The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  Abandoned by its soldiers, Timbuktu bowed to the guns of the Islamists. Algerians, Libyans, Pakistanis, Afghans, even a French convert – an international hodgepodge of mania – screamed their slogans out of their jeeps, wheeling around town to implement their half-baked version of the shariah. Socialising between men and women, alcohol, smoking and dancing were forbidden; basically, all the universally accepted ingredients for a party. Women were instructed to lower dresses over ankles and veils over faces; men to lift the hems of their trousers so their ankles were showing; and swords were selected as the most judicious way to lop off the hands of thieves. In barely a month, the majority of Timbuktu’s population had voted with their feet, seeking sanctuary further south.

  They were part of a nationwide displacement of nearly half a million people – the largest migration ever witnessed in the Sahara. Refugee camps in neighbouring countries absorbed some of them, but many could be found in the capital. Bamako was bursting at the seams, stuffed with every northerner who could spare themselves the insalubrity of the camps. They all had a story to tell. There was Mammy, a married man in his 20s, beaten for smoking. There was Abdullai, who lived behind the BMS Bank in the centre of Timbuktu, which had been transformed into a correctional facility, ‘so we could hear the screams of the people inside’. There was Nady Haidara, scion of a celebrated Timbuktu family, who had taken a bus out of town soon after the jihadists arrived. Now she was sitting in a damp, poky flat pining for her hometown.

  ‘I miss Timbuktu,’ she said. ‘It’s calmer there. You can visit people on foot, you can buy things on credit in the shop. I miss the sand. The red colour of the earth here annoys me. People in Bamako are greedier, more aggressive, they don’t help you like they do in Timbuktu. I don’t find them easy to talk to.’

  Nady, like many of the refugees I met, was planning to return (and she did – I met her several weeks later, in Timbuktu). Her family was an example of circular migration, which is often overlooked by demographic experts focusing on the prevailing patterns of urbanisation. Yet even when people returned, it would be optimistic to imagine nothing had been lost, or broken.

  Among the refugees I met were many from nomadic communities, including a Tuareg family who had spent several squalid months in a refugee camp in Burkina Faso. Selling off most of their possessions, they had rustled up enough cash to make it to Bamako, where they were living on wasteland near the airport.

  ‘The life was too hard in the camp,’ said Mohammed Ali, the family chief. ‘The UNHCR gave rice and beans and coverings to keep us warm. But there was a lot of sickness and the water pump was dirty. It’s better here, but I can’t find any work. There are organisations, but they only took our names and numbers, they don’t do anything.’

  Equally fraught were the cultural tensions they had to negotiate. Since the crisis, people in Bamako had become less tolerant of the Tuareg, blaming them for starting the conflict. In a barbershop near my hostel, a couple of local Bambara guys showed me a clip on their phones while I was getting my beard trimmed: a dead man in an indigo turban, lying at the feet of a Malian soldier. Hundreds of clips, photos and stories were circulating, like football cards swapped by kids, reinforcing centuries-old antagonisms. So, for families like Mohammed Ali’s, it had become impractical to go about in traditional dress.

  ‘We get bad looks from people when we dress in our traditional way,’ said his wife. ‘We have to hide our Tuareg identity or people might attack us.’

  Mohammed Ali himself didn’t wear his tamelgoust any more. ‘This is only temporary,’ he said. ‘When we go back home, I will dress like I did before. It’s the young people I worry about. The longer we stay down here, the more they lose their culture and traditions.’

  The drought of the 1960s and 1970s had taken away their nomadic lifestyle, but they had retained many of its trappings. Now, in the wake of the Sahara’s biggest crisis since those ruthless years of desiccation, the last vestiges of their heritage were being lost as well. They were a microcosm for the nomadic culture that was bleeding dry all over the region.

  According to the politicians, at least, the crisis was over. French troops and fighter jets, erratically supported by the Malian army, had swept the MNLA and the jihadists out of Northern Mali’s key towns. F-1 Mirage fighter jets wheeled over the desert, dropping bombs on terrorist camps and hunting down the ringleaders like desert trackers rounding up stray camels. That was the media narrative, at least. Many people believed the situation was still precarious, but there was a sense the tide had turned.

  I was now approaching the home straight on my journey, potentially the most dangerous and unpredictable stretch. I wanted to find out how Timbuktu had fared; I wanted to catch up with old friends. Throughout the crisis, I had read so many commentaries and analyses and seen the words ‘nomadic’ and ‘militant’ jammed together like a forced marriage. There were clearly many nomads involved in the fighting, but the media images were hard to reconcile with the people I had met in the desert. I wanted to find Lamina. Emails from friends in Timbuktu offered a few clues: some said that he was in a camp north of Timbuktu, others that he had escaped to Mauritania or Burkina Faso. I hoped by travelling to Timbuktu I might be able to find out.

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Abdramane.

  He was a friend from my previous journey. We had met on a boat up the Niger and shared stories and cigarettes. Later, he hosted me in his family home in the desert town of Goundam, and helped me when the danger signals were flaring. Now he was living in Bamako, sleeping at his sister’s house in the unpaved, dusty Lafiabougou district.

  We sat on the rooftop, hemisphered by the sandstone parapets of the Manding mountains. A brazier was burning behind us. Abdramane’s wonderful big sister, always smiling, greeting me with vivid Songhay phrases, was peeling onions and slicing up plantain to fry. The meal was delicious, the most wholesome I had eaten in weeks, my plate ladled with celery, garlic and tangy green peppers. I wolfed the vegetables down, relishing their rooty taste.

  Underneath us, on the other side of the street, sparks were flashing from a tailor’s brazier, swung and stoked to heat his iron. Next door, a coiffeuse was washing her scissors in a bowl, before emptying the water in the street. There was a melancholy atmosphere that night, a moon-silvered brittleness, stirred by the matter we were discussing.

  Abdramane had prospered since we last met. Which is to say: he had qualified as a teacher and now worked a punishing schedule for three different schools in Bamako, which earned him enough money to run a motorbike. He invited me back to his sister’s house every evening I was in Bamako, and in the daytime I squeezed behind him for rides around town. He was a wonderful companion, cheerful and incredibly generous, an antidote to my anxieties. Yet he was nursing a broken heart: for a girl he had hoped to marry.

  ‘I did everything properly,’ he told me. ‘I sent cola nuts and a griot (storyteller) to her parents to ask for the engagement. But they didn’t accept me – I’m too poor, they want a rich husband for her. As long as she’s in Bamako, they knew she won’t forget me. So they sent her to Spain. They had contacts there, some distant relative. The problem is, she is so beautiful, and when she arrived in Spain, she got too much attention from her host. His wife didn’t like this, she accused her of trying something, and she ended up on the street. Now she’s living with some guy she met on the plane. Her visa’s expired, and she can’t find any work, so she’s stuck in Malaga, dependent on this guy and there’s only one business he’s going to find for her.’

  It was the old story – a version of the tales I had heard in Freddy’s favourite bar: the scramble for a better life, which was turning so much of Africa into a demographic whirlpool. Economic mobility has a patchy history in Mali, but increasingly people were daring to dream. It was the same impulse that was luring so many nomads out of the dunes and pasturelands in search of employment in town, driving Mali’s extraordinary rate of urban growth (which at 5.08 per cent was substantially higher than the cont
inent’s rising average). I hoped to learn more about these issues on the way to Timbuktu, as well as to meet another branch of urban nomads, a group that I had already seen lining the road to Bamako, panhandling to paradise. Whether a journey in that direction was a sensible option, though, was another matter.

  ‘My family in Goundam tell me things are getting back to normal,’ said Abdramane, ‘but there is still a lot of suspicion. People don’t know where the jihadists are. Maybe some are still hiding in the towns. You heard about the bomb at the military barracks in Timbuktu last month? So you see, the situation is very unstable.’

  This was the refrain that kept tolling in my ears. If you’ve got any sense, you’ll stay in Bamako. Absolutely, that was sound advice – stay put, don’t stray out of the capital. After all, there were plenty of refugees to interview, and places to visit in the south of the country. Who needs to go to Timbuktu anyway?

  One evening, Abdramane took me to meet his marabout, an elderly preacher in a cotton cap, with sprigs of silver hair in his ears. He was the man Abdramane consulted whenever he had an important decision to make. He sat, hugging his knees and tipping his head, while Abdramane explained where I was planning to go. The marabout scribbled down some markings on a sheet of paper, ruminated over them for a few moments, then told me to buy three guineafowl and a sheep, and offer them to the poor.

  ‘That seems like a lot!’ I said, mentally adding up how much I would have to shell out.

  ‘Well …’ He tipped his head, the shadow masking his inscrutable expression. ‘To keep out of danger, you will need a lot of help. The blessing you ask is not a simple one.’

  17

  City of Spells

  THE MORNING BUS TO DJENNÉ ROCKED LIKE A SHIP IN A STORM. POTHOLES sucked down the wheels, then spat them back out, and herds of scrawny cattle yo-yoed in the corners of my eyes. It was barely six o’clock when we set out, but like a hiker determined on the best view, the impatient sun muscled its way over the low-standing trees. A bank of eucalyptus held firm for a while, until the syrupy light oozed between the leathery leaves and splashed over the canopies. I envied the French soldiers, sitting in the back of an army truck, knees braced under their machine guns. They might be heading to mortal danger, but at least they had shade.

  The road to Djenné was a fixed anvil under the solar hammer. Still, a few crops had survived the blast. Watermelons glowed the brightest, bubbling on beds of dark leaves or rolling off trestle tables in the villages, among heaps of shrivelled fruit that looked even more pallid against the colours of the vendeuses’ dresses: tomato reds, tangerines and cyans, dappled with shadow from the skeletal shade of a tree or spotted with maculae of sliding sunlight.

  Women were doing all the work: pounding millet with pestles the size of baseball bats, drawing buckets of water, with babies tucked into pagnes wraps knotted under their breasts. Living caryatids, they were able to support impossible loads – buckets and baskets perched on rings of twisted head-cloth, the weight balanced on the columns of their spines, held in place without any muscular effort. Like René Caillié, I was in awe of them. ‘They go to distant places for water,’ he wrote, ‘their husbands make them sow, weed the cultivated fields, and gather in the harvest.’

  Plus ça change …

  The bus dropped me at a dusty crossroads, where a grouchy Slovenian backpacker in combat trousers was already waiting beside a Japanese photojournalist, strapped into his gear like a modern-day White Knight. We huddled in the shade of an abandoned pick-up truck, like raiders waiting for their chance, until an eight-seater minivan trundled off the main road to carry us – along with thirteen adults and five babies – down to the river.

  ‘This is the last time I come to Africa!’ vowed Jos, the Slovenian.

  He clamped a handkerchief over his face to keep out the dust. Beside him, the photojournalist held one of the window bars to keep himself still, eyeing up another thatched granary for a snap.

  Sliding across the vista, silvery and abrupt, the river forced a dust-clouded swerve. We had reached the Bani, a tributary of the Niger. The afternoon haze was shimmering on the water, draining the light out of the odd pirogue (a traditional fishing punt), catching the skirt of a ferry raft and sparkling in the froth that bubbled round its edges.

  ‘You think everyone can fit?’ asked Jos, scrutinising the crocodile’s tail of traffic.

  A flock of sheep had joined the queue, scraggly coated and anxiously bleating, along with a chestnut-brown stallion, his god-like head floating above us.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them,’ I said.

  The current shone beneath us like molten glass. Behind it hovered a jagged crest of mud, pitched above banks of matted grass and cropped rice fields. Djenné appeared like the enchanted isle in a romance; or, as the French journalist-explorer Félix Dubois put it in 1910, ‘Jenne in her island has remained as completely herself as if she had been enclosed in a tower of ivory.’ Hardly surprising for a place whose name echoes the word for a magical spirit, a djinn. You half expected there would be some price to pay – a riddle or a sacrifice – before you could plant your feet on such hallowed ground. As if you had left the real world behind and were entering the land of fable.

  The price was a leap of faith – or, if your legs didn’t stretch, a wade. Reaching the other side, the minivan hurtled down a steel ramp and splashed to the banktop, leaving the passengers to lurch through the shallows. The locals had no fear. Unencumbered by socks and shoes, they hitched their skirts and rolled up trouser legs, while the rest of us fumbled with buckles and laces before crashing behind them, taking part in the bilharzia lucky dip. ‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ fumed Jos, while the photojournalist snapped away, knee deep in zen.

  ‘This place exceedingly aboundeth in barley, rice, cattle, fishes, and cotton,’ wrote Leo Africanus. A couple of generations later, the chronicler As-Sadi described Djenné as ‘the reason why caravans come to Timbuktu from all quarters – north, south, east and west’ and ‘one of the great markets of the Muslims’. Every Monday, it still lives up to that billing.

  Pitched logs and sacking canopied the animals – pack donkeys, cart ponies, sheep and goats – as well as spatula-wielding women frying galettes of karité butter.fn1 Bozo fisherwomen presided with the flies over black heaps of carp and capitaine fish, while robed men from the north hawked boxes of ‘Tuareg’ green tea or bags of dates, and Bambara women sat behind piles of red peppers, which glistened like firecrackers on their hessian sacks. It was a thrilling place to wander – to the trill of anxious goats, the bisyllabic boasting of guineafowl, the languorous call to prayer, the pop and rumble of truck engines, the chatter of people sipping tea over braziers. Even Jos was enjoying it: I found him beaming in a snack shack, dipping bread into salted eggs and honey.

  ‘Isn’t this a marvellous place?’ He shook his head at the wonder of it all, his fingers icky with yolk.

  Towering over us, impressively and a little pompously, was the Grand Mosque. Ostrich eggs blinged its towers and rodier palms spiked its sides. Its walls were high buttressed and swollen: a muscular, steady contrast to the nimble colours flickering beneath. Félix Dubois (who saw it when the clay façade was still fresh) unflatteringly described it as ‘an hysterical mass drawn from a hedgehog and a church organ’. Softened by the market, I was easier to please: I thought it was marvellous.

  Although it is Mali’s most iconic monument, that doesn’t mean the tourists can swamp it. Ever since a truckload of scantily clad models paraded under the vaults for a Vogue magazine photoshoot in 1996, foreigners have been strictly forbidden.fn2 It took me four days to find a breach. Every morning I lingered in the square, angling for an opening. Above me, workmen scaled the walls as nimbly as lizards, toes curled over the palm spikes or the splintered rungs of ladders, pasting cracks in the wall with plaster made out of river mud and rice husks. After asking around and being rebuffed each time, I wasn’t holding out much hope for a peep until I got chatting with a cheery water
seller, who claimed to be a nephew of the imam.

  ‘You want to look inside? Sure you can!’

  ‘But I thought it was forbidden.’

  ‘Forbidden? What is this word? You want to look inside or not?’ All that remained was to work out his fee.

  Next day at dawn, droopy eyed and a little poorer, I followed him up a ramp behind the southern wall, crossed a courtyard and scuttled into a jungle of mud pillars as wide as baobabs. Through the gaps under the pointed arches, you could make out the odd prayer rug … a carpet brush hanging off a nail … the figures of worshippers, who seemed in the semi-dark to be part of the building, breaking away from their prayers as if a section of pillar had come loose.

  There is often a feeling of disappointment when you have made it inside a forbidden building. How can it match the promise that lured you through the breach? Djenné’s Grand Mosque is no Kairaouine. It has the shadowy atmosphere of a cavern, a place well suited to prayerful repose. The men kneeling in the corners of the mosque were as silent as monks at vespers, prostrating on the rugs or resting against the pillars, squinting at Qurans as tattered as the manuscripts in the libraries of Chinguetti. They were all men: the undecorated corridor that functioned as the women’s area was empty. I guess they were too busy doing all the work.

  I took a room in a nineteenth-century villa: a buttressed fort with a high porch, triangular battlements and delicately carved wooden shutters battened over the windows. There was a well in the courtyard and a billowing neem tree, occupied by carolling sparrows. The house had the double identity so common along the Niger’s banks: a stronghold ready for a siege (complete with its own water supply) and a sprawling mansion fit for a wedding party.