The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  By the time I opened my eyes the morning after the festival’s opening, he was already inside my tent. I was still giddy from the concert. He sat on the floor cross-legged and hummed a high-pitched tune under his breath. For a moment I couldn’t decide whether I was still asleep, though the Sahara sun was already out and hitting the sand hard, sending a blinding light pouring into the tent.

  My husband wasn’t lying next to me; he must have gone looking for water so we could brush our teeth. I pulled the sleeping bag up to my chin and stared at the man as he caressed the leather handle of his tellak—the short dagger Tuareg men keep in a sheath attached to the left forearm. Now I was fully awake.

  “Bonjour, mon amie,” he said, smiling. He had dark lips, teeth white like the flesh of a coconut, a prominent nose, and sad squinty eyes. I looked at the dagger, at this turbaned man sitting a mere foot from my mattress, back at the dagger, and at the cloth bag he carried across his chest. His brown fingers were stained with hues of blue dye. I waited for my fight-or-flight instinct to kick in, while outside the desert wind picked up a bit and a camel—presumably this man’s—made whistling noises by grinding its teeth. Someone from another tent played traditional music.

  “Ahh, Salif Keïta,” the man said, referring to the albino singer known as “the Golden Voice of Africa.” And I’ll never know if it was the music, his camel fussing outside, or the cool January wind that soothed me, but I curled up inside my bag and watched him rock his head softly to the beats of Salif Keïta’s song as he absentmindedly emptied the contents of his bag on a piece of cloth over the sand and proceeded to polish an array of Tuareg jewelry as if my tent were his workshop.

  I dozed off.

  The chaos that follows the coup d’état in Mali puts this war-ravaged country on the map. Everyone with a TV knows now where Mali is, including my Afrikaner neighbor who stops by for coffee and finds me reminiscing about my time there. I have pictures, notes, maps, routes, and a few pieces of Tuareg jewelry spread over my dining table. She finds me trying to reconcile the splendor of this African country before my eyes with the pictures of destruction diffused on the news. My neighbor can’t understand why Mali is so dear to me. I tell her about the demolished historic buildings and the loss of ancient manuscripts. She gives me a sideways look that I can’t decipher. So I tell her about the current human suffering in Mali and how much I fear for the fate of those Tuareg whose lives we shared in 2006.

  I tell her about Oosman, a little boy who pestered us in Mopti as soon as we arrived in Mali until we agreed to use him as a guide. The three of us took a taxi from outside our modest hostel and drove downtown. Minutes into our ride, after my asking Oosman in rudimentary French what this or that building was, it became apparent that he had never been there before and was simply trying to make some money. We decided to rely on our Lonely Planet book, and instead of using Oosman as a guide we saw the trip as an opportunity to get to know him better, to let him be what he was: a Tuareg boy pretending to be a man. In one corner of the market—a vibrant shantytown of dusty stalls where salt slabs competed for space with dried fish, shea butter soap, secondhand clothes, goat meat, and calabash containers—we found the cheche section and we asked Oosman to choose one for himself. Immediately wrapping the long indigo-dyed cotton around his head, he looked uncannily mannish.

  The following morning he was waiting for us outside our bedroom, sitting with legs spread wide apart on a rickety chair, both hands crossed over his lap. He was visibly upset. We owed him money, he said, for the services he had rendered the day before as a tour guide. Hadn’t he been the best guide we could have asked for?

  Oosman managed to catch a ride on one of the 4x4s from the convoy driving our group from Mopti to Timbuktu. At our first stop, I noticed the soles and tips of Oosman’s shoes were in shreds, his cracked feet pelted with cram-cram desert barbs. I gave him an extra pair of trainers I had. In exchange he gave me one of his splendid little smiles. We were friends again. I also noticed he wasn’t wearing the cheche.

  “Where is your cheche?” I asked him.

  He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know. “Je l’ai perdu.” He had lost it.

  “We’ll get you another one in Timbuktu, OK?” He smiled coyly, as if he had known all along that we’d buy him a new cheche. He had been wearing the same pair of tattered red jeans since the day we arrived in Mopti. By the time we reached Timbuktu, Oosman was wearing my shoes, my trousers, and my husband’s fleece jacket. An English woman in our group was wearing a brand-new cheche, which she said Oosman had sold her for a very good price.

  My neighbor makes a tsk-tsk noise. Her husband was a cop in South Africa during the apartheid. She’s seen too many Oosmans, she tells me. After an awkward silence I tell my neighbor about Baba Ali, the old Tuareg who invited us to his home for tea the first day in Mopti. We sat on thin mattresses laid on the dirt floor, exchanged pleasantries, and talked about family and country, the concert, and the ways tourism had changed his Tuareg culture. Then came teatime.

  Following tradition, we had three cups of black tea: for the first cup, bitter as life, we were considered strangers. Fifteen minutes and many awkward silences later, Baba Ali added sugar to the teapot and poured the second cup, not quite as bitter as the first one but smooth, smooth as death, he explained—and with that one we became friends, true friends. Baba Ali’s hospitality was heartfelt and sincere. He was extremely delighted that we had traveled from so far away just to have tea with him—a statement I was not about to debate. And so he added a good helping of sugar to the teapot and poured the third cup, sweet as love, and with this cup we joined his family, and for his family Baba Ali was prepared to do anything. “Even die,” he said with a grin that I couldn’t quite understand.

  He looked noble in his Tuareg regalia: the tagelmust, which he refused to call cheche—a word he considered too hip for his old age—concealed his entire head and face excluding a set of scrutinizing eyes and the top of his prominent nose. “I die for you, my friend, yes?” he asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said, moved.

  “And you?” he asked.

  No, I thought. I like you, Baba Ali, I really do, but I would not die for you. I barely know you. I was about to spill a courteous lie when Baba Ali finished his question. “And you? You buy nice silver from an old friend that die for you? Look, nice silver,” he said as he displayed before our eyes an array of cheap Tuareg knickknacks made out of tin for which our friend wanted every penny we had ever worked for. We refused politely. Baba Ali seemed offended or hurt, mostly offended, and he whispered something in Tamasheq that sounded like a desert curse. “I die for you. You buy silver from me. Not fair, but OK with this old man. No problem.”

  “Typical,” my Afrikaner neighbor says, and the word comes out with enough sand for me to discover that she carries scars and grudges from the apartheid. So I tell her about Mohammed, the handsome teenager who traveled with us to the festival and who wanted to become the first Tuareg physician, but more than anything wanted to sell me his own stash of Tuareg jewelry, each piece carved with symbols whose meanings and histories varied with his mood. A little squiggle meant a desert dune one minute, and the next it meant the hump of a camel, or the Niger delta, or the vast sky, or the branches of a baobab. Mohammed was a relentless salesman and on Day 1—after he had offered me morning specials, afternoon bargains, and evening deals—I caved in and bought a pair of splendidly blue earrings. They were lapis lazuli. Or opal. Or malachite. Mohammed couldn’t make up his mind. We settled for Very Nice Blue Tuareg Gem.

  From then on, whenever we ran into each other, he greeted me with, “Necklace for you?”

  “No, Mohammed, I’m not buying anything else from you,” I said every time, feeling slightly offended that this boy was not interested in me, only my money.

  “You buy earrings. Very good, mon amie. Now you buy necklace. Oui?”

  At dinnertime I offered him the dry mutton on my plate. He ate it with gusto.

&nb
sp; “You give me food, I give you necklace. Oui?” he said as he reached over to fasten the necklace around my neck. I moved away and gave him a hard “No.” He seemed to understand, sat cross-legged on the sand next to me, patted my hand, and after a long pause said, “Good price for you.”

  I tell her about the children of Timbuktu, how throngs of half-naked kids followed us around, chanting “Toubab, Toubab” (Foreigner, Foreigner), “donnez-nous un Bic.” They were barefoot and covered in desert dust, had discolored hair matted in dry kinks, and their clothes were in shreds. If they were sad, hungry, or sick, they didn’t show it. They were delighted to follow us around, giggling, pushing each other to be close to us. Instead of begging for money or food, they wanted a Bic pen, a token of Western culture introduced by a missionary a few decades ago when he handed out box upon box of Bics all around the fabled city. A few of them asked for a cadeau, a gift, while some others asked for our empty water bottles they could use to store goat’s milk.

  My Afrikaner friend shakes her head when I show her the picture I took of the children in Timbuktu. She feels sorry for me. I had been used, but I was too much of a romantic to realize it. Based on my accounts, she concludes that the Tuareg are underdeveloped people prone to trickery, thievery, and deceit, just like other black Africans. An awkward pause follows, and then she gives it all to me: How Africa is a mess (present Africa, that is, because colonial Africa was fantastic). How the blacks, the blacks and their shenanigans, ruined South Africa, whose golden years were under the apartheid. And how everything in Mali would be all dandy had it stayed under French rule instead of under a bunch of inept black Tuareg. I repress an urge to tell her that actually the Tuareg are not black, they are lighter than the other ethnic groups in Mali because they are descendants of the Berber people, much fairer than their Mandé counterparts from the south, who are truly black. She carries on about how the Tuareg are destroying Timbuktu. Those Arabs are savages. Am I not watching the news? I am about to tell her that the Tuareg are not Arab, that she is mixing apples with pears, but she goes for my jugular and tells me that she is sure my sweet Mohammed is not a doctor but probably one of those turbaned loonies wielding an AK-47 for the BBC cameras. And she goes on and on about fundamentalist Muslims and Tuareg and al-Qaeda, all of them meaning the same to her. To try to educate or persuade this Afrikaner would be a waste of my time, and hers. After she leaves, I cry; I don’t know why or over whom. But I cry.

  For centuries, the Empire of Mali was a powerful state and one of the world’s chief gold suppliers. During the 1500s, when the empire was at its peak, Timbuktu and Djenné were the main African centers of commerce, scholarship, and culture. Mali also controlled all the trade in West and North Africa and regulated the commercial routes along the Niger River. The empire remained intact until the Berlin Conference of 1884, when the European powers got together and agreed on a systematic invasion, occupation, colonization, and annexation of African territory. That plan was like a birthday party for Europe, and Africa was the cake they sliced into unequal but satisfying parts. Britain claimed roughly 30 percent of Africa’s population under its control; 15 percent went to France, 11 percent to Portugal, 9 percent to Germany, 7 percent to Belgium, and 1 percent to Italy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Europe had colonized the entire African continent except for Ethiopia, Liberia (an American colony), and Spanish Sahara. Africa, the second largest continent in area and population, had 90 percent of its area and population partitioned and given away to European conquistadors. The Empire of Mali was renamed French Sudan after it fell under French control in 1892. A few years later, the French merged Mali with present-day Senegal and parts of Mauritania, Niger, and Burkina Faso, and called this new territory Senegambie et Niger. Some other chunks of Mali were transferred to French Guinea. In 1904, after a few retouches to its borders, Mali—or rather, the territory known as Senegambie et Niger—was renamed Upper Senegal and Niger. But the name didn’t stick, and in 1920 Mali was again called French Sudan. Unfortunately for the Malians, in 1947 the French altered their borders once more after giving away some districts to Burkina Faso and Mauritania. Twelve years later French Sudan became known as the Sudanese Republic, after again changing its borders by annexing Senegal. In 1959, the territory was known as the Fédération du Mali, taking its name from the ancient empire. The federation broke apart a year later and the Sudanese Republic declared itself independent and took the name République du Mali, with its capital Bamako.

  Surely, somewhere, due to all of this, someone was bound to revolt.

  The Tuareg. The indigenous people of the Sahara. The blue-veiled people of the desert. An animal-herding people in a dying world of relentless droughts. One of the poorest, most isolated, and most militarized peoples of the world. The Tuareg, an ethnic group divided by colonialism among Mali, Algeria, Libya, Niger, and Burkina Faso. An ethnicity whose homeland straddles the largest energy deposits in Africa. Yet the Tuareg in northern Mali remain a neglected group of Berber-descendant nomads fighting for independence from the south of the country.

  The ongoing armed conflict in northern Mali is the fourth Tuareg rebellion, or the fifth, or the seventh, depending on whom you talk with. It’s hard to tell, really, because the Tuareg have not stopped fighting for autonomy since the Berlin Conference of 1884.

  Malian diaspora is confusing. During the 1970s, after a devastating drought that killed livestock and starved northern Malians, a massive Tuareg exodus to neighboring Libya took place. Colonel Qaddafi offered these starved immigrants more than they had ever had: housing with electricity and running water, food, salaries, clothes, and all the other commodities his country had to offer. In exchange, he asked for their military service. He armed them, trained them to be his mercenaries, turned them and their sons into fierce fighters, demanded their undivided loyalty to his regime, and got it. But many years later, following the start of the Arab uprising in 2011 and after the fall of Qaddafi’s regime, his mercenary army was forced out of Libya. Hundreds of the deposed dictator’s soldiers escaped across the desert, with antiaircraft weapons and heavy machine guns mounted on the backs of their pickups.

  Having lost access to the country that was their only source of livelihood, they drove into Mali and found the same crushing poverty, hunger, and drought that had forced them to migrate in the first place three decades earlier. Barely able to feed their children amid total state neglect, the men launched a rebellion to found their own country, an independent Tuareg state in northern Mali called Azawad. They joined forces with local Tuareg and called themselves the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA).

  Following the 2012 coup d’état in Bamako, the Malian capital, the MNLA allied themselves with jihadist rebels, including al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, and together they became a force to be reckoned with. But the MNLA were ill disciplined, internally divided, inexperienced in statesmanship, and too dominated by self-serving clan elites to make an independent state viable. Naturally, the jihadists—who were stern and organized, had concrete self-governing plans, and perceived the Tuareg as too secular—seized the moment, fighting and crushing the MNLA. Once again the Tuareg found themselves fleeing, this time to southern Mali, where they were blamed for causing unrest and chaos, and for allowing the Islamists to take control. With nowhere else to go, the Tuareg fled to Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mauritania. And with them went the Festival in the Desert.

  I didn’t doubt for a second that Abou was a dancer, but it was hard to look at the way he danced and not think of him as an athlete. He was the leader of Tamnana, an extended family of dancers vastly popular with revelers at the six editions of the festival. There was no limit to what he could do as soon as the music started. He could jump, fall, rebound, curtsy, throw in some Cossack-like squats, and then stop instantly, all to the beat of the drums, the vigorous clapping, and the chords of the amzad, a one-string violin. I saw him go into the air without warning, defying gravity, then land on his two feet as if the moment of imbalanc
e had been a mirage. Tamnana’s dance was half sheer energy, half pure fluidity—a concoction of athleticism, grace, and joie de vivre. Every time the dancers jumped, their indigo boubous billowed in the air, and when the vocalists sang, they moved their hands with a grace that was almost Hawaiian hula, almost Thai fingernail dance. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything else but singing and dancing. They were the happiest and, based on their physical strength, the best-fed Malians in the whole country.

  After accepting Abou’s invitation to visit his village—a short camel ride away—I imagined this place as a colorful and festive little settlement where the music never stops, block parties are mandatory, and people die primarily of dance-induced exhaustion. But the reality was different. Abou’s village was a small group of tents made of discolored animal hide, tattered yards of sand-beaten cotton, and dry grass. The enclave looked like an old campsite that had been beaten to its knees, a place last used a long time ago and then abandoned.