Near where I pitched my tent, a Tuareg man grabbed a squealing goat by the horns and pulled it away from the flock. It bayed. The flock bayed in unison. In front of me, out of sight of the flock, the Tuareg unsheathed a long knife. The chosen goat yelped pitifully to its friends. They replied, almost screeching, knowing. The man yanked the goat’s head back, stretched its neck. A single bay of resignation followed. Among the flock, friend to friend to friend, the baying moved in fear. Slice. Silence. The sawing sound of further slicing. Bays from the flock. Then that stopped, too.
The group’s food was being prepared by Nema and another Malian woman, who took Nema’s instruction while barking back at her. It was Nema’s manner to assert and direct, and the other woman’s to sound strong in defiance while acquiescing. They worked on a makeshift counter carved into the sand and covered with a cloth. This was where we would eat for the next few days. Large pots were loaded before being set over heat: chicken meat was unwrapped, picked apart, thrown in the pot; the paper wrapping was dropped on the ground. The cooks opened tins of peas, emptied them on the meat, and tossed the cans under a bush. They poured a sack of couscous into a canister bubbling over the fire and set water to boil in another pot — a hint to relax with pre-dinner coffee.
The ground suddenly shook, and a thundering in the distance came closer as fifty warriors on camelback galloped from a stand of trees. “No!” a woman shouted. The camels charged single file along the narrow space between me and my tent. I froze. Hooves pounded around me. They kicked sand in my face but I could not look away, and they knocked me back. Finally it was over and the last passing Tuareg slowed, glanced my way, and smiled. Then he whipped his camel and caught up with the herd.
We abandoned dinner and ran to the festival grounds. A hundred strong now, the camel riders were a formidable sight. There was nowhere to hide: if these warriors attacked you in the desert, would you dart to the next dune? Startled by their hard arrival, even the Tuareg spectators at the festival were in awe. The men on camels rode away, climbing the horizon as the sun set red. They slowed, swerved around as one and pounced back at us, yelling and flying across the desert with raging colours and frightening beauty.
Their riveting prelude completed, the camels came to rest and their riders dismounted as music blared to open the festival. The swirl of excitement was quickly quelled as drums, amplified with speakers, primed the audience and then stopped, the silence filled by politicians who postured with their event-opening comments, celebrities who read poetry, and organizers who spoke in earnest Tamacheq.
Dusk descended and drifted into night. I walked away from the stage and up the amphitheatre’s hillock of sand as desert music rocked the gathering of three hundred Tuareg and guests in front of the stage. The rhythm of the djembe drum produced a haunting tranquility.
Essakane is without any supplies, facilities, or expertise suitable for a festival of any kind. It offers only splendid remoteness. The equipment used here had made the trek from Timbuktu and, before that, Bamako. This explained the leanness of the structures, the appearance of the generators, and the price of Coca-Cola. The festival’s intention was to be one of the grandes festes, and it succeeded, with variations. One writer called it “Woodstock in the Desert.” The performances were traditional, easing the logistics. The light and sound and staging were funded by Germany, but despite that country’s engineering efficiency, power outages were frequent.
On the slope of the dunes were two-dozen stanchions: wire mesh tubes a metre high, half a metre wide, and filled with coals. As the evening progressed and temperatures cooled, the stanchions were lit to shed warmth within a five-metre radius. Many of those people gathering before the stage also took to the acres of sandy slopes, in clusters near the fires. Seeking to be alone, I drifted a further hundred metres from them, stopping atop a solitary dune and beneath stars that seemed as bright as the kliegs.
The musicians’ chanting and singing appeared to be effortless. Their words were lost in shocking melodies or tucked behind haunting drums. The unfamiliar French accents of some of the entertainers, along with the Tuareg’s singing in Tamacheq, made it difficult for me to discern if Tinariwen or Afel Bocoum was on stage. Names like Takumbawt and Kel Amazagh meant little to me, except that they were Malian. But I cherished their music in the same way as I had been captivated with Ali Farka Toure when first I heard the wonder of his music back home, for now I was at the music’s source.
An Essakane family was gathered near me, and close to them three men sat talking and smoking. We were a small cluster, far from the others. The night got colder and I lay down on the firm sand, nestled in my jacket and with my baseball cap pulled down over my eyes. I shivered and shunted from side to side against the breeze. It was as hard to feel warm as it was to feel solitary.
Into this peripheral gang, appearing slowly over the dark brown sand, rose a man in a blue turban. He stood full height atop the dune, a silhouette of power and intrigue. After a moment’s hesitation, he walked down the dune and came to sit beside me. His attention was riveted by the music, and it was half an hour before he spoke.
“I am Tabel,” he introduced. “I am Tuareg.”
“I am Rick,” I replied. “I am not.”
He kind of laughed. “Dutch?”
“No. Canadian.”
“Ah. Far away. I, too, live far away. I live in the desert.” He gestured over his shoulder where nothing and everything was far away. “There.”
“I want to go ‘there,’” I said, with the shifting of my head.
“You should ride my camel,” he said.
“Tomorrow?” I asked, and it was a confirmation. We shook hands. Tabel was the first Tuareg I met face to face. He was a herdsman. His family lived as nomads; their provenance was sand.
The Tuareg captivate. They reflect the glamour of the desert — desolate, dangerous, and remote. Feared defenders of their territory, they have dispatched Moors, Arabs, British, and French with equanimity. Those around Timbuktu are the Kel Tademaket tribes. Travelling through their lands in 1825, Gordon Laing feared them: “I shall consider myself as fortunate if I get through their territories with the loss of half my baggage.”
The region the Tuareg tribes cover is vast, and their contacts with each other are rare except to protect the trade routes. René Caillié was the first European to fully cross the expanse of Tuareg lands, traversing the Sahara to Morocco after his success in reaching Timbuktu. Caillié’s view was that they “roam about … and behave in the most arbitrary way, making the inhabitants give them provisions and other property — in fact, seizing whatever they can get their hands on …”
It is said that the Tuareg later taunted the colonizing French soldiers as cowards for using rifles. Their camel charges against these invaders, with shiny sabers held high, were repulsed repeatedly by the French, who rode into Timbuktu in 1893.
The word Tuareg is not their own; its origin is Arabic, from the eleventh century, denoting a classification based on religious criteria for pagans. Northern Mali’s Tuareg ancestors were Berbers, though the younger people today often prefer to speak Arabic. Indeed, some Tuareg call themselves Tamacheq, after their language. Fergus Fleming’s book The Sword and the Cross explains: “The term Tuareg (or Touareg) is currently used in the West to describe a person, a group, their language and their script. The correct declension is: I am Targui, we are Tuareg, we speak Tamacheq and we write Tinifar.”
They have lighter-coloured skin than other Malians do and, as a result, are sometimes called “whites” by their countrymen. They are also known as “Blue men,” as a result of their ever-present blue veils and turbans. These distinctive dirt protectors, dyed a dark indigo, transfer their colour, via sweat, to the Tuaregs’ faces.
Jeremy Keenan’s book The Tuareg focuses mostly on those inhabitants of the Ahaggar region of Algeria and the Sahara in northwest Mali. (The Tuareg also inhabit Libya, Niger, and Burkina Faso; Mali may be home to 500,000.) Keenan wrote for all Tuareg whe
n he said, “After sixty years of ‘protection’ under French colonial rule, from 1902 to 1962, they have been obliged, as it were, to enter the twentieth century, but without grace and dignity, and perhaps that is the sadness of it all.” Keenan observes: “They have not at any time formed a single politically united kingdom, state or federation, but comprise several major groups which seem to correspond to politically autonomous units or federations.”
Their feudal society sufficed until their nomadic lifestyle, clashing with modern times, fell victim to the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. In the Tuareg rebellion of 1990, the freedom movement concentrated on the desert north of Timbuktu, an area known as Azaouad. Thousands of Tuaregs had returned from their years in Algeria and Libya, where they’d migrated when times became economically tough. These repatriated Malians had a combination of political irreverence and military savvy. Weapons were available. The goal became one of establishing an independent status for their race. They wanted an autonomous territory within Mali, one to which the Tuaregs of Mauritania and Niger would also move.
Mali’s standing army fell under attack from the Tuareg. It responded vigorously, and the ensuing deaths, economic disruption, and world interest forced a resolution. The peace negotiations, brokered by France, Algeria, and Mauritania, resulted in the National Pact in April 1992. This peace accord did not appease a number of side groups, whose splintering kept the revolt alive. Their banditry continued unabated, and civil war threatened. For years, this pocket of Africa had the attention the world gives only to locations of violent uprisings. Eventually, the killings stopped. With nothing to be gained from continued strife, all sides agreed to make the National Pact meaningful and to implement its guidelines. On March 27, 1996, the Tuareg revolt ended (others would say “culminated”), though final agreements with some holdout rebels were still three years away. The peace pact was celebrated with a burning of weapons in Timbuktu at the Flame of Peace.
Once feared by every explorer, and known as the Blue Men of Africa, the Tuareg today host “the most remote festival in the world.”
The Tuaregs’ future has always been one of “today.” Tamacheq does not possess a word for tomorrow.
The Essakane oasis rested in pre-dawn tranquility. As I woke, light breezes barely creased the camel hides that were draped over the tent frames.
The Arab traveller Ibn Battutah visited Timbuktu in 1353 and wrote of the Tuareg as “the most perfectly beautiful of women.”
The sound of deep spitting startled me. The Tuareg too were up. They expelled phlegm from their throats as though it was esophagus-driven. I thought, I must remember to wear sandals when I step outside the tent.
The prospect of the morning exhilarated me. I sat up in my tent and looked through the flap. The sun was low in the sky, glowing orange, the desert sky making it more so. Only I and the Tuareg were awake. Absentmindedly, I moved the night’s deposit of sand particles around in my mouth, inadvertently grinding them with my teeth.
A few metres from my tent an old Tuareg tended an embryonic campfire. His presence softened the desert’s fierce beauty. He pulled unburned branch ends from the fire’s edge and placed them in the flames. The wood would soon become cooking embers. Nothing sat above the fire, though a teapot rested ready next to it. Its warmth and smell comforted me. I felt that only once in my life would I see this: a Tuareg performing the rituals of fire-making in the light of the rising sun.
That people take photographs of such a moment rather than cherishing the gift has long seemed rash to me, though I prepared to do the same. I forsook the moment to preserve it. Stepping out of my tent, I intentionally alerted the old man by the fire. I squatted and indicated that I wanted to photograph him and the sky. He whispered in reply, but I didn’t understand. I pointed again, and he whispered once more. Then he adjusted his shawl and seemed to accept my invitation. One photo. Pleased and impressed, I took my camera, framed the instant and pressed.
Nothing. I adjusted and clicked again. Nothing. I inspected the camera and concluded the battery was dead. No matter. Tuaregs have centuries of patience, and my other camera was in the same bag. Grabbing it, I repeated my actions. Nothing happened. At this point the old man surely thought I’d taken half a dozen pictures, more than my request for “just one.” When I popped the camera back, a canister of rewound film sat passively in the hold. I held it open to show him, by way of naive explanation on my part. He looked at the camera, at me, and then, with utter indifference, added more wood to the fire and invited me to join him.
Here, sitting with my back to the camel-skin tents and beside a crackling fire, I had my first Tuareg tea. Centuries of tradition required that the elderly man pour tea in a high arc. His right hand stretched a thin stream of tea half a metre toward a tiny cup on a tray. He offered me the filled teacup. I accepted and lifted the hot cup from the serving tray. The cup had pressed many lips before mine. I sipped, sitting cross-legged in the cool morning. He firmly poured a second cup. There are three pours to a serving of Tuareg tea, each separate, and with a purpose. The first drink was “strong against the desert’s harshness,” the second was said to be “cut with warmth and sweetness.” The third was “pleasant” and completing. I sipped each cup, sensing the tradition, and accepting it as a privilege. I felt I should bow. Especially when I was not offered a fourth cup. (It is said that if you are given a fourth pour, you are not really welcome.)
I walked away from the camp, past camel saddles piled under a tree, and, beside them, Tuareg blankets taken from their tents and folded after use. My sandals sifted sand, making calluses on the balls of my feet. Sacks of grain were arranged under a tree to provide a windbreak for two men tending a fire of saplings. One of them sewed repairs on a tarp. They nodded to me. The women were elsewhere that morning, tending kids, doing chores; gossiping, one hopes.
Everyone has special attire for the festivities at the oasis.
Essakane did not offer the romantic image commonly found in books, where weary travellers come upon an oasis sheltered by greenery beside a broad pond, and camels are secured nearby. It was dust-haunted, distinguished by square buildings with missing boards and flapping metal siding in need of a nail. Water, pumped from beneath a shed, was shared among the villagers. The Sahara is a timeless tableau; with winds, it sculpts itself by breezing litter into corners, drying green to brown and covering where and what it will.
The brief beauty of the morning had passed.
Solomon, young, British, and believing that school should never interfere with one’s education, was part of Mohammed’s crew. I suspected foreign-aid funding had been found to keep the lad busy. He could walk in ankle-twisting sand and still pull off a swagger. I had breakfast in the common area with a Dutch couple, amid the piles of past meals’ refuse and the next meal’s preparation, and listened to Solomon’s pronouncement.
“I’ve bought a goat head,” he boasted. “Two thousand seffe. Good eating.” And in the way of repeating a lesson he’d been told as though he already possessed the knowledge, Solomon said, “Paid too much. Didn’t get the legs.”
“I’m inexperienced, but somehow the legs seem where to start,” I offered.
“At the least, shouldn’t they come along with the head?” the Dutch man suggested.
“The head’s the trophy,” said Solomon.
Surprisingly, Mohammed arrived at camp, having scrounged the last empty seat on a Bamako to Timbuktu flight and then having driven to Essakane under cover of night. He strode about as a cattle rancher on the range might. To me, he suggested going for a camel ride, and my hesitation about that day or the next seemed silly to him. “You’ve got nothing to do here; you’ll be bored.” He was at his best when the going was good.
“I’ve made arrangements,” I replied.
Mohammed scowled. “Troublecane,” Only Mamadou laughed. “Not Essakane. Troublecane.” He worried about his burden — that of organizing people. Even he had been asked to repay the entrance fee when he arrived. The earl
ier payment had apparently gone astray.
His quick temper showed. “Security is lax. People do not pay, and they come anyway,” he complained. I did not see how the festival organizers could gate the desert. Mohammed’s slender body tried to shrug, but his shoulders didn’t quite do it.
“Artists do not show. Performers are promised but are not here.”
His eyes said he had a plan for me, and some profit for him. I pre-empted the attack: “Last night I met a fellow and promised to ride his camel,” I said. “Tabel.”
“Yes, he is my friend. Tabel has a camel. You must go.”
“Tabel is my friend,” I countered.
He ignored my pretension. “Others are going,” he told me. He stood lean, hunched with the pressures of his life. His pant cuffs were frayed, and through his sandals I could see that his toenails needed clipping.
I retorted, “I will go later. I will go alone.” I did not want him to organize my life.
“Yes. No. Those Americans are going for only one hour. You go a different route. Until late afternoon.”
“Café first.” I stalled, trying in my mind to reconcile my commitment with Tabel. I walked toward the dwindling fire and found Nescafé, powdered milk, and boiling water. Plunks of donut-like cakes were frying in fat over the fire: tasty, doughy. I was suspicious of the contents, the history of the fat, and the potentially mouth-scorching temperature, yet I was hungry. Eat. Ouch. Drink. Ouch. A lump of semi-dissolved powder caught my teeth in the last scalding swig of coffee.
I retrieved a full bottle of water, two power bars, a knife, and sunscreen from my tent. I grabbed my brimmed hat from next to the cookstove, while Nema tended the fire. A young Tuareg tugged my sleeve. “Camel.”
Walking over a dune, I asked in French, “How old are you?”
To Timbuktu for a Haircut Page 13