We wove our way among stony piles until we came to one of the miners’ enclaves. Built of the same rubble that surrounded it, the miners’ “village” was straight out of the Stone Age. The huts were built of illhewn rocks stacked atop one another and cemented with mud. Most of these shelters were built like row houses with four or five individual cells to each. Huge inner tubes swelling with water sat outside the scrap-tin doors.
Since it was near the peak of the midday heat, the place seemed deserted. Everyone was inside. Walid began knocking on doors, looking for someone who could direct us to Abdi. At the first house we stopped at, five miners emerged. They greeted Walid warmly, and looked me over with curiosity. One eagerly extended his hand to me, smiling with a genuine welcome that completely contradicted the message conveyed by his T-shirt, which depicted Osama Bin Laden riding out of the clouds on a white stallion, swinging a scimitar like a warrior-prophet.
As though word of our arrival had been broadcast by a silent PA system, other miners emerged from their dwellings to investigate. A few were clearly good friends of Walid; their reunion was celebrated with hugs and shouts of glee and, of course, the ritual greeting. One of the miners agreed to find Abdi and bring him to us, so a group of us retired across the lane to the hut of Walid’s friend Mohammed.
We piled our sandals by the door and sat down in the cool darkness on thin blankets that covered the bare earth. Tea was promptly poured, and a big metal bowl of rice was placed among everyone. I, as usual, was given my own plate. I still found this strange; when I had been in Morocco, I was always invited by local people to join in the collective feeding frenzy, and plunged my hands into the same platters of couscous as everyone else. I initially suspected that these men believed I wouldn’t want to eat with them—or that maybe they didn’t want to eat with me. I subsequently learned that they merely thought I’d eat too slowly and wouldn’t get my fill.
As they ate, the miners talked spiritedly, sharing and receiving news from Walid and Baba. With no telephones or mail service, miners rely on such word of mouth to keep in touch with their families. There didn’t seem to be too much serious business; though they spoke too fast for me to understand most of what they were saying, they were obviously cracking jokes and teasing one another as they rollicked with laughter. At one point, they paused, and Walid asked me what I thought of our host, who had been particularly animated in his antics. Hoping I was judging the situation correctly, I answered, “Mohammed? Howa majnoon,” and shook my head. This broke them up, especially Mohammed, whom I had just declared insane. For the rest of my stay at Taoudenni, he was referred to as Mohammed Majnoon, to distinguish him from all the other Mohammeds. I was beginning to suspect that the impressions I’d gleaned from the articles I’d read about Taoudenni, which portrayed the miners as miserable souls, their spirits crushed by terrible living and working conditions, were less than accurate.
Mohammed’s place was about eight feet wide by twelve feet long. There were no windows, no furniture, and no decoration but for half a rack of drying goat ribs hanging on the wall. The ceiling/roof was made of scraps from flattened fifty-gallon drums, and was supported by a spiderweb of twine laced over two truck axles that served as crossbeams. Mohammed’s few belongings were kept in sacks around the edge of the room.
Aside from a simple lack of resources, the miners’ cabins are so sparse because they are abandoned after a year or two of habitation. The mines of Taoudenni are perpetually spreading westward; each pit is worked for a month or two before its salt is depleted, then a new mine must be dug. Hence, before long, a hut that was once conveniently located becomes a long walk from a miner’s quarry, so new, more accessible dwellings are built on a regular basis. The constant migration of the mines—and the mining community—explains why Taoudenni is rarely marked in the same spot on different maps of the Sahara.
The oldest salt mines in the region were dug at a place called Tegaza, some eighty miles northwest of Taoudenni, which were first excavated in the fourth or fifth century. The Taoudenni deposits were discovered around the year 1585. Due to harassment by Moroccan forces at Tegaza at about that same time, the mines there were abandoned in favor of Taoudenni, which quickly became the new quarry of choice for salt caravans from the Azawad.
Abdi arrived as I finished eating. He was dressed in his work clothes—a pair of light blue pants that had once been double-layered, though the outer material was so shredded it looked like it was made of cobwebs; a black Polo-style short-sleeved shirt powdered with salt dust; and a tattered army-green sun hat with a pink band that said TOMMY GEAR. His skin was a deep brown and his hands and feet were cracked like dried desert mudflats. He had perhaps the longest fingers and toes I had ever seen.
We spoke for a while about the camel journey, his family—who happened to be the people we’d visited in Araouane—and about what a relatively educated, French-speaking young man was doing in a place like this.
He was eighteen, and this was his third season at the mines. Like the other miners, Abdi had come to Taoudenni because work elsewhere was scarce. He learned French in Mauritania, where his family lived as refugees for five years during the Tuareg Rebellion. Since Araouane had become even more desolate in their absence, when Abdi turned sixteen he followed his father, and many other men from their village, up to the mines, where income was paltry but assured. His father taught him everything he needed to know about digging earth, cutting salt, building shelter, and preparing food for himself. Even with his father’s help, Abdi said he found his first season at Taoudenni unbearably brutal. “The more you perfect your technique, the more accustomed you become to the heat, the easier it gets,” he said. “But it never gets easy.”
He dreamed of one day using his language skills to become a guide based out of Timbuktu, but felt like he couldn’t yet trust his family’s welfare to the whims of the tourist
When Abdi asked what I wanted to know about the mines, I said, “Everything.” But first, I asked him the question that had been nagging me since Araouane: “Do you think trucks are one day going to replace the camel caravans?”
Abdi broke into a wide grin and said, “Eeeeeee! No, no,” in such a way that he might as well have added “You silly American” to the end of his exclamation.
“Ask them,” I said, referring to the other miners. He did, and their answer, a collective laugh, needed no translation. The mere suggestion of it sounded ridiculous to their ears.
“Why?” I asked. “The trucks can carry more, and travel faster, right?”
“Sure,” Abdi replied. “But most salt traders prefer camels.”
He then explained the fundamentals of the caravan economy, checking in with Walid, Baba, and the other miners for verification.
Trucks, he said, were very expensive to run. First, the truck had to be purchased. Then more money had to be spent on repair and maintenance, and not a small sum, since these were ancient vehicles tackling a grueling route. Moreover, gas had to be paid for, and trucks carried an average of two thousand liters per trip. At about eighty cents per liter, the fuel alone cost somewhere around sixteen hundred dollars.
Camels, on the other hand, were virtually free. Any family involved in the caravan already had a herd of their own, and they reproduced naturally. Since they eat grass, it costs nothing for them to travel to and from the mines, and they can go for weeks without drinking water while carrying heavy loads. They rarely break down, and if they do, they don’t jeopardize the entire enterprise—the lone sick camel is left to die, while the others continue on.
Since the nomad families who run the caravans view time from an African perspective, speed is only of the essence in crossing the desert quickly enough to survive. It’s not a valuable asset in itself. Thus, the fact that trucks travel faster isn’t such a compelling advantage when balanced out by their expense.
What’s more, and is of equal importance to the equation, the caravans and the mines operate on an archaic, saltbased economy—one in which salt is
cash.
The miners, Abdi said, earn their wage in the salt they harvest. The azalai act as middlemen, transporting the salt to Timbuktu, where they sell it. But they don’t buy the salt outright from the miners; instead, they trade space on their camels, which allows the miners to get their own salt to market.
It works like this: Each camel carries four bars of salt, weighing approximately eighty pounds each. The azalai keeps three of these for himself, essentially as payment for transporting the fourth one, which is reserved for the miner. The miner’s bar is marked with a unique symbol drawn with wet clay and is picked up at the end of the route by a member of his family. When the miners need new tools, they pay the Taoudenni blacksmith in salt—four bars for each pick or adze. Then the blacksmith makes a similar deal with the azalai. Moreover, since the nearest water is fifteen kilometers from the mines, the miners pay the azalai two bars of salt for each camel-load of water—usually four full truck-tire inner tubes. In none of these transactions does money change hands; only at the market in Timbuktu is the salt converted into cash, fetching about fifteen dollars per slab. Thus, because the camels cost nothing to drive and the azalai trade space—not money—for salt, the extent of each caravan’s financial investment is the little it costs to supply a few men with five weeks’ worth of rice and millet, meaning that nearly everything they haul back to Timbuktu translates into profit.
Truckers, however, don’t participate in this system. They pay cash directly to the miners for the salt they take (about eight dollars per bar), and sell it for a profit in town—as though with modern means of transport comes a modern method of trade. But due to all their expenses, at the end of the day their profit margin is slim; they rely on sheer volume to make their work worthwhile. As a result, they often drive to the towns of Gao, Mopti, or Kidal, where the salt fetches slightly higher prices than in Timbuktu.
“So you see,” Abdi concluded, “pound for pound of salt, camels are far more profitable than trucks.”
With the resounding and unanimous verdict in favor of the caravans’ survival expressed by the azalai and the miners, as well as the truckers, salt historians, and tribal leaders I spoke to later—and which the math of the caravan economy supports—I wondered why some American journalists had drawn the conclusion that the camels were doomed to obsolescence. My best guess is that they had been so influenced by an unconscious cultural perspective—one steeped in the myth of that steel-driving man who fell victim to the hubris of thinking he could outperform a machine, whose legend has been passed down in the most recorded song in the history of American music—that they naturally assumed no creature could successfully compete with machines in a head-to-head contest.
In fact, I later learned that the simple act of framing the relationship between camels and trucks as a contest is itself a culturally biased assumption. For in actuality, as a result of the Saharan worldview that values mutual sustainability, truckers and camel drivers do not compete against one another, but strive for balanced coexistence.
After his discourse, Abdi excused himself, since he had left his lunch uneaten when he learned that Walid and I had arrived. He promised to come to our camp in the morning, when he would take me to his mine to observe his work. I thanked him profusely for his introduction to the mining economy and bid him “a tout a I’heure.”
As Abdi departed, it dawned on me that my entire journey had been based on a fallacy. I had traveled to Timbuktu and ventured across the desert, battling heat, hunger, and pain, to get a parting glimpse of a way of life that I believed was in its dying days, only to learn that it was alive and well. I laughed at my folly, yet was anything but disappointed. What I’d just discovered, I felt, was far more remarkable—and important—than what I set out to find. And that turned out to be only the first of the profound surprises in store for me at Taoudenni.
When the hottest hours had passed and the sun cast a bronze glow through a filter of haze, I told Walid I was going to take a walk and would meet him back at camp. After assuring him repeatedly that I wouldn’t get lost, I meandered around the quarry, meeting some of the miners who had gone back for a late-afternoon shift at their picks. While most wore turbans, some wore brimmed sun hats, others baseball caps. While some wore boubous or other types of traditional robes, many wore jeans and T-shirts, or tank tops with the names and numbers of NBA or soccer stars—in one pit, Ronaldo was hacking away next to Shaquille O’Neal. Nearly all the miners were happy to take a few minutes to chat in Arabic and many invited me to take their pictures, erasing any fears I had of being viewed as an unwelcome voyeur.
With the sun nearly resting on the horizon, I headed toward our camp. I met Walid, Baba, and Mohammed Majnoon outside one of their friend’s huts. A few of them had set up a fire line and were passing platters of dirt up to a guy on the roof who was finishing his new home on the prime real estate at the western edge of Taoudenni. Despite his beard, his broad, goofy grin reminded me so much of Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter that I had trouble remembering his real name. I shook hands with those I hadn’t yet met, including Abdullah, whose puffy beard opened to reveal a guilelessly kind smile; Abdullai, Walid’s lean, clean-shaven brother-in-law; and another man named Baba, who was large and dark and wore a bright yellow turban wrapped around a face that, when revealed, expressed a mischievous but gentle nature.
Each wanted his picture taken, and after I’d snapped a few shots they began challenging one another to strike ever-more-humorous poses. All at once, the empty metal bowl heading back for another load of dirt was turned upside down and became a drum; Abdullah slapped the flat platter he was holding, and Horshack, still perched on the roof, started clapping. Big Baba began ululating and dancing in circles, weaving his hands through the air, then uncoiling his yellow turban and using it as a prop, stretching it and twirling it seductively; with the sensual swaying of his body and the expression of abandon on his face, he might have been performing a courtship ritual. Abdullai danced behind Baba, chanting with his arms raised skyward, hands aquiver. Soon, with the rhythm section pounding furiously and singing passionately, six other miners joined in the revelry, dancing together in a circle like a supercharged Arabic version of the Hora, whooping, chortling, and laughing—at one another, at themselves, and at life.
The festivities ended in breathless exultation as spontaneously as they began. The bowls and platters transformed back into vessels for carrying dirt; Horshack went back to his roof job; Big Baba rewrapped his yellow turban around his head. Walid asked if I would take a look at a wound on Abdullai’s leg, and I said sure, but we had to go back to camp where I’d left my first-aid kit. I told my new friends I’d see them tomorrow, ensha’allah, and was bid a heartfelt good night.
The sinister aura I’d sensed upon arriving at Taoudenni had completely disappeared. Walking back to camp, I felt exhilarated. I could hardly believe what I had just witnessed, so completely had it defied my expectations. These men were not broken by hardship, but were as vibrant and alive as any I’d ever met. If this was Hell, they didn’t know it. Sure, they would have preferred to be somewhere else, but they were proud to be supporting their families in a region where work is scarce, and where easy work is practically unheard of. So they made the best of it, stealing pleasure from every possible moment.
Back at our pile, Baba built a fire and Walid spread a blanket for us to sit on while I dug out my medical supplies. Word had traveled among the miners that the tourist was going to play doctor, and a small group of them waited for my attention. I imagined that this scene would repeat itself every evening we were here, and I quickly realized that I could exhaust my first-aid kit, leaving myself not a single Band-Aid for the trek back to Timbuktu. For the sake of conservation, I triaged my patients, employing what I thought of as “the futility test.” In each case, I assessed whether using my precious supplies would have been truly beneficial, or basically a waste.
The majority of the miners were seeking treatment for deep cracks and cuts on their h
ands and feet. With continuing care, and rest, all could have been effectively healed. But since any bandages would have quickly fallen off while they worked, and none of these guys was going to take a few days off, there was little point in dressing them at all. They failed the test. Yet I couldn’t just turn them away. I remembered I was carrying a vial of New-Skin—an antiseptic that hardens to form a protective layer over minor wounds—which I could apply a hundred-odd times before the bottle ran dry. One after another, I swabbed their cuts with the stuff, which did no harm and which they thought did plenty of good.
Some of the “injuries” I was asked to treat were so insignificant I could hardly see them. I almost laughed. Here were these deserthardened men making a big fuss over tiny boo-boos that I myself would have ignored. It occurred to me that perhaps they were truly seeking attention for something other, something deeper, than their hands. Or maybe, I thought less charitably, it was so ingrained in them to take whatever was offered by foreigners that if New-Skin was what the white guy was giving out, they’d get in line.
Abdullai was the only one who passed the futility test. He had accidentally jabbed his thigh with his pick. While the wound was just an inch long and half as deep, it was nasty and packed with dried dirt. Since he could easily work without shedding a bandage, I opted to give him the best of care. When I put on a latex glove, snapping it over my hand for dramatic effect, the other miners gathered around, hovering over us, sensing that some serious business was about to take place. As I pulled out a syringe, which I filled with a solution of water and iodine, a grave silence fell over the gallery. I irrigated the cut a few times, flushing out as much of the grime as I could. Ultimately, I had to scour it with an alcohol pad (as Abdullai winced) to loose the most stubborn particles, which I feared could cause an infection. At last it came clean, looking pink and fleshy. I applied some antibiotic ointment, covered it with two Band-Aids, then with tape, which I wrapped around his leg a few times. I promised to examine him again the following day. Through the care I’d provided, I succeeded in repaying the miners in some small way for the kindness with which they’d welcomed me into life at Taoudenni.
The Caravan of White Gold Page 14