Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  He was a gaunt, silent man with an inscrutable look, and with him were the airport supervisor and another official. The four of us took up places in a row before his desk like a trade delegation and accepted the tea he ordered. After preliminary polite greetings, Abbas began to talk smoothly about our case. He said that we were guests in the country and had made a mistake in the confusion of our arrival. A mistake was a bad thing, but we were good characters and there had been mistakes on both sides. The expression on the director’s face never changed. He made some challenging remarks. Abbas countered politely. The discussion went on and on until it seemed they must have forgotten about us.

  Suddenly, I sensed a relaxation of the tension. The director was smiling. Even the supervisor was smiling. ‘We welcome guests in this country,’ the director told us, ‘so we’ll let the matter drop. You will fill in the declaration form again. But do it right this time.’

  That was my first taste of the Moors. Discussion was a way of life for them. Even in pre-Arab times, the nobility had been composed of families of mediators. The mediators had been deposed by warrior tribes of Arab stock but had soon reasserted their status by converting to Islam and learning classical Arabic, while the warriors remained illiterate. The present nobility of Mauritania comprised just these elements, the Arab warriors and the Berber mediators or marabouts. Together with a third, vassal class descended from the ordinary Berber herdsmen, these castes formed the bidan or white Moors. Their language was Hassaniyya, a dialect of Arabic.

  Nouakchott was not part of the traditional Moorish state. It had been built in the 1960s to serve the newly independent government of Moukhtar Ould Dadda. The city was a blend of many half-remembered styles. Little chunks of Africa—the street stalls and the artisans—were tucked under the verandahs of modern office blocks and scattered along boulevards shaded with mesquite trees. The Sahara drifted along the streets, blowing into the lobbies of the hotels with every swing of a plate-glass door, dragging down the highways, frosting the traffic lights, and piling up in the gutters.

  The city seemed a tranquil place, but its appearance was deceptive. It was ringed with hundreds of thousands of makeshift houses constructed of old timber and flattened-out tins. Thin goats and old women in ragged, black robes could be seen wandering among these shanty streets. The Moors who lived here were nomads who had been forced out of the desert by the Great Drought of the previous five years. They had lost their animals—their camels, goats and sheep—and now they could no longer survive in the desert. They were in the city as refugees. More than half of Nouakchott’s population were displaced nomads.

  There was a mixed reaction to our proposed journey. Some expatriates laughed outright. A young volunteer from the Peace Corps told us confidently, ‘It’s not possible to do a trek like Moorhouse’s any more. Too many of the wells have dried up in the drought.’

  A UN worker assured us with equal confidence that there were few camels left now in Mauritania. ‘Most of them died in the drought.’ he said.

  That, at least, was not true. There were camels in plenty within the city itself. We were walking one day, near sunset, by the football stadium, when a battalion of dark shapes came marching into view. There were three separate camel herds, more than 200 animals, streaming two or three feet from the battlements of the city. They were being driven by two men on foot who were dressed in faded blue gandourahs and oily headcloths. They carried sticks across their shoulders in time-honoured herdsman style. As the procession stomped by, we caught the pungent smell of camel and heard the sshssh cries of the herdsmen. Most of the camels were females, their udders strapped to prevent their calves from suckling. Among them was a large, red bull camel, which foamed at the mouth and blew out his floppy pink bladder. Here, under the eaves of the city, the old life of the desert went on. When they had gone, Marinetta said, ‘You look like a child who’s been given his favourite food. You’re only satisfied when you’re in the desert. Sometimes, I think there’s no room for me in your life at all.’

  We were anxious to leave for the oasis of Chinguetti, where we intended to spend the summer months acclimatising and learning Hassaniyya. It lay in the Adrar mountains of northern Mauritania. The only way to get there was by Peugeot taxi, which you shared with six or seven others, and to spend a cramped five hours as far as Atar, the capital of the region. From there, Chinguetti could be reached by Land Rover through the tortuous Amogjar pass.

  Before leaving, though, we wanted a last look at the ocean. We visited the fish market. The sky was grey over the Atlantic and an offshore breeze riffled the waters and whipped up a thick surf. Rows of fishing smacks belonging to the Imraguen fishermen were drawn up out of the current, and the fisherfolk hurried back and forth in their yellow oilskins with trays of tunny and mullet, which they gutted, filleted and laid out on acres of trestles to dry in the sun. The smell of high fish was everywhere. Some men carried lobsters and other shellfish, which were sold live on brine-soaked slabs of wood, sculpted into totems by generations of fishermen’s knives. ‘We won’t see anything like this again till we reach the Nile,’ Marinetta said. And as we turned back and saw the desert stretching before us, I remembered just how far away that was.

  Sid’Ahmed

  From the door of our house in Chinguetti, you could see an ocean of dunes, amber, cream, and ivory, cascading down to the wadi, where palm trees grew and the sand was white and smooth as snow. The wadi cut the oasis neatly into halves, so that the inhabitants regarded themselves as two distinct divisions. Our landlord, Sid’Ahmed auld Aidud, was sheikh of the western division. His house was almost the last on the west bank of the wadi, a manor built of stone and surrounded by the tents and sack-cloth shacks of retainers and poor relations. I suppose that we were also regarded as Sid’Ahmed’s satellites. Chinguetti clung to its feudal traditions, and everyone was expected to have a protector. As the hereditary leader of the Awlad Ghaylan, the dominant Arab warrior tribe of the oasis, Sid’Ahmed fitted this role perfectly.

  The official ruler of Chinguetti was the préfet. He was a Pular from the Senegal river, a polite, educated man who had studied in Paris. He was often to be seen walking in the market with a long face, so that white Moors like Sid’Ahmed would screw up their eyes and say, ‘That man’s not happy here.’ The préfet thought Chinguetti about as far from civilisation as you could get and yearned for the intellectual café society of Paris. Sid’Ahmed longed for the old days, when the warriors ruled, but he knew those days had gone forever.

  Sid’Ahmed was a big man with a bull-like neck and an upright bearing. A paunch of good living showed under the folds of his gandourah, but he carried his weight as regally as an emperor. Still, he was not above showing you the scars on his legs made by a saddle. ‘I’ll carry those scars for life.’ he would say. ‘I was a méhariste with the French. I’ve been everywhere there is to go on a camel. And I can still ride, by God!’

  When Marinetta and I arrived in Chinguetti, it was the préfet who directed us to Sid’Ahmed. ‘I’ve got a house for you,’ the big man told us. ‘Just what you’re looking for.’ It was a single-roomed house of stone, standing not two hundred yards from Sid’Ahmed’s manor. On one side was a staircase that led to the roof and, at the back, a cubicle for washing. There was no furniture except for an Arab carpet and three foam-rubber mattresses. On two sides stood the Sahara and, on the other two, a wall that for some reason had never been completed. He asked for 3,000 ougiyyas a month. We beat him down to 2,000 ougiyyas and accepted. It was, as he had said, just what we wanted.

  Sid’Ahmed’s house was an austere mansion of several rooms, set in a high-walled courtyard. There, we met his buxom wife Mahjouba, two very buxom daughters, and a spindly son called Boyhin. Boyhin was so thin, in fact, that it seemed he had sacrificed any spare flesh he might have been born with for the sake of his sisters. Both they and their stepmother were plump enough for two, but this was normal among Moorish women. For them, fat was beautiful, and no self-respecting lady woul
d be seen in public without a goodly layer of flesh on her bones. They even fed their daughters a special diet of milk and peanuts so that they would grow up desirably colossal. Naturally, they looked askance at Marinetta’s sylph-like figure. You could hear the pity in their voices when they told her, ‘You don’t eat enough, by God!’

  ‘She’ll never make it,’ was Sid’Ahmed’s opinion when he heard our plans. ‘She’s too weak. Why don’t you leave her here and go on your own?’

  ‘I’m not weak.’ Marinetta cut in indignantly. ‘The reason why I’m not fat is because I work hard!’ This probably lowered our standing even more in the eyes of the bidan women. They did nothing and were proud of it. One of them even boasted to us, ‘I’ve never in my life made a glass of tea.’

  It was the Haratin who did all the work. The Haratin washed, cleaned, cooked the meals, fetched the water, tended the domestic animals, cultivated the palm gardens and, more often than not, looked after the children. Haratin men and women were as lean and sinewy as the palm trees they tended. They were black but not negroid, and they had been in the Sahara far longer than the Arabs or even the Berbers. ‘A long, long time.’ Sid’Ahmed told us. ‘Since before the Arabs came. Since before the time of the Prophet, may peace and blessing be upon Him.’ But the term ‘Haratin’ had become confusing. Once, it had meant a distinct caste of settled people, superior to slaves. They were the free sharecroppers who worked the palmeries for their white overlords. Slaves, on the other hand, were bound to their masters and worked for them as servants. As recently as 1980, the government had abolished slavery and decreed that all former slaves would be known henceforth as ‘Haratin’. Naturally, the real Haratin had been livid. ‘My father had slaves,’ Sid’Ahmed said, ‘and my grandfather. All my ancestors had slaves. I am the first of my line who doesn’t have slaves. I have Haratin.’

  The Hartani we got to know best in Chinguetti was a lad called Dada. Every day, he brought us a goatskin of water from the well, carried on his donkey. He was about fifteen, a tall, slim youth with a face already grained with the effects of outdoor work. We looked forward to the raucous singing that announced his arrival each morning. Together, he and I would unload the heavy girba and hang it from our wobbly frame. Then Dada would point to his donkey and say, ‘The old so-and-so is worn out. Look at him!’ Almost daily, he would repeat, ‘A new donkey will cost more than 10,000 ougiyyas. Now, where will I get that kind of money?’ Then he would vault into the wooden packsaddle with a flourish and drive the animal into a terrific gallop towards the well. He never got very far. After a moment, the animal would grind to a halt and Dada would be flung off. Then he would pick himself up, curse, dust off his ragged clothes, and drive the donkey back, singing the same jaunty song.

  Our girba frame stood at the door of our house, and if the waterskin was not tied very tightly, we would be plagued all day by the maddening drip-drip of water on the sand. After hours of this I would explode. ‘Marinetta! Haven’t you learned to tie a girba yet?’

  To which she would politely reply, ‘But it was you who last drew water.’

  The frame was something like a clothes-horse and was made of bits of wood lashed together with string. It never inspired our confidence and got more wobbly with each new hanging. Finally, it collapsed in a heap, almost depositing the swollen girba at Marinetta’s feet. After that, I looked for somewhere else to hang it and eventually found a metal ring fixed in the rear wall of the house. ‘It’s too far away!’ was Marinetta’s verdict after I had struggled for two hours to hang it. Exasperated, I went to cut it down. No sooner had I severed the first strand than the wall crumbled and the whole Heath Robinson arrangement collapsed. The knife was knocked out of my hand and stuck in my foot just behind the big toe. I looked down in surprise at the blood welling out of the wound and thought longingly of tap water.

  When we started cooking with charcoal, I understood why the Moors used Haratin cooks. Even cooking for two was a full-time job. First, you had to hunt for straw or paper, which meant some serious scavenging in the streets. Once, the charcoal was alight, you had to fan it frantically with a tray until the orange stain of fire crept through the carbon. If there was no wind, you had to keep fanning at intervals until your arms ached and your brow ran with sweat. It sometimes took twenty minutes to boil water. I suggested moving the iron stove up to the roof, where there was more wind. There, fanning was unnecessary. Instead, the charcoal exploded with sparks, which blew into our clothes, leaving scorch marks like cigarette bums. The charcoal became so hot that everything we put on it was instantly charred to a frazzle. It drove Marinetta mad. ‘How the hell do they do it?’ she grumbled, presenting me with a plate of blackened rice. From thereon, at sunset, the smell of burning food became familiar and a little later she would appear, smiling bravely, with yet another platter of burned-out pellets, saying, ‘I think it’s a bit better today.’ Once, she announced that she would make bread to end the monotony of rice. She had never made it before in her life. After an hour of silence, I went to investigate. Guiltily, she held up one of our precious cooking pans with a half-inch hole neatly burned through the bottom.

  The Moor women who visited our house had plenty of advice for her but rarely lifted a finger to help. They would come waddling up to inspect the nsara (as they called Christians), their plump behinds undulating beneath thick wraps of indigo cotton. The cotton looked mercilessly hot, but they claimed it was the coolest material of all. They preferred it even though it left a tell-tale stain of blue on their skin, which gave them a ghostly appearance. Sitting well-padded on our rug, they would tell Marinetta, ‘You should hire a Hartani to do the work. A respectable woman shouldn’t be washing and cooking.’ They pressed her constantly to eat more. ‘Your husband won’t desire you unless you put on more weight,’ they whispered to her more than once.

  Sex seemed to be their main preoccupation. They joked about it when I was there and talked about it ad nauseam when I was absent. Marinetta told me that they always asked, ‘Is this your first man?’ They seemed surprised when she answered, ‘Yes.’ Many of them had been married and divorced several times and were ‘between marriages’, waiting for someone to pick them up. Marinetta thought that this was why so many of them came to our house and sat there without speaking, fluttering their eyelids and looking pretty. They’re after you,’ she said. ‘They remind me of loose women in Europe.’ I was flattered, knowing that she was joking but remembering that Muslim custom allowed up to four wives.

  They spent an extraordinary amount of time prettifying themselves, trying out perfumes, dressing their hair, and applying henna in geometric designs on their hands and feet. I returned one day to discover Marinetta sitting on the rug with her hands and feet tied up in plastic bags. They insisted on my trying the henna,’ she said. They said, “You should look nice for your husband, then he will desire you more.”’ The plastic bags were supposed to help the henna dry, but when she had scraped off the soggy clots of manure, the effect was less than erotic. The women did persuade her, however, to try out local dress. She scorned the indigo robe, with its prestigious blue stain, and chose a light-orange one. It looked elegant when she was sitting, but as soon as she moved, there were problems. It trailed around her feet, tripped her up, caught in the door, fluttered into the cooking pans and got scorched by the charcoal. ‘I’m never going to wear that on a camel!’ she said.

  I felt the same about the gandourah I tried out. It was as stately as a Roman toga on the Moors, but on me it looked like a sack tied in the middle. It was really no more than a square of cotton with a hole cut for the head and a pocket stitched on the outside. In the wind it bellied out and wrenched at me like a kite, and on calmer days, it tripped me up constantly. It was the worst possible dress for camel-riding. I soon noticed that, when working, the herdsmen and Haratin wore trim Arab shirts, layered headcloths and floppy sirwel. We decided that this would be the ideal dress for both of us.

  Our occasional adoption of Moorish dress did
nothing to disguise our strangeness from the hordes of children, who dogged our footsteps in the street, shouting, ‘Nsara! Nsara!’ If it hadn’t been for them, we would certainly have delighted in the beauty of this little town squatting on the sides of the wadi. There was a huddle of mud-brick shops clustered around a grain store, each shop skirted by the tiny stalls of Haratin women selling eggs, dried gazelle meat, tomatoes, and fresh-baked bread. Beyond the shops was a sandy square, where camels hustled around a rusting water tank, bordered on the other side by the battlements of the old French fortress, with its Saharan ‘meat-ball’ walls and moresco arches. The fortress now housed the préfet and the town police. Behind the fort were streamers of narrow, crooked streets, fanning out as far as the sand dunes and the ring of palmeries that stood below them.

  But the children made our visits to the market a misery. They would pour into the shops behind us, pointing and staring, repeating what we said and asking for gifts. Perhaps they thought that if their presence was obnoxious enough, we would pay them to go away. But I have never believed in blackmail. Their grubby hands remained empty, causing them to follow us home again, still chanting, ‘Nsara! Nsara!’ And even at home, there was no escape. They would camp outside in little squads, and the bolder ones would make forays to peek through our windows and the cracks in the door. When I had had enough I would sally forth waving a camel stick and trying to look ferocious, sending them scattering into the distance and giggling at the fun.

  Often, people would stop us and bring out little bundles of cloth, neatly tied, displaying an array of flint axe heads, arrow tips, and ornaments, for which they asked exorbitant prices. They seemed disappointed when we turned them down, saying, ‘The other nsara always bought them!’