Johnny is court jester to King Manu, always ready with a string of obscene jokes and puns; a couple of stewardesses received matrimonial proposals, as so do I. Johnny’s behaviour seems an anarchic shadow of the thoughts and impulses that Manu, being shy, would never express himself. By the time the plane is soaring half way across the crystal blue water of the Mediterranean, people are dancing in the aisles.
An hour later, we’re flying over Andalucia, which apparently channels its flamenco spirit up to us from 20,000 feet below. The guitars and chanting just get rowdier, bottles of brandy appear (we had been in an Islamic, officially non-drinking zone for the past few days), and the party really takes off. We feel relief, tinged with guilt, to be escaping the unforgiving desert, mindful that hundreds of thousands of refugees are still stuck there.
Joining in at the back of the plane are the Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem, his brother and fellow thespian Carlos, and other celebrities, charity workers and organisers, all fresh from the Sahara Film Festival which takes place in one of the most remote parts of the Algerian desert. ‘The backyard of hell’ was how Bardem describes the place to me. Running into Bardem’s instantly recognisable face, like the fleshy incarnation of an Easter Island statue, was alarming. I’d just seen the film No Country for Old Men, where he plays a terrifying and convincing psychopathic killer and I half-expected him to produce that compressed-air cattle-gun which he uses to murder his way through the badlands of Arizona and New Mexico.
A week before, we had all flown to Tindouf in the far west corner of the Algerian desert, jumped into a convoy of minivans and travelled through shifting dunes and sandstorms for three hours to a refugee camp in Dakhla, where the festival was taking place. Our intention was to highlight the plight of the Sahrawis, who have lived for more than thirty years in exile in the Algerian Sahara. An estimated 200,000 of them languish in a number of dust-blown refugee camps near the border with their homeland.
According to the United Nations, the area referred to today as the Western Sahara is one of the world’s last major non-self-governing territories. Since the 1970s, an Algerian-backed rebel movement called the Polisario Front has demanded independence from Morocco, who occupied the territory in 1975. Conflict between Morocco and the Polisario ended with a ceasefire in 1991, but a promised referendum on a future Sahrawi state has never been held. In the meantime, the status quo remains immovable and the refugees are trapped in their melancholy exile. An entire generation of Sahrawi have been brought up in those refugee camps, with their Polisario-run schools and hospitals, almost entirely off the media radar.
How do you get the outside world to pay attention to your cause if you are a marginalised people that has been largely ignored for more than three decades, living in one of the loneliest and most isolated places on earth? Violence and suicide bombing would be a speedy route to the headlines. There were disturbing rumours that the camps, with their despairing young men, were beginning to be infiltrated by al-Qaida in the Magreb (AQIM); indeed, in 2011 three aid workers at the camp were kidnapped.
A more civilised route, which the Sahrawi government in exile opted for, was to host an arts festival and invite some celebrities along. Both Bardem and Manu held Spain (the ex-colonial master of Western Sahara) largely responsible for the situation. The presence of both men in Dakhla would glean significant coverage in the Spanish media.
My desert adventure begins when I receive a call from Manu’s management company inviting me along to the film festival. Could I meet Manu in Madrid in a week’s time? I am given a time, 2pm, and a place, the Plaza Tirso de Molina. Further details are not forthcoming. The phone goes dead. Like some old-school espionage outfit, Manu’s team seem to operate on a need-to-know basis.
When I get to the square, there sitting outside a café are the familiar figures of Madjid, the French-Algerian singer Akli D (whose album Manu had just produced), and the genial Johnny McLeod. Johnny’s nickname for me is Sheik Spear, ever since I’d told him in his Parisian bar that some Muslims believed the immortal bard of Avon was actually an Arab called Sheik Spear. ‘Sheik Spear has arrived!’ he announces ceremoniously. Manu arrives soon afterwards, clad in desert boots, and we go off to a local TV station for a show called Don’t Shoot the Piano Player, where Manu is booked to sing “Me Llaman Calle” from La Radiolina. He had composed the song originally for the soundtrack of a gritty feature film, Princesas, about two prositutes in Madrid, and had later dedicated it to a prositutes’ collective in the city, filming a beautiful, life-affirming video for the song, featuring the prostitutes of the Malasaña district, to publicise their campaign.
Madjid and Manu playing in the Madrid Bar, El Palentino, in the video for ‘Me Llaman Calle”, drawing attention to the rights of Spanish prostitutes.
Carolina, a working girl from Ecuador and member of the Hetaira Collective (or, to give it its full title, the Hetaira Collective for the Defence of the Rights of Prostitutes), who had appeared on the video, was on the show as well. She explains that the hetaira were ancient Greek courtesans who had a wide access to culture and managed to achieve respect and recognition in society, and talks about the collective itself, which fights for the rights and welfare of street women by providing information and support about health, psychology and legal issues. When Manu was awarded a major Spanish song prize for “Me Llaman Calle”, he suggested some of the women accept the award in his absence. Cue massive publicity.
We reunite with the rest of Manu’s posse at the airport. As we walk through the crowds, several people stop him. There is a nice example of Manu’s organic information-gathering technique when a Mexican journalist called Francina Islas asks him whether he knows about the current teachers’ strike in Oaxaca in the south of the country. Manu proceeds to suss her out: she is a serious journalist who has made a documentary on Nobel-winning author Octavio Paz. The authorities in Oaxaca had treated the strikers brutally and there were allegations that a couple of teachers had been raped. Manu knows about it, but wants Francina to email him up-to-date information. One of the posters onstage for his Mexican tour later in the year proclaims support for the Oaxaca strikers.
The flight to Algeria is delayed a couple of hours but Manu, Madjid, Johnny and Akli D entertain the waiting crowd at the gate with an impromptu jam session. I’d asked Aitzi from Manu’s management company whether there was anything specific I should bring to the camps, and she told me that they had received requests for particular medicines and various other useful items which they would bring and I was not to worry. Based on my experience of previous visits to Muslim countries, from Morocco to Pakistan, I guess that some people in Dakhla are likely to appreciate a few less practical gifts, so I stock up on whisky and cigarettes.
After a fitful few hours of attempted sleep on the plane, which are continually interrupted by Johnny’s ribald jokes from the seat behind, we touch down in Tindouf. We dump our suitcases on a lorry and jump into four-by-four vehicles for the three-hour ride across the scrubby desert to Dakhla. After half an hour, we are out of mobile phone signal range. I sense a slight panic from the journalists as we leave the wired world behind. Manu doesn’t have a mobile, so he is serenely unconcerned.
When we arrive at the refugee camp, a couple of figures wrapped in brilliant white djellabas and cool shades seem to stand out among the small gaggle of people waiting for us in the sharp dawn light. ‘I wonder if they run the place?’ I say to Manu. ‘The boss here is the sun,’ he replies. I don’t have any answer to that. When it’s at its midday peak, the desert sun is implacable and vicious, draining all colour from the landscape.
Manu and the VIPs are escorted to a rather gorgeous tent, furnished with cushions and rugs and with a four-by-four vehicle with driver on standby. The journalists’ accommodation is a bit less salubrious. Francina and I are billeted in a one-storey sandstone dwelling as the guests of a Sahrawi family. We are introduced to Nuena, the matriarch, and her teenage sons, Sidi, Nagem and Basir. They tell us that they work on
ly occasionally, looking after visitors, helping out on building sites or doing any other odd jobs. Francine begins unpacking her heavy bags, stuffed full of presents which she has carried from Madrid: torches, pens, drawing books, pasta, rice. I don’t know the family well enough to know if whisky is forbidden, though my sleeve of cigarettes, sheepishly proferred, is received with a show of gratitude.
Johnny McLeod and Manu en route to the Western Sahara.
We are given a dinner of couscous topped with a small lump of gristly camel meat. Francina, despite being a vegetarian for ten years, tells them that it was delicious. I had thought she was about to retch. In the family room opposite where we are staying, there is a solar-powered satellite TV with a hundred channels. The reception isn’t great and most of the channels are only in black and white, but it is enough to keep the family highly informed about the outside world. They are all experts on the latest Egyptian and even Brazilian soap operas.
Our sandstone dwelling is identical to a thousand others, and the multitude of white tents in the camp are also seemingly indistinguishable from one another. With no mobile to summon help, it is going to be very easy to get lost, especially at night. Sidi tells us that we are in Barrio 4 of what I write down phonetically as ‘Wilaya Daira Ben Faran’. According to him, we are going to have to ‘trust the desert. Its people will look after us.’
We manage to find Manu’s tent before night falls, only getting lost about three times. As we walk up, Johnny is talking to their personal driver on the walkie-talkie. He asks us if we need anything and I suggest a pizza takeout. Johnny launches into one his manic fantasies, offering to get his favourite pizzeria in Rome to deliver a twelve-incher in a private jet in return for 5,000 euros.
Whilst Madjid strums on his guitar in a corner of the tent, Francina starts filming the opulent carpets and drapings with her little video camera. Aitzi orders her to stop, telling her in no uncertain terms that she should have asked before starting to film. She is then banned from the tent altogether. Later, Aitzi takes me aside and said, ‘I need your help creating some distance between Manu and all the journalists here who want interviews.’
She is enlisting my support for her role as Manu’s gatekeeper and I don’t feel comfortable about it. Manu had said that everyone was welcome in the tent, but this episode heralds what is to become a problem, not just here in Dakhla, but in other trips I make with Manu later in the year. The tour manager’s job is to keep people, especially journalists, away from Manu. Manu can be the nice guy, welcoming everyone into the tent, while Aitzi has to be the bad cop keeping them out. What is the problem here, anyway? Francina is a serious journalist and Manu is here to publicise the plight of the refugees. His presence will get her TV film more coverage in Mexico.
Manu with Javier Bardem (right) and Sahara Film Festival director Javier Corcuera in the camp.
To Manu’s credit, he apologises to Francina the next morning at an elaborate ceremony to mark the opening of the Film Festival. He explains that he wants to experience the camp before making any pronouncements. At the event, Manu, Javier Bardem and his brother Carlos and other Spanish TV stars, are seated in the front row. Festival director Javier Corcuera welcomes the assembled delegates and assorted bigwigs from the Polisario. Pepe Toboada, from a Spanish NGO called Los Amigos del Sáhara, talks about the way that Spain has ‘betrayed the promise they had made to the Sahrawi people when they turned over the country to Morocco’.
Pepe helps to organise summer holidays in Spain for hundreds of children from the camps and organises monthly protest demonstrations in Madrid. Afterwards, he tells me that he had been a member of the Spanish army at the time of Spain’s withdrawal from the colony and that he ‘felt remorse for what had happened’, before adding, ‘I felt I should try to right a wrong.’
Then there are camel races followed by an extraordinary procession of teenage kids in khaki uniform, synchronised female basketball players wearing the hijab and teachers carrying placards in the local Hassani language. The display has been organised by the Polisario’s government in exile. Despite the seriousness of the Sahrawi cause, it all seems strangely but charmingly Ruritanian.
The Festival, then in its fifth year, features numerous political films, including Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World, which focused on the exploitation of immigrant workers in Britain. There are documentaries on the Sahara amongst other more straightforwardly entertaining movies from around the world. The screen is set-up in the dunes and the audience sit on rugs in the open air. There is no admission fee. A Mongolian film with the intense hallucinogenic greenness of the central Asian grasslands is a treat for local eyes, tired with the monotonous colour of their surroundings. Sidi, Nuena’s son, also reckons that the most controversial or erotic films are shown in the one indoor venue, which had Polisario guards on the door. ‘Some films are for everyone, some only for the foreigners,’ Manu adds.
Most locals seem to dress up for the movies. Two girls called Fatimatou and Lala, who sit next to me, are friendly and flirtatious in their full evening regalia and make-up. They are in their late teens and as well as Hassani and Arabic, they also speak excellent French and Spanish and some faltering English, which confirms what others had said about the high level of education in the camps. Sidi tells me that local girls consider a film screening to be a good place to find a husband.
Back in Manu’s tent, similar conclusions about the quality of local education are being reached. Johnny is doing subtractions, additions and some writing with an eight-year-old girl from the camp. ‘She’s at a very high level,’ he says, clearly impressed. ‘Much better than a similar girl from Algeria or Morocco, or even Paris.’ Manu is also astounded. ‘In the middle of the desert, that’s incredible,’ he says, explaining that many of the teachers and doctors spent eight years or so studying in Cuba before returning to the camps. ‘It’s not easy for these people. A couple of guys I met had experienced the beaches, music, girls, maybe rum, in Cuba. And then they have to come back to this. But they do return, because they know why they’re doing it there. That’s perseverancia.’
When I tell Manu about the girls at the film, he says he is also impressed by the dignified bearing of the women and relatively easygoing relation between the sexes. ‘It’s very modern, compared to other Muslim countries,’ he says. ‘I have a problem with the position of women in Islam. But here there seems to be a kind of Islam of the future, an educated, tolerant Islam. The politicians are always going on about the problem of radical Islam, but here there’s a positive, modern version. Maybe the solution is right here in the desert and no one in Europe and none of the politicians are paying any attention to it. In fact, they are forgetting and ignoring the people here.’ He suggests that the next Olympics should be staged in the Sahara.
That night, I hitch a lift with Manu and the gang to a concert in the dunes. A stage has been set-up with a generator, and a local band – a cheesy synthesiser and guitar combo – performs. But the star of the night turns out to be a Venezuelan singer called Luzmira.
The sand dunes are shaped like a concert bowl and we sit at the top looking down. There is a magic hour in the desert, just before the night drops, and it falls fast, when colour comes out, the roses, soft pinks and ochres, and there are shadows thrown by the thorn trees. As anyone who has slept in the desert will tell you, the stars suddenly appear, like myriad glinting daggers that have rent holes in the fabric of the sky, brighter and more infinite than in Europe. The camp conveys a curious and contradictory impression, mixing the claustrophobic atmosphere of a prison with the endless space of desert and sky.
Libertad para Sahara! Manu performing at the stage in the dunes.
I tell Manu that when I was last in the Sahara, staying with the Touareg band Tinariwen, they’d explained that songs can help travellers navigate through the desert and that each town or oasis has its guiding star. The Touareg have stories attached to many of the stars: the Pleiades are the sisters of the night and nearby Orion is a Tou
areg warrior, doomed to watch the beautiful women from a distance, for eternity. ‘It’s their TV’, is Manu’s deadpan reaction.
The camp has its own local radio station in a fly-blown studio, where Manu gives his only official interview. On the way there he tells me about the time he was in Macedonia and gave his one interview to a gypsy radio station: ‘They had an exclusive and they broadcast it every day.’ At the station here he tells the listeners that ‘music goes back millennia but film is only a hundred years old, so it’s a baby. No one yet knows what it’s capable of.’
Later, we catch Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, a classic 1966 black and white film based on events during the 1954–62 Algerian War against French rule, which portrays atrocities committed on both sides. ‘I guess it’s the perfect place to see such a film,’ Manu says. When a fighter talks about the day the Sahrawi would get their country back in a documentary about the Polisario, the crowd start cheering. Manu tells me he hates films that are too intellectual. He’s a fan of The Blues Brothers.
Coming back from Manu’s tent in the dark that night, I get totally lost before following some music in the distance. A figure appears and beckons me into a tent, where I find Javier Bardem playing bongos with the Venezuelan singer Luzmira, who had sung beautifully in the dunes the previous night, with Madjid on top form on guitar. I even do a spot of percussion myself. It is a surreally glamorous event in the circumstances. ‘Better than the Vanity Fair party at the Oscars?’ I ask Bardem, as we trade bongo licks.
Next night, it is Manu’s turn to perform at the stage in the dunes. The gig is superb, Bardem playing bongos with Manu, Luzmira, Madjid and Johnny McLeod. Akli D sings his song “Good Morning Chechnya”, adapting it for desert conditions. The banner behind the stage reads, ‘FISAHARA 08 – LIBERTAD PARA SAHARA’ and Manu wraps himself in a Sahara Libre flag, which makes the local audience go wild as he pumps out “La Vida Tómbola”, “Me Llaman Calle” and “Mr Bobby”.
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