The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  sura a chapter of the Quran (the individual verses are ayat).

  tagine traditional Berber dish, steam cooked in an earthenware pot.

  Tamazight the family of Berber languages.

  tamelgoust a Tuareg man’s headscarf, traditionally 5 metres long and made of indigo-dyed cotton, although these days it is often made from cheaper rayon.

  tidinit a Moorish lute.

  Tifinagh the written script of Tamazight (the language of the Berbers, or Amazighen).

  toguna a meeting place for Dogon elders, traditionally built with a low roof so none of the elders can stand up in anger.

  toh a thick porridge made from pounded millet, which is a staple among the Fulani.

  wadi a valley or dry riverbed (Arabic).

  yardang a rocky protuberance, carved by wind abrasion and turbulence.

  zawiya an Islamic shrine. The word can also be used for a Sufi monastery.

  Notes

  ‘Africa, which country I have’: Leo Africanus, The Description of Africa and the Things Therein Contained, Vol.3, p.971. (The translation was made by John Pory in 1600, but I have adapted the spelling to modern usage for the sake of clarity.)

  ‘Before the coming of the red sun’: Hawad, Le coude grinçant de l’anarchie (Anarchy’s Delirious Trek), translated by George M Guyelberger & Christopher Wise, quoted in C Wise (ed.), The Desert Shore: Literatures of the Sahel, Vol.3, p.113.

  Prologue

  ‘addicted to feasting’: Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, p.464.

  ‘burn in lust’: ibid., p.458.

  ‘Pastoral peoples of Africa’: Aggrey Ayuen Majok & Calvin W Schwabe, Development among Africa’s Migratory Pastoralists, p.6.

  ‘progressive desiccation’: discussed in James Webb, Desert Frontier; also Jeremy Keenan, The Sahara: The Past, Present and Future, and Bruce S Hall, History of Race in Muslim West Africa.

  ‘attached themselves to the country’: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, Vol.1, p.305.

  ‘It is their nature to plunder’: ibid., Vol.1, p.303.

  ‘closer to the first natural state’: ibid., Vol.1, p.254.

  ‘death in life’: TE Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p.29.

  ‘the Tragedy of the Commons has underpinned’: Katherine Homewood, Ecology of African Pastoralist Societies, pp.5–6.

  Part One

  ‘Wide Afric, doth thy sun’: Alfred Tennyson, Major Works, p.4.

  ‘Howbeit there is a most stately temple’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.3, p.824.

  ‘a mythical city in a Never-Never land’: Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness, p.27.

  ‘the richest Mynes of Gold’: Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, p.75.

  ‘until the discovery of America’: Nehemiah Levtzion in JF Ade Ajayi & M Crowder (eds), The History of West Africa, p.141.

  Details of Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage are from Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, p.9.

  ‘This negro lord is called Musa Malli, lord of the negroes of Guinea’: quoted by E.W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, p. 90.

  ‘a tyrant, a miscreant, an aggressor, a despot, and a butcher’: As-Sadi, quoted in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, p.91.

  ‘such as drinking fermented liquors’: As-Sadi, ibid., p.194.

  ‘Jawdar’s troops broke the army of the askiya’: As-Sadi, ibid., p.190.

  ‘the true meaning of Touareg’: Jacques Hureiki, Essai sur les origins des Touaregs, p.69.

  ‘to raid’ or ‘plunder’: Jeremy Keenan, Lesser Gods of the Sahara, p.63.

  ‘a dry and barren tract’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, pp.155–6.

  ‘many acts of gross injustice and tyranny’: ibid., p.33.

  ‘most cruel depredations and exactions’: René Caillié, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo, p.65.

  ‘one of those sinister pirates of the desert’: Louis Frèrejean, Objectif, p.244, quoted in Hall, History of Race in Muslim West Africa, pp.136–7.

  ‘Considering that we will never succeed in making friends with these tribes’: Aoudéoud, Commander of the French Soudan, to the Commander of Timbuktu, 13 September 1898, quoted in James McDougall & Judith Scheele, Saharan Frontiers, p.135.

  ‘They are barbarians’: Masqueray, quoted in Henry, Touaregs des Français, p.260, cited in Hall, History of Race in Muslim West Africa, pp.127–8.

  ‘When I imagine their wandering life’: Lieutenant de Vaisseau Hourst, Mission Hourst, pp.235–6, quoted in History of Race in Muslim West Africa, p.129.

  ‘cultures babylonienne’: Hureiki, Essai sur les origins des Touaregs, p.671.

  ‘nomads of the white race’: Amouksou ag Azandeher, quoted in Baz Lecocq, ‘That desert is our country’, p.134.

  ‘Know that the Tuareg race was entirely self-reliant’: letter from Muhammed ‘Ali Ag Attaher to President Charles de Gaulle. Attached in a letter from the Cercle de Goundam to the Ministère de l’Interieur, 22 December 1959, quoted in Hall History of Race in Muslim West Africa, p.308.

  ‘nomad society, as it is left to us by the colonial regime’: Bakary Diallo, quoted in Lecocq, ‘That desert is our country’, p.74.

  ‘Let us drive the nomads back into the sands’: La Voix du Nord, reported by Hélène Claudot-Hawad in ‘Touaregs au Mali: Negrafricanisme et racisme’.

  ‘rescue my name from oblivion’: Alexander Gordon Laing, Missions to the Niger (ed. EW Bovill), p.286.

  ‘the great emporium for all the country of the blacks’: Shabeeny, in James Grey Jackson (ed.), An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa, p.20.

  ‘five sabre cuts on the crown of my head’: Laing, Missions to the Niger p.302.

  ‘situation in Tinbuctu’: ibid., p.312.

  ‘ordered his negroes’: ibid., p.313.

  ‘the houses whereof are covered only with gold’: Jobson, quoted in Anthony Sattin, The Gates of Africa, p.9.

  ‘its wholesale value on arrival in Europe would exceed’: Report by United Nations Overseas Development Commission (www.unodc.org/toc/en/reports/TOCTAWestAfrica.html).

  ‘I have a compulsion to wander’: Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness, p.76.

  ‘apocalyptic sentiment’: Anja Fischer & Ines Kohl, Tuareg Society within a Globalized World, p.13.

  ‘that I might present a proper silhouette’: Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p.8.

  ‘This is a great island’: al-Idrisi, quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, p.147.

  Part Two

  ‘the goal of civilization’: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, Vol.2, p.296.

  ‘enchanted labyrinth’: Paul Bowles, The Spider’s House, p.168.

  ‘a world it is to see’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.2, p.419.

  ‘a wooden cage’: ibid., p.450.

  ‘in life he had been all undoubting impulse’: WB Yeats, quoted in Margaret Harper Mills & Warwick Gould (eds), Yeats’ Mask, p.302.

  ‘wily bird so indued by nature’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.189.

  ‘From beyond the hils Atlas maior’: George Abbot, A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde, Folio F, 2 recto, quoted in Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, p.20.

  ‘geographers and cartographers remained dependent’: Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, p.142.

  ‘frantic and distraught persons’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.2, p.426.

  ‘nothing as fundamental or dramatic’: Jones, Othello’s Countrymen, p.26.

  ‘that make sword-scabbards’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.2, p.431.

  ‘should sound like the bleating of a sheep’: Peter Mayne, A Year in Marrakesh, p.33.

  ‘fall laughing’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.3, p.722.

  ‘Sedentary people are much concerned’: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, Vol.1, p.252.

  ‘commit unlawful veneries among themselves’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol. 1, p.148.

  ‘from the twentieth hour’:
ibid., Vol.2, p.472.

  ‘to describe things so plainly’: ibid., Vol.1, p.188.

  ‘houses are very loathsome’: ibid., Vol.2, pp.323–4.

  ‘greater quantity of cloth’: ibid., Vol.1, p.158.

  ‘Their meat will not reach Allah’: Quran, Surah 22, Verse 37.

  ‘is bound upon a rude altar’: Saint Nilus, quoted in Robert Irwin, Camel, p.69.

  ‘pass through a cold hall’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.2, pp.426–7.

  ‘keeping of doves’: ibid., p.454.

  ‘disobedient and ill-tempered’: John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens, Vol. 4, p.41.

  ‘no animal is more stolid’: Jonathan Raban, Arabia through the Looking Glass, p.160.

  ‘They put me in mind of elderly English ladies taking tea together’: Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh, p.11.

  ‘gentle and domesticall beasts’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.3, p.939.

  ‘What a masterpiece of nature’s workmanship’: Caillié, Travels through Central Africa, Vol.2, p.115.

  ‘Once the North African nomads became acquainted’: Nehemiah Levtzion, in Ajayi & Crowder (eds), The History of West Africa, p.121.

  ‘a habitable, controllable region’: Labelle Prussin, African Nomadic Architecture, p.13.

  Part Three

  ‘You shall find many among the Africans’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.161.

  ‘the African tongue soundeth’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.129.

  ‘The conquest of Africa is impossible’: Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan, writing to the Caliph, quoted in HT Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature, p.52.

  ‘The Arabs search for towns’: quoted in ibid.

  ‘he has created and formulated a philosophy of history’: Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 3, pp.321–2.

  ‘base and witless people’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol. 2, p.276.

  ‘The past resembles the future’: Ibn Khaldun, A History of the Berbers, Vol.1, p.17.

  ‘After the preaching of Islam’: ibid., Vol.1, p.28.

  ‘a Berber reserve’: Jacques Berque, quoted in Jonathan Wyrtzen, in Driss Maghraoui (ed.), Revisiting the Colonial Past in Morocco.

  ‘The result was financial ruin’: John Shoup, in Dawn Chatty (ed.), Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa Entering the 21st Century, p.130.

  ‘became more and more integrated into a larger national entity’: quoted in Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco.

  ‘Decision making power’: Shoup, in Chatty, Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa, p.135.

  ‘The ground is all memoranda’: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works, p.141.

  ‘though without a compass’: Caillié, Travels through Central Africa, Vol.2, p.91.

  ‘translucet, luminous, pure’: Ibn Tufail, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan, p.5.

  Part Four

  ‘The lion slumbers in his lair’: Felicia Hemans, The Poetical Works of Mrs Felicia Hemans, p.492.

  ‘I came not to this country’: Yusuf Ibn Tafshin, quoted in Ronald A Messier The Almoravids and the Meaning of Jihad, p.84.

  ‘He girded himself’: Qirtas, quoted in Charles André Julien, History of North Africa, p.82.

  ‘Indeed, we may say’: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, Vol.2, p.296.

  ‘I have heard that in old time’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol. 2, p.268.

  ‘torrid zone … where the sun’s orbit is’: Pliny, Natural History, p.114.

  ‘a Moorman from Inner Marocco’: The Arabian Nights, eds Malcolm C Lyons Ursula Lyons, p.281.

  ‘All I understood’: Yusuf Ibn Tafshin, quoted in Messier, The Almoravids and the Meanings of Jihad, p.107.

  ‘Camels have again become’: Mohamed Oudada, in McDougall & Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers, p.217.

  ‘they take great delight in poetry’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.158.

  ‘yand being as then but fifteen years’: ibid., Vol.1.

  ‘They have neither dominion nor yet any stipend’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.146.

  ‘the court has not found legal ties of such nature’: Summary Opinion of Advisory Court of International Court of Justice, 16 October 1975, www.icj-cij.org.

  ‘The Arab Spring’: Noam Chomsky, speaking at Gaza’s Almathaf Restaurant and Cultural House, reported by the Electronic Intifada, 22 October 2012, www.electronicintifada.net.

  ‘There is an immense desert’: quoted in Tony Hodges, Western Sahara, p.28.

  ‘death in life’: Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p.29.

  ‘water containing some pounded millet’: Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, p.333.

  Part Five

  ‘Wherein I spake’: Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3.

  ‘the word Faraca’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.122.

  ‘you get into those waggons called railway coaches’: letter to Frank Budgen, July 1920, Selected Letters of James Joyce, p.267.

  ‘obnoxia Mauris’: Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogues, 4.40–41.

  ‘honourable murderer’: William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 5, Scene 2.

  ‘black in his look’: George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, Act 1, Prologue, l.16; The Stukeley Plays, p.64.

  ‘We have still’: Lois Whitney, ‘Did Shakespeare know Leo Africanus?’, p.473.

  ‘by reason of jealousy’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.154.

  ‘steadfast in friendship’: ibid.

  ‘You know that the cause of enslavement’: Ahmed Baba, quoted in Hall, History of Race in Muslim West Africa, p.53.

  ‘Exhausted by their sufferings’: Caillié, Travels through Central Africa, Vol.2, p.114.

  ‘Though I had been accustomed’: ibid., Vol.2, p.26.

  ‘for supper they have certain dried flesh’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.1, p.152.

  ‘the dues of hospitality’: Lyons & Lyons (eds), The Arabian Nights, Night 281.

  ‘The African king landed’: in HT Norris (ed.), The Pilgrimage of Ahmad Son of the Little Bird of Paradise, p.102.

  ‘There is nothing I love better than books’: ibid.

  ‘Is there scholarship in your land?’ ibid., p.8.

  ‘We have taken the back of she-camels’: Mohammed Wuld Buna, quoted in Graziani Krätli & Ghislaine Lydon (eds), The Trans-Saharan Book Trade, p.41.

  ‘It happens that the mimiya ode’: ibid., p.29.

  ‘Long, long ago, during the prehistoric ages’: Lloyd Cabot Briggs, Tribes of the Sahara, p.34.

  ‘slumped to 6’: these statistics are supplied in the 2000 General Population and Housing Census in Mauritania: Specific characteristics of the nomadic environment, www.unstats.un.org.

  ‘a colony of barnacles’: Norris, The Pilgrimage of Ahmad, p.xv.

  Elliot Fratkin, in Andy Catley, Jeremy Lind & Ian Scoones (eds), Pastoralism and Development in Africa, pp.203–5.

  ‘scientific speculation’: Ibn Tufail, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan, p.6.

  ‘are like irrational animals’: ibid., p.13.

  ‘previous sublime station’: ibid., p.13.

  ‘natural curiosity’: ibid., p.15.

  ‘It should be known’: Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, Vol.3, p.281.

  ‘There’s more truth about a camp’: Roger Deakin, Wildwood, p.15.

  Part Six

  ‘The great affair is to move’: Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, pp.68–9.

  ‘as broad as the Thames at Westminster’: Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, pp.178–9.

  ‘said to be very comfortable and preservative’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.3, p.971.

  5.08% rate of annual urbanization: this data covers 2010–15 and is cited in the CIA World Factbook, www.cia.gov.

  ‘They go to distant places’: Caillié, Travels through Central Africa, Vol.1, p.349.

  ‘Jenne in her island has
remained’: Félix Dubois, Timbuctoo the Mysterious, p.148.

  ‘This place exceedingly aboundeth’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol. 3, p.822.

  ‘the reason why caravans come to Timbuktu’: As-Sadi, quoted in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, p.18.

  ‘an hysterical mass’: Félix Dubois, Nôtre Beau Niger, p.189.

  ‘dancers sauntered about’: Dubois, Timbuctoo the Mysterious, p.159.

  ‘by the light of a great fire’: Caillié, Travels through Central Africa, Vol 1, p.60.

  ‘a few charges of gunpowder’: ibid., Vol.1, p.259.

  ‘many are found lying dead’: Leo Africanus, Description of Africa, Vol.3, p.798.

  Part Seven

  ‘In the Maghreb’: Gautier, Le Passé de l’Afrique du Nord, pp.279–80.

  ‘stripped me quite naked’: Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, p.224.

  ‘destroying the little commerce’: Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, p.329.

  ‘The most dramatic political development’: Hall, History of Race in Muslim West Africa, p.31.

  ‘It subjected everybody’: Victor Azarya, Anneke Breedveld, Mirjam de Bruijn & Han Van Dijk (eds), Pastoralists under Pressure, p.246.

  ‘The problem with the agricultural communities’: AA Batran, in Ajayi & Crowder (eds), The History of West Africa.

  ‘the creed of private property’: Charles Grémont, in McDougall & Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers, p.138.

  ‘State institutions clearly considered’: ibid., p.136.

  ‘constitute the chief wealth’: Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, p.55.

  ‘If a woman’s reproductive potential’: Prussin, African Nomadic Architecture, p.205.

  ‘They display great skill’: Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, p.54.

  ‘Therein is the tragedy’: Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, quoted in Majok & Schwabe (eds), Development among Africa’s Migratory Pastoralists, p.6.