‘Nomad’ derives from the Greek nomas, ‘roaming’, and its cognate nomos, ‘pasture’ or ‘grazing’. For this reason, anthropologists (who often have to work within stricter parameters than travel writers) tend to define nomads as pastoralists, moving about with their herds in search of grazing. But the Arabic word has a broader, more interesting derivation. Bedawi (anglicised as ‘Bedouin’) comes from the noun badw, which means both ‘desert’ and ‘beginning’. For desert-dwelling Arabians, living in a landscape unsuited to hunter-gathering, pastoral nomadism was the original, and the only viable, lifestyle. It is scorned by urban Arabs for this very reason – why do something so old-fashioned when you can pile up the moolah in the oil trade? – and at the same time revered.
This ambiguous attitude, this switch between scorn and awe, is the double-edged sword on which the nomadic reputation has been impaled for most of recorded history. Whether or not Cain killed Abel, it is pretty likely some farmer knocked some herder over the head at some very early point (I would hear of many such incidents among the Fulani of Central Mali) and it has been hammer and tongs ever since. Nobody captures this cognitive dissonance better than the historian Ibn Khaldun. ‘It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess,’ he wrote in the fourteenth century. ‘Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lance falls.’ But, but, but … in another passage, this nimble thinker expresses the never-ending schizophrenia: ‘Bedawi [nomads] are closer to the first natural state and more remote from the evil habits that have been impressed upon the souls [of sedentary people].’
Centuries later, the same inconsistency prevails. Nomads are accused of denuding hills, deforesting woods and desertifying plains (the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, cited by William Forster Lloyd in the nineteenth century and popularised in the 1960s by the ecologist Garrett Hardinfn3) and failing to pay taxes – but are co-opted by politicians eager to show their environmental consciousness or cultural sensitivity. Just how useful they are for political gain was underlined by Colonel Gaddafi, who spent four decades parading himself in a tent, trading on nomadic stereotypes.
Is nomadism really the ‘death in life’ that TE Lawrence called it? It still has millions of practitioners in North Africa, and in Mali it accounts for an estimated tenth of the population. Not every nomad wants to call it a day; at least, not today. Travelling among various nomadic communities, I hoped to understand why so many still toil at such a challenging lifestyle: how they relate to their complicated past, what obstacles preoccupy their present, what future they envisage. Not just how they lived in Leo Africanus’s time, but how they live now.
So I set off for North Africa once again, to continue my education in another world. It was a training that had begun at the back end of the Sahara, in a town so notoriously off the beaten track that its own inhabitants hail you with the greeting: ‘Welcome to the middle of nowhere.’
Part One
The Middle of Nowhere
Wide Afric, doth thy sun
Lighten, thy hills enfold a city as fair
As those which starred the night o’ the elder world?
Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
A dream as frail as those of ancient time?
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Timbuctoo
1
City of Gold
Howbeit there is a most stately temple to be seen, the walls whereof are made of stone and lime; and a princely palace also built by a most excellent workman of Granada.fn1 The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and scepters of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 pounds, and he keeps a magnificent and well-furnished court.
THAT WAS THE ASSESSMENT OF LEO AFRICANUS, ARRIVING IN TIMBUKTU in 1507 after a 1200-mile journey across the Sahara. I arrived by boat up the Niger 494 years later, and here is what I scribbled in my diary:
You come out of the desert anticipating a town, and you’re already in the middle of it before you realise you’re here. The Grand Mosque is the most impressive building and next to the Mosque of Djenné, it looks like a termite mound (plus I couldn’t bribe anyone to let me look inside). The streets are so dusty, I’m constantly rubbing the grit out of my eyes, and I’m sweating so much I feel like those slabs of meat the flies are buzzing around outside the butcher shops.
But but but. It’s Timbuktu! Tim-buk-bloody-tu! I’m walking in the streets of TIMBUKTU!!!
Anywhere else, it would matter. Any iconic historical city – Fez, Venice, Jerusalem – the name is insufficient. The city has to match its reputation or you feel short-changed. But being a shadow of its former self is no shame for Timbuktu – it only makes the place all the more Timbuktu. It is the Miss Havisham of famous metropolises – a fading relic whose character is drawn not from its rose-tinted prime but from the long decline that slumbered in its wake.
After several months on the road, I’ve made it to Timbuktu at last! The thought bounced me around town, and my eye was on the lookout for anything to fit my mood: women with giant spatulas spooning wheat bread out of street-corner ovens; a girl in a yellow dress plaiting her sister’s cornrows on a bench outside a dépôt de boissons; a cavalier on a winged horse, mounted on a concrete arch – the Al-Farook monument – towering over a couple of blue-veiled Tuaregs as if he were eavesdropping on their conversation.
It was my first visit, and I was as high as a rocket. I had dreamed of this day ever since, aged 8, I watched the Disney classic The Aristocats. At the end of the movie, the dastardly butler was bundled into a trunk with the mysterious label: ‘To Timbuktu’. Where was this strange-sounding place? Did it even exist? We hear the name ‘Timbuktu’ so often, a byword for the back of beyond, a metaphor uprooted from geography, ‘a mythical city in a Never-Never land’, as Bruce Chatwin put it. Now I was here, discovering that some metaphors can be stepped on and walked around and slept in … and now the travelling could really begin.
When the Sultan of Fez dispatched Leo Africanus’s uncle on an embassy to the King of the Songhay, Timbuktu was the lodestar of a great empire. This was no backwater, but a thriving city at the heart of the international gold trade. For Europeans, the New World was still news and its treasures were yet to saturate their markets. West Africa remained Eldorado. It was this region that drove the currencies of Europe, from the Venetian ducat (with its 99.47 per cent fine gold quotient) to the British guinea (named for the West African lands where much of the gold originated). With hard cash, city states could be built, soldiers salaried, merchant voyages commissioned.
Was it ‘Dark Continent’ gold that burned out the Dark Ages in Europe?fn2 For Timbuktu, however, the sun was already setting. It was about to enter its own dark age – an age still awaiting its climax. So it is no wonder that when I visited a local historian, he was weighed down by a chronicle from the seventeenth century.
Salim Ould Elhadje is an author, retired teacher and civil servant whose two-volume Tombuctou is the first history of the town written by an inhabitant in situ. A Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mali, he has appeared on West African television and spoken at conferences in the USA, and his name was the one I heard most often when I asked who could tell me the tale of Timbuktu’s rise and fall.
He was sitting in a parapeted limestone house near the central market. Lemony strings of light peeled through a fretted window like rind through a grater, oozing around his silvery hair, which quivered in the air spun by the ceiling fan. The book on his lap was the Tarikh as-Sudan (‘History of the Blacks’), written by a notary and imam called Abdarrahman As-Sadi. The creases on its cover were as tight as the laughter lines around Elhadje’s eyes. ‘Have a look,’ he said, thumbing through this comprehensive tome, which swung from brutal massacres to fabulous accounts of Timbuktu’s glory days.
‘The story of Timbuktu,’ said Elhadje, ‘begins a thousand years ago with the Tuareg nomads. They were gathering at the river. But they saw there were mosquitoes and insects, the water was bad, there was a smell of fish, everyone was getting sick from the humidity. So they decided to mov
e into the desert to a place without insects, where the water was good. A lady was living there called Bouctou, and she was known as a kind, trustworthy woman. So, when they travelled, people left their luggage with her and when they came back they said, “we’re going to the place of Bouctou’s well” – “Tin Bouctou” in the language of the Tuareg.’
It was under Mansa Musa, the ‘Lion of Mali’, that Timbuktu’s legend started marching. He was a 24-carat bling king, greased in the fat of the West African gold mines. He trumpeted his wealth when he set off on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, caravanning with 60,000 soldiers, 500 slaves, and 100 camels loaded with gold. Largesse was sprinkled along the way, most notably in Cairo, where Mansa Musa distributed so much gold that he stripped a quarter off its value; and rumours percolated across the Mediterranean, where the first European reference to Timbuktu appeared on a Catalan map in 1375 (as Tenbuch), hieroglyphed by a king with a sceptre and a nugget of gold.fn3 Forget Bill Gates, the Rothschilds or even Croesus: according to a 2012 survey by the financial data website Celebrity Networth, Mansa Musa’s inflation-adjusted $400 billion fortune makes him the richest man who ever lived.
But for the common folk there were smaller fish to try. Literally, in the case of the river dwellers who came to Timbuktu to trade with the nomads from the dunes.
‘Timbuktu is the city of the pirogue and the camel,’ Elhadje explained. ‘People from the dunes brought milk and skins and salt. And people came from the river with rice and karité butter, fish and gold. The town became a big gathering place for people looking for knowledge, for trade, for everything.’
Here is the whole Saharan region encapsulated: a swap-shop for nomads and sedentarists, an entrepôt for their goods. Tribesmen wander out of the desert, bringing salt and fattened livestock; they carry back the rice and sugar and tea they need on the long caravan trails. This interdependence has endured for nearly a millennium, and for good reason. In a desiccated region where grass is mostly confined to dreams, only the nomadic life can sustain the vast herds necessary to supply the meat and dairy required by town dwellers. Timbuktu is more than just a metaphor – it is the lynchpin of this relationship. It was the heart of my journey; the port from which I hoped to sail the nomad sea.
When Leo Africanus made it here, the gold trade through the desert had a rival on the coast: Portuguese caravels were starting to prove as lucrative as camel caravans. Still, Timbuktu was in fine fettle. Leo marvelled at the markets, the trade in books, the high-spirited music. Under the Songhay dynasty – and especially Mohammed Askiya, ‘the usurper’fn4 – Timbuktu was the engine room of a grand regional power. An effective administration had been established, along with a standing army, and Songhay rule stretched from the Atlantic coast to Lake Chad. This magnificence was still visible to Leo, but the moral cohesion of the Askiya’s empire was already starting to melt. Timbuktu was turning into a cesspit of vice, records As-Sadi, ‘such as drinking fermented liquors, sodomy and fornication – indeed, they were so given over to this latter vice that it appeared to be nothing forbidden’. The city was ripe for plucking. And for the Sultan of Morocco, it was high time to seize this gateway to the land of gold.
In 1591, a Moroccan army of 5000 men (including Christian slaves, mercenaries from Eastern Europe and 1000 musketeers from Andalusia) marched across the desert, supplied by more than 10,000 camels and led by a Castilian eunuch called Jawdar. Their blunderbusses and English cannons terrified the Malian cattle, and their technological superiority was so emphatic that the Songhay troops dropped to the ground, lying in the dust with their legs crossed over their shields. ‘Jawdar’s troops’, declared As-Sadi, ‘broke the army of the askiya in the twinkling of an eye.’
‘It was’, said Elhadje, ‘the biggest catastrophe for our city.’ Steepling his hands under his beard, he shook his head, as if the invasion had just taken place: ‘Because they took away all the intellectuals. Before this, if you came from Cairo, from Al-Azhar University itself, to teach at our University of Sankoré, you would be turned away. Nowhere else had such a high level. And then, in one black night, all was lost.’
It was an event collapse. Over the next few generations, everything went wrong for Timbuktu. Droughts and famine wiped the land of vegetation and killed off herds, forcing the inhabitants to eat the corpses of animals and even their fellow citizens; the rise of shipping directed merchant traffic towards the coast; and the influx of precious metal from the Americas deflated the value of African gold. At the very moment that Europe was emerging into its brightest epoch – the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution – the region around Timbuktu disintegrated. Other caravan towns fell away altogether, such as Sijilmasa in southern Morocco; or snoozed even more deeply, like Ouadane and Walata in Mauritania. Yet none became more iconic, more synonymous with occlusion and inaccessibility. Slowly, Timbuktu earned for itself the soubriquet with which it is promoted on tourist posters all along the Niger river: Timbuktu la Mystérieuse.
2
Dinner with the Blue Men
THE BLAST WHIPPED THE AIR AND GLUED ME TO THE SPOT. IT WAS UNMISTAKABLY gunshot. I stood rigid beside the fourteenth-century Sankoré mosque, the university extolled by Salim Ould Elhadje: a crumbly mud pyramid spiked with rodier palms, built in the fourteenth century at the behest of a Tuareg benefactress. It looked like a rocket that has landed on a desert planet, gathering dust long after its passengers have run out of air.
‘Don’t be scared,’ said a blue-robed figure, stepping out from under a goatskin awning. ‘It’s only a party for someone’s circumcision.’
His face was mummified. His turban left only a slit for the eyes, like a woman’s niqab, but those eyes were sparkling with welcome. A dust-smeared hand beckoned and I followed the man to the awning, where he invited me to sit down. Scattered underneath were the tools of his trade – scraper, crucible, sewing awl, a hardwood bellows with a clay nozzle. He patted down the sand and dug a pit of earth to boil his teapot.
His name was Ousmane. He was working on an earring, with circles to denote the wells of a caravan route and silver dots for the stars. Beside him was a knife, the handle scored by chevrons to signify the caravan trail. Cusped edges suggested camel saddles; there were crescent shapes for the moon. A goatskin toggle bag hugged the sand next to him, scarred with enough motifs to satisfy a semiologist. A triple-dotted triangle connoted a fawn; a spoked circle conjured the tracks of a jackal. Code is intrinsic to Tuareg culture, expressed in a fondness for word play, riddles and secret languages, and this cryptic atmosphere extends to the people’s clothing. Ousmane’s tamelgoust (the Tuareg veil) had to be worn over the nose in front of his elders, but when he was hanging out with friends he let it drop.
‘Maybe you only see a veil,’ he said, ‘but there are more than a hundred ways to wear it.’
Tugging a couple of glasses out of the toggle bag, he shook a few pellets of gunpowder tea into the pot, initiating the elasticated process of Tuareg refreshment.
When it comes to making tea, the Tuareg have no rivals. There are so many pourings out and pourings back, so much fiddling about, so many longueurs of tantalising inaction, that you start to wonder if you’re witnessing some obscure exercise in alchemy. I tried to count how many times Ousmane reintroduced the water to the pot, but after the fifth outpouring, all my concentration was focused on restraining myself from snatching the glass in thirst. Ousmane – thin, expressionless, delicate as a figure in a miniature painting – raised his arm for a frothy cascade and finally presented me with a thimble of delicious, amber-coloured tea.
‘Welcome’, he said, ‘to the middle of nowhere.’
Leo Africanus describes ‘a dry and barren tract … [which] extends to the south as far as the land of the blacks; that is to say, to the kingdom of Gualata and Tombutto.’ Here, in the ‘desert of Arouane’, his party encountered the camel-riding chief of ‘the Zanaga tribe’, who demanded substantial custom from the travellers, but also invited them to stay
in his camp. Camels were slaughtered, ostrich meat roasted, mutton cooked. ‘And thus we remained with him for the space of two days,’ reports Leo, ‘all which time, what wonderful and magnificent cheer he had made us, would seem incredible to report.’ The cost to the chief he estimated at ten times the value of the custom they paid.
Leo’s account represents a vivid, early encounter with the Tuareg, the ‘Zanaga’ or Sanhaja Berbers, who he terms elsewhere the ‘people of … Terga’ and tells us ‘they live after all one manner, that is to say, without all law and civility’. Of all the nomadic groups I would meet on my travels, none is more iconic.fn1 More independent, more restive, more mysterious, they are the über-nomads. They loom over the history of Northern Mali like aliens in a pulp sci-fi tale: descending on the natives in a storm of pillage and blood, plugging the bloody gaps between periods of settled rule. Leo’s account of Tuareg hospitality is rare: they are remembered mostly for what As-Sadi calls their ‘many acts of gross injustice and tyranny’. Describing events in fourteenth-century Timbuktu, he tells us the citizens appealed to Mansa Musa to take over their town: ‘They began to roam about the city, committing acts of depravity, dragging people from their homes by force, and violating their women.’ In the fifteenth century, Tuareg raids drove the townsfolk to invite the first Songhay ruler, Sunni Ali, to invade. When the grip of the Moroccans weakened, the Tuareg took control again. And when central rule was collapsing in the nineteenth century, they were once more in the ascendancy. Observing their ‘most cruel depredations and exactions’ in 1828, the French explorer René Caillié noted: ‘The people exposed to their attacks stand in such awe of them, that the appearance of three or four Tooariks is sufficient to strike terror into five or six villages.’
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 2