19. Cowboys and Animists
fn1 In a December 2011 video, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa claimed inspiration from Sekou Amadou and Osman dan Fodio, alongside Osama bin Laden. In February 2014, while I was in another part of Mali, this group was responsible for a devastating attack in the Gao region, in which 31 Tuaregs were killed on their way back from a fair. The attackers were later identified as Fulani.
fn2 ‘State institutions’, writes Charles Grémont, ‘clearly considered agriculture as the only real work, while raising stock was seen as a marginal and transitional activity, if not as an ecological threat and a potential source of conflict.’
20. A Short Walk in the Gondo Bush
fn1 This principle is followed in many nomadic communities. In Mauritania, Yisslam’s wife owned the tent I stayed in. In Tuareg culture, women traditionally own the tents. Nomadism, generally though not exclusively, offers a more equal share of power between the sexes. Women are less confined, have a greater share of property, and in some cases (such as the Fulani) they have broader sexual freedom. Broaching this subject in African Nomadic Architecture, Labelle Prussin writes: ‘If a woman’s reproductive potential, with its guarantee of social continuity, is embedded in the material components of nomadic life, then sedentarisation has far more dire emotional and cognitive consequences than we have yet to realise.’
fn2 This was the vicious cycle inflicted by the Great Drought. Without adequate vegetation, the animals turn to the trees; the destruction of the trees leaves the ground with no shade (and reduces ground moisture), so it is even harder for vegetation to grow back; and the soil is left open to the wind, which blows the topsoil away to create desert.
fn3 Dicko’s concern echoed the ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons: ‘Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destruction to which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.’ This distinction (which has had a massive impact on the way governments around the world treat their pastoralists) assumes there is land that is not common – which, under the neo-liberal policies of twenty-first-century Africa, is the growing majority. Pastoralism depends on the sharing of land; on the agreement that those who pass through it have the same rights as those who mark it with their tools.
Part Eight: River
23. Lights Out on the Sahara
fn1 The ringleader of the kidnappers, I later learn, is an Algerian called Belkacem Zaoudi, who fought in Bosnia and Afghanistan and lived in Britain during the 1990s.
Part Nine: The Middle of Nowhere (Revisited)
24. Timbuktu the Broken
fn1 A mover and shaker since the 1990s, Ag Ghali had a reputation for making deals – whether between the Tuareg movement and the Malian government, or securing the release of Western tourists. Wildly inconsistent, he spun from an appointment in the Malian consulate in Saudi Arabia to establishing Ansar ad-Dine, forsaking his old whisky-drinking ways in favour of the austere lifestyle of a man pledging to bring shariah law to the people of Northern Mali.
fn2 Salafist derives from ‘as-salaf as-saliheen’, referring to ‘the pious predecessors’ of early Islam. The movement originated in nineteenth-century Egypt and spans a range of views, from non-violence and evangelism to terrorism. What is consistent is an emphasis on looking back to the early Muslim community and the aspiration for a unified Islamic state governed by shariah law. In Timbuktu during my visit, ‘Salafist’ was used as a general term for all the foreign jihadists.
fn3 Timbuktu already boasted several libraries by the mid-sixteenth century, when Askiya Daoud established ‘repositories of goods and even libraries’ (according to the Tarikh al-Fattash). ‘He had calligraphers copying books for him, and would sometimes make gifts of these to scholars.’ The size of these libraries is suggested by an anecdote about the scholar Ahmed Baba, who protested when he was deported to Morocco in 1591 that his library of 1600 books had been plundered – and he claimed that his was one of Timbuktu’s smaller libraries.
fn4 ‘Slavery is an age-old institution that forms the principal basis of the social organization of the peoples of the Soudan,’ wrote the military governor of Timbuktu’s colonial garrison in 1894, ‘we must tolerate it unless we want to bring about a complete disruption of the economy of the country.’
25. Licking the Desert’s Wounds
fn1 They had good reason to fear the army, for there is a growing stack of testimonies of army malpractice. In October 2012, eight Tuareg nomads were abducted by Malian soldiers from the military barracks at Diabali and executed. In another incident, soldiers invaded a nomad camp near Nara and took several men, who never returned. On 6 May 2013, nine men were taken from villages and nomadic camps near Léré and beaten, chained with ropes, tied to trees and slammed against pick-up trucks. These are a few among numerous examples of murder and abuse, many of them perpetrated against nomads, which have been recorded by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
fn2 Mayor Ould Elhadj’s argument is echoed by the writers Majok and Schwabe in their important study, Development among Africa’s Migratory Pastoralists: ‘Not only their practices but their desires have not been known to many who propose “development” measures among them. Often pastoralists have not been even a part of the development equation.’
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 37