A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  Monsieur Brahim has now managed, amazingly enough, to find me an English connection in amongst all his Saharan history – a tiny fragment, but still, gripping. Four English cannons, purchased from Queen Elizabeth the First, once came through this place – in 1591, on their way to Gao, the Malian city that lies directly across the desert from here, on the shores of the river Niger. The Moroccan sultan of the time, it seems, was suffering from the same gold fever that had gripped the Europeans and sent them off to pillage the Incas and the Aztecs. He decided to go for the African gold on his own doorstep. He would invade Mali and take the cities of Timbuktu and Gao, for centuries the source of most of the gold transported northwards by the nomads’ Saharan caravans. Six thousand camels and three thousand men came through these oases, dragging the English cannons with them, heading for Gao. Alas, like the Europeans in the Americas, the sultan was doomed to disappointment. There were no fabulous riches to be grabbed, no bottomless mines to be exploited. Just enough gold was mined in Mali to keep a small, steady trickle coming across the desert.

  But the sultan was not to know that. And he was in a precarious position at home. He was not well loved among his subjects, and, worse still, his kingdom had become over-populated with men of fighting age, refugees from Andalusia. The well-heeled Muslims had mostly got out of Spain two or three generations previously: these newest arrivals were restless and rootless, hard up and hungry for opportunities. The situation was bad for his nerves. What better than to send the lot of them off across the Sahara to win his new kingdom? So of the 3,000 men who left Morocco on this mission, 2,500 were refugees from el-Andalus. If the Andalusians succeeded, they could colonize the place for him; if they failed, they were out of his hair for a while, at least – and either way, their troublesome numbers would certainly be reduced.

  And so the convoy set off. The English cannons, once the cameleers had got them across the desert – perhaps using the technique recently invented by Barbarossa, of attaching sails to them to help the beasts of burden in their heavy task? – were a great success. The Malians’ preferred battle strategy at this time was to bring every available head of sheep and cattle into the field, the livestock both serving as mobile cover and to confuse the aim of their attackers. And, I imagine, providing the celebration dinner ready slaughtered, post-battle. Brilliant plan altogether, if you have never met a cannon. One blast, and their cover was blown.

  No great colony grew up from this exploit. But in the environs of Gao there is, to this day, a small group of people known as the Arma, a sad tribal remnant who these days keep themselves to themselves, but who claim that once upon a time they were a powerful military aristocracy and identify themselves – although there is no visual evidence of this – as white. They are, according to Monsieur Brahim, all that is left of the sultan’s Andalusian army. Nobody knows what became of the English cannons.

  Andalusia to Mali, Alsace to Tizi Ouzou. What distances the unwanted populations of the world have been constrained to travel! Those Highland ancestors of mine were onto a cushy number, I now see, getting to settle a mere 500 miles from their roots.

  Over the salad course, once we have dutifully inspected Hadj Mouloud’s diagrams of the fouggara system and its workings, given to him by the grateful team of Italian hydrologists who came here to investigate and learn from it, we find out that there is a whole class system to be read from the long white robes people wear here. Guy has asked for some clues to help him decode the multifarious outfits of the town, and we have begun with the basics. You can have a straight white robe, like Monsieur Brahim’s, or one that gets much wider towards the bottom, like Hadj Mouloud’s. This extra width, Hadj Mouloud explains, is so that he can ride a horse, or a camel: the ordinary narrow ones would get in the way.

  Does that mean he has a horse, then? Or is it a camel? I ask excitedly.

  He smiles at the thought. Certainly not! He has a Toyota pick-up. He is just explaining the principle behind the garment.

  I get it now: his outfit says he’s a gentleman, or even an aristocrat, maybe. The same applied in Europe once, didn’t it: to call yourself a chevalier, literally just the French for ‘horseman’, was to distinguish yourself from a commoner. He is being pretty reticent about it, but then, what with all the Islamic injunctions against ostentation, and the Evil Eye that might get you if you were to awaken envy in the hearts of those around you, he has good reason to be. And then, you need to find a good reason for adding those several extra yards of vainglorious fabric to your robe, or risk your entrance to Paradise. My theory about his superior social standing is confirmed when our host gets badly offended by Gérard’s assuming that he works in his palmeraies himself. He certainly does not engage in manual work. He has sharecroppers to do that. He himself is kept more than busy looking after the business side of his groves.

  Hadj Mouloud now turns to converse with his other two guests in their own language. The debate quickly gets very heated. Abdallah, making sure to talk well below the volume of his father’s conversation, gives us some low-down. His father doesn’t understand the modern world, he says, and it doesn’t understand him, either. He’s turning into an oasis Don Quixote. (Why am I surprised that Abdallah should know of Don Quixote? Cervantes actually began his great work here: he spent five years in Algiers – captured by pirate corsairs and held as a slave until his friends and family raised the ransom to get him back.)

  Abdallah explains that some years ago Hadj Mouloud donated a small palm grove he owned, beside a small village up in the dunes of the Erg, to the inhabitants. A lot of the young and strong had emigrated from the place: the family has distant connections there. The village is out beyond the reach of the fouggaras – the land too high, the sand too deep – and the palmeraie in question has a small well in it. Hadj Mouloud’s was an act of kindness. Quite a few families didn’t need to walk so far for their water; and everyone could grow more food.

  But at the back of Hadj Mouloud’s mind was the notion that he would earn much respect from the émigré men of the village who, when they returned for their month’s holidays each year, would appear at his home bearing gifts, and praising him to the skies for his generosity to their old folks left at home. That’s how people would have behaved in his father’s youth. But not any more: there’s an air of democracy abroad, and the recipients of his charity have paid him no homage at all, in all this time. He has been getting more and more offended, year upon year, and now he’s asking for his property back, thinking to punish them for their lack of respect! But he’s operating by rules only the old even recognize. They are not going to understand the message he’s sending them. He’ll get himself a name for being a miserly old skinflint – the exact opposite of his original intention!

  Monsieur Brahim has promised to try and talk him out of it. But Mouloud has got a lot more stubborn since he’s heard that an ex-émigré from the village is actually trying to buy up a palm grove, here in Timimoun, with his French savings. It will be hard for us to understand, says Abdallah, but till recently only Arabs and Berbers ever owned land here – and this man is a Haratine. His father sees it as another sign that the end of the world is at hand!

  20

  Brilliant moonlight is shining down into the courtyard: at last the heat of the day has died down. Abdallah is off now, but he’s going to take a walk round town before he goes home. Do we fancy coming along?

  Once we’re out of the house, and out of earshot of his father, Abdallah makes us promise to come round for a meal with him and his wife, Amina. She was dying to meet us tonight, but of course he couldn’t bring her round – pointless, she would have had to eat in the other room with the rest of the women. Abdallah reveals that he has no intention of going home yet; he is coming to the Ahellil. He didn’t want to mention it in front of his father. We would all have got a lecture about the fall in artistic standards in the town. Hadj Mouloud would prefer his guests not to see an Ahellil at all than to see it in a less-than-perfect form, all the more so since
a group of French musicologists came to town and spent an evening with him, lamenting its popularization and consequent loss of purity.

  We head ever deeper into the ksar, winding through covered streets of earthen walls, following the sound of the drums. Soon we see the flicker of warm light from the square, hear the murmur of a big crowd. We find a bonfire in the square as predicted and the music coming from the flat roof of a nearby house – flutes and percussion, a stringed instrument, some kind of massed chanting. Abdallah tells us that the word Ahellil – just in case we have any doubts about the Jewish past of this place – is from the same Hebrew root as ‘Halleluia’, meaning praise and celebration. It is such an ancient musical form that nobody really knows its origins – a strange mixture of the sacred and the profane, of Berber Tamazight and Bedouin Arabic combined with couplets from the Koran in classical Arabic. It drives anthropologists and musicologists mad. And this town, as we may have gathered, is under constant assault from every kind of -ologist!

  Up a narrow enclosed stairway onto the wide roof to find thirty or forty people here under the stars. Edging gently through the packed bodies, we find two musicians, one playing a flute and the other a red clay drum, and one main singer who raises his voice into a strange, harsh sound. He is the caller, and the other singers respond, all in polyphonic harmonies. He stands in the centre of a circle of white robes and white turbans, fifteen-odd men all clapping and singing, or tapping out the rhythm on some kind of metal castanets, standing shoulder to shoulder around the soloist, who improvises a few verses, then the rest repeat a chanted refrain. The words now are Berber, Abdallah says, a mixture of tales of ancient glories and comments on recent events – some humorous, I gather from the audience’s reactions. Slowly the rhythm builds up, and every now and then they break into Arabic chanting, verses of the Koran: the lessons to be drawn from the tale, says Abdallah. The circle of swaying white robes is not static but circling around the soloist very, very slowly. Every now and then they do a little double-step-and-knee-bend all in unison, as if they were making obeisance to him. The voices begin to overlap, the rhythm gets tighter and tighter, faster and faster, the dancing kicks in harder . . . After an hour of this, you are totally gripped, and a serious frenzy is building up. Now the soloist improvises a long something that brings a smile to the faces of his chorus, and guffaws from the crowd. A couple of the chorus break ranks, improvise a long response – to more laughter.

  It’s a good job his father isn’t here, says Abdallah. Hadj Mouloud won’t even come to an Ahellil any more, not when it’s a disorganized, family thing like this, and the rules are bent for entertainment’s sake. The Ahellil is a competitive sport: how skilful is the soloist at improvising around the couplets of the ancient Berber poetry, how stylish the telling of the stories, how brilliant the connections made with the couplets from the Koran that anchor the section and draw out the chorus to improvise in its turn. This is the early part of the event – people will slowly drop out until only the masters of the genre are left. An Ahellil won’t finish till dawn.

  The ignoramuses seem to be having a good time, Hadj Mouloud’s opinion regardless. There are even, I am shocked to report, women actually speaking to men in public. This is the first time I’ve seen men and women socialize together at all, except for our afternoon with Ismail’s cousins and our night out with Farida in Algiers – neither of which was exactly typical of ordinary everyday Maghreb life. There are plenty of women here, though, clapping away to the rhythm, clacking with the castanet-things. A pair of middle-aged women next to me, joining in with a will, are accompanying themselves on pairs of pebbles.

  Downstairs in a back room, though, is a private women-only party for the bride and close relatives, and suddenly I am dragged away by my pebble-playing neighbour, and taken down to be presented to the bride. I find myself in a room sparkling with bright dresses, golden earrings, tinkling bracelets and anklets – and plenty of semi-naked hair, in every shade of henna. Some are dancing and you-you-ing and banging those ceramic tambourine-things, while one seated woman uses the two halves of a quern, a grindstone, for a percussion instrument. I am never going to get any coherent picture of women in this country. One minute they are silent and repressed, trudging the streets wrapped in a big sheet, eyes downcast, the next they are whirlwinds of bright colour, music, dancing, laughter and chaos. They all go wild at the sight of me, double you-yous, screams and laughter, manhandling me over to meet the bride, who is all veiled up, sitting on a little dais in the corner. They lift her veil so she can have a proper look at me – or so that I can see her properly? My presence will bring extra baraka for the marriage, they say. Like the women of the Ouled Naïl, I guess, my weird neither-man-nor-woman status has the extra baraka-power.

  Back upstairs, the crowd is settling in to the event, the rhythm slower and more heartfelt. There is still no sign, alas, of Kebir or any of his nephews. The ladies who took me downstairs are beside me, singing along ecstatically. A couple of youths behind Gérard launch into the next response at maximum volume. We look round: they are Moussa and Moulay. And they don’t seem to be taking the event as seriously as they should. In fact, they are definitely, if subtly, taking the mickey. Moussa bounces over to me. He thinks he’s got a lead on the Kebir I’m looking for, but he will say no more. He waggles his index finger from side to side. No, no. He will tell me when he is sure.

  Another bonfire: this time on the edge of the palmeraie, where the trees meet the moonlit glow from the sebkha. Moussa and Moulay have enticed us away from the Ahellil – it’s boring and old-fashioned, and anyway, it’ll be on all night – to join a bunch of people whom they call the moksirin – which means, they say, the ‘night-shorteners’.

  We have headed out along a red-earth road that slopes gently down through the palmeraies, discovering by ghostly moonlight that, tucked in beneath the palm trees, is an amazing array of other crops, whole fields of moonlit barley, of onions, carrots, chilli-peppers, even tomatoes. Once you have the palm trees to protect more tender plants from the violent Saharan sun, you can grow anything here, says Moulay. You can’t go outwards – the desert stops you doing that – so you go upwards instead! Three storeys of cultivation: the tall palms up above, vegetables and grain down below, and fruit trees, gourds, pumpkins, and henna bushes inbetween. That’s how you make the best use of your land here.

  As we draw closer to the sebkha these bountiful gardens give way to plain palms, wall-less and unprotected, sown by the hopeful landless on the dry limits of irrigation. Here the palmeraie meets the desert, trailing sadly off through a little grove of half-dead palm trees on the very edge of sand and salt plain. The trees down here are sick, Moulay says, not from lack of water – for once – but from too much of it. Torrential rainstorms, unheard of in the past, have hit the town three times in the last few years. They have destroyed a lot of homes – Timimoun’s flat roofs of mud supported on palm trunks are not designed to stand up to that sort of treatment – and have brought the strong salts in the deeper levels of the ground up to the surface, poisoning the trees. There is no help for them, says Moussa, nothing to be done. The trees out here on the limits are doomed to die.

  Now we hear the sound of voices, of laughter, of Rai music from a tinny transistor. The bonfire is red-hot, and it needs to be – it is very nippy indeed, out here on the edge of town, now that the sun is off the land, and the night wind blowing in off the desert. Everyone has dug themselves a protective seat right into the sand, a ground-level nest of an armchair, and a couple of boys jump up to help us do the same, making sure we avoid the shifting smoke-path. Long pipes are doing the rounds, thin skeins of paler smoke drifting between crouching figures and moonlit sky. We’re in the Timimoun equivalent of the local pub, we decide. All the more so when we are offered a swig of a very strange and noticeably alcoholic drink called, I think, deffi. Brewed from forty different plants, they tell us, and only used at Ramadan. They just happen to have some left over . . . I’m not sure if they�
�re just pulling our leg, though. The stuff tastes remarkably like one of those herbal preparations, sweet yet bitter, that Italians drink after dinner to aid their digestion.

  Moussa introduces us to everyone and explains where we are staying. The moksirin are intrigued: how do we come to know a shurfa family?

  We don’t know what shurfa means. Is it the tribe Hadj Mouloud belongs to?

  Shurfa, Moussa explains, is not the name of a tribe, but the plural of sharif, meaning a legitimate descendant of the prophet Mohammed. The permanent inhabitants of the towns – unlike the passing nomad populations – have been settled for so many centuries that they have lost whatever tribal identities they once had: they only think of themselves as Arab, Berber or Haratine. The shurfa of the oasis towns, though, have become an aristocratic clan. They are the propertied class down here, vying for power and influence with the other powerful clan, the m’rabtin, which is just the plural of marabout: the inheritors and descendants of the holy men of the area. You can have Berber-speaking shurfa or Arabic-speaking shurfa: the same goes for m’rabtin. The shurfa and m’rabtin are the educated and literary classes of Timimoun, the merchants and djema’a men: they are the people born with baraka, thanks to their holy origins, and the owners of most of the palm groves, into the bargain.

  A few of the people around this camp-fire, we discover as the bottle and the pipe pass on around our circle, are Berbers and Arabs, but most are Haratine. Almost all of them are sharecroppers, which means, they explain, that they rent a palm grove from its owner by the year and pay him come harvest-time with a share of the crops. This is, traditionally, a whole four-fifths of the produce they have grown – by their own hard work!

  This seems, we say, taking our cue, a most excessive proportion!

  Everyone congratulates us on our insight. Daylight robbery! But in the old days the proprietors made the rules. According to them, since they provided four of the five necessities – the land, water, seed and manure – and the sharecropper only one – his labour – he only deserved one-fifth of the crop. You couldn’t get out of it: the sharecropper families had debts with their landlords that went back generations and grew rather than shrank, always augmented by fines from the djema’a for not having paid off enough, in years of bad harvest, or by loans when a plough broke or a donkey died . . . There was no escaping the debt, or, indeed, escaping the town. The only transport out of here was with the nomads, and they were the landowners’ own trading partners, with no reason to start helping a criminal to default on his debts. You paid your four-fifths or you got no land to work at all, next year. And then how would your family eat?