The Timbuktu School for Nomads Read online

  Praise for

  The Timbuktu School for Nomads

  Nick Jubber’s The Timbuktu School for Nomads is an abundantly energetic gold-mine of a book. Heaped with history and background information, with ideas, adventures, and poignant postulations, it stares right in the face of current events. This is a book that will remind us all to look with care at what is happening on the great sandscape of North Africa ‘now’. A work of inspiration and scholarship, it deserves all the attention it getsa.

  Tahir Shah, author of The Caliph’s House

  A well-informed and readable book based on time usefully spent in nomad camps, informed by a thorough survey of the literature. The Sahara and Sahel are complex, dangerous, productive, compelling places. The Timbuktu School for Nomads captures the feel of this in conversations with nomads about their livelihoods, with the constant threat of a drought or an al Qaeda squadron just over the next dune.

  Dr Jeremy Swift, author of The Sahara and The Other Eden

  ‘Sedentary civilization has been telling itself that nomads are an anachronism for many centuries. But nomadic cultures are still vibrantly alive, as the intrepid Nick Jubber shows us in North Africa. This book is both a wonderful travel adventure, and a defense of journeys without end.’

  – Richard Grant, author of Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads and Dispatches from Pluto

  ‘Nick Jubber’s new book takes us on an unforgettable journey through time and space, plenty of it, and gives voice to voiceless communities that inhabit one of the most problematic corners of the globe.’

  – Amir Taheri, author of Holy Terror

  Also by Nicholas Jubber

  The Prester Quest

  Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah’s Beard

  www.nicholasbrealey.com

  First published in 2016 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing

  An imprint of John Murray Press

  An Hachette company

  Copyright © Nicholas Jubber 2016

  The right of Nicholas Jubber to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781473645288

  Map drawn by Sandra Oakin.

  Nicholas Brealey Publishing

  John Murray Press

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  Tel: 020 3122 6000

  www.nicholasbrealey.com

  www.nickjubber.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for The Timbuktu School for Nomads

  Also by Nicholas Jubber

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE – The Middle of Nowhere

  1. City of Gold

  2. Dinner with the Blue Men

  3. White Man’s Grave

  The School for Nomads – Lesson One: Baggage

  PART TWO – City

  4. The God-Blessed Lair of Pigeon Shit

  5. Learning to Love the Glottal Stop

  6. Death of a Camel

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Two: Riding

  PART THREE – Mountain

  7. The Sultan’s Road to Azrou

  8. Market Forces

  9. The Hunt for Aziza’s Lost Cattle

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Three: Tracking

  PART FOUR – Dunes

  10. Poets of the Sahara

  11. The Last Colony in Africa

  12. Picnic in the Desert

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Four: Camp

  PART FIVE – Plateau

  13. Iron-Ore Train to the Adrar

  14. Dancing with Nomads

  15. Libraries in the Sand

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Five: Study and Play

  PART SIX – Urban Nomads

  16. Fishing and F***ing

  17. City of Spells

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Six: Lore

  PART SEVEN – Plain

  18. Paradise Lost

  19. Cowboys and Animists

  20. A Short Walk in the Gondo Bush

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Seven: Water

  PART EIGHT – River

  21. Masters of the River

  22. Spirits of the Niger

  The School for Nomads – Lesson Eight: Score

  23. Lights Out on the Sahara

  PART NINE – The Middle of Nowhere (Revisited)

  24. Timbuktu the Broken

  25. Licking the Desert’s Wounds

  Postscript

  Glossary

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Footnotes

  For Poppy

  Africa, which country I have in all places travelled quite over: wherein whatsoever I saw worthy the observation, I presently committed to writing; and those which I saw not, I proved to be at large declared unto me by most credible and substantial persons, which were themselves eye-witnesses of the same.

  Leo Africanus, The Description of Africa and the

  Things Therein Contained

  Before the coming of the red sun,

  we played upon the anthills,

  like a breaking storm over the calm,

  becoming death rattles in our turn,

  a rainbow of arms and chanting

  and thronging roads,

  smashing the barriers, garrisons, and borders,

  buried in vertigo’s saddlebags

  and in nausea’s bile,

  nostalgic,

  voices of delirious trek.

  Hawad (Tuareg poet), Le coude grinçant de l’anarchie

  (‘Anarchy’s Delirious Trek’)

  Prologue

  THE CITIES WERE SCORCHING, SO THE DESERT WAS THE PLACE TO COOL OFF.

  Banners were shaking on the grand public squares. People who had been gagged for decades were shouting themselves hoarse. The whole of North Africa was palsied with protest. But it was an urban phenomenon, lit by flashbulbs and LED, marshalled by social media. The people in the countryside were out of the frame.

  I was looking south. I wanted to scale the mountains and ride the dunes, float along the rivers, camp under doum palms. I wanted adventure. I wanted to cross the desert, browse between the great bookends of Fez and Timbuktu. I wanted, specifically, to follow the journey of Leo Africanus, a sixteenth-century explorer who travelled with his uncle to the Kingdom of the Songhay in 1507.

  Actually, it wasn’t so much ‘crossing the desert’ that spurred me. It was the prospect of travelling in the desert. I wasn’t hung up on mapping some unknown route or breaking a record – I just wanted to meet the people who lived there. I had been dreaming of something along these lines, I suppose, since I was 6 years old. That’s when I saw the Sahara for the first time – like so many of my generation – although it was framed in teak and transmitted by cathode ray tube and I was safe on the saddle of my father’s knees.

  Ever since that first viewing of Star Wars, when the dunes of Tatooine floated thrillingly in my family’s living room, I always associated the desert with the alien and faraway – the ultimate adventure. Rea
ding under my duvet at night, I turned to the stories of Ali Baba and Sindbad, rather than the Kon-Tiki Expedition or Kipling’s jungle tales. Rainforests and arctic poles never had the same impact. It was always the desert – the landscape of Mad Max and Dune as much as of TE Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger – that offered the gateway to a world completely different from my own.

  Science fiction had lit my earhly interest in the desert, but it was Leo Africanus’s mealy book that lured me on this particular journey. First published in Venice as Della descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabili che iui sono (‘The Description of Africa and the Notable Things Therein Contained’), it has few peers among the travelogues of its age. Fizzing with observations on trade and traditions, history and hearsay, plenty of sixteenth-century prejudice, and the occasional racy anecdote,fn1 it conjures up an Africa at once elusive and eerily familiar.

  At first, I thought it was Leo himself I was following. But during the course of my journey, I realised I was responding less to the parallels with his journey than to the people he describes – and their descendants. Travelling often stokes its own goals: the more I dug into North Africa, the more I was drawn to the nomadic communities I met along the way. I would make their world the climax of my trip, I decided. I would join a camel caravan in Timbuktu, a company of nomads heading to the salt mines of Northern Mali. It would be a sumptuous end to my adventure.

  Down in the dunes of South Morocco, I camped with a Berber cameleer called Salim under the jagged crest of the Black Mountain. I rode a camel that seemed to be practising the Harlem Shake, fell off twice and, after eating the salted goat that Salim hung off his saddle (a sort of desert jerky), I supplied a feast for the local insect population. One of my abiding memories of that experience was stumbling out of the tent to be sick, sliding past the hardened pizza of my earlier vomit, gazing in horror at the hundreds of pinprick eyes glowing in my torch beam. My desert learning curve would have to be as steep as the dune that sent me on my first tumble.

  ‘Desert’. Our English word tells us so little. It derives from the Latin verb deserere, ‘to forsake’. Arabic is much richer, as you would expect from a language born in the desert (quite literally: the root of ‘Arab’ is an ancient Semitic word for an arid tract). Just as Inuit languages cater for different grades of snow, so the textures of the desert are expressed in Arabic, from baadiya or the wild steppes, to the tih or trackless waste, to the sahel or ‘shore’, the semi-arid belt that runs under the belly of the Sahara. But it is ‘Sahara’ that receives the widest usage: as-Sahra, with its allusions to colour, specifically the mixing of yellow and red.

  Long before I rolled out of Morocco, the cities of North Africa were whipping up a storm. Strong Man politics was being chopped down for lumber, fuelling the flames of white-hot sectarianism. Egypt was undergoing the labour pains of revolution; Libya was being strangled in civil war. A few weeks earlier, Libyan rebels had dragged Colonel Gaddafi out of a drainage pipe to his death. His weapons hoard spilled into various hands, among whom were Tuareg fighters who had front-lined his ‘Army of Islam’.

  I was roaming in the same direction as the militants – and blissfully unaware of it. I travelled by bus, boat and occasionally donkey cart, carrying a backpack that weighed little more than my boots. The militants rode in Hilux jeeps loaded with rocket launchers, mortars and machine guns. By the time I reached Timbuktu the desert storm was already brewing, although I could see no more than a misty horizon.

  Theoretically my timing could have been worse, but it didn’t feel like it. A week before the salt caravan was due to set off, armed jihadists drove into Timbuktu while the town was at Friday prayers. Four tourists were seized in their hotel, and one of them was shot dead for trying to resist. Travelling in the desert was now inconceivable – if only for the fact there were no guides willing to take me. So I returned home, my plans foiled.

  A month later, the desert of Northern Mali replaced Eastern Libya as the most violent place in Africa. One military post after another was knocked out. Whole swathes of the Sahara were seized. In the Malian capital Bamako, frustration boiled over; people were growing restless at the army’s inability to stamp down the rebellion. In March 2012, a coup spun out of a military barracks and President Amadou Toumani Touré was ousted. Like a stray goat too close to drag itself clear, Mali was sucked into the quicksand. The militants exploited the chaos in the capital and pushed their advantage, declaring the independence of ‘Azawad’, the Northern Malian desert. Well-trained jihadists joined and later overwhelmed them, armed with lavish funds gleaned from Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb,fn2 shady donors in the Middle East and naïve European governments dishing out ransom payments. Mali, for so long the most affable country on the Saharan belt, had disintegrated into a no-go zone as inhospitable as Syria or Iraq.

  For a year, the black flag of the jihadists sagged in the breezeless air of Timbuktu. The people sagged as well, under prohibitions against music, visible female hair and fraternising between men and women. Those who could manage it voted with their feet; over the course of the occupation, the bulk of the population left. But in February 2013, there was another twist in the tale. The French army launched Operation Serval, swooping into the Sahara at the head of a pan-African alliance. The jihadists were driven out of Timbuktu and other strongholds; as the initial celebrations died down, the French army was sucked into the murky bog of long-term conflict – the phenomenon known to war reporters as ‘mission creep’. Mali remained a teeth-jangling destination, but for the first time since my previous visit, it was possible to conceive of a return.

  While the conflict had smothered the salt caravans for the time being, there were other reasons to travel back. I had already visited several nomadic communities in North Africa. I wanted to revisit them and meet some of the others, to fit the different pieces of the jigsaw together and form a picture of nomadic life in the twenty-first century. I wanted to learn from the nomads; to develop my raggedy skills at water drawing, camel riding and camp building; to deepen some of the lessons from my earlier trip.

  It was time to go to school.

  Imagine … you could still meet the Hun, ranging their horses between the Rhine and the Danube. Or if the felt tents of Scythians continued to pimple the shores of the Black Sea. Or if Goths still wrapped themselves in sheepskins on the Baltic Coast. In North Africa, there are Berbers, Fulani and Tuareg (and other equally ancient communities) who carry on traditions and ways of life that stretch back millennia. I am not suggesting we should celebrate them simply for their hoariness, but surely any lifestyle that has endured for so long has something to teach us. ‘Pastoral peoples of Africa, who have lived in the closest relations to their lands for millennia,’ write ecologists Aggrey Ayuen Majok and Calvin W Schwabe, ‘must be given some benefit of the doubt and it must be considered seriously that they know a lot about what they are doing and are not hell-bent on their own destruction.’

  The more I learned about North Africa, the more its nomads resonated with me, herding a greater range of livestock, across a greater range of landscapes, than anywhere else I had travelled. Nomadic heritage permeates our modern, sedentary cultures. But in the last few centuries, itinerant lifestyles have been hacked down in Europe, felled by a mighty army of antagonists (led by enclosures, industrialisation and privatisation). Apart from a few rare pockets, the practice survives primarily in the vocabulary we have inherited from our pastoralist ancestors – words like ‘capital’ (which shares a root with cattle and a linked meaning of portable property), ‘fee’ (derived from the Old English feoh, ‘livestock’) and ‘aggregate’ (which evokes the Latin root gregare, ‘to herd’). Nomadism may no longer play a significant role in our economies, but it has certainly left a legacy.

  In Africa, very different circumstances are at play, enabling an archipelago of nomadic islands to survive in the sea of urbanisation. The contributing factors are many and complicated, key among them the prevalence of tribal systems, the comparatively slow
rate of industrialisation and geographical practicalities. From the sixteenth century onwards, as the Sahara region succumbed to ‘progressive dessication’, the reins of power increasingly fell to the people best equipped to navigate the desert. Nomads lorded over their sedentary neighbours, establishing slave castes and systems of tribute that are still being untangled. Far from being in retreat, for large periods of the last millennium nomadism was flourishing. For many of North Africa’s nomadic groups, it is only recent times that have found them on the back foot.

  You can hack a trail through North African history by focusing solely on its itinerant tribes. The classical era gives us the cattle-breeding Gaetulians, who raided their Roman vassals and refused to pay them tribute; along with the shadowy Mauri, ancestors of the Moors, who traded with Carthage and supplied many of Rome’s most distinguished cavaliers. The medieval period is dominated by the arrival of the Bani Hillal (‘Sons of the Crescent Moon’), an Arabian tribe who led their flocks into Egypt and spurred them on to Morocco, looting, burning and deforesting the eleventh-century Maghrib. According to the great Maghrebi historian Ibn Khaldun they ‘attached themselves to the country, and the flat territory was completely ruined’. For many medieval observers they typified all that was wrong with nomads. Yet they also sealed Arabic as the region’s lingua franca and Islam as its faith, smashing their sedentary opponents in a wave of victories that are still narrated by bards across the region.

  The most dynamic medieval dynasties sprang from nomadic stock, such as the drum-beating Almoravids, scourge of El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista; or the Merinids, who ruled late medieval Morocco. When Sultan Abdelhafid signed off Morocco’s independence to the French in 1912, it was Berber tribesmen from the Middle Atlas who protested most actively against foreign rule, although it was the urban elites who reaped the benefits of independence. More recently, the drive for Tuareg separatism hovers over Saharan politics like a planing sparrowhawk, while traditionally nomadic Saharawis continue to campaign for independence against Morocco in Africa’s last colony. Contrary to the assumptions of many armchair anthropologists, the story of Africa’s nomads is far from over.