Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

  The goat went home, but, fearing the duplicity of the jackal, she invited over her friend the dog for dinner. She prepared a tasty meal for him, and while he ate, she explained her predicament. The dog agreed to help her.

  Meanwhile, the jackal conspired with the gazelle, and came up with a plan to cheat the goat of her garden.

  In the morning the goat and the dog went early to the garden. The goat harvested the ripest vegetables, and placed them in a pile within which she hid the dog.

  When the gazelle and the jackal arrived, the jackal began to distribute the harvested vegetables according to his scheme: nine handfuls for the gazelle, one handful for the goat. The goat protested, but the jackal ignored her, and continued his unequal distribution.

  The pile grew smaller until suddenly the jackal spotted the ears of the hidden dog. He said nothing, but in a panic immediately reversed the scheme and began giving nine handfuls to the goat, and only one to the gazelle. When the gazelle complained, the jackal said, “I see the truth now in this pile of plenty.”

  But before he had time to correct the earlier injustice, the dog sprang out of the crops. He killed the jackal first, and then the gazelle. And that is how the goat retained her garden.

  21

  A

  TUAREG

  TRAGEDY

  THE FRENCH CONQUERED the Sahara easily. Once they decided that they wanted this desert, it was theirs for the taking. Their only real problem was its size: for a while it was more than they could control. Tuareg resistance persisted not because the Tuaregs were great fighters or idealists, but because drought and distance protected them. We may cherish the image of desert-hardened warriors, but by European standards the Tuaregs were weak.

  In the 1920s the French finally assumed control of the central Sahara with the most simple expedients. They beefed up their garrisons, declared the rule of law, established a postal service, and killed a few dissidents. But their most effective tactic was to replace the camel with the wheel. They did this in standard-production automobiles, which they drove into all the remote corners of the desert. The superiority of the automobile was immediately obvious. The French drove through the desert simply to leave tire tracks. The tracks endured. The Tuaregs submitted without further argument.

  Then a strange thing happened. The French became the only protectors that the Tuaregs had ever known. The French were not entirely easy on them: they forced the nobles to abandon their raiding and to free their slaves; they made them pay a small tax as a symbol of their allegiance; they required at least one child in each family to attend “nomad school,” to learn the French language and history. But beyond that, they also shielded the Tuaregs from their enemies to the north and south. By making a human preserve of the central Sahara, they provided the Tuaregs with what everyone agreed was a splendid sort of isolation.

  It is said that by imposing the rule of a foreign law, and forbidding the old business of raiding, they strangled the Tuaregs. But the truth is that the world outside had changed anyway, and cargo ships, trains, and trucks had killed the caravan trade. In the central Sahara there was nothing left to raid—a dry desert had become even drier. The French could not keep these changes from happening, but they could protect the Tuaregs from facing the consequences. As colonial masters, the French were sincere and well intentioned. They thought they should help the Tuaregs to maintain their nomadic ways. They encouraged the Tuaregs to indulge in a way of life that became a fiction.

  It was a fiction dreamed up in Europe. The French did not choose the desert by default, as is sometimes said. They were a densely civilized people, frustrated then as now by the competence and rigidity of their society. The Sahara was everything that France was not: big, clean, wild, dry, hot, hostile, and empty. It was uncivilized. It gave the French the escape they badly needed, a land that was empty and untouched and already so barren that it could not be spoiled, an especially pure sort of wilderness. There was no need even to go there; for ordinary French citizens, enclosed by all the refinements of their civilization, it was enough to have established this claim on the greatest open space on earth.

  Never mind that during the years before Algerian independence, oil was finally discovered there. The French originally had higher intentions for their desert. They drew boundaries through the middle of it for the purpose of colonial administration, but allowed those boundaries to have little effect. The soldiers and civilians sent to rule the Sahara prided themselves not on what they did to the desert but on what it did to them. They were malcontents, ethnologists, and adventurers—not missionaries. The Sahara was their refuge. The Tuaregs who wandered through its heart were the noble savages of Rousseau’s vision. The women were long-bodied beauties; the men wore swords and veils. They were aristocrats and brave warriors. They rode through the French imagination like characters in a romance novel. So much the better that these were the very people who had held out longest against French influence. Their resistance made the wilderness all the more authentic. It is hardly surprising that the French wanted the Tuaregs to remain proud, and encouraged them to remember a mythical past.

  The Tuareg rebellion today would be uninteresting were it not for the complicity of this European wishfulness. It would be unimportant were it not for its kinship to wars elsewhere. Mano Dayak, a Tuareg rebel in Niger today, has written this best-selling account of his childhood under the French:

  Before going off to school, I knew the happy childhood of the encampments. What memories! Those of children playing with the dry dung of camels. Memories of the first words of tamachek that my mother taught me to write in tefinagh, our script, on the sand of dunes. Memories also of all the late nights up around the fire.

  With my father and Ebayghar, it was the school of the desert: the apprenticeship of trails, and of navigation by the wind and stars. A whole nomad science to acquire the knowledge of places, of the oueds of the Aïr, of the enormous dunes of the Ténéré. An intimate ancestral geography of the Sahara, our universe.

  Every time I think again about the desert of my childhood, I feel sad and nostalgic. I see it like a sort of image, a very beautiful dream that I grieve for, that I would love to find again and to touch with my hands and my soul. I don’t know how better to describe such a feeling. It is so difficult to explain and to share.

  Born in the desert, one remains strongly attached to it, no matter what one does afterwards. He who leaves it, keeps a part of his oued with him, his paradise that awaits him. There is a Tuareg proverb that says, “No matter where he wanders, the nomad will always return to his first encampment.” This is so true.

  Mano Dayak is typical of the aristocratic Tuaregs who after generations under special French treatment learned to see themselves as the French saw them, with all the romance of outsiders. This is hardly an unusual syndrome—other people see themselves as the movies might portray them—but it can produce dangerous exaggerations. Dayak served up his memory of childhood in a 1993 book entitled Touareg, La Tragédie, which, significantly, he did not write alone, but rather produced with the collaboration of a professional French author. Published in Paris, the book is perhaps the most perfect Saharan artifact of our times. It has enjoyed success because it is still easy to convince the French that nomads are happier than city dwellers, and that they are more free.

  This explains why there is no Tuareg emigration. Forced exile, yes, it exists. Our enemies make sure of it. But not voluntary emigration. Those Tuaregs who have been able to study in Europe—sadly, there aren’t many—have all returned to the desert.

  At this moment, hardly more than fifteen Tuaregs live more or less permanently in France. A number that must be compared with that of North African immigration, for example. It’s true that the Moroccan and Algerians don’t leave their countries for the pleasure of it. That is correct. We too are poor, but we can endure misery better than we can the absence of the desert.

  When, as an adolescent, I left my home to discover the world of others, I soon began to b
urn with the desire to see the desert again. And I did return there, as have all our other travelers. Despite the droughts and the massacres, the Tuaregs remain so adapted to this Spartan existence, so in love with the desert. We cannot imagine living elsewhere. If I were told that I would have to stay permanently in Europe, I think I would die from it. And yet, I love Europe.

  Touareg, La Tragédie is full of this. It reminds the French of old Saharan holidays when they wore chèches and squatted with nomads. It plays on life in northern France, and on current understandings of colonial history. The reader is hardly surprised, about halfway through the book, to discover that Mano Dayak once ran a tourist agency in Agadez.

  He is probably an intelligent man. No doubt he is a brave and dedicated one. He writes from the front lines of a dangerous struggle. Despite the overwrought tone of his musings, elements of an obscure truth come through.

  Under the French colonization, we still had the impression that we could move about without constraint, since the boundaries were not the sort of obstacle that they are today. Certainly, the [colonial] tax humiliated us, but to a certain extent our daily lives, away from the towns, continued peacefully. Some people now accuse us of nostalgia for the colonial times. What an aberration! No one fought the colonist as we did. Colonization hurt us enormously, but we have known worse since then. One must say things as they are.

  The concept of pure ethnicity is as dangerous as that of pure race. All people are mongrels. “Indigenous” societies are subject to the same requirements for change as others. There is no such construct as an inauthentic culture. The worst thing the French did to the Tuaregs was not to defeat them in battle, but to treat them afterward like a privileged people. The worst thing the Tuaregs did was to deceive themselves. They were arrogant. They believed they were better than their neighbors and did not have to make peace with them. They let their desert fool them. They thought they could live in isolation from the world, though they never had before. They ignored what new technologies meant to the caravan trade. They ignored what changing ideologies meant to the practice of keeping slaves. And they were slow learners. Even today, generations later, there are many who cannot bring themselves to accept the obvious—that their camel culture is doomed, that their raiding days are over, that the central Sahara is too dry to sustain a purely pastoral form of nomadism, that they have to find some other way to survive. Were they Americans or Europeans, we would call them hopeless reactionaries. One must say things as they are.

  The tragedy of the Tuaregs is that today they must pay for these delusions. By now the choices are indeed limited. The crisis started around 1960, when in a last-ditch attempt to retain Algeria, the French gave independence to their West African colonies, and abandoned the Tuaregs to the new national boundaries. The boundaries were invisible and largely unmarked, but they were real nonetheless. The Tuaregs could cross them undetected, but they could not escape their effects. Mano Dayak writes:

  We didn’t really know what happened. During colonial times, the French divided us. They sat around a table to draw a map that denied our existence as a people. But because all of these territories, despite some internal French technicalities, were part of the same empire, the borders were not very important.

  With independence, all that changed brutally. Suddenly, the policemen and soldiers representing the new nations demanded to see passports, and even required visas when impoverished nomads from the Aïr wanted to visit their cousins in the Hoggar or in Adrar des Iforas.

  He simplifies. The Tuaregs had never formed a cohesive nation; they operated within anarchic groupings that sometimes fought one another, and shared little beyond their Berber language and cultural identity. The effect of the borders was not to separate loving families, or to deny the Tuaregs’ existence, but to force them into the modern world. They had lived artificially in a European dream, but this now was the real Sahara.

  The Tuaregs who belonged to the Algerian side of the divide were the lucky ones: they joined a mostly Berber nation into which if they chose they could melt. Only a few miles away, the Tuaregs of Niger and Mali had an entirely different experience. In each of those two countries they accounted for less than 10 percent of the population. The remaining 90 percent were black Sahelians—Mandé, Fulani, Songhai, Djerma and others—who were the very people that the Tuaregs had traditionally preyed upon. The Tuaregs were from the start outgunned.

  With these people from the south, hate came to the north. At night, in our desert encampments, travelers told us stories of what was happening to the Tuaregs of Agadez. During public gatherings, southern soldiers were stripping off the turbans of our chiefs, an act which represents the worst dishonor for a Tuareg. They were also taking away our swords, another grave insult.

  The government of Niger set about terrorizing the nomads. It could not stand our pride, which the people of the south took for arrogance. Our dignity, even during colonial times, would not allow us to kneel to administrators. One did not bow before a man who, because he was armed, thought he had the power of life and death over civilians. The French at least respected our pride. But the Republic of Niger decided to make the Tuaregs pay dearly for their “insolence” and their past as “slave masters.”

  Their punishment was to be excluded from national development schemes—the new schools, hospitals, roads, and lucrative administrative positions. For proud and independent nomads, you might think this would not have posed a problem. But the symbolism grated on them. They thought that these things, which they did not want, were being denied to them by men who had no natural right to deny them anything. Arlit made the insult worse. Uranium was discovered there in 1968, and within two years the profits were being whisked 700 miles down the new “Route de L’Uranium” past Agadez to the capital city, Niamey. The Tuaregs who followed became street beggars. Those who went to Arlit found only menial jobs.

  The situation was more difficult still in Mali, where as soon as the French pulled out, the government imposed heavy taxes on livestock and began strong-arming the northern population. In 1962, around Gao and Timbuktu, the Tuaregs rebelled and were crushed. The leaders crossed the border into Algeria, but were arrested and returned to Mali. Diplomacy between the uneasy neighbors required the gesture. Public executions followed, and have continued sporadically ever since.

  In 1968 the summer rains faltered. In 1973 and 1974 they failed entirely. Across West Africa 50,000 people died, not of thirst but of starvation after their goats, cows, and camels had perished. Niger lost 60 percent of its herds. In itself this was not unusual—the southern Sahara has always been a treacherous place to live—but the difference now was political. In the past the Tuaregs would have shifted south with the drought, pushing their herds to the banks of the Niger River and beyond, shoving aside the black tribes of the Sahel. Those tribes, collectively, had a long memory of such apocalypses during which, just as the crops failed, masked swordsmen would appear out of the desert like the agents of hell. In modern Niger and Mali, in 1974, the southerners did not think that the Tuaregs could hurt them anymore, but they would not forgive them either.

  The ancient pattern reversed: in the depths of the drought, traders from the Niger River moved north into the desert and bought up the emaciated Tuareg herds for the equivalent of a few cents. Towns like Agadez and Arlit swelled with destitute Tuareg refugees dying for the lack of charity. By 1975, when the rains returned, many Tuaregs were too poor to rebuild their herds. The old aristocrats had to slip secretly into Algeria to huddle by Tamanrasset or to work illegally in the northern oases.

  Libya offered a more attractive alternative, because Muammar Qaddafi, a true Saharan, embraced the Tuareg refugees, employed them in his oil fields, and recruited them into his Islamic Legion. Qaddafi set up a radio transmitter and began beaming Tamachek broadcasts into Niger and Mali. This was unhelpful, since both countries were run by frightened Sahelian dictators already obsessed with conspiracy theories.

  In 1980 Qaddafi called for an inde
pendent Tuareg republic, and promised to provide the guns and military training to make it happen. Indulging again in a massive act of self-deception, thousands of young Tuaregs took him up on the offer. Qaddafi sent them to fight against Morocco in the distant Western Sahara, and in 1987 gave them a taste of defeat in Chad. By then the price of oil had dropped, and with it the wages and conditions in Qaddafi’s oil fields. The few squads sent into Niger had been wiped out. The Tuaregs in Libya felt betrayed. They continued to look outside for an enemy.

  They were condemned already to their nihilistic war. Another great drought had hit the southern Sahara in 1983. It lasted three years, and was so severe that for the first time in recorded history the Niger River ran dry in Niamey. No one knows how many people died. Starvation spread across Africa at its widest, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. Saharans by the tens of thousands fled north to tent camps in Mauritania and Algeria. I remember the crowds in Tamanrasset, which included as many black tribesmen as Tuaregs. In Algeria, the Tuareg refugees temporarily again had the upper hand, and they used it. Twenty-five years after national independence, they reverted to shoving around their fellow countrymen, to treating the blacks like slaves. Had they forgotten what a border could do to them? Did they think this refuge would last?

  Qaddafi was not the only one leading them on. The colonial empire had disappeared from the desert forever, and had indeed become irrelevant, but its strongest tradition still flourished. If the world now was growing smaller it meant this: more Westerners than before surrounded the Tuaregs with cameras and mirrors, and extended their friendships and their sympathy, and encouraged the Tuaregs to remain something they never had been. These Westerners were jealous of their relationships with the natives, and they outdid each other in their expressions of understanding. This mattered because of who they were: like Charles de Foucauld, many had come to the Sahara precisely because they wanted to separate themselves from the national powers that stood behind them. But every Westerner in such a desert, no matter how full of Christian love, is an agent of the West. And the West is seen as stronger and more clearly intentioned than in practice it is. The Tuaregs heard compassion among visitors and in the European press, and they misread the emotion as political commitment.