The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  I am hugely indebted to Mahmoud Dicko for all his help in and around Timbuktu. And I cannot express enough my thanks to my friend Abdramane Sabane (along with his family), who showed me so much generosity and kindness from our first encounter on the Niger river. Finally, I am grateful to my family for their support and patience, Milo and Rafe for inspiration, and Poppy for a thousand and one impossible things.

  Footnotes

  Prologue

  fn1 He tells, for example, of a Sufi sect ‘addicted to feasting and lascivious song’, who stripped off their garments in the heat of their dancing and ‘lasciviously kissed’ each other; and of lesbian fortune tellers who ‘burn in lust’ towards their customers, ‘and will in the devil’s behalf demand for a reward, that they may lie with them’.

  fn2 Although it shares its branding with the ‘mother’ organisation, AQIM has a complex parentage, having grown out of the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which emerged in the Algerian Civil War of the early 1990s. In 2006, its name was changed to align with international jihadist currents, linking its goal of an African caliphate with similar aspirations in the Middle East.

  fn3 This concept has been used to impose restrictions on grazing rights and even to justify forced settlements, despite the safeguards historically deployed by nomadic communities. Ecologist Katherine Homewood observes: ‘the Tragedy of the Commons has underpinned powerful national and international policy pressure to privatise rangelands, with drastic implications … This drive for privatisation has interacted with twentieth-century colonial and post-independence trajectories of boundary formation, which have themselves left most pastoral populations marginalised on the geographical and political periphery of African nation states, fragmented between adjacent and often hostile nations, under intense pressure to sedentarise and often drawn into violent and destructive geopolitical confrontations.’

  Part One: The Middle of Nowhere

  1. City of Gold

  fn1 His name was Abu Ishaq as-Sahili (although his friends knew him as ‘the Little Casserole’) and he was paid the handsome sum of 440 pounds of gold for his trouble.

  fn2 As late as the seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas could write that ‘the richest Mynes of Gold in the World are in Africa’. Scholarship supports this position: ‘until the discovery of America,’ writes Nehemiah Levtzion, ‘the Sudan was the principal source of gold both for the Muslim world and for Europe.’

  fn3 The description reads: ‘This negro lord is called Musa Malli, lord of the negroes of Guinea. So abundant is the gold which is found in his country that he is the richest and most noble king in all the land.’ According to the historian John Hunwick, West African gold at this time accounted for two-thirds of the global supply.

  fn4 His predecessor, Sunni Ali, had been ‘a tyrant, a miscreant, an aggressor, a despot, and a butcher,’ according to As-Sadi, who ‘killed so many human beings that only God most high could count them’. Mohammed was his military commander. Figuring that Sunni Ali’s son would carry on the vicious family tradition, Mohammed decided to take matters into his own hands and toppled Sunni Ali in a coup.

  2. Dinner with the Blue Men

  fn1 A few words on the origin of ‘Tuareg’. Etymologists trace it to the Fezzan region of Libya, but it is traditionally believed to derive from the Arabic root ‘t-r-q’, meaning ‘abandoned (by God)’, a reference to the people’s late adoption of Islam. The French writer Jacques Hureiki traces it to the word ‘taqaqa’, meaning to knock, referring to genies who knock on doors and tents at night: ‘the true meaning of Touareg’, he writes, ‘is that of genies, recognised by the imouchar and by Touaregs in general, because that is appropriate to their culture.’ The broader endonym used by Tuareg across the Sahara is imuhaghan or imashaghan, which is conventionally translated as ‘the free people’, although according to anthropologist Jeremy Keenan it may derive from the verb ‘to raid’ or ‘to plunder’. Malian Tuaregs generally call themselves Kel Tamasheq – the people of Tamasheq, referring to their language.

  3. White Man’s Grave

  fn1 In 1620, the sailor Richard Jobson told of a city in West Africa, ‘the houses whereof are covered only with gold’; and in the early nineteenth century, a Moroccan traveller called Abd Salam Shabeeny informed his listeners in London that ‘Timbuctoo is the great emporium for all the country of the blacks, and even for Marocco and Alexandria’.

  fn2 These days, Timbuktu’s underground economy encompasses everything from flour to motor fuel to class A drugs. Cocaine, in particular, is a massively lucrative business. According to a report by the United Nations Overseas Development Commission, ‘its wholesale value on arrival in Europe would exceed the national security budgets of many countries in West Africa’. The most notorious smuggling event to date was the ‘Air Cocaine’ incident in 2009, when a Boeing 727, believed to be transporting ten tons of South American powder, crashed in the desert north of Gao. A dispute arose between the clan that was trafficking the drugs and a rival clan in whose territory the plane had landed. Violence ensued, with hostages taken on both sides. The dispute was resolved by the intercession of a government minister, who demanded a share of the profits in return for his mediation. More recently, drug smuggling across the Sahara has continued to rake in the big bucks, with Islamist groups reportedly profiting from their windfalls, sending drug mules across the desert in Totoya 4x4s, armed with Kalashnikovs and satellite phones, hiding their narcotics in spare tyres and in the gaps between their fuel tanks.

  fn3 This triangular relationship between salt, slaves and gold is expressed in an old saying, describing Timbuktu as the city of three kinds of gold: ‘black gold’, ‘yellow gold’ and ‘white gold’ (or slaves, gold and salt).

  fn4 Named after a celebrated Timbuktu savant, who flourished in the late sixteenth century. Ahmed Baba wrote hundreds of works, from a biographical dictionary to treatises on slavery and tobacco, and spent most of his life in exile as one of the literati taken away in chains after the Moroccan invasion of 1591.

  fn5 ‘I have a compulsion to wander and a compulsion to return – a homing instinct like a migrating bird,’ wrote Chatwin. He travelled among many nomadic communities and felt great empathy for them. He echoed the words of Ibn Khaldun in writing ‘they are closer to being good than settled people because they are closer to the first state’. But his attempt to write the definitive book on nomadism floundered on his inability to reconcile the personal and the anthropological. For all they have in common, travelling and nomadism are driven by very different motivations.

  Part Two: City

  4. The God-Blessed Lair of Pigeon Shit

  fn1 The Arabic language supports this connection: badr, the word for a full moon, also denotes a bucket of lambskins.

  fn2 In 1599, a year before the first English edition of Leo’s Description was published, George Abbot was able to write (in A Briefe Description of the Whole Worlde): ‘From beyond the hils Atlas maior, unto the South of Africa, is nothing almost in antiquity worthy the reading, and those things which are written, for the most part are fables.’ But Leo provided a vivid account of precisely this region, on which, as EW Bovill put it (in his classic The Golden Trade of the Moors), ‘geographers and cartographers remained dependent for almost all they knew of the interior of Africa for the next 300 years’. Other writers, from Herodotus to the Arab geographer Ibn Hawkal, had written about Africa, but none had penetrated so far, nor written in such depth; and ‘nothing as fundamental or dramatic as Leo’s History was to be added to Englishmen’s knowledge of Africa’, writes Eldred Jones, ‘until the famous nineteenth-century telegram of Speke and Grant, “The Nile is settled”.’

  fn3 Leather goods were a major part of the economy back in Leo Africanus’s day too. He wrote of shops ‘that make sword-scabbards and caparisons for horses’, shops for shoes and buskins, about 40 shops specialising in ‘stirrups, spurs and bridles, so artificially [made] as I think the like are not to be seen in Europe’, makers of leat
her tankards, tailors specialising in leather shields and a whole street of saddlers, ‘which cover the saddles before mentioned threefold with most excellent leather’.

  6. Death of a Camel

  fn1 For advice on dove-keeping, he could have turned to Leo Africanus, who writes about the ‘keeping of doves, which are here in great plenty, of all colours. These doves they keep in certain cages or lockers on the tops of their houses, which lockers they set open twice a day, to wit, morning and evening, delighting greatly to see them fly.’

  Part Three: Mountain

  7. The Sultan’s Road to Azrou

  fn1 These were not only in Africa. A Berber commander called Munnuza, who was in charge of a crucial pass on the Pyrenees, conspired with the Duke of Aquitaine to overthrow the Arabs – as revenge for his people’s treatment in North Africa. The revolt was suppressed, but it is a symptom of the tensions that derailed the Arabs’ invasion of Europe and led to their defeat at Poitiers in 732 AD. Without the recalcitrance of the Berbers, the history of Western Europe might have been very different.

  fn2 This theory can be applied to events like the French Revolution (where radicals turned to counter-revolutionaries and distributors of venal offices), Soviet Russia and the Ayatollahs’ Iran, as much as to the North African kingdoms on which Ibn Khaldun focused. No wonder British historian Arnold J Toynbee wrote of the Muqaddimah: ‘he has created and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place’. What makes Ibn Khaldun all the more remarkable is the abundance of groundbreaking economic, philosophical and sociological matter in which this theory is enmeshed. For example, his analysis of the negative impact of an overbearing state on a lively economy (and the parallel significance of judicious public works) anticipated John Maynard Keynes; and he identified coordinated specialisation as the primary source of economic surplus three centuries before Adam Smith.

  9. The Hunt for Aziza’s Lost Cattle

  fn1 Anthropologist John Shoup describes this process: ‘Decision making power was taken from tribal councils and placed in the hands of elected commune councils … Among the results of the weakening of corporate tribal cooperation has been to open common “tribal” resources to both private and commune interests. In the Middle Atlas this has resulted in serious problems of overgrazing by private flock owners (some from Meknes and Fez) and deforestation as a result of logging and demands for fuel.’

  Part Four: Dunes

  10. Poets of the Sahara

  fn1 It was founded by his cousin, Abu Bakr Ibn ‘Umar, but Yusuf oversaw the construction. ‘He girded himself with a belt,’ records the fourteenth-century Rawd al-Qirtas (the ‘Garden of Pages’), ‘and worked in the relay and at the building work along with the labourers out of humility towards God.’

  fn2 ‘Indeed, we may say’, the historian tells us, ‘that the qualities of character resulting from sedentary culture and luxury are identical with corruption.’ This certainly holds with the Almoravids: although their leaders maintained Yusuf’s puritanism, the courts became increasingly decadent. ‘Even worse,’ reported the contemporary chronicler Abd-Wahid al-Marrakshi, ‘their wives took charge, involving themselves in every vice, not least the drinking of wine and prostitution.’

  fn3 This slogan is displayed on hillsides all over Morocco, although not with everyone’s endorsement. A Berber in the High Atlas told me about his mischievous friends, who had climbed up one of the hillsides and added some stones to the first letter of the declaration, transforming it into kul – ‘eat’ – so the slogan now read: ‘The King eats the country.’ In a case of unusually rapid state efficiency, it was renovated within days.

  fn4 This has become a major source of revenue for many nomads. As Oudada points out, the tightening of borders encourages smugglers to lean on older techniques: ‘Camels have again become the most favoured means of transport, because they can penetrate the tighter chain of frontier posts silently and by night, and also because they are able to cover short distances, thus reducing the risk of capture for the smugglers themselves.’

  fn5 He tells us, with disarming pride, of his recital for a mountain chief: ‘and being as then but fifteen years of age, the prince gave right joyful and diligent ear unto me; and whatsoever he understood not sufficiently, he would cause it to be interpreted.’

  fn6 A branch of the Tekna confederation and descended from the Bani Hillal, the pastoralists whom historians like Ibn Khaldun have blamed for devastating the Maghrib after their arrival from Arabia in the eleventh century AD.

  11. The Last Colony in Africa

  fn1 This resolution was backed by the International Court of Justice, which categorically refuted Moroccan claims to sovereignty: ‘the court has not found legal ties of such nature as might affect the application of resolution 1514 (XV) in the decolonisation of Western Sahara and, in particular, of the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory.’

  fn2 ‘The Arab Spring’, claimed Noam Chomsky in a speech in October 2012, ‘began in November 2010 when the people of Western Sahara revolted against their Moroccan occupiers.’ Mohammed Lamine, the Saharawi UK ambassador, put it this way: ‘If you’re talking about the ingredients – marginalisation, poverty, lack of rights – the Arab Spring started in Laayoune. But if you do this in Laayoune, no one cares. If you do it in Cairo, then people start to notice.’

  12. Picnic in the Desert

  fn1 Where there is a sizeable Saharawi population, comprised largely of refugees and asylum seekers. People are not the only exchange with the Canary Islands, which import Western Saharan sand to top up their beaches, although much of it is blown back on the prevailing wind.

  Part Five: Plateau

  13. Iron-Ore Train to the Adrar

  fn1 ‘Genealogists who had no knowledge of the true nature of things imagined that Negroes are the children of Ham,’ he wrote, ‘… and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse … The curse included no more than that Ham’s descendants should be the slaves of his brothers’ descendants. To attribute the blackness of the Negroes to Ham, reveals disregard of the true nature of heat and cold and of the influence they exercise upon the air [climate] and upon the creatures that come into being in it.’

  15. Libraries in the Sand

  fn1 The poem he recited, the Burdat ash-Shifa’, is known for its healing properties. ‘It happens,’ wrote Sidi Ahmed in his Pilgrimage (because he heard this poem too, in Alexandria), ‘that the mimiya ode possesses a great secret, and mighty Baraka.’

  fn2 Although there were comparable disasters in earlier eras, such as a sixteenth-century drought around the time of the Moroccan conquest, and a terrible drought in 1913, which cost thousands of lives, caused the evacuation of colonial outposts, and led to a Tuareg uprising in Niger.

  fn3 So wrote Sidi Ahmed’s translator, HT Norris, who discovered The Pilgrimage of Ahmed in Ouadane in the 1960s.

  Part Six: Urban Nomads

  16. Fishing and F***ing

  fn1 So valuable are Mauritanian waters that in November 2015, the European Union signed its biggest fisheries deal with an African country to date, worth €59.125 million, allowing EU fleets to fish up to 281,500 tonnes a year.

  fn2 Like Freddy, Leo Africanus delved into the use of rootstocks as a form of natural Viagra. He identified a root called surnag in the Atlas, which is ‘said to be very comfortable and preservative unto the privy parts of man, and being drunk in an electuary, to stir up venereal lust’. This sounds pretty much like the method Freddy was planning on.

  fn3 The Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad – the Tuareg independence movement whose armed insurrection launched the Malian crisis in late 2011.

  17. City of Spells

  fn1 Also known as ‘shea butter’, this is the fat from the nut of the shea tree, and is used in cooking and washing as well as being rubbed into
the skin to protect it from the sun and smeared in women’s hair to give it lustre.

  fn2 Although the association of sexual licence with the Djenné mosque is hardly as foreign as all that. Back in the early nineteenth century, ‘dancers sauntered about the galleries of the mosque itself’ (according to Félix Dubois) and a young Quranic scholar was so affronted by the carnal activities taking place around the mosque that when he emerged as a regional conqueror, under the name Sekou Amadou, he had it torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

  fn3 There has been no huge change from the Quranic schools René Caillié described in his nineteenth-century journey. ‘By the light of a great fire,’ he wrote, ‘they recite some verses of the Koran, chanting them in a loud tone; these verses the master writes upon their boards and they have to learn them by heart. At night they meet again at the master’s tent to repeat the lesson.’ Western educators tend to be dismissive of rote learning, but it can be a useful tool and helps to develop the faculty of memory.

  Part Seven: Plain

  18. Paradise Lost

  fn1 According to this interpretation, they were one of the Tribes of Israel, who emigrated south of Egypt to escape the cruelty of the Pharaohs and took their name from the word foudh, meaning ‘those who left’.

  fn2 This was the same drought, spanning 1968–74, that spread disaster across Mauritania. My guide there, Ghazi, had told me about its impact. Its nightmare shadow similarly hung over the nomadic communities I met in Mali. For the Fulani, its effect was especially severe, as cattle are less resistant to drought than many other animals such as camels (in the cool season, a cow can last only 3 days without water, compared with 90 for a camel). Equally damaging was the impact on the land. ‘Everything died,’ said Hamidou Bouki, an elder in the village of Yoru, ‘the animals, the grass, the trees. The government brought us wheat and red sorghum but there wasn’t enough to go around. We were only saved by the fruit of the gigilé bushes.’ Bouki listed seven different grasses that could no longer be found in the area around his village. Other people talked about the death of the baobabs and the disappearance of the fauna. The drought acted as a courier for the desert, bringing sand dunes and acres of arid flatness where there used to be lakes and forests, establishing a vicious cycle of desiccation from which the land has yet to untangle itself.