by Peter Boehm
Since there’s no public transport in Timbuktu, I’d trudge through the ankle-deep sand in the streets every day. But despite this, I was happy.
The uniform rows of houses gave Timbuktu the charm of a historical Disneyland. This made me feel a little as I had in Aksum. When I got up in mornings I always had to first make sure that the lovely houses were still there.
At the slaves‘ riverbank (Tillamedess)
Really, I just wanted to know who owned the herd of cows at the water’s edge. The young man crawled out of his low tent and said, amicably, “These cows belong to everyone here – the Tuareg, the Songhai and the slaves.”
He spoke French, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d understood him correctly. He’d pronounced the final word without the slightest trace of emotion. And so I slowly repeated, “These...are...the...cows...of...the...Tuareg,...the...Songhai...and...the...slaves?”
“Yes, exactly!” he confirmed, without any noticeable malice or irony in his voice.
I wasn’t prepared for that. We were in Tillamedess, a Tuareg camp just outside Timbuktu. I was flustered by the way the young man talked so naturally about slaves.
Up to now, slaves hadn’t featured in my image of the Tuareg people. Bruce Hall had warned me that something like this would happen, and I’d come here precisely to test this out.
Bruce was a Canadian historian, conducting research in Timbuktu for his PhD. But I hadn’t believed him. I simply thought that, as everyone knows, people tell a lot of stories when the days start to drag. And then, when it actually happened, I wasn’t prepared.
And why should I have been? I’d never had any contact with the Tuareg people before I’d come to Timbuktu. My perception of them had been shaped by newspaper articles and books. There are enough of these, after all.
Even people who otherwise know little about Africa are bound to have heard of them at least once. Just like the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, the Tuareg people seem to fit exactly into the image which the West has of Africa. As some Tuareg people wear indigo-coloured cloaks and turbans, the European media like to call them “the blue knights of the desert”.
And they’re considered to be a kind of medieval heros – harsh but fair. They defy the austere environment in which they live. And they have a rich and distinctive culture, of which they are proud and which they defend with all their might.
As early as the 1920s, the Tuareg people in neighbouring Niger rebelled against the French colonial powers. In the 1960s, the Tuareg in northern Mali took up arms because they felt excluded by the young country’s authorities. And in the 1990s, the Tuareg rebelled again, in order to win an autonomous region, or even an independent country, in northern Niger and Mali.
But what I’d read about the Tuareg simply hadn’t prepared me for what was awaiting me in Tillamedess. So I hadn’t taken Bruce seriously when he’d told me that Tuareg society is so characterised by the dichotomy of nobles and slaves that it would be unimaginable without them.
That was why I wanted to visit the Tuareg people for myself. Preferably with one of their slaves, who had freed himself from them. Such a person would be best placed to tell me something of the relationship to his former masters. And he could introduce me to the Tuareg people. Of course, slavery was a controversial topic for them. I feared I might encounter difficulties.
The teacher who had taught Bruce the Songhai language had once taken part in an aid organisation study in a Tuareg camp outside Timbuktu. And he knew one of the Bella people in his neighbourhood, who had been born and had grown up in one of these places.
“Bella” – this Songhai word for the Tuaregs’ slaves sounds less derogatory than “Ikelan”, which is the word in their own language. That’s why it has taken root in northern Mali.
Most people living in Timbuktu are Bellas who have freed themselves from their servitude, or the descendants of these people. And since the introduction of free elections in Mali, in the early 1990s, the mayor of Timbuktu is also a Bella.
It was Bruce’s Songhai teacher who introduced me to the Bella, Aguissa Dico. Aguissa had been born in Tillamedess, 12 miles to the south-west of Timbuktu. But he’d been living in Timbuktu itself for almost 30 years.
Aguissa said that we could go together to his birthplace, and visit his brother. That wouldn’t be a problem. He went there himself a couple of times a year. And when the Tuaregs from Tillamedess came to the city, they stayed in his house.
Aguissa didn’t know exactly how old he was. He was probably in his late fifties. And he looked very odd.
A lot of the people in the Sahara and the Sahel zone wear turbans which also cover their mouths. They wrap a long scarf around their head and chin several times.
Aguissa also wore a black scarf. But he wrapped it only a couple of times around his head, so it didn’t look like a turban, but more like a headscarf. The scarf made his head look too small for his large body – like a fabric helmet – and it gave him a rather dark and archaic air. This was how I imagined the followers of a secret sect, who didn’t want to be recognised in public.
I never saw Aguissa without this scarf. Besides this, he wore a simple, pale blue boubou, matching cloth trousers, and worn suede shoes. And when we travelled to Tillamedess, he leant on a gnarled stick, and carried a Tuareg sword under his robe.
We set off the very next morning. First, Aguissa and I went to Kourioume, Timbuktu’s river port, then another mile or so by motorbike taxi across a dyke to the village of Toya. From there, it was another hour and a half on foot, beside the steel-blue water of the Niger River. Only a small bump in the ground separated the Tuareg camp from the bank of the Niger. A strong wind was blowing all day, making it almost impossible to hold a conversation.
When we arrived at the camp, we were immediately taken to the traditional Chief’s tent. He told us the camp was called “Tillamedess I”. It had 240 inhabitants. Not far from here – the Chief pointed away from the Niger River – were the camps Tillamedess II and III.
It was only at the very end of my time in Timbuktu that I learned that some Bella people, who had left Tillamedess I, lived there. “Our black people”, said Aliasid Ag Ahmed, who represented Tillamedess I on the local council in Toya. The traditional Chief and Aguissa hadn’t mentioned that. The Chief just said, “They’re members of the same family.”
From the outside, the tents in Tillamedess looked like miniature beer tents in the desert. Wooden pegs had been rammed into the ground at the sides, and a roof frame of thin branches had been laid over the top. The side walls and the roof were covered with plaited grass mats.
The tents were so low that you had to kneel down, and then still bend over, in order to crawl inside. The roof was slightly higher in the centre, but only a toddler would have been able to stand up inside. The ground in the tents was covered with the same mats as those used for the roof, or simply with straw. When it got too hot you could push the outer walls slightly to one side, at two points opposite one another, to let some wind blow through.
One family would have two or three tents pitched next to each other. Then you had to walk for another couple of minutes until you could be sure that the distant dots on the huge meadows were the homes of the next family.
The grass around the tents had been scorched by the sun, and there was cow dung all around. But during the day the cows and sheep were nowhere to be seen.
All of the Chief’s possessions were hanging on strings from the ceiling at the far end of his tent. He owned a couple of rolled up blankets and brightly coloured mats, an old hard-sided suitcase, a carpet bag, a tin box, the camel saddle typical of the Tuaregs with its triple-forked grip and its backrest, as well as a few old canisters and cans which had once contained engine oil. He now kept water in these for drinking.
The Chief himself was veiled in a white, freshly-washed garment, and he wore a white embroidered boubou on his naked torso.
His wife’s tent was immediately beside his. His wife had very pale skin, and straight hair braid
ed into pigtails. She had twisted her plaits around the crown of her head, rather like Heidi in the desert.
She owned a couple of chickens, a few earthenware bowls and jugs, some leather cushions and a large metal box.
A dark-skinned woman and girl were walking around the tent the whole time. They were evidently in the process of preparing lunch.
The Chief said that the people of Tillamedess had never properly recovered from the great drought of 1984. Their entire herds had starved to death then. “Most of us now have one, two or three cows if we’re lucky.” And these had been donated by an aid organisation.
He said that the same organisation had, at the same time, set up education programmes for their children. And last year a primary school had even been built in the village of Toya. The parents had to pay the teachers’ salary and buy the children’s pens and books themselves, however. He named a large sum. But nonetheless, the children of Tillamedess now went there every morning. In addition, they’d now been cultivating rice for a couple of years.
On our way from Toya we’d passed a modern pumping station. It looked like a lock on the Niger. A syndicate of aid organisations had built it a couple of years earlier, and Aguissa had been employed there as a builder.
The Tillamedess rice paddies were over half a mile from the Niger River, and connected to the pumping station via canals. The earth in the fields was baked hard, like fired clay, and the individual parcels of land were divided from one another by low earth walls. They could only be cultivated during the four months following the rainy season, when the Niger was at its highest.
It was only now that Aguissa and I could go to see his brother, Tilhouad. He was younger than Aguissa, perhaps in his forties, and looked permanently sulky. He was barefooted, and wearing a dirty wrapper.
He also had two tents. The tents looked exactly like the Chief’s. They just didn’t have any boxes or blankets, or a saddle, in them.
We couldn’t, however, talk to Tilhouad alone, as an elderly, pale-skinned man, who had been sitting with us in the Chief’s tent, latched on to us, settled himself with us in Tilhouad’s tent, and sat beside us like a dark shadow.
Aguissa was greeted amicably and with respect everywhere. Even the Chief’s elderly mother-in-law crawled out of her tent especially, and shook his hand.
In return, he generously distributed chewing tobacco. And he appeared very confident. He struck me as the typical relative who had done well in the city and was now returning to his poor village for some admiration.
His brother, Tilhouad’s, greeting, however, was much briefer. The pair didn’t have much news to give each other. And it was the same with Tilhouad’s two wives and his children.
I asked Tilhouad a few questions, and Aguissa translated. But I couldn’t get anything out of his brother. He sat there, leaning back against his tent pole, and mostly stared at the ground. Now and again he grunted, he kept glancing at the pale-skinned man who would then, occasionally, answer for him – unless Aguissa had already given me the answer, without asking his brother first.
I expressed my surprise at this. Whereupon, the pale-skinned man said “That’s just Tilhouad’s character. He doesn’t talk very much.”
It was only later than I understood what had been going on here. Aguissa hadn’t explained anything to me. He’d introduced the pale-skinned man to me in the Chief’s tent – “And that’s Abdullatif” – as though he’d already told me about him, and I now knew. But it wasn’t until we’d returned to Timbuktu, and he’d told me that his brother worked for Abdullatif, that I was able to make sense of what I’d seen.
Tilhouad’s tents were right next to Abdullatif’s. And Aguissa had also worked for Abdullatif, before he’d left for Timbuktu. And their father had worked for his father too.
Our work for the day was completed. We had told the traditional Chief that we would return two days later, in order to talk more thouroughly. And we now said the same to Aguissa’s brother and to Abdullatif. Then we returned to Timbuktu.
The following morning I visited Aguissa to interview him. His house was very simple, and was located in a residential area of Timbuktu with low houses and sandy front gardens. It was built of sun-dried clay bricks, and the roof was of corrugated iron. There were three rooms inside.
One was for his three sons and his daughter, one was the living room, and there was a smaller room for him and his wife. There were thin mattresses on the compacted clay floors of the two bedrooms. The living room contained three wooden armchairs. The kitchen was out in the yard, under a roof made of branches.
I wanted to find out from Aguissa why, and under what circumstances, he had left Tillamedess. The previous day, on the way there, he had told me that he hadn’t done away with his turban – the symbol of Tuareg culture – after he had moved from the camp. “Other Bellas discarded it immediately. But I couldn’t to that”, he said, and laughed.
He knew the exact year that he had left Tillamedess, as if it were the main event of his life. Otherwise, he struggled with year dates.
And, finally, he also said, about his brother, Tilhouad, that “I’ve already asked him a few times, ‘Why don’t you leave Tillamedess? You could live with me in Timbuktu. It’s no problem at all. I’ll help you.’ ”
And so, I thought, the journey from Tillamedess to Timbuktu was far more for Aguissa than just a three-hour trip. And that he’d felt a sense of conscious liberation when he’d left his birthplace.
But now he suddenly claimed that he’d not said any of this. “My brother is a herdsman”, he now said. “He can’t move away from there. If he doesn’t get any milk, he gets ill.”
So what was the truth? I was certain that he had told me all that. But Aguissa’s French wasn’t very good. So perhaps we’d misunderstood each other. Yet I soon noticed that it wasn’t to do with his French, and that we hadn’t misunderstood each other. It was more a case that a short history lesson was required here.
Like many inhabitants of the Sahara and the Sahel zone, the Tuareg have, for centuries, preyed on the dark-skinned people living to the south of them, and have made them work for them. Thus, a separate caste developed within Tuareg society – that of the Ikelan, the slaves.
Soon, the Ikelan knew nothing of their origins, and they adopted the language and culture of their masters. In most Tuareg clans there are no marriages between the pale-skinned nobles and the dark-skinned slaves. So, as well as “slave”, “Ikelan” also meant “dark-skinned”, “black”.
Usually, several slave families lived around one Tuareg family. They tended the cattle, did the housework and, where these existed, tilled the fields and gardens.
It wasn’t the politics of the French colonial powers, nor of the Malian government which ultimately sounded the death knell of the slavery system, but the great drought of 1972-73, during which the Tuaregs’ herds died in huge numbers. There was no longer sufficient food for the Ikelan. So they moved to the towns, or established their own settlements.
In 1958, you could still buy slaves in Timbuktu without any problem. And, as a traveller reported in the 1960s, it was normal for a host to offer a visitor a female slave for the night “because there was no TV”.
But that wasn’t the picture Aguissa painted of his youth. “Abdullatif’s father never saw my father as a Bella, but as a friend”, he now told me, during our interview. And he had been born in exactly the same year as Abdullatif, and at night the pair had slept on the same mat, such was the close relationship between their families.
Until Aguissa was twenty-five, he had worked as a herdsman for Abdullatif’s family. At the time, they had still had 300 or 400 cows, and perhaps 200 sheep, and around twenty Bella families tending the herds.
But Abdullatif’s father hadn’t opposed Aguissa’s move to Timbuktu. “I bought him sugar, and gave him clothes”, Aguissa said. “And whenever he came to Timbuktu, he stayed with me.”
Aguissa first visited Timbuktu on his own in 1971. Prior to that, his mother had tak
en him there only a couple of times, to go shopping. “After a while, I’d lost my heart to Timbuktu”, he said, “and I stayed here. I got interested in money, and I built myself a house here, with my own money and my own hands.”
It was in Timbuktu that he first got a passport. Before that, he hadn’t been listed on any state register – officially, he hadn’t existed.
To begin with, Aguissa continued to return to Tillamedess every weekend, but soon the herds there died because of the drought. “That's how I realised that there was no future for me in Tillamedess”, he said.
But would he have still left the camp if there hadn’t been the drought? “I can’t say. Only fate knows the answer to that. In any case, I loved Tillamedess very much.”
Aguissa disputed everything which didn’t fit this idyll. Although he’d been standing right there, Aguissa claimed not to have witnessed the incident when the young Tuareg man in Tillamedess had assigned some of the cows to the slaves. He made out that he couldn’t remember it. I had to describe the incident to him twice before he looked sheepish and resignedly admitted, “Well yes, that’s true.”
And now, during the interview, he claimed that he’d never heard the word “Ikelan”. I, who didn’t speak his native language, had to explain to him what the term meant.
Of course, Aguissa wasn’t an Ikelan. He always used the French word for “captive”. He never talked of slaves. He said his mother was a Fula – so from an ethnic group which inhabits huge swathes of West Africa. Like the Tuareg, the Fula had been Muslim for a long time. So, in the Tuaregs’ legal sense, Aguissa couldn’t be an Ikelan, he said.
Aguissa didn’t make it easy on me. If Bruce hadn’t given me documents describing the history of the Bellas’ situation in the Timbuktu region, I’d have had to accept Aguissa’s stories of his idyllic childhood.
But, at the points where I could draw his attention to historical facts, he withdrew behind his poor French. He made out that he didn’t understand me. That happened a couple of times. Then I accused him of wanting to pull the wool over my eyes.