The Last Caravan
1970s in the Sahara: The Natural Disaster that Threatened a Nomadic People with Extinction
Also by Thurston Clarke
By Blood and Fire
Dirty Money
(with John J. Tigue, Jr.)
For my two fathers—Thurston and Esmond. And for the many friends who have supported me—particularly Carolyn, Marilyn, and Steven.
Acknowledgments
I began my research for The Last Caravan in the summer of 1975. At the United Nations, Michael Platzer directed me to reports from various U.N. agencies and arranged interviews with officials involved in famine relief and development programs in the sahel. Bonnie Schultz and Joy Zollner of the African-American Institute, and Lorraine Watriss, a veteran of many expeditions to the sahel, were all helpful in recommending people and documents that I should consult, both in New York and in Niger.
In London I used the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Books and articles about Niger, the drought, and the Tuareg by Edmond Bernus, Robert Murphy, Johannes Nicolaisen, Francis Nicolas (some of the poems included in the text were translated from Tamashek into French by Nicolas), and Jeremy Swift were all especially perceptive and useful. All of these men are (or were) distinguished anthropologists who have spent many years living with the Tuareg. I am also in debt to Victor DuBois, an American political scientist, for his moving eyewitness account of the Tuareg refugees at Lazaret. While I was in Britain I enjoyed the generous hospitality of Jamie and Damaris Fletcher and Margaret and Ronan Nelson.
In Niger, Boucli Najim and Khamed Moussa spent many days with me as friends and interpreters, both of their language and their culture. They also introduced me to Tuareg in Niamey and in the bush whose stories are the basis for this book. It was a traumatic experience for many of these Taureg to recount, and in some cases reenact, what had been sad and painful experiences and I am grateful to them, particularly to Sidi and Hassan.
I would also like to thank Dioulde Laya (the Director of the Nigerien Research Institute), his staff, Amadou Ousmane, and numerous other officials and citizens of Niger who gave generously of their time.
The European and American residents of Niger who offered advice, rides, and rooms in which to work and sleep are too numerous to list. I am especially grateful to Al Baron, Sidney Bliss, Craig Buxton, Jim Conway, Douglas and Ernie Heck, Gene Stone, and Peggy Zirker.
I am also thankful for the support and encouragement that I received from my friends and relatives while I was writing The Last Caravan. Among those who deserve special mention are John Brim, Alice Geller, Frank Hendrickson, Dexter Hunneman, David McEwan, and Julie Toland. My mother the novelist read the first chapters of the manuscript and told me how to make them better. I followed her suggestions.
Ann Glasser not only convinced me that this was a book that should be written, she also gave excellent advice as to how it should be written. I am grateful to my publisher for understanding that the research for this book would present me with unique obstacles and difficulties.
Finally, I am indebted most of all to Hugh Howard, for his wise and sensitive editing, and for his devotion to this book.
Author’s Note
Between 1968 and 1974 a drought ravaged the people, animals, and land of the six countries that make up West Africa’s sahelian region.
The most serious years of this drought were the last two, from September 1972 to September 1974, when the cumulative effects of years of substandard rainfall resulted in a famine. During these two years the sahelian country of Niger endured the most devastating losses of crops and livestock.
Niger contains four major ethnic groups: the Hausa and Djerma farming peoples and the Peul and Tuareg nomads. All suffered during the drought, but because the Tuareg suffered and were transformed the most, I decided that they should be the subject of this book. In 1975 I went to Niger and interviewed individual Tuareg about their experiences.
Besides questioning Tuareg who had survived the drought, I visited most of the cities, towns, and nomadic areas in which the events described in this book took place. I went to In Waggeur, and on camel and on foot retraced the route followed by Atakor in the prologue. I went to Gao and visited the Mokhtar, Rissa, the animal market, and the port—the people and places described in chapter four. In Niamey, I arranged for the participants in the incidents described in the final chapter to re-enact their movements.
The people portrayed in this book are typical; the events factual. In some instances I have changed names and expanded individual stories with incidents that happened to other Tuareg from the same tribe or region during the same period of time.
Instead of assuming what people were thinking, I have decided to let them speak for themselves. Throughout the book I have consolidated their responses to my questions into longer statements.
Sympathy and aid for the victims of poverty and disaster in wealthy countries is often solicited by emphasizing individual tragedies. In poor countries, suffering is normally expressed in terms of mortality rates, health, diet, and life expectancy.
People become collages of gaunt faces pushing babies and empty bowls into the lens of a camera. It is easy to forget that these malnourished millions are comprised of unique peoples, whose struggle to survive is grounded in their own particular history and culture, and that these peoples are individuals, each drawing on his or her own genius, as well as that of their people, to wage a battle against extinction.
June 1973
Vicinity of In Waggeur, Niger
Atakor woke up nightblind. Flashes exploded in his eyes as he strained to adjust to the light of dawn. Usually they disappeared in a few seconds. Now they were prolonged by vitamin deficiencies.
He searched for his clothes. His feet swept the sand until they found his sandals. He lifted a blue robe, a boubou, over his head, strapped a sword to his waist, and hung red leather pouches around his neck. Sealed in each pouch were verses from the Koran. He patted them with the soft touch of the blind.
He pulled a swatch of indigo cloth through his right hand. The dark-blue dye that colored the material smudged his hands, and he then rubbed the blue residue onto his forehead and sunken cheeks. Previous applications had left a sediment in the lines in his face, making them dark and prominent.
The cloth was eighteen inches wide and twelve feet long. He draped it over his head like a shawl, the short left end hanging a foot below his chin, and gathered the remaining material in his right hand. He looped it once under his chin and wound the rest into a turban that covered his head. Then he drew the loop from under his chin over the bridge of his nose and pulled down a swath of the turban to shade his forehead like a visor. Veil and turban covered his face. Nightblind eyes stared through a medieval slit.
“Never uncover your mouth in front of your wife’s parents or Tuareg from other tribes. Before your own family or when you are among the blacks it is not necessary to be modest; you may expose your mouth.” Twenty years ago a marabout, a member of a caste of Tuareg religious teachers, had recited these instructions as he wound the turban around Atakor’s head for the first time. Atakor had been fourteen.
During the last week hunger and sadness had drawn him into a fitful delirium. Time stopped, a past in which history had become myth and myth history slid into the present, and his exploits became confused with those of ancestors. The marabout’s words came back to Atakor. He wore the veil, he thought, because Tuareg men had always worn it. It protected the face from the sun and the nose and throat from the sandy winds.
The women who sing, remember, and compose history had another explanation. Atakor’s wife Miriam recited a poem which claimed that once only Tuareg women wore veils. When a group of Tuareg warriors had been routed after a fierce battle and their camels seized, they straggled back to their camp on foot. Their wives had screamed, “You have disgraced our eyes, vanquished warriors! In the future it is you who shall hide your faces!” The women ripped off their veils and threw them at their husbands’ feet. The men had put them on.
Atakor’s taut, brown skin was visible only around his eyes. His mouth, his nose, the rest of his face were hidden. Clues to his emotions were found elsewhere. Frowns, smiles, scowls were reflected in his hollow hermit’s eyes, or in how he wrapped his veil: how tight, how close to the eyes, how high over the nose.
His movements revealed his feelings, and he had a repertory of shy, fluid, feminine gestures. With his thin arms and fine hands he smoothed his veil like a woman pulling the hem of her dress over her knees. Shaking hands, he followed the ritual of snapping his fingers and then touching his heart; when he served tea, he was like a geisha, pouring from a great height, arranging glasses in a neat pattern, smoothing and brushing the blanket for a guest.
These gestures were watched intently by others, and admired and criticized. On Niger’s plains, the Taureg recognized each other from great distances by gait or a particular physical disability: A limp was a scar, a slouch a mole, a twitch a birthmark.
As he finished dressing, Atakor’s eyes registered the first strong light since he awoke. He walked east, toward it. One of his loose sandals slapped on the dry riverbed. He heard his wife stir, sigh, and gather her robes under the skin tent he had just left. His infant daughter cried. From a neighboring tent a tubercular cough answered.
He bent down, felt for his feet, and pulled off the sandal. He was too late. Miriam was awake.
“Where are you going so early?”
“To save myself.”
Not understanding, she swept the baby under her black cloak and comforted it. When mother and child were quiet, he went on his way.
The Tuareg call themselves the Kel Tamashek, the “people who speak Tamashek.” Tuareg is an Arabic word meaning “the abandoned of God.” Some linguistic authorities believe instead that the word refers to a particularly desolate place in the Sahara desert. In both cases the name has unwanted connotations, and the Tuareg themselves do not use it.
The Tuareg who live in Niger are accustomed to an annual hunger. The French who colonized Niger called this time of famine la soudure, “the soldering.” The image is of lips and fingers soldered together, of people unable to feed themselves.
The soudure begins during the spring hot season. The temperature rises to 120° Fahrenheit; the udders of cows, goats, and camels are dry, and the stores of millet, sorghum, and wild grains are exhausted. For the farmers the soudure lasts until the autumn harvests. For the Tuareg nomads it breaks in August, when summer rains renew pastures and animals give milk.
By June of 1973, however, five consecutive years of drought had triggered a human and ecological catastrophe. Atakor’s animals were not dry, they were dead. Farmlands had become arid pastures, arid pastures deserts, and the soudure lasted twelve months.
Before the soudure of 1969 Atakor had owned fifteen camels, a hundred cows, and more than two hundred goats. He was unsure of the numbers because, he said, “I owned so many that I rarely counted.” Half of them died in 1969, a few during the next three years, and the rest in 1973: first the donkeys, sheep, and cows, and then the camels and goats. When his last and favorite camel died, he squatted on the ground, covered his forehead with the palms of his hands, rocked back and forth on his heels, and cried for two days. His wife, his infant daughter, and his two sons by a previous marriage were fed by his cousin, the head of one of the other six families who shared his camp and lived among the thorn trees that bordered the dry river. His cousin was fortunate enough to have saved a few of his goats and cows.
After two days of sleepless misery, Atakor decided to “save himself,” to walk alone into the bush without food or water. He knew that after he left the camp the members of his family would have larger portions of the food that remained. This knowledge brought him immediate comfort. He imagined that afterwards Miriam would recite poems celebrating his heroism in saving his family, describing how he had tried to survive in a land in which even goats starved, telling how he tried to save himself because suicide is forbidden.
After walking for five minutes, Atakor stopped and, facing east to where the sun was balanced on the horizon, knelt to wash his hands and arms by rubbing them with sand. Then he stood, bowed his head, bent forward from the waist, fell to his knees, and, prostrate, touched the earth gently with his head.
“In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, praise belongs to God, the Lord of all being, the all-merciful, the all-compassionate, the Master of the day of doom.”
He rose, paused as if awaiting a reply, and repeated the ritual. Thousands of miles of identical arid landscape separated him from Mecca. Among other Moslems, the Tuareg have a reputation as unorthodox followers of Mohammed. Their knowledge of the Koran is limited, their sexuality is considered indecent, their women are unveiled, and their praying is thought to be sporadic and clumsy. Yet Atakor performed the ritual of prayer with grace and attention to detail.
His prayers finished, Atakor walked southeast, away from the water pump in the small nomadic village of In Waggeur and the dirt track that ran through the village and connected the desert oasis of In Gall, 50 miles to the north, to the market city of Tahoua, 145 miles to the south. He left behind him the carcass of his last and favorite camel, and his family. He walked with long strides, his tall, thin body erect and his eyes straight ahead.
He was in the Tadarast, a sandy, monotonous plain in the center of Niger’s northern nomadic zone. Scattered across it were bushes and short, thick-trunked trees. Beneath them clumps of dying grass hugged the ground, their extensive network of roots searching futilely for moisture.
The trees and bushes seemed geometrically spaced, an ordered labyrinth of bare branches which during a sandstorm appeared to be puffs of fossilized smoke. The landscape repeated itself endlessly, as if surrounded by gigantic mirrors that intensified heat, trapped dust, and reflected an infinity of trees and bushes.
Seen closely, the trees were unique in their deformities. Branches had been hacked off or bark stripped for firewood. Lower branches had been ripped off by goats and the higher ones cut by nomads and fed to animals. Trunks were scarred by termites and surrounded by ant castles. Sand had smothered saplings. Erosion had exposed roots which were then buried by sandstorms until summer floods exposed them again or washed away the entire tree.
In another time, Atakor, mounted on a camel above the tree line, could identify individual trees. They directed him to neighboring camps, wells, and seasonal pools of water. During the months just past many had been cut down, altering the landscape. Now, on foot, he missed these familiar signposts.
By midmorning a red wall of dust, the kind of intense sandstorm that often precedes a summer thunderstorm, rolled across the Tadarast. The winds stripped away the thin covering of soil. As the edge of the storm advanced toward Atakor, it rippled the sand into wavelets. More sand seemed to pour from the sky, plugging his nostrils, scouring his eyes, clogging his throat. He tightened his veil and breathed with difficulty. Finally he stopped and sat, leaning against a withered tree, sand drifting at his back.
As the drought destroyed their material wealth, many Tuareg withdrew into the familiar and comforting myths and oral histories of their people. They resembled impoverished aristocrats wandering through crumbling mansions, doting on heirlooms, recreating the past, escaping the present. Now even this comfort eluded Atakor. Since leaving his camp that morning to “save himself,” he had thought of Tanut.
Although the French had claimed Niger as a colony in 1900, not until seventeen years later did they succeed in crushing the last major Tuareg uprising that challenged their rule. Atakor’s Tuareg tribe, the Illabakan, then numbered around a thousand. The Illabakan and about twenty other tribes of varying sizes were all members of the Kel Dennik confederation. In 1917 Ikhesi, a member of the Kel Nan tribe, had just become the chief of the Kel Dennik. Ikhesi was reluctant to join the general Tuareg rebellion against the French. He wanted to consolidate his own power, and his people were more accessible to French reprisals than dissident confederations to the north.
Ikhesi was therefore receptive when, in March 1917, he received a communication from a Captain Sadoux urging him not to join the revolt. Sadoux promised that if Ikhesi complied, the French would formally recognize his leadership. Sadoux himself was coming north from the French fort at Tahoua with a column of troops to conduct the ceremony.
Having waited for twelve years to become chief, Ikhesi was determined to let nothing stand in his way. He waited for the French column at Tanut, a collection of small wells in a tree-lined valley southeast of In Waggeur, near where Atakor now leaned against the withered tree. With Ikhesi were over a thousand warriors, most of the Kel Dennik nobles, and many of their vassals, wives, children, marabouts, and slaves.
On March 12, 1917, Sadoux and a column of ninety men left Tahoua. The column consisted of three French officers, African soldiers from the French colony of Senegal, and warriors and interpreters from the Kel Gress, a Tuareg confederation that had frequently fought against the Kel Dennik during the nineteenth century. On April 8 they arrived at the Tanut wells. Sadoux sent two Tuareg interpreters, Al-Qasem and Afangarom, to Ikhesi’s tent. They told Ikhesi that the French had come on a peaceful mission, had marched for a day without food or water, and were hungry and thirsty. Ikhesi and the Kel Dennik moved away from the wells and gave them food. The soldiers ate and drank and camped among the trees.
The next morning the French column built an enclosure of wood and thorn branches. The walls were six feet high, and there was one exit. “You will gather here tomorrow to name your chief,” Captain Sadoux explained.
The following day, the Tuareg were led in and the entrance closed. Turbaned and veiled, their ancient swords at their sides, daggers tied to their forearms, some carrying spears, they talked and stared at the stockade walls, waiting to vote. The women sat inside as well, their black cloaks pulled over their heads but not their mouths. They wore silver earrings and bracelets. Silver pendants anchored their black braids.
Although there were only a few of his tribe, the Illabakan, at Tanut, one had been a relative of Atakor’s. Atakor remembered the scar on the man’s forehead. He touched his own forehead and recalled a poem that was still recited at Kel Dennik gatherings:
O God my saviour
I will soon join my dead parents.
Al-Qasem is on my trail.
He accompanies the lieutenant who will kill me.
They are going to return with my head
And earn a great reward.
The lieutenant has called Afangarom and given him a double reward
So that he can seek his fortune among the black women.
O God my saviour,
During the night which will hear my last sigh,
The women will stay by my side,
Weeping as they stitch my shroud.
O God, divide my inheritance among my women:
Saoudata, Echchehidet, Errilata,
Aminata and Elfelilet,
Because the lieutenant will pierce my side,
His sword will cut my throat.
Thirst interrupted Atakor’s reverie. He was suddenly alert, rescued from his vision of Tanut. The wind had slackened and he stood up, his back to the tree. A hundred yards away he saw black shapes merge and then separate. They sky had cleared and dust devils, small tornadoes of sand fifty to a hundred feet in diameter, formed as hot currents of air met above the ground. They danced between the trees, disappeared and reappeared on the horizon, swallowing the black forms.
Atakor remembered a nearby well used by the Peul, the other nomadic people of the Tadarast. Hoping to find water, he reversed his direction and walked west, back toward In Waggeur.
When even the stunted bushes disappeared, Atakor knew he was close to the Peul well. Trees, stripped of their branches, looked like poles. Sand slithered around clumps of inedible grasses, encircling them.
During five years of drought, circular deserts had formed around the wells, pools, and pumping stations of the Tadarast and the fossilized Azawak valley on whose eastern fringes the Tadarast is located. The radius of these deserts was usually less than ten miles, or half the distance a cow could walk before it needed water. Once the cows had consumed the edible grasses within this circle, they had to be led to another water point. On such journeys, many died of thirst. But the alternative was to die of hunger. Peul and Tuareg nomads had to choose: Would they watch their animals die of thirst outside this ten-mile radius, or of starvation inside?
The land around the well was barren. Beyond the crest of a small, newly formed sand dune, Atakor saw a Peul, dressed in skins and wearing a conical straw hat. He was bent over the well, pulling up a leather bucket.
The ground sloped away from the mouth of the well on three sides. At the foot of the little hill, thirty severed cows’ heads were arranged in semicircular rows. Bloated tongues hung from their mouths and enormous horns, a matador’s nightmare, stuck out like wings. There were whitened skulls and decomposing heads. Under a recent casualty a pool of blood reddened the sand.
The Peul ignored Atakor. He carried his bucket from the well and dashed water on the remains of his dead herd. Behind the well three young boys, his sons, stood in a line holding each others’ arms like a string of paper dolls.
His wife was crouched behind them. Naked breasts that looked like badgers’ tails hung to her waist. As Atakor approached her husband, she lifted one breast, then the other. They slapped against her stomach. “Dry,” she whispered. “Dry.”
The Peul began the elaborate ceremony of greeting.
“Welcome on your arrival.”
“How is your health?” asked Atakor.
“Fine, thanks be to God. How is your health?”
“Fine. How is your work?”
“My work goes well,” answered the Peul.
“How is your family?”
“All well, thanks be to God.” (The Peul’s wife smiled.)
“And your animals?”
“All are in good health,” the Peul replied.
The greetings continued, each man repeating the same questions and giving the same answers, always replying that everything—animals, family, health, and work—was fine. Any other response would have been rude.
When the ritual was completed the Peul asked if Atakor wanted some water. He threw the bucket into the well, hauled on the rope, and poured water into a gourd. As Atakor drank, the Peul filled another bucket and wandered among his garden of heads, pouring water into pools in front of the bloated tongues. He tapped a stick against the horns, urging his cows to drink.
Like the Sahara, the Tadarast is characterized by a sterile silence that magnifies the slightest sound—the groan of a camel, the slap of a sandal, the buzzing of a fly. As the Peul finished watering the heads, Atakor sensed that someone else had invaded this silence. Hoping to avoid whoever it was, he left the well. He walked west, back over his earlier tracks.
Two hours later he crossed the In Gall-Tahoua track within sight of In Waggeur, whose dozen mud houses, cement school, and water pump made it similar to other small villages scattered across Niger’s nomadic zone. He continued west, following one of the dry rivers that filled with brown water during the rainy season and ran into the In Waggeur pond. Many of these riverbeds had been formed thousands of years earlier, when the climate was more humid. Their fossilized promise of water taunted the rest of the landscape.
On one bank of the riverbed, a few miles from In Waggeur, was a camp that had been built by the Tuareg slave caste, the bouzous. It was empty. The bouzous had joined the exodus. Atakor poked at piles of ashes, picked up tattered mats, and kicked broken gourds as he looked for food. A donkey brayed, and he turned to see some shadows merge with those of the thorn trees. Again he was not alone. Instead of investigating, he climbed into a four-foot-high enclosure made of woven thorn branches meant to prevent young goats from wandering. He sat down inside and stared at the wall of thorns opposite. In a few minutes he was asleep.
In 1917 the French had called the Tuareg out of the Tanut enclosure one by one, presumably to cast a secret ballot for their next chief, for Ikhesi. The most famous warriors were called by name.
As each man emerged, he was seized from behind and thrown to the ground. His turban was ripped away. If he wore his hair long and braided in the style of the Tuareg nobles, his throat was cut. His body was stripped of weapons and jewelry and tossed into a growing heap. Only the marabouts, who were not warriors and were identified by their shaved heads, were spared.
After some dozens of their comrades had “voted,” the men remaining within the enclosure became suspicious that they failed to return. They rushed toward the narrow entrance. The French blocked it. The Tuareg shrieked when they climbed over the walls and saw the bodies of their comrades. Those who could, jumped out and ran. The troops pursued them into the bush with knives and rifles. The African mercenaries and the Kel Gress burst inside the enclosure and fired point-blank into the survivors.
Ikhesi was wounded in the abdomen, then shot again by a Senegalese mercenary. His head was cut off and stuck onto a pole. His long braids waved over the massacre.
Some people survived. One wounded Illabakan lay under a pile of bodies, feigning death. Others simply outran their pursuers. But the bloodshed was devastating. Nearly all of the 207 Tuareg warriors at Tanut perished. As late as 1965, nomads who visited the Tanut wells were still digging up the jewelry of the victims.
According to Atakor, Tanut proved that the Kel Dennik were truly courageous. “They were afraid of us, so they had to resort to treachery to defeat us.”
Awakened by a sharp cry, Atakor stood up and looked out of the enclosure. Nothing was visible. The sun was setting and the surrounding trees threw their shadows on him. He paced uneasily around the circumference of the enclosure until he reached the entrance. Outside he could hear someone calling his name.
Atakor whirled and leaped over the wall of the enclosure. The voices continued to call his name. He crouched close to the ground and they sprang from the other side of the enclosure. He jumped into the dry riverbed. They followed.
At sunset, the temperature in the Tadarast can drop as much as 30 degrees. The sun disappears and the moon is suddenly visible. Action is suspended between night and day, moon and sun, cold and heat. Caught between Tanut and the drought, vision and blindness, Atakor unsheathed his sword and turned to face his pursuers.
As they separated, he whirled and slashed. Limbs crashed down from a thorn tree, and as he lifted the sword again it became entangled. Shadowy black forms were holding the ends of a rope that fell across his chest. The forms ran in opposite directions, drawing closer as the rope bound his body, tying his legs and binding his hands to his sides. The shapes met in front of him and knotted the rope. His vision cleared, and they became Miriam and his sister Fani.
Other Tuareg men had already tried to kill themselves by walking off into the bush without food or water. When Atakor hadn’t returned by midmorning, Miriam remembered what he had said and understood his intention. She told Fani, borrowed a rope and a donkey, and set off after him.
Miriam was thirty-two. When she married Atakor in 1967 she had been, by her own account, “large and beautiful.” Seven years later she was thin, and the robes that once stretched tightly around her waist hung in folds.
Miriam’s skin had been soft and pale. It had become hard and dark, because she “worked, walked in the sun, and had no milk to drink.” Once she had spent hours arranging her jewelry, braiding her hair, and coloring her fingernails with a dye squeezed from red berries.
She was certain that large and white she was more beautiful. The drought had melted away the attractive fat and left her arms scrawny and her cheekbones prominent. During the soudure of 1973 she aged years in a few weeks. Her thick black hair dropped out and her braids became thin. Coughs cut every breath. Wrinkles creased her forehead and her eyes became dry and red.
Miriam was a conventional Tuareg woman. She had been divorced, and she had enjoyed numerous lovers. Also, like many Tuareg wives, she often intimidated her husband. That she should rescue him was not unusual.
Miriam and Fani tied Atakor onto the donkey and walked back to In Waggeur. The next day they took him to Emouzakoum, a marabout.
Insanity was rare in the Tadarast before the drought, but in 1973 it was epidemic. The Tadarast resembled an open-air madhouse, and Atakor was one of many inmates. Others slept all day rather than tend their dying herds. They refused to eat and their eyes watered with tears. They attempted suicide, and if they succeeded their deaths were attributed to “sadness.”
A Peul tried to jump into a well when his last cow died. His wife grabbed him by the heels and held him suspended for hours.
The wife of a marabout sat naked under the midday sun. She crooned a mad song that blamed God for her dead animals and begged Him to take her life. The Tuareg believed that to blame God for a calamity was madness.
An elderly man, Abrika, began searching for his dead sheep in January. During February he rode a camel. When it became too weak to carry him he traded it for a donkey. When the donkey died he walked. He became enraged when his kinsmen suggested his sheep were not lost, but dead. He continued his search, and sometime during the soudure he vanished.
Miriam left Atakor alone with the marabout. The men were friends but their meeting under the circumstances was dignified and formal. They clasped hands and then slid them apart until only their fingertips touched. As they lost contact they each snapped fingers against palms. This traditional handshake was followed by an involved ritual of verbal greetings.
The marabout had lost most of his own animals, but he could still afford to buy tea, sugar, millet, and tobacco from the trader at In Waggeur. The drought had forced him to lower the price of his magic but had increased the demand for it.
Before, a potent amulet that protected the wearer against death and disease, that made him invulnerable to sword wounds, promoted good fortune, and prevented camels from straying, cost a cow or a combination of less valuable animals. With few surviving animals, charms were sold for whatever a client could pay. People asked for an amulet that would protect their animals from the drought, but the marabout had been unable to find a fitting Koranic verse and had to admit that there was no amulet to prevent the drought.
After he and Atakor had drunk three glasses of green tea, the marabout offered advice instead of an amulet. “Since you can no longer support your wife, you must send her to her parents. Since you have no animals, you must beg. Since you loved your animals, you must find a way to buy new ones.” Before Atakor left, the marabout gave him a fistful of green tea and a branch of dates.
In Waggeur is located on one of the major trans-Saharan routes, and four-wheel-drive vehicles, mostly Land Rovers and Toyotas, and large diesel trucks, some private and some belonging to SNTN (the Nigerien government transportation agency), pass through the village several times a day. Many stop for a few minutes. The drivers and passengers relieve themselves, fill canteens from the pump, and buy hard candies and stale cigarettes from an open pack kept by a merchant.
Trucks are the sole form of public transportation in northern Niger. Passengers bargain with the drivers over the fare and ride sitting on the cargo. Most of the trucks are old and slow. Along the In Gall-Tahoua road they average less than twenty miles an hour. It takes them at least twelve hours to cover the two hundred miles between the two towns. Breakdowns and flat tires are frequent. Often a driver and his passengers will camp next to a stalled truck for days waiting for a spare part to arrive from Niger’s capital, Niamey. Pumps at the infrequent petrol stations are apt to run out of fuel.
At In Waggeur a single tree stands at the side of the In Gall-Tahoua road. Since it provides shade, it is the truck depot. Two days after Atakor visited the marabout, he and Miriam sat under this tree waiting for a truck. They had been there since late afternoon, and now it was getting dark.
During the hot season most trucks travel at night. Twenty minutes before they arrive at In Waggeur their headlights flicker on the horizon like artillery flashes. They disappear and reappear, again and again, finally becoming a dull glow accompanied by a grinding of worn gears and a bubbling of broken mufflers.
About midnight one of these trucks stopped in front of the In Waggeur tree. Atakor paid the driver with money he had begged the day before from a Land Rover full of English tourists (following the marabout’s advice) and climbed over the side to join the other passengers, most of whom were Tuaregs and bouzous, a cargo of silent, veiled heads. When he was settled Miriam handed up his sword and a bundle wrapped in a blue cloth that had once been a boubou. Inside were the dates, a rusty lock and key, and green twigs for cleaning his teeth.
The route Atakor was about to travel was familiar. Three or four times a year he and other Illabakan had formed small caravans of between ten and a hundred animals and gone south to the markets of Abalack, Kao, Barmou, and Chadawanka. All were located on the fringes of the nomadic zone, between 60 and 150 miles south of In Waggeur. They were meeting places for farmers and nomads.
The Illabakan caravans were gone for a couple of weeks. They left with herds of sheep and goats and returned with their donkeys and camels laden with millet, cloth, tea, sugar, and tobacco. But on this trip Atakor had nothing to trade. He was following this familiar caravan route for the last time.
i
Sahel is an Arabic word meaning “border” or “shore.” The West African sahel is a 300- to 600-mile-wide border separating desert and tropics, a 2,600-mile-long shore of arid and semiarid land on the southern edge of the Sahara. It runs from west to east, from the Atlantic beaches of Senegal to the center of the African continent.
Its people are tested by a harsh climate. A short and unpredictable rainy season gives farmers one yearly harvest and herders three months of good pasture. In the space of a few hours, both farmers and herders can be scorched by walls of wind-blown sand, drenched by pounding rains, and suffocated by temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
The sahel’s land is poor. In the north it is mostly sandy plains with scattered bushes, nearly a desert; in the south, more plains of hard red clay and more bushes, almost fertile.
The sahel’s people are poor. Twenty-five million live in six nations which were French colonies until 1960. Except for a tiny upper class of merchants and government functionaries, the people are either herders or farmers. Some are both, farmers who own animals and herders who scatter seeds.
The farming people have black skins and negroid features, and live in the south. They have not always been farmers. Many were also, and some still are, clever traders, brave warriors, and efficient administrators.
The herders have skin that shades from white to black, facial features which can be Caucasian, negroid, or a mixture, and live in the north. They too were once traders and warriors.
The sahelian farmers and herders are separated by history, vocation, and race, but unified by malnutrition, illiteracy, and disease. They are among the poorest people in the world. Whenever the United Nations or the World Bank publishes world economic summaries, the people of four sahel countries—Niger, Mali, Upper Volta, and Chad—compete with a half-dozen others for the distinction of having the lowest per capita income in the world. The people of the other sahel countries—Senegal, Gambia,1 and Mauritania—are close behind them.
Of the six West African countries—Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Upper Volta—which contain sahelian land, Niger has by far the most. Niger is also the largest country in West Africa, covering 489,000 square miles,2 more than Texas and California combined.
Most of the 4.5 million people who inhabit this huge country belong to one of four ethnic groups. They are either Hausa or Djerma farmers, or Peul or Tuareg herders. Niger’s farmers are concentrated in a narrow strip of fertile land running parallel to the border with Benin and Nigeria. Two million Hausa farmers and traders live in the eastern portion of this strip, and one million Djerma, who dominate Niger’s government, live in the west.
In the semiarid grasslands to the north of this farming belt, Niger’s two nomadic peoples, the Tuareg and the Peul, raise cattle, camels, sheep, and goats. The Peul, who number 600,000 in Niger, are an extremely mobile nomadic people found throughout West Africa. Their skin is dark red, their faces oval, and their features Hamitic. The Peul who inhabit Niger’s Tadarast plateau are generally darker, their features more negroid than those found in many other regions of West Africa.
The Tuareg consider themselves a Caucasian people and, although many do have light-colored skin and European facial features, they are, in fact, racially a very heterogeneous people. Their skin color ranges from light brown to almost black.
1Gambia is a small, ex-British colony surrounded by an ex-French colony, Senegal. Although its land is not sahelian, it has become classified with these countries for political purposes because it is totally within the borders of Senegal, a country that does contain sahelian land.
2Statistics for the drought, the sahel, and Niger vary greatly and are extremely unreliable. According to some sources, Niger has 459,000 square miles, while others give it 465,000. If these figures are accepted, Mali, rather than Niger, becomes the largest West African country. Some of the confusion about Niger’s precise area stems from uncertainty as to the exact location of the Saharan border with Libya.
ii
The Tuareg are indigenous to three African countries. There are 10,000 of them living in the vicinity of the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, 250,000 in northeastern Mali, and another 250,000 scattered throughout central and northern Niger. (These figures exclude the Tuareg slave caste, the bouzou, of whom there are almost an equal number.)
Some Saharan historians and explorers believe that the Tuareg are the descendants of a valiant band of twelfth-century European crusaders who, cut off from and later abandoned by the Christian armies in Palestine, wandered across Egypt and North Africa and finally settled in the southern Sahara. Another theory is that they are the survivors of the Garamantes, Christian knights descended from Roman legionnaires who built fortresses in the Libyan oases.
Such theories suggest that the racial and cultural similarities between the Tuareg and these early Christians are more than coincidental, that the Tuareg’s intricate codes of chivalry and courage, their feudal social structure, and their weapons—two-edged swords, javelins, skin shields, and sheathed daggers—are inherited from European warriors.
Some evidence supports these theories. Heraldic lions have been found engraved on the hilts of ancient Tuareg swords, as has the Wolf of Passau, the mark of medieval German swordsmiths that was later copied by Spanish craftsmen. Tuareg swords, which are shaped like crosses, resemble those of the crusaders. The stylized crosses that decorate shields and women’s jewelry, especially the famous cross of Agadez, are thought to have been inspired by the Christian cross. Some Tuareg, in greeting each other, kiss the crossed thumb and forefinger of the right hand, a gesture that was one of the secret signs of the early Christian church, a sign still used among some Spanish Christians.
However, the most likely reason for these similarities between the Tuareg and European Christians is that the Agadez cross is derived from an ancient Egyptian fertility symbol, that the European swords were brought not by crusaders but by traders, and that the other resemblances are coincidental.
A more logical explanation for the presence of the Tuareg in West Africa is that they were once Berbers, a Caucasian people who were the original inhabitants of North Africa and whose occasional blue eyes and blond hair are the legacy of the Roman and Vandal invasions.
The largest Arab invasion of North Africa took place in 1045. Fleeing a famine in Egypt, the Arabs arrived in North Africa with wives, children, and slaves. They were colonizers who wanted to convert and assimilate the native Berbers. Many Berber tribes evacuated the coastal plains and isolated themselves in the mountains. Others, presumably the original Tuareg, fled into the Sahara Desert to preserve their unique culture and language.
Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, as the climate of the Sahara became drier and men and animals increased and required more abundant pastures, many Tuareg migrated further south into the Air Mountains and the plateaus of northern Niger and Mali. They prospered in this region. Not because of what was buried under its land—there was no gold or minerals—or what could be grown on it—a small harvest in the oasis and pasture grasses that supported modest herds. But because of what traveled through it—caravans that brought slaves and gold from tropical Africa to the Mediterranean and cloth from the Mediterranean to tropical Africa. The Tuareg were able to “tax” these caravans, either by guarding them or, if their services were spurned or they were being guarded by a rival confederation, by plundering them. Both occupations encouraged them to become skillful warriors.
As the Tuareg moved south into the northern regions of the sahel, they also found another source of profit and comfort, slavery. They enslaved the indigenous black sedentary people in their path and recruited others by raiding more southerly villages and carrying away their inhabitants. These black slaves, known as bouzous, were soon absorbed into the culture of their masters. They wore veils, learned Tamashek, and became a distinct people in their own right.
The bouzous enabled the Tuareg to become overseers. When they weren’t raiding or warring, they needed only to make decisions as to where and when their animals would graze and drink, which animals would be traded, and how much millet should be bought to enable them to survive the soudure.
The bouzous did the work. They usually milked the animals, led them to the wells, and then pulled up buckets of water. Sometimes they fought in Tuareg armies as spear-carrying foot soldiers.
The Tuareg women became ladies of leisure. They nursed children, gossiped, recited poetry, played violins, and managed the bouzou women who pounded and cooked millet, gathered wood, made fires, swept the camp, and looked for emergency foods such as wild grasses and melons. Rarely did a Tuareg woman perform these tasks herself.
In Niger’s nomadic zones wealth was measured by the size of herds, and many Tuareg were wealthy. Animals were a capital resource that multiplied and produced income when pasture was plentiful. They enabled the Tuareg to “pay” their bouzous with milk, skins, and an occasional yearling, and to enjoy a life of leisure surprising for a nomadic people living in so harsh an environment.
Blacks seized in Tuareg raids had both more liberty and security than those sent to America. Tuareg and bouzou lived in the same camp, in similar shelters, and ate the same meals, often from the same pot. In many respects the bouzous were members of the Tuareg families. Atakor said, “I loved them all. Of course you love someone who works for you. Sometimes, though, they were naughty children and had to be beaten.” These beatings, however, usually consisted of only a few swats with a light stick.
An elaborate ritual discouraged harsh treatment of the bouzous and enabled them to change masters. When a bouzou was dissatisfied with his master, he chose a new one and cut an insignificant slit in the ear of one of his anmials. Responsible for his slave’s actions, the embarrassed and unwanted master then had to give the slave to the owner of the injured animal as compensation. A Tuareg master did not have an equal right. Involuntary manumission was prohibited, and it was a master’s duty to feed, clothe, and shelter a bouzou until he either died or ran away.
iii
During the nineteenth century, the Europeans who explored West Africa wove a schizophrenic myth around the Tuareg which was to influence the actions of European colonizers in the early years of the twentieth century and, later, those of European philanthropists. One part of this myth portrayed the Tuareg as cruel and treacherous primitives who signed treaties one minute and massacred the signers the next, a people never to be trusted. The second part of the European myth portrayed them more sympathetically, even romantically.
The first European explorer to reach Timbuctoo, Gordon Laing, was slain in 1826 by a Tuareg. His murderer, Sheikh Labeida, was rabid in his hatred of Christians, and acted with a religious fanaticism that was unusual among the Tuareg. As a sign of his contempt for infidels, Labeida held his nose while Laing’s possessions burned. Laing’s death was the first in a series of nineteenth-century atrocities that gave the Tuareg a reputation for treachery and barbarity.
(In 1910, eighty-four years later, a French army officer, Bonnel de Mézières, visited Timbuctoo and sought out the eighty-two-year-old nephew of Sheikh Labeida. This nephew said that he had been told by Labeida that “we burned his [Laing’s] cases and buried them because he had come to poison the land, and we held our noses as we burned them.” The nephew was able to direct de Mézières to a tree outside Timbuctoo under which, he said, Laing had been murdered and buried. De Mézières dug beneath the tree and uncovered charred bones which a French army doctor later identified as having belonged to a European adult. No evidence of Laing’s diaries was ever found; presumably, they were burned with the cases. The written records of the first European to reach Timbuctoo were lost, but the Tuareg histories had preserved an amazingly accurate account of his murder for almost a century.)
In 1828 a young French adventurer named René Caillié became the first European to visit Timbuctoo (now located in Mali) and return alive. In his widely read journals, he said, “The trade of Timbuctoo is considerably cramped by the Tooariks [Tuareg], a warlike nation who render the inhabitants of the town their tributaries.… They are cruel as they are warlike. Their nose is aquiline, their eyes large, their mouth finely formed, the face long and the forehead rather elevated. The expression of the countenance is however savage and barbarous.”
Caillié was particularly sympathetic to the blacks of Timbuctoo: “The Tooariks have terrified the negroes of their neighborhood into subjection, and they inflict upon them the most cruel depredations and exactions. Like the Arabs, they have fine horses which facilitate their marauding expeditions. The people exposed to their attacks stand in such awe of them that the appearance of three or four Tooariks is sufficient to strike terror into five or six villages.”
Although Caillié was probably correct about the exploitation of the inhabitants of Timbuctoo by the Tuareg, many of his other judgments were erroneous. However, since he was the first European to have visited and returned from Timbuctoo, his journals were the most important single source of European prejudices against the Tuareg.
The Tuareg reputation for treachery was renewed some fifty years later. In 1881 a column of ninety-seven men, including French engineers and soldiers, left Ouargla in southern Algeria under the command of Colonel Flatters. The purpose of the expedition was to explore possible routes for a trans-Saharan railway. A year later twelve men returned. The rest had been attacked and murdered or fed poisoned dates by hostile Tuareg. Some had died of thirst and been cannibalized by their comrades.
For decades this disaster convinced the French that, if their colonization of the Sahara and the sahel was to be successful, the Tuareg would have to be eliminated. They ignored the fact that Flatters had unwisely allied himself with a weak Tuareg confederation and was considered fair game when he entered their rivals’ territory.