I asked if some of them had been killed, and the lines tightened on his brow.
‘I saw a truck driven by the father of one of my students. Another had three of my students in it. They were going to Konna. I guess they weren’t so precious to the jihadists, so they were chosen for the front line.’
Not all Emad’s students had joined the jihadists. Many of them followed the long trail to the refugee camps; a few had come back to Timbuktu, although they were deeply traumatised by the conflict, he said.
These students were not unusual. It is a crushing irony that the violent movements who stripped security (and sometimes rustled herds) away from nomadic life were the same movements that lured so many herders’ sons to their banners. When ideology is not enough, financial incentives will go a long way. Yet this irony bleeds into a paradox. For military occupation is alien to nomadism – historically, the martial spirit of the nomad was satisfied by raiding. There are nuances, of course, but it is telling that Yusuf Ibn Tafshin didn’t hang around in Western Spain after his victory over Alfonso the Brave.
There are other aspects of modern warfare, however, that fit more snugly into the old nomadic paradigm: guerrilla tactics, kidnapping, lightning raids on vulnerable outposts. And as the people most likely to suffer from poverty and social exclusion (sitting on the margins of society not only in geographical terms), nomads have plenty of motivation to take the bait.
Former nomads like one-eyed Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Iyad Ag Ghali had been instrumental in presenting jihadism as an attractive proposition. Marabouts like Hamedou Kouffa, who led a string of Fulani youth into the decisive battle of Konna, had also played a part. As Emad’s story underlined, nomads were entangled in the bloody mess of Mali’s crisis along with everyone else.
Several of his students were working at the Arab market, on the northern side of Timbuktu, manning stores among boxes of Egyptian yeast and American Legend cigarettes. They wouldn’t talk about the jihadists, although they were keen to tell me how their stores had been ransacked and some whispered of the ‘disappearances’ – a growing list of Arabs and Tuaregs, suspected victims of extra-judicial killings by the Malian army.fn1 Still, another layer was added to Emad’s story when I met a nurse called Niamoyu Touré. Wrapped in batik cloths, shuffling with the air of someone who has been worked too hard, she spoke in a gentle, measured voice.
‘I’ve been a nurse in the camps and villages since 1994,’ she said. ‘I would go by motorbike, wherever there was a need. There were many problems: in the winter people suffered from the cold, in the summer from the heat. There was a lot of trouble with the animals, and the veterinarians don’t visit very often, so we were often asked to help. We collaborate with the veterinarians, because we understand that if the animals are healthy, the people are healthy too.’
Niamoyu’s experience pulled back the cover on nomadic isolation. Medicine in Africa tends to be hospital based and mobile outreach is expensive. The concrete separation between human and animal health is a sedentary one. It makes no sense for communities where diseases often pass between human and beast.
‘What was it like going to the villages in the crisis?’ I asked.
‘It was really hard. Many bandits came to Agouni, the same with other camps and villages. Some of the people joined the jihadists; I would say about one in ten. They threatened us. Once, some men with guns came and told me to give them all my medicine or they’d beat me to death. Another time, some bandits took my motorbike and my luggage, which included my medical books. But you know, the jihadists weren’t all like that. Some of them said the health centre is untouchable, and supported me. After they took my motorbike, I left the village and never went back. It became too hard.’
She was ambivalent about whether she would like to return.
‘If I get paid, perhaps. But it’s too hard. Riding through the sand is difficult, it’s easy for the motorbike to break down and then you’re stuck. The camps are very far from each other. Many people don’t accept our medicine, they say “God will decide” and go to the marabouts instead. But people are starting to appreciate what we’re trying to do. Slowly, things are changing.’
Talking to Emad and Niamoyu, it was clear the people of the desert had been dealt a terrible blow by the crisis. I wanted to hear an official take on this, and there was none more rubber-stamped than Mohammed Taher Ould Elhadj. Officially titled the Mayor of Salam, he was chief of his ‘fraction’, a corridor of villages and encampments from Timbuktu all the way to the Algerian border – a population that he estimated at 40,000.
‘The life of nomads here’, he said, ‘is nearly finished.’
Dressed in a crisp white boubou, his hair neatly combed, he sat at a metal desk in a small mud-brick office near the edge of the desert, speaking in soft, murmuring French.
‘The nomads have been exhausted by this crisis. We had many problems even before – the lack of medicine, schools, markets, security. Life for nomads is hard, and it’s expensive. For example, to buy a sack of rice in our area costs twice what you pay in Bamako.’
He was adamant about where the blame for the crisis lay: foreign jihadists from Algeria, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. The only Malian jihadists, he insisted, were Tuaregs.
‘Our people weren’t involved.’ He beat out the emphasis with a sharp flap of hands. ‘You cannot find one Arab chief in all our commune who was with the jihadists. Maybe there are some individuals who joined them, people who wanted to profit from the situation, but you cannot say they represent the community unless they are the chiefs.’
In its own way, this was an admission. But he wasn’t going to let me push the subject any further. As he pointed out, for many of the region’s nomads, jihadism is the least of their worries.
‘If there is no intervention to help us, we will lose everything. We need development. We need better schools and hospitals, better administration and security. Our community didn’t create this problem, but we are the ones who are suffering most from it. People are dying, from lack of medicine and many other problems, but also from the lack of hope.’fn2
I felt a shiver as I listened to him – because this wasn’t only Mayor Ould Elhadj speaking. So many communities had spoken about these problems. The Berbers, hedged into inhospitable corners of the mountains. The Saharawis, denied their own identity. The Moors and Fulani, struggling to find pasture. The Bozo, at a loss for fish. Mayor Ould Elhadj was articulating the despair of the nomads I had met all across the region.
I needed to get out to the desert. Somehow. I had tried to find out about the azalai and heard only horror stories – camels incinerated by French gunships, caravaneers marooned in refugee camps. I sought out my old Tuareg friend Ousmane, and found him living in a concrete hut at the edge of town. His family had lost all their tents, along with their animals and smithy tools. Worse was the human cost.
‘My cousin was killed by rocket fire when the French came,’ said Ousmane. ‘Him, his wife, his child, in their tent. We went to the camp in Mauritania. But there was so much sickness everywhere and the tents were so close together you couldn’t even move between them. My uncle had lost all his food so when he got to the camp he hadn’t eaten for a week, and he died a few days later.’
Ousmane was wearing his tamelgoust loose, his face exposed. I remembered how fastidious he had been in the past, proudly explaining there were more than a hundred ways to wear a turban. Had he lost faith in the old cultural cornerstones? There was no news of his brother, Haka, who had talked so wittily about the difficulties for Tuaregs. Ousmane said he hadn’t seen him for months.
As for my old guru, the man who had shown me more of the desert than anyone else … well, what was I expecting? That Lamina would be waiting at the brink of a dune, ready to take me on the azalai? I had lost hope in good news, I just wanted some news. I wanted to know he was alive and hadn’t been killed in the bombardment. I wanted to know that Jadullah was in good health, that their wives were well, that Abdul-Hakim had not b
een too badly scarred. That his old cousin Ismail was still chattering away, singing his songs of faith. But for days it was impossible to find out anything … until Mayor Ould Elhadj put me in touch with a contact in the Mauritanian refugee camp.
‘Alhamdulillah! Praise to God! Marhaba bek! A thousand welcomes! A thousand welcomes! Praise to God!’
That reedy, magnificent voice was like a blast of fresh desert air. I wanted to hug that wonderful man. Hearing him speak, I felt as if he were there beside me, not trapped on the other side of a border. Nevertheless, a reunion would have to wait. He was stuck in the Mbera camp and having already travelled through Mauritania, I was unable to obtain short-term permission to visit the camp.
Sitting in the calm of Sidi’s house later that evening, I spoke to Lamina again, my heart beating for my fantastic old teacher.
‘Oh, Yusuf, life became very hard.’
‘And Jadullah? And Abdul-Hakim?’
‘They are with me, in the camp.’
‘And the camels?’
‘They are …’
A long, crackling pause. He didn’t need to say any more.
We arranged to meet, a few days later, at the Malian–Mauritanian border. But Lamina got scared – the Malian soldiers had killed too many of his clan. He never showed up.
‘The desert goes round in circles,’ he told me the last time we spoke. ‘One day you will come with us, Yusuf. One day, God willing, we will drink tea on the way to Taoudenni.’
It sounded less like a prophecy, or even a promise; more like a ritual phrase, its truth embedded in the emotion it conveyed. Like the branding symbols we had drawn together, hieroglyphics of a pact that could never be broken.
That was my last night in Timbuktu, and I sat clutching my phone long after Lamina’s voice had receded, trying to visualise him on his camel, Abdul-Hakim bouncing on the perch, Jadullah galloping off like a gaucho.
I wouldn’t see them in the desert, this time. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t see the desert itself. I wanted one last trip. It wasn’t recommended, and Mahmoud took a little persuading to arrange it. Even so, I needed a final glimpse. A last dance with that world I had lingered in and loved. The world Lamina had introduced me to, like Mr Tumnus escorting Lucy Pevensie through the woods of Narnia.
It was time for a last trip into the desert.
Wrinkled metal barrels and wire-framed sand baskets barriered the back of town. Soldiers dozed in the shade while their colleagues twitched at the triggers of their rifles. Mahmoud had arranged a car, and I zipped myself into a second-hand cagoule, donned a pair of wraparound shades and knotted my turban in the back room of a tailor’s shop, making sure to cover every inch of my skin. Everyone I met had told me, ‘If you really have to go to Timbuktu, whatever you do, don’t go out to the desert.’ But nomads don’t live in towns – not when they are still being nomadic. If I wanted to understand how their lives had been affected by the crisis, I needed to venture out to the dunes.
The red earth of the road decomposed into a rutted scrawl of tyre tracks. The sand around us, grey-cream and grainy, had the colour you would expect on a crater of the moon. Donkeys and goats scrambled under wild acacias, but they were rarely accompanied by people. We saw a woman carrying a sack on her head; a man bearing a mattock between the trees; no one else.
Five miles out of town stood a well. Its coping was unsealed and a rubber inner tube hung from its cross-pole. It looked like a siege engine waiting to be operated. This was where we’d been told to wait, so we stood beside the well, watching a pepper grain on the horizon, hurtling towards us with sandballing dimensions. A knobbled stick. A green tamelgoust. Grey eyes glowing through the turban, challenging and sharp.
‘What did he say?’ I scurried alongside Mahmoud, following our contact.
‘He’s going to take us to the chief.’
I felt like some captured earthman in a pulpy sci-fi movie. Take me to your leader.
A few minutes’ trudge away, Sandy Ag Mostapha was standing in the middle of his herd, robed in loose blue cotton. A black turban framed his sombre face, pooling the light across a silver tuft of beard and the smooth planes above his cheeks. He tossed instructions at his son, who was drawing the water from a 50-metre-deep well, beating a donkey to draw the swollen sacks of water. The rope creaked on the pulley, the slosh of water echoed on the bore, and the stick cracked on the donkey’s back. These sounds were echoes, reminding me of other watering holes on my travels. Sandy’s son poured the water into a couple of troughs on either side of the well, while his daughter, wearing a Dallas Field Hockey anorak, filled up the bidons. She glanced round, eyes dark under her scarf, assessing us, then turned her head with a toss of indifference.
‘You find us here at the source of nomadic life.’
Sandy smiled under his dusty turban. Tradition might dictate that Tuareg men cover their faces in the presence of strangers, but for him the practicalities of herding took priority.
‘If I am in the town, or visiting another camp, I will do this,’ he told me, ‘but here I am at ease.’
While most of his neighbours had fled to the refugee camps, he was determined to hold his herd together. During the peak of the bombardment, he and his son had gone a few miles north, ‘to a place where the animals wouldn’t be frightened’.
‘Was there a lot of shooting round here?’ I asked.
‘We are close to Timbuktu. The planes came overhead, many animals ran from the herd out of fear. And in this area, if an animal is lost it will die very soon. They need us to bring them water. Look over there. You see?’ He pointed to a cluster of low-roofed banco buildings. ‘It is our school building. One of the Islamists hid in there. The army came and shot at him. We still have the damage. By the time he came, most of the families had gone to the refugee camps. That was our biggest problem. We had no one to look after the buildings, so when the rains came, they were ruined.’
The disrepair was visible all over the building. Cobwebs frilled the edges of the piled desks; the windows were jagged and misshapen; the doors hung loose. In one of the huts, a collection of nomadic clobber – camel saddles, metal luggage trunks, a couple of food bowls – was scattered under a blackboard on which the last lesson remained, chalked up till the class came back.
‘As soon as the jihadists took Timbuktu, people started leaving,’ said Sandy. ‘Some went by bush taxi, others by camel or donkey, whatever means were available. We were afraid of the jihadists, because there are many things in our culture they don’t accept. Like the gris-gris.’ He rubbed the side of his arm. Bulging under the blue shift was a sheepskin armlet binding a prayer.
For Sandy, this crisis was another nail in a coffin that had been closing ever tighter for decades. He talked as if he’d been buried alive and was desperately looking for an airhole.
‘Our camp used to be at the edge of Timbuktu. But when the government started selling the land, we had to move further out. When we first came here, the pasturage was better. We had date palms, jujubes, lots of fruit. Then the droughts killed everything. Now we only have the wild acacia. We get a lot of use from it, but we need so much more.’
As if to emphasise the difficulties he was talking about, cattle bones gleamed in the sand, among trails of donkey droppings and cow pats. They formed a grisly breadcrumb trail towards his tent. A couple of acacias provided shade, one of them bundled with dry grass for cattle feed. A solar panel – the only sign of technology apart from a long-wave radio – was embedded in the sand. Sandy’s wife, bare armed in a loose black shift, prepared tea while we crossed our legs on a reed mat.
I had a question to ask, and now felt like the right time. Many nomads had told me how hard their lives were. I had seen enough to know they weren’t exaggerating. I often wondered why, in the face of such hardship, they chose to carry on.
‘It is true,’ said Sandy, ‘many have left this life. But I will never leave it. To leave this life is to scorn the life of my parents, to say there is something su
perior to that life. Of course, we can do things to improve. We should educate our children, so they can understand better how to treat the animals, how to work with people in the city. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon this life. To be a Tuareg is to be a herder. We are free and independent. We walk differently from the people in the town. Our life is a good one, as long as there is pasture, water and security. It is the best life I know.’
I wondered at his words – the selflessness, but also the strictness of them. ‘To leave this life is to scorn the life of my parents.’ It had never occurred to me to follow my father’s path. I came from a different culture. I had been nourished on a different way of thinking. I thought how hard it must be for those nomads who aren’t cut out for this life, who lack the sanctuary of other options. One of the motivations for this journey, for all journeys I think, was to learn about other ways of interpreting the world; to stretch the muscles of empathy. Nomadic perceptions of space, reading the stars and desert tracks, Berber responses to nature, the Pulaaku code of the Fulani, attitudes to silence, the consolations of Islam …
Behind the camp, the plain spread to the horizon. There was little change in gradient. Apart from the odd wild acacia, it was flat and empty. Yet it wasn’t featureless. I could see the dip of a blowout to the east, a flat-sided barchan dune to the west, a ripple of acacias and stalks of bunchgrass. Closer to my feet was the delicate embroidery of scarab tracks.
I sat down on my own for a moment. This was one of the best things about the desert. You were never more than a few steps away from solitude: the chance to sit by yourself, think about what you’ve been doing and where you want to go next.
A few inches below the horizon, I could see a man leading some animals. Some trick of the light convinced me they were camels (I think it was the heat waves, swelling their thoracic humps). They drew closer and I realised they were cattle, as emaciated as Sandy’s. The herder looked like he was moving in the direction of the well. I had learned to draw water from Ismail, Lamina’s garrulous cousin, and practised among the Fulani. If I found myself marooned here, there were a few tasks I could tackle, although there were other skills I’d learned for which there would be no call. The camp had no camels, so my lessons in riding and baggage loading would come to nothing. Hobbling the camels and guiding them to water would also be redundant, although some of my training might be transferable. Well, at least I could make the tea … except, as Lamina had pointed out, that wasn’t really my forte.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 32
