  ‘This is the problem in Africa,’ he muttered. ‘It’s the way Africans treat other Africans.’

  He had lost his watch, 10,000 ouguiyas and, worst of all, his silver-crocodile-buckled belt.

  ‘Man, I loved that belt.’ His head shook from side to side, unsoothed by the remains of the dates. ‘And so did the chicks!’

  New countries usually announce themselves slowly, but crossing into Mali the difference was immediate: the whole mise-en-scène had shifted. Curly horned zebu cattle congregated around lakes that caught the sun like fully operational heliostats. Hats of woven palm and goatskin gripped the coppery heads of the herders, whose arms stretched across their goads, turning them into elongated scarecrows. They were Fulanis, and they intrigued me, with their stiltwalker postures, their hair braids and the tattoos on the women’s faces. They were nomads in the purest sense. On my last visit, I had managed no more than fleeting encounters, so I was hoping to learn more this time.

  It wasn’t only the people: the landscape was changing too. There were more trees – jackalberries, umbrella-shaped kapoks and tamarinds. Most spectacular of all were the baobabs. Broad as elephants, they lashed the air with their twisting branches, like the tentacles of electrocuted octopuses. In Mauritania they were rare sights, but now the world was growing back again, and this reflected itself in the village markets. They were more crowded, more thick with produce and activity – women pounding yams or grinding pepper, picking the weevils out of the beans and turning the white, gourd-like pods of the baobab into ‘monkey bread’. Whenever we stopped, hoarse-voiced women levered themselves onto the bus, nudging out small boys with tomato-tin begging cans. They had ginger beer and mango juice in refrigerated sachets, twists of newspaper filled with hard-boiled eggs, grilled plantains, bruised banana
s and any rootstock you cared for: ginger, manioc, baobab, cassava. Freddy dived into the pockets of his linen jacket for change. He hugged a lump of cassava to his chest, purring over it, as if it made up for the loss of his belt.

  ‘I want to take this for tonight,’ he said, pulling off a chunk and peeling it with his teeth.

  ‘Why?’ It looked like it would make a good doorstop.

  ‘Because it makes your dick go hard all night!’fn2

  I got the feeling Freddy needed to get off the bus – pretty soon. We had been on the road too long and were both suffering from that feeling of encapsulation that tightens on a long journey. Dusk was sucking out the light, blue ribbons of smoke coiling over the forests. Half-shrouded by their braziers, people sat on the stoops of thatched huts or lay down on bedsteads. Women carried piles of firewood on their heads; men hacked at them with axes; stick-like children with runny eyes and umbilical hernias waved their hands against the flies. Slowly, concrete and cement stamped down the flora, flyovers swung into carriageways blurry with taillights and the Niger spewed beneath us, a tar-like soup, ‘as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing to the eastward’, as Mungo Park described his first sighting in the eighteenth century; although the buildings around us were a little less gilded.

  Bamako is never going to steal the beauty prizes, but it makes up for its looks with verve. In the markets, diesel and dust reacted with the sickly odour of the offal sold in butchers’ tubs, the rotten fruit, sun-pulped sweat and hundreds of other pongs to blast the nostrils with the full olfactory spectrum – a synthesised smell you could market as ‘100% alive’. It was Freddy’s kind of place. I checked into the same hostel where I had stayed a couple of years ago, greeting Boucoum, the laid-back owner, who was brewing coffee under a mango tree.

  ‘So you came back?’ He slid a Dunhill out of his pack and called over to one of his boys to fill the pot. ‘Look at this place! No tourists, no peace. You should be careful.’

  Most of his rooms had been turned into dormitories for boys from the villages, sleeping side by side on the floor, scrapping around for work. After Boucoum set me up with a bed and a mosquito net, one of his tenants took me on his moped to the market. Behind a gauzy curtain, Chinese businessmen were dabbing their chins with their napkins. We passed their striplit restaurant and dived into a tunnel of Afro-funk.

  The central market was a labyrinth of clanking poles and rustling burlap, greasy with acrid stenches, hidden like a trap street from any kind of inspector. Slumped around a zinc counter, traders and bargain hunters fuelled themselves on tin bowls of bissam, a soup of split peas and cumin with a disc of olive oil floating on top.

  ‘Man, life’s too short to waste it.’ Freddy dropped a Winston in the dregs of his dinner. ‘You and me, we’re gonna party!’

  The place he had in mind looked from the outside like a saloon bar in the Wild West – swinging doors between plasterboard walls and drunks stumbling off the porch, crashing into a cigarette trolley. Inside, the atmosphere was like you’d expect if the end of the world had just been announced on News at Ten. Men and women were shouting at each other, kicking each other, spilling Castel beer down half-unbuttoned tops, jostling with each other to get to the bar. But mostly, they were fucking each other.

  ‘Man,’ yelled Freddy, ‘this is my favourite place in the whole city!’

  On the dancefloor, breasts and thighs and buttocks shook with blue and purple light, sweaty and sizzling like the ingredients of a cannibal’s cauldron. Big-hipped girls in tiny skirts were taking turns to rule – spidering arms and bodies convulsing, like baobab trees uprooted in an earthquake. Guys in coloured trousers bucked around the sides, shaking their legs like sprinters on the starting blocks, beer drool sliding down their chins. Stabbing cigarettes into heaped bowls, they picked out their paramours with a few sparky preliminaries, and led them behind a bamboo-cane screen in the yard. All that was left to negotiate was the shrill-voiced woman who managed a row of short-stay cabins, which she advertised with a couple of fob keys dangling from her wrists.

  ‘I told her, “come with me girl!”’ said Freddy, ‘But she says she’s gotta work. Man, some chicks need to relax!’

  I know there are classier places in Bamako, but I’m glad that’s the bar I went to. It was a place for the hard-up, a chance to unwind, on cheap girls and cheaper beer. For some of the girls, it could earn them enough to get through another week, which I guess is as far ahead as most Malians can afford to plan. And it was a place where people talked, where I heard one or two tales that made me realise the nomads aren’t just in the desert – they’re right over the whole continent.

  ‘Je gagne!’

  I was leaning forward on a wooden stool, ears ringing like stamped metal. Somehow, I’d got myself embroiled in a thumb war. My opponent was a guy in polka-dot trousers called Moussa, who presented himself as the ‘good guy’ of the bar. He was wearing a gris-gris, a prayer sewn into a strip of sheepskin, wrapped around his upper arm. When it rolled down to his elbow, I asked about it.

  ‘It gives me power,’ he said, ‘and God’s protection.’

  ‘Even here?’ I was a little surprised by the religious emphasis, given our surroundings.

  ‘Of course,’ said Moussa, ‘but I must be careful. If I do glu-glu with the girls, then my gris-gris is finished, and I like my gris-gris. I got it from a famous marabout in Djenné.’

  ‘So no glu-glu in that case!’

  I was planning to visit Djenné and wanted to learn more about its marabouts, so I hoped Moussa could give me an info dump. But when his inevitable victory came, he thundered at the open sky ‘Je suis champion!’ and tore across the dancefloor like he’d won the Paris–Dakkar Rally.

  Tossing another swig of Castel down my throat, I shuffled over to the bar. There was a Cameroonian girl with dyed red cornrows leaning over the counter. Her name was Ashley and Freddy had already introduced us.

  ‘You still don’t want to marry me?’

  ‘Sorry, like I said, I’ve got somebody …

  ‘Back home. Yeah …’

  ‘But I could buy you a beer.’

  ‘Okay. But I don’t think you want to marry me, so why should I drink it?’

  She had come up with her sister, who had married a tailor from southern Mali. Ashley had trained as a masseuse and travelled as far as Casablanca in search of work.

  ‘But they don’t like black people in Morocco,’ she said. ‘The Arabs are the most racist people in the world, they think we’re lower than donkeys.’

  Back in Bamako, she had briefly secured a restaurant job – ‘waiting at the tables and looking after the clients’. But the restaurant had closed down and now she was here, hanging out among all the other girls who came to the bar to make a buck.

  ‘Anyway, they’re all sex workers.’ She drew on a Dunhill, tipping her head behind a cataract of smoke. ‘They’re from Guinea mostly, dirty girls, no education. They want to get a job in a restaurant but they can’t find anything. So they come to this bar, then when it’s too crowded they try somewhere else. Malian men are animals. As long as you don’t look like a goat you’re gonna find something.’

  I thought of the depressing tales that circulated – the brothels near the gold mines in Kayes, with abortion clinics next door, the foetuses sold to traditional healers to use in rituals; the STDs that were spreading round West Africa faster than the rate of urbanisation. I looked at the faces around us. Was there no room for romance in a place like this?

  A couple was sitting behind us, hands clasped on the edge of their table. The girl looked into the boy’s face and smiled, pressing a hand flat against his chest. He smiled back and she reached forward to plant a kiss on his cheek. Their body language seemed so connected, so much sweeter than the way Ashley described it. The boy edged over to the bar, to start negotiations for a cabin. The girl’s lazy lover’s smile disappeared in a moment, wiped away like a stray crumb, and she pulled out her mobile phone. A few moments later, arms a
round each other’s waists, they rolled in a bubble of mutual rapture towards the bamboo-cane screen.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Two more Castels arrived, and we clinked. ‘Stay here in Bamako or go somewhere else?’

  ‘When I was a child,’ said Ashley, ‘I thought, “I will go to Europe.” I thought, “I will reach Spain or France and live a wonderful life.” I knew it cannot be easy, but I thought, “This is possible, if I try hard and I’m lucky.”’ She tugged at the bottle and threw her head back. ‘Now I know it was only a dream.’

  My previous visit to Mali had been curtailed by a deadly attack in Timbuktu. Three Western travellers had been taken hostage and another shot dead. That incident was like the hornbill’s squawk in an African folktale – the warning cry that must be heeded at all costs. A few weeks later, the country collapsed, like a mud-brick wall that hasn’t been resurfaced for decades. Insurgency fractured the north and a military coup spun out of the barracks in Bamako. Renegade ‘green berets’ overran the state television studios and the presidential palace, ousted President Touré and installed a military junta. Meanwhile, the MNLAfn3 grabbed its opportunity like a cattle thief stumbling on an unmanned corral. With the country’s borders frozen, aid suspended and the land scorched with looting like a bush fire, the situation was ripe for rebellion.

  Driven by Libyan arms, an inept opposition and the asabiyyah (solidarity) cited by Ibn Khaldun as the most precious tribal weapon against sedentary opposition, the Tuareg militants swatted Malian forces out of one base after another, until they seized control of Gao and encircled Timbuktu. It was April Fool’s Day, and there was no doubt who were the fools. A day later, Timbuktu was under the charge of Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ansar ad-Dine, erstwhile allies of the Tuareg secessionists. Shariah law was their goal, and Azawad was merely one patch among the many to be collected in the neverending fanatic’s game of Risk.