Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Our motorized caravan was parked amid a huge jumble of rocks that had probably formed the narrows of a swift-flowing, ancient river. The rocks were black, river-rounded, the size of large trucks, and many were festooned with drawings of creatures that must have existed here in a forgotten time, when the sun-blasted sandscape had been a vast and fertile grassland. There were drawings of an elephant, an eland, an ostrich. Giraffes seemed to have been considered the most consequential of the animals depicted. There were two of them etched in ocher onto flat, black rock, set just above the sand as if in a gallery. The figures were five feet high and expertly rendered. Riding beside one of the giraffes was a man on horseback, reining his mount and preparing to throw a spear. There were already four spears in the giraffe.

  I had planned to study the rock art in the morning, along with my favorite among the Italians, Luigi Boschian. Gigi, as everyone called him, was the oldest in our group, sixty-seven, but nonetheless a strong walker who wanted no help clambering over the rocks and who seemed always to know where he was when we strolled through the desert together. Our bond was this: Gigi and I were interested in the same things—history, astronomy, archaeology, geology, anthropology—the difference between us being that he had taken the trouble to do an immense amount of reading in these areas.

  Our common language was Spanish, though neither of us spoke with precision, which was sometimes frustrating. I wondered, for instance, if the men on horseback depicted on the rocks could be the ancestors of the Tuareg people, who now populated the deserts of northern Mali, Niger, and southern Algeria. When I asked Gigi about it, he started at the beginning, as he tended to do. Present-day Tuaregs were the descendants of North African Berbers, who had invaded the central Sahara about 3,500 years ago. They were originally horsemen, but as the climate changed and the desert claimed the land, the horse gave way to the camel. And wasn’t it interesting that while the Berbers had used chariots, the use of the wheel was eventually abandoned? Camels were the better technology.

  In the course of his explanations, Gigi often got sidetracked, wandering off on some tangent or other and dithering there for half an hour at a crack. He wore desert khakis, neatly pressed, but a shirttail was always out or a pant leg stuck into a sock. His abundant white hair was properly combed in the morning, but by noon it had degenerated into a finger-in-the-light-socket situation I’d describe as a full Einstein. He was the quintessential absentminded professor, Italian style. In explanation mode, he held his hands in front of his chest, palms up and open, as if weighing a pair of melons. When our mutual incompetence in Spanish defeated us, he’d turn his palms over and drop them to his waist, as if patting two small children on the head. I thought of this as Gigi’s I-can-speak-no-more futility gesture.

  Now, with bandits presumably chasing us, we had to abandon the rock art.

  I gathered my gear, lurched down the sand slope, and began helping with the loads. Our caravan consisted of three four-wheel-drive, one-ton vehicles modified in this manner or that for hard overland desert driving. Lanterns were glowing, and our party of just over a dozen—three West Africans from the land below the Niger River, two local Tuaregs, a cacophony of Italians, myself, and photographer Chris Rainier—was moving fast, stashing the gear any old way because it was thought the bandits were now very close.

  We’d been half expecting the bastards.

  No Guarantees

  Aguelhok was a small, wind-scoured town of narrow, sandy streets and adobe buildings, none of which would look out of place in Taos, New Mexico. We pulled our vehicles into a large walled courtyard that seemed to be a municipal gathering place, locked ourselves behind the metal gates, and milled around in the dark, unwilling to sleep.

  One of the Italians, Dario, said, “Bandits? Ha. They want us to stay here so we have to pay.” Dario, I’d guess, was in his early forties, a trim, athletic man I could see snapping out orders in a corporate boardroom.

  Muhammad, the Tuareg security consultant we’d hired and the man who’d told us about the bandits, was talking to our Italian guide, Alberto Nicheli.

  “I can no longer guarantee you safe passage to the salt mines,” he said.

  “You could this afternoon,” Alberto said.

  “That was before the car followed you up from Kidal.”

  “We can’t pay you if you don’t come,” Alberto explained.

  “This is no matter,” Muhammad said.

  I caught Dario’s eye. We’d offered Muhammad $400 for two weeks’ work; $400 is the average annual income in Mali.

  “Maybe,” Dario said, “this is more serious than I thought.”

  Gigi motioned to me. He had a map draped over the hood of the Land Rover and was displaying what can only be described, given the circumstances, as a singular lack of urgency while he traced the course of the Niger River with a finger. Could I see how it flowed east, starting in the highlands to the west, and then humped north into the Sahara like a hissing cat before turning back south and east to empty into the Atlantic at the Bight of Benin? And here, perched on top of the northern hump of the river, was Timbuktu. Geography made it the great trading city of antiquity. North African Arabs from the Mediterranean coast brought trade goods south, through the desert, while the black African kingdoms sent gold north from the forests and mountains. They met in Timbuktu.

  The caravans started about the time of Christ. Around A.D. 1100, Arabs began bringing salt down from the desert to trade in Timbuktu. Salt, used to preserve and flavor food, was then a rare spice, as much in demand in certain circles as cocaine is today, and equally expensive. It was traded weight for weight with gold in the Middle Ages, and for centuries the camel train bringing salt south to Timbuktu was called the Caravan of White Gold.

  And while all this was happening, Gigi explained as he weighed a pair of melons in his hands, the climate was changing, changing, changed. The giraffe-littered grassland became a desert, and the Tuareg nomads became great warriors who preyed on the caravans. They developed the mehari camel—the ultimate medieval desert-war machine—a tall, elegant beast with an elongated back that allowed riders to sit in front of the hump, down low, in sword’s reach of horsemen and those fleeing on foot.

  The Tuaregs, not unreasonably, sought tolls and tributes from the caravans passing through their desert. The Arab caravans—one-thousand-or-more-camel operations—were loose confederations of traders, and they did not band together for mutual defense in the manner of American wagon trains facing hostile Indians in John Wayne movies. Tuareg raiders simply rode along with caravans, located the weakest groups, cut them out of the train, and took what they wanted. These affairs were most often bloody.

  Today Tuaregs are considered the finest camel breeders and riders on earth. They live the romance of their past, still herding goats, pursuing a nomadic lifestyle, and dressing as they have throughout the whole of recorded history. The men most often wear blue robes—they are sometimes called the Blue Men of the Desert—and blue or black chêches, ten-foot-long strips of cloth that are wrapped around the head and neck and can be pulled up over the nose to protect the face from blowing sand. The chêche can also be used as a mask, which is no small advantage for those engaged in the business of banditry.

  An Ambush

  We had started in Gao, on the Niger River, where there was a paved street or two, a market, and crowds of people clamoring for a cadeau, a gift. Moving slowly through the streets was a plethora of white Toyota Land Cruisers, all of them belonging to various aid agencies. My traveling companion Chris Rainier talked with a woman from the UN High Commission for Refugees, who said things in northern Mali were settling down nicely. The six-year Tuareg rebellion against the central government in Bamako was essentially over. The rebels had signed a peace treaty in Timbuktu in March 1996, during a ceremony in which three thousand weapons were burned in a great bonfire.

  The droughts of the eighties and early nineties had helped fuel the rebellion, and the government had taken a unique step designed to f
eed hungry people: Former Tuareg rebels were allowed to enlist in the Malian army. The pay these soldiers earned fed large, extended families. In effect, the Malian government had bought off the insurrection.

  Which wasn’t to say that everything was hunky-dory. The Tuareg rebels were actually a loosely aligned group of several different desert factions—the Popular Movement of this town, the People’s Army of that area—and not all of them were in agreement with the peace treaty. Some, it was said, were still fighting. Plus, the army hadn’t been able to take every former rebel who wanted a job, so there were still some bands of hard men in the desert, former rebels who were in fact out-and-out bandits.

  The woman from the UN told Chris that about a month ago, bandits had ambushed several UNHCR workers, stolen their car, stripped them naked, and driven off. It was winter, and the workers were more likely to freeze to death at night than bake to death in the day. Besides, they weren’t far from town, and everyone got back all right, so there wasn’t any harm done.

  “What town was that?” Chris asked.

  “Kidal.”

  The Sleeping Colonel

  The Trans-Saharan Highway from Gao to Kidal was a thin red line on the map, and the line was a lie. There was no road, only a number of braided tracks in the sand, all of them running vaguely northeast and littered with the rusted and half-buried hulks of vehicles that had surrendered to the desert. In Kidal, a sprawling town of adobe houses only slightly darker than the surrounding sand, we tried to speak with the governor, the army commander, anyone who could give us information on the security situation. We wanted to go to the salt mines. Was it safe? Few answers were forthcoming.

  One morning, Alberto, Chris, and I walked the red-dust streets to the largest house in town. It was said to be owned by Colonel Yat, the man thought to be the instigator of the Tuareg rebellion, a fellow, we imagined, who might have some cogent thoughts about security.

  The house had a high-walled courtyard punctuated by a pair of large metal doors wide enough to admit a good-sized truck. We knocked for a long time until a gentleman inside opened one of the doors a crack. He wore threadbare black pants, a tattered red tunic, a black chêche, and rubber flip-flops. His right foot was terribly twisted. We were admitted into a large flagstone courtyard, where dozens of small trees had recently been planted. A satellite TV emblazoned with the RadioShack logo stood to one side of the house near several dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline. A white Land Cruiser—the modern equivalent of the mehari camel—was parked in front of the door. There was a bullet hole just below the backseat on the driver’s side.

  One tended to speculate about such vehicles. In June 1990, after soldiers massacred several Tuaregs at a famine-refugee camp just over the border in Niger, rebels ambushed a team of aid workers, stole their Land Cruiser, and used it to attack the town of Mënaka, killing fourteen Malian policemen. They escaped with guns and ammunition, and the rebellion was on. Soon there was fighting on the streets of Gao and on the blazing plain of Tanezrouft. Those are the facts. The legend is this: Colonel Yat, the man we had come to see, planned and executed the initial attacks.

  The Toyota in the courtyard was white, like most aid agency cars, with a thin red stripe, and it did not carry a Malian license plate. I thought it might be a car with some history to it.

  The house itself was unlike anything else in Kidal. It was a large, poured-cement building with flowing Moorish lines, painted brown and white. The man with the twisted foot knocked on an ornately carved wooden door. We stood there for some time until we were admitted by an almost preternaturally handsome Tuareg man who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was about six feet tall, slender, wearing black slacks and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. His black chêche covered his mouth but not his neatly trimmed black mustache, and what we could see of his skin was that curious Tuareg color of charcoal and milk. He looked like a human sword. No names were given. No handshakes.

  We said we’d like to speak with Colonel Yat, if it was possible. Wordlessly, the man turned, motioned for us to follow, and led us across highly polished wood floors to a large dark room completely bare of furniture except for five mattresses pushed against the two far walls. Colonel Yat, we were given to understand, was the man-shaped lump under a sheet on one of the mattresses. It was late in the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan—no food or drink between sunrise and sunset—and the colonel was resting.

  In whispers, we said that we could come back later, after sunset, when the colonel had refreshed himself. The man in sunglasses stared at us without expression. Colonel Yat stirred on his mattress and propped himself up on an elbow. He called out. His voice sounded sleep-clogged.

  The slender Tuareg walked over, squatted by the bed, and exchanged a few words with the colonel. He walked back across the room, moving with a kind of lethal grace.

  “What do you want to talk about?” he asked in heavily accented French.

  “We want to talk about the current state of security in the area,” Alberto said.

  The man glided to the bed, whispered some words, and came back.

  “Why?”

  “We’re journalists,” I said.

  When that bit of information was relayed to the colonel, he pulled the sheet up over his head and turned to the wall.

  “He doesn’t want to talk to any journalists,” the Tuareg said.

  “We’re not really journalists,” Alberto said.

  “He won’t talk to you,” the man replied, and even in his bad French, it sounded like a threat.

  Out of Bounds

  And so we drove to Aguelhok, where we hired Muhammad, who claimed to have been an intermediary between the government and the rebels during the late war and who now said he could no longer provide security.

  Alberto called us all together in the courtyard, and we stood around in the dark, shifting from foot to foot because there were decisions to be made. Alberto’s clients, the Italians, were all prosperous men who’d spent dozens of vacations together traveling in the Sahara. Now they wanted to go somewhere no one else had been, someplace unique, and Alberto, a guide with a reputation for getting things done in West Africa, had suggested the salt mines. This is the nature of adventure travel at the turn of the century. Truly exotic journeys, singular and privileged, like the one the Italians had contracted for, are easily arranged. A person standing in any airport on earth is no more than forty-eight hours from Timbuktu (given the proper connections and no desire to sleep). There, in that dusty desert town, travelers congregate at the post office. Send a card to your Aunt May, postmarked Timbuktu.

  These days tourists are enthusiastically welcomed to the fabled city, which was once forbidden to the world outside Africa. Those with the perverse desire to visit currently forbidden sites, people like my Italian friends, must endure various uncertainties regarding their own personal safety.

  The salt mines were just such a place. “For one thousand years,” Alberto had told his Italian clients, “no one from the outside could go to the salt mines. They were forbidden. You don’t tell people where your gold mine is located.”

  In the seventies, Alberto, like many adventurous young Europeans, had made a living of sorts shipping cars from Europe across the Mediterranean to Africa and then driving them two thousand miles south through the Sahara and selling them in Mali or Nigeria or Togo or Burkina Faso. At the time, the salt mines were still operating up at Taoudenni, or so he had heard. No one he knew had ever been there. After independence from the French in 1960, the Malian government had used the mines as a political prison. Dissidents, generally from Bamako, were sent to the desert, where they were ill prepared to survive. To be condemned to work in the salt mines was tantamount to a death sentence.

  Alberto became obsessed with the Taoudenni salt-mine prison during his car-running days. As a political prison it was, of course, off limits to foreigners. Forbidden. The only outsider Alberto ever talked to who had even gotten close to the prison was an International Red Cross worker
who’d driven up from Timbuktu to check on the welfare of the prisoners. A guard stopped the man at gunpoint. The relief worker, staring into the business end of the rifle, explained the concept of international law and reminded the soldier of the strict neutrality of the Red Cross, called the Red Crescent in Muslim Africa. It was his duty to see that political prisoners were treated humanely, in accordance with international law.

  “Imbecile,” the guard said, “there is no law here.”

  Alberto hatched an ill-conceived plan to dress as an Arab and try to see the mines. Good sense finally got the better of him.

  In 1991, the prison was shut down. Mali, once aligned with the Soviet Union, was now moving toward a multiparty democracy. The elimination of human-rights abuses, such as forced labor in the salt mines, was a first step in securing international aid money. In 1996, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department declared Mali’s human-rights record for that year “a bright spot on the African continent.”

  But, Alberto had heard, there were still people working in the mines, on their own, for money, and since there was a thin red line on the map but no real roads from the mines at Taoudenni to Timbuktu, Alberto figured there still had to be camel caravans, carrying salt across the flowing dunes.

  Seeing this medieval anachronism—the Caravan of White Gold—well, Alberto thought and the Italians agreed, it could be the experience of a lifetime. You just didn’t want it to be the last experience of a lifetime. And so Alberto gave us a choice: we could go back down south of the Niger River and see, oh, the Dogon cliff dwellings, a nice, culturally captivating trip with no security problems at all—a trip, in fact, that Alberto guided frequently for the company Mountain Travel-Sobek. Mali south of the Niger was safe.