The Sahara

by Eamonn Gearon

  One of the best things about this whole time has been how happy my team has been, consistently. There has not been a cross face or a bad mood from any of them. They start and end each day in the same way, chatting, smiling and laughing as they crouch around the fire. I know ‘‘Africans” are supposed to be happy people, but the Tuareg dismiss all black people from the south as “les Africains” and would be horrified to be lumped in with them. This is a Tuareg thing.

  Toubou and Sahrawi

  The main ethnic group found in the Tibesti region of northern Chad and southern Libya is the Toubou (or Tibou or Tebu). For centuries the nomadic Toubou were as little known to outsiders as their homeland, the secluded massif in northern Chad that still receives fewer visitors than any other part of the desert. For this reason, many older references to Ethiopian or Sudanic races in all likelihood actually apply to the Toubou. As the great 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, “The allusions by classical writers to Ethiopians as inhabitants of the Sahara prove little, in view of the very vague and general meaning attached to the word.” The same entry on the Sahara goes on to observe: “The Tibbu (q.v.) or Tebu, once thought to be almost pure negroes, proved when examined by Gustav Nachtigal in Tibesti, where they are found in greatest purity, to be a superior race with well-formed features and figures, of a light or dark bronze rather than black. .. Physically, the Tibbu appear to resemble somewhat the Tuareg.”

  Long separated from the main Chadian Empires such as Kanem-Bornu, which grew up around Lake Chad, the Toubou were historically ignored by the country’s centre. When the French ruled Chad, which was only one part of French Equatorial Africa, the situation was not radically altered. With limited resources to police the enormous northern expanses of the country, French authorities were forced to reach an unspoken, mutually beneficial understanding with the Toubou; the French would not interfere with the Toubou as long as the Toubou did not attack their camel caravans or outposts.

  Saharawi women in a refugee camp

  Sahrawi is an Arabic word that means “people of the Sahara’ or “desert people”. The term is most commonly used by and for the people of Western Sahara, and usually carries nationalist connotations for the people of that country which has yet to achieve independence. Sahrawi is not, however, transposable for a citizen of Western Sahara, a colonial-era border which would have been meaningless to the people - as is the case for all Saharan borders - before the arrival of European mapmakers. Inaccurately, Sahrawi has now become almost synonymous with the Western Sahara, what the UN calls one of the world’s last major non-self-governing territories. Sadly, this has become the rather negative defining characteristic of the region’s inhabitants: a landless people, refugees waiting for a nation. Many self-identifying Sahrawis live in Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria, as well as migratory populations in Mali, Niger and beyond.

  The people themselves are a mixture of indigenous, that is to say pre-Islamic Berbers, Moors, Arabs from the seventh and subsequent centuries and black African ethnic groups from the Sahel and West Africa, both willing migrants and slaves.

  Like those Sahrawi who call an Algerian refugee camp home, many denizens of the Sahara today - Berber and Bedu alike - find themselves unemployed and without the prospect of work. The Sahara continues to support numbers of livestock farmers: shepherds tending their flocks of sheep and goats in close proximity to the oases and camels and their owners living further out, beyond the pale, in the desert’s more remote and wilder corners. Some, with the largest flocks or herds, can grow very rich in this line of business but many never rise beyond a basic, subsistence level, with a single animal providing a family as much wool, milk, and meat as it possibly can.

  Apart from the farmers and those working in tourism, employment options in the desert are limited. Where oil and gas is found so too are jobs. However, many of these are for skilled workers, engineers and the like, leaving those with limited formal education, into which category most habitues of the Sahara fall, overlooked or unemployable. Looking to the future, planned projects such as solar energy plants seem unlikely to offer anything like the numbers of jobs needed among the desert natives. Instead, the more likely course of action is for the continued migration of young men out of the desert into the towns and cities, where the persistent belief is that the streets are paved with gold. The majority of those seeking work will realise that if they do find what they think is gold on the streets of Cairo or Lagos it is probably sand that has followed them out of the Sahara.

  One thing that all nomads - Saharan or otherwise - need to survive is a vital understanding of their landscape, whether it relates to where they are, where they have been or where they are going. As Chatwin wrote in Songlines:

  To survive at all, the desert dweller - Tuareg or Aboriginal - must develop a prodigious sense of orientation. He must forever be naming, sifting, comparing a thousand different “signs” - the tracks of a dung beetle or the ripple of a dune - to tell him where he is; where the others are; where rain has fallen; where the next meal is coming from; whether if plant X is in flower, plant Y will be in berry, and so forth.

  Such skills are in decline today, as more people opt to turn their backs on a traditionally nomadic way of life, favouring instead the less arduous life of the settled.

  The decision about whether to stop moving or retain the nomadic life is not always a straightforward one, but nor, as Chatwin was to discover, are the reasons for making such a choice necessarily complex. Meeting an Adrar chief in a village two days from the Mauritanian trading centre of Chinguetti, Chatwin asked him about his life in the desert: “The sheikh, Sidi Ahmed el Beshir Hammadi, spoke perfect French. After supper, as he poured the mint tea, I asked him, naively, why life in the tents, for all its hardship, was irresistible. ‘Bah!’ he shrugged. ‘I’d like nothing better than to live in a house in town. Here in the desert you can’t keep clean. You can’t take a shower! It’s the women who make us live in the desert. They say the desert brings health and happiness, to them and to the children.”‘

  Two Incomers: Isabelle Eberhardt and Paul Bowles

  Others take the decision to adopt the nomadic lifestyle although such a life is not part of their cultural heritage. Born in Geneva in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Isabelle Eberhardt fell in love with the Sahara and eventually settled there after years wandering its northern fringes. The illegitimate daughter of an Armenian anarchist, ex-priest and later convert to Islam, Eberhardt was brought up wearing boy’s clothes, which unorthodox background and upbringing prepared her well for the unconventional life she led. She and her mother first went to North Africa in 1897, but her mother died suddenly in the Algerian coastal town of Annaba, historically Hippo. After her mother’s death Eberhardt spent most of the rest of her life in Algeria, exploring and living in the desert, often maintaining a masculine disguise, which made it possible for her to travel alone in the region.

  Of her life in the desert she wrote, “Everything is so clear here, too clear! No more obstacles to overcome, no more progress, no more action. You wouldn’t know how to act anymore, or almost how to think: you’d die of eternity... I wanted to possess this country, and this country has instead possessed me. Sometimes I wonder if this land won’t take over all her conquerors, with their new dreams of power and freedom, just as she has distorted all the old dreams... Is it not the earth that makes men?” As much as any native-born Saharan, once she settled in the desert, Eberhardt came to understand the necessity of living according to its terms.

  She writes movingly about her adopted lifestyle. In the following extract from In the Shadow of Islam, she notes in particular the peace and simplicity of life in the desert, reduced to the basics needed for survival:

  So it is on the desert roads of the south; long hours without sadness, without worry; vague and restful, where one may live in silence. I have never regretted a single one of these “lost” hours... I live
this life of the desert as simply as the camel drivers... I have always preferred simplicity, finding in it vibrant pleasures which I don’t hope to explain... When I sleep under the starry skies of this region, religious in their vastness, I feel penetrated by the earth’s energies; a sort of brutality makes me straddle my mare and push straight ahead unthinkingly. I don’t want to imagine anything; the stages of the journey only count as insignificant details. In this country without green, in this country of rock, something exists: time. And the spectacle of morning and evening skies.

  Eberhardt died at the tragically young age of 27, ironically drowning in the desert, the victim of a flash flood that swept through the town to which she had travelled for a reconciliation with her frequently absent Algerian soldier-husband. After the flood many of her papers were rescued and her diaries and stories later published, some translated by Paul Bowles. Although Eberhardt had written for numerous French newspapers, including working as a war correspondent near Oran, it was these stories that secured her reputation.

  Although a non-Saharan resident of North Africa, the work of the American composer and writer Paul Bowles is so closely associated with the desert that it is virtually impossible to separate the two. A long-term resident of Tangier, his residency there encouraged a stream of foreign visitors including Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and numerous prominent so-called Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Apart from his writing, Bowles was a noted translator, not just of Eberhardt but also of numerous Moroccan authors such as Mohamed Mrabet and Mohamed Choukri.

  Bowles’ own writing has, with good reason, come to be more closely associated with the Sahara than that of any other writer in modern times. Unlike many expatriate writers, his fiction and travel diaries distinguish themselves through consistently creating characters as individuals and recording genuine scenes of daily life, as opposed to falling back on stereotypes and unchallenged assumptions. His Saharan settings, too, set him apart, so convincingly capturing a sense of place that the words are a more than adequate substitute for the real thing, the literary as a substitute for the literal.

  Here for example, is Bowles’ evocation of the stillness encountered upon first entering the Sahara:

  An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimises and disperses sound straightway... You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who has lived there has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory... For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is the same as when he came in.

  This spirit of the desert that changes people, not necessarily for the better, is central to Bowles’ debut novel and most famous book, The Sheltering Sky. Published in 1949, it tells the story of an alienated expatriate couple travelling deeper into the Sahara, the seemingly empty desert central to the novel’s nihilistic credo, summed up in the line, “The difference between something and nothing is nothing.” Bowles replicates this sense of emotional emptiness in the barrenness of the desert geography, brilliantly and disturbingly.

  In The Waste Land by T S. Eliot, a poem which Bowles said influenced him a great deal, there is a similar sense of desiccation, and it is easy to draw a line directly from Eliot to Bowles, as is evident in the following few lines from part five of Eliot’s masterpiece:

  Here is no water but only rock

  Rock and no water and the sandy road

  The road winding above among the mountains

  Which are mountains of rock without water

  If there were water we should stop and drink

  Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

  Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand.

  The appeal of emptiness, which can inspire and terrify, the space - literally awful in that it is full of awe - that provides equilibrium for an otherwise unquiet mind, also threatens to lead the way to madness. As Bowles wrote, “Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares... nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating... no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute.” This sense of place and nothingness such as Kit and Port Moresby experience while travelling through the Sahara in The Sheltering Sky is outlined in Bowles’ foreword to Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue, where he remarks, “With few exceptions, landscape alone is of insufficient interest to warrant the effort it takes to see it. Even the works of man, unless they are being used in his daily living, have a way of losing their meaning, and take on the qualities of decoration.”

  The desert ought to be at least as much about its people as its landscapes. Outsiders rarely see this, and for residents, natives and blow-ins alike, it is simply home. Bowles, the outsider who moved in, recognizes this, and is not alone among those who have enjoyed some intimacy with the great desert, able to see many Sahara’s at once, but the people first. As he put it, “North Africa without its tribes, inhabited by, let us say, the Swiss, would be merely a rather more barren California.”

  Further Reading

  Travel Guides

  The Lonely Planet series of country-specific and regional guidebooks, i.e. North Africa, are a useful source of information for tourists, including very basic language guides and some background to the history, politics and culture of the country or countries concerned. For anyone interested in organizing their own journeys across the desert, Sahara Overland (2nd ed.) is indispensable, detailing as it does tried and tested routes, choice of vehicle, navigation and suchlike.

  Landscapes

  For classical accounts of the region’s natural history, no reader should be without both Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and Strabo’s Geography. E. F. Gautier’s Sahara: The Great Desert (Cass, 1971) is a great read, even if the original text is approaching its centenary.

  History

  The Encyclopaedia of African History (ed. Kevin Shillington, 2004) is an excellent three-volume work that deals in some detail with much of the region’s history. Two smaller volumes that cover Saharan history in a simpler and often more accessible form are the Travellers History of North Africa (Cassell, 1998) and the Travellers’ History of Egypt (Interlink Books, 1997).

  The following limited list consists of first class, established works that cover one or more aspects of Saharan history: Dr J. Ball, Egypt in the Classical Geographers (Cairo, 1942); E. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (OUP, 1968); Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Blackwell, 1997); E. W Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Columbia University Press, 1990); Fergus Fleming, The Sword and the Cross (Granta, 2003); Anthony Sattin, Sahara: The Gates of Africa (Harper Collins, 2003).

  Imagination

  Many creative works born in the Sahara, real or imagined, are mentioned in the text. Here I offer some personal choice for a week’s reading holiday in the desert: Metamorphosis by Ovid; The Greek Myths by Robert Graves; The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles; Desert Air: A Collection of the Poetry of Place (Eland, 2003); and Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

  Encounters

  Among the most important classic accounts of Saharan journeys and expeditions are W G. Browne, Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798; Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central and Africa; Friedrich Hornemann, Missions to the Niger (1797-1798); Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara and Sudan (Hurst, 1975), an epic among epic
s. The journal of Hugh Clapperton, Difficult and Dangerous Roads (Sickle Moon Books, 2000), offer a new and welcome perspective on the Denham, Oudney, Clapperton expedition.

  The Lost Oases by Hassanein Bey (American University in Cairo Press, 2006) is a joy to read, while Libyan Sands (Hippocrene Books, 1987) by Ralph Bagnold was the first book that made me love the desert.

  Post-independence volumes would have to include Michael Asher’s Impossible Journey (Viking, 1988), a gripping account of his nine-month walk with camels, and his wife, across the Sahara. Geoffrey Moorehouse’s account of an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to do the same is equally readable: The Fearful Void (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974). Justin Marozzi’s South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara (Harper Collins, 2001) is a great modern take on the joys of non-motor-powered Saharan journeying.

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