Tuareg Read online

  Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa

  Tuareg

  To my father

  ‘Allah is Great. Blessed is Allah.’

  ‘It was a long time ago now. A time when I was young and my legs carried me over sand and stone for days at a time, without tiring, and I received news one day that my younger brother was ill. Although three days of travel stood between my jaima and his, the strength of my love for him was enough to overcome any apathy and I set off without trepidation, being, like I said, young, strong and fearless.

  Night was closing in on the second day of my journey, when I came across a cluster of high dunes, some half a day’s walk from the tomb of the holy man Omar Abraham. I scrambled up to the top of one to see if I could spot a settlement and somewhere I might take shelter, but I saw nothing and decided to stay put for the night, shielded from the wind.

  The moon must have been very high in the sky — lucky for me that Allah had wished it so on this particular night — when I was awoken by a blood-curdling scream and terrified, I curled up into a small ball of panic.

  Then the terrible screams started up once again, but this time they were followed by such a wailing and a moaning, that it felt like the howls of a soul suffering in hell had penetrated through to this very world.

  Soon after that I heard a scratching noise in the sand nearby, then the noise would stop and start up again further away, so that I was able to predict its whereabouts. This happened some five or six times over, whilst the heart-breaking sobs continued, and I recoiled, paralyzed and shaking with fear.

  But my troubles didn’t stop there, as a huge sighing sound suddenly filled the air and something or someone started to throw fistfuls of sand into my face. So begging forgiveness from my ancestors, and beside myself with fear, I jumped up and started to run as if Satan, the stoned demon himself, was on my tail. I didn’t stop running until the sun came up and I could no longer see any sign of those towering dunes.

  I arrived at my brother’s house, and praise be to Allah, he was sufficiently recovered to be able to listen to the story of my terrifying night. And whilst I was retelling the story by the warm glow of the fire, just as I am recounting it to you now, a neighbour told me what had happened, according to what his father had told him.

  And he said this:

  “Allah is great. Praise be to Allah. Many years ago there were two powerful families, the Zayed and the Atman. They hated each other vehemently and so many lives had been lost between the two families that you could have dyed all their clothes and livestock with the red from all their spilled blood. A young Atman had been the last victim of the feud and revenge hung heavy in the air.”

  And it was there, among those dunes where you slept, not far from the tomb of the holy man Omar Ibrahim, that the Zayed tribe were once settled. Only all the men in the camp had been killed and just a mother and child remained there, living peacefully, because even though the families loathed each other fiercely, to kill a woman was still considered a heinous crime.

  But one night their enemies appeared and after tying up the mother, who sobbed and wailed, they took the little one away to be buried alive in the dunes.

  Her ropes were strong, but it is well known that a mother’s love is stronger still, and the woman managed to break free. But when she got outside they had disappeared and she could see nothing more than a line of high dunes stretching out to infinity. So she took off, throwing herself from one dune to the next, moaning and crying out in the knowledge that her son would be suffocating at that very moment and that she was the only one that could save him. And suddenly dawn was upon her.”

  They say she continued like that, searching desperately for her son, for the rest of her days and that her madness was a gift from the merciful Allah, to ease her suffering and help her to forget the evil of man’s ways.

  The old man paused.

  ‘And no one knew what became of the poor woman and they say that her spirit still roams the dunes, not far from the tomb of the holy man Omar Ibrahim, still searching and lamenting her misfortunes. It was there that you slept without knowing it and there that you met with her.

  Blessed is Allah, the Merciful one, that he let you out safely and that you are here now, with us, by the warm glow of the fire. Blessed is Allah.’

  When he had finished his tale, the old man took a deep breath and turning to face the youngest in the group, those who were hearing the story for the very first time, said:

  ‘See how hate and struggle between families leads to nothing, nothing more than fear, madness and death. I can tell you one thing for certain and that is in all the years that I battled with my own men against our eternal enemies from the North, the Ibn-Aziz, I never saw anything that justified such treachery. In the end one pillaging is paid for with another and the deaths in each group had no price and only served to create a spate of new deaths. The jaimas were left empty of strong arms, and the children brought up without the sound of their father’s voice.’

  For a few minutes nobody spoke, out of respect, as the lessons of the story told by the ancient Suilem were absorbed and his listeners considered its message, all of them aware that the venerable man had sacrificed some hours of sleep for their benefit and was now weary.

  In the end it was Gazel, who had heard the tale a dozen times before, who signalled with a gesture of his hands that it was time for everyone to retire and go to sleep. Then he went off alone, as he did every night, to check that the livestock had been brought in and the slaves had finished their work; that his family was resting in peace and order prevailed over his small empire, made up of four camel-hair tents, half a dozen woven cane sheribas, a well, nine palm trees and a handful of goats and camels.

  Then, as he did every night, he slowly climbed to the top of the tall, solid dune that protected the settlement from the east winds, and by the light of the moon, looked out over the rest of his empire. This was his dominion, the desert that stretched out to infinity. Gazel Sayah ruled over this vast area of sand, rock, mountain and stony ground with absolute authority, being the only inmouchar to have settled there and owner of the only known water source in the region.

  He liked to sit there on top, to give thanks to Allah as he counted the thousand blessings that filled his thoughts: the beautiful family he had been given; the good health of his slaves; the wellbeing of his livestock; the fruit from the palm trees and the highest of all his fortunes, that of being born a nobleman amongst nobility in the powerful town of Kel-Talgimus, one of the veil people, the indomitable Imohag, or, as they were known to the rest of mankind, the Tuareg.

  There was nothing to the south, the east or the west that set a limit to the land under Gazel’s rule. Gazel “the Hunter” who had, over time, left the settlements behind him in order to set up camp in one of the desert’s furthest confines, where he could feel utterly alone with his wild animals. There he lived side by side with the roaming addax, that grazed on the plains for days at a time; the mouflons from high up in the remotest mountains that rose up between the seas of sand; wild donkeys, wild boar, gazelles, and never ending numbers of migratory birds. Gazel had fled the advances of civilization, the influences of invaders and their indiscriminate killing of the sand beasts and he was well known throughout the Sahara and all around, from Timbuktu to the banks of the Nile, for his generous hospitality. But while Gazel Sayah’s hospitality went unequalled, so did his wrath and he was equally well known for having stopped slave caravans and mad huntsmen who had dared to enter his territory, dead in their tracks.

  ‘My father taught me,’ he used to say, ‘never to kill more than one gazelle at a time, even if the herd was on the move and it would take another three days to find it again. I can easily go on a trip for three days again, he would say, but nobody c
an bring a gazelle that was killed in vain, back to life.’

  Gazel had seen how the “French” had killed off the antelopes from the north to extinction, and the mouflons in much of the Atlas, and the beautiful hamada addax that came from the other side of the great Sekia, which thousands of years ago used to be a mighty river. That was why he had chosen this stony corner of the plains, with its endless sand and inhospitable mountains, a fourteen-day walk from El-Akab, because only someone like him would dare to take on such an inhospitable land, in the most inhospitable of all deserts.

  The days when the Tuaregs were true warriors — ambushing caravans and attacking the French military with their war-like cries, sweeping the plains like fierce winds, pillaging and killing and in combat with anything that stood in their way — were long gone. They had been proud of their reputation as the “desert bandits” or “masters” of the Saharan sands, from south of the Atlas to the shores of the river Chad. But the fighting and wars of fratricide were long forgotten now, apart from in the distant memories of some of the older generations. The Imohag race was in decline, as the most valiant of its warriors chose to leave the desert and drive lorries for a “French” patron instead, or joined the regular army or sold candles and sandals to tourists in tie-dye t-shirts.

  On the day that his cousin Suleiman left the desert and went to live in the city to sell bricks, driving them around from one place to the next, day after day, covered in cement and whitewash, he knew that he to had to leave and establish himself as one of the last of the solitary Tuaregs.

  And it was there, high up on that same dune, his family below him, that he would sit every night and give thanks to Allah one thousand and one times and not once in all those years — so many now that he had lost track — had he regretted his decision.

  From the bits and pieces he picked up from passing travellers, it seemed to him that strange things were happening in the world. They brought with them tales of death and war, of rapid change that did not seem to be of any great benefit to anyone and he was happy not to have witnessed the events that they spoke of.

  One night, as he sat there, contemplating the stars that had so often guided him through the desert, he saw one he did not recognise, shining brilliantly and moving at a fast but steady, almost purposeful rate, unlike the reckless paths of errant shooting stars that would eventually fade away to nothing. For the first time in his life he had frozen with fear, unable to find in his memory or in the memories of his ancestors a tradition or legend that told of such a star, of one that followed the same path, night after night. They grew in number over the years, until together, they resembled a pack of racing hounds running riot through space and disturbing the ancient peace of the skies.

  He would never know the significance of these strange apparitions. Nor would the ancient Suilem, the father of nearly all his slaves and so old, that his grandfather had bought him, already a man, in Senegal.

  ‘The stars have never taken such strange paths through the sky, master,’ Gazel noted. ‘Never. This could mean that the end is nigh.’

  He had asked one traveller about them, but he had been unable to give him a straight answer. The second traveller he asked had said that it might have something to do with the “French.” But Gazel was not convinced, because even though he had heard rumours that the French were making significant advances in technology, he still could not believe they would be mad enough to start putting more stars into a sky that was already full of them.

  ‘It must be a divine sign,’ he said. ‘Allah is trying to tell us something. But what?’

  He tried to find the answer in the Koran, but the Koran did not mention shooting stars that followed paths of mathematical precision, so over time he just got used to their presence, but that is not to say that he forgot about them.

  In the clear air of the desert, in the darkness of a land where not a single light burned for hundreds of kilometers all around, the stars looked so close to the land that Gazel would sometimes stretch out his hands as if he was trying to touch the trembling lights that hovered just above him, with his own fingertips.

  He remained up there for a long while, alone with his thoughts, and then scrambled quickly down to take a last look at the livestock and the camp and to check for hungry hyenas or cunning jackals that might threaten his small world, before retiring to bed.

  At the door of his tent, the biggest and most comfortable in the encampment, he stopped and listened. If the wind had not started up, the silence would have been so intense that it hurt.

  Gazel loved this silence.

  Every day at dawn Suilem, the old man, or one of his grandsons would saddle up Gazel the inmouchar’s favourite camel and leave it at the entrance of their master’s tent.

  Every day at dawn the Targui would fetch his rifle, mount his white, long-legged mehari and head off to one of the four compass points in search of prey.

  Gazel loved his camel, as much as a man of the desert is capable of loving an animal and often depended on him with his life. When they were alone together he would chat to him out loud. He called him “R’Orab, the raven,” and made jokes about his snow-white colour, so close to the colour of the sandy landscape through which they travelled, that it often just melted into the background.

  There was not a faster or stronger mehari to be found on this side of Tamanrasset. A rich merchant, who was the owner of a caravan of over three hundred animals had once offered to exchange it for five of his choice, but Gazel had turned down his offer. Gazel knew that if anything were ever to happen to him on one of their solitary adventures, “R’Orab” would be the only camel in the world capable of carrying him back to his camp, even on the darkest of nights.

  Sometimes, overcome with tiredness and lulled by the animal’s swaying gait, he would arrive at the entrance to his tent fast asleep on its back and his family would take him down and put him into bed.

  The “French” were convinced that these camels were stupid, cruel and vindictive creatures that only responded to shouting and whipping. A real Imohag knew that a good desert camel, particularly the pure-blooded mehari, that was well cared for and well trained, could be as intelligent and faithful as a dog, but a thousand times more useful in that land of sand and wind.

  The French would treat the camels in the same way throughout the different seasons of the year, without understanding that in the rutting season these creatures became irritable and dangerous, especially if the heat intensified with the east winds. This was one reason the French had never made good horseman in the desert and why they had never managed to conquer the Tuareg, who, back in the days of battle and unrest, had always managed to defeat them, despite their larger numbers and more sophisticated weaponry.

  The French came to dominate the oases and the wells, and these scarce water sources became their strongholds, which they barricaded in with canons and machine guns, forcing the free and indomitable horsemen, the sons of the wind, to surrender to the enemy they had faced since the beginning of time:

  Thirst.

  But the French were not proud of having conquered the veil people, because in reality they had not conquered them through open warfare. Neither their black Senegalese men, nor their lorries or tanks were of much use to them in a desert that was still dominated by the Tuaregs and their meharis, from one end of it to the other.

  The Tuareg were few and far between, while the soldiers marched in from the cities or the colonies like clouds of locusts, until eventually the day came when neither a camel, man, woman or child could drink in the Sahara without permission from the French first.

  So, the Imohag, tired of watching their families dying, laid down their arms and from that point in history they became a people condemned to oblivion; a “nation” that no longer had any reason to exist since the very essence of their existence — war and freedom — had all but disappeared.

  There remained some families here and there, like Gazel’s family, lost in the desert’s confines, but they were no
longer made up of proud, tall, warriors, but men that raged internally in the knowledge that they would never be the feared veil people, masters of the sword or spear again.

  The Imohag, however, were still masters of the desert, from the hamada to the erg and up in the high, wind-battered mountains, since the real desert was not made up of the wells found scattered through it, but of the thousands of square kilometers that surrounded them. The French had never dared venture too far away from these water sources, nor did the Senegalese Askaris. Even the Bedouins, who despite their keen knowledge of the sands and stony plains, tended to follow the established routes and moved from one well to another, from village to village, fearful of the large and unknown territories that lay on either side of them.

  Only the Tuaregs and more specifically the solitary Tuaregs were fearless enough to take on the “lost lands”, which were nothing more than a white smudge on the map. They were places where the intense heat of midday would make your blood boil and where not even the hardiest of shrubs grew. Migratory birds even avoided those lands by flying around them, even if it meant adding thousands of kilometers on to their journeys.

  Gazel had only crossed that smudge, the so-called “lost land”, twice in his life. The first time as a challenge, when he had wanted to prove that he was a true descendent of the legendary Turki, and the second time, as a man, when he had wanted to prove to himself that he was still made of the same stuff as the Gazel who had risked his life as a young boy.

  Gazel was strangely drawn to that inferno of sun and heat, to that desolate and maddening furnace. It was a fascination that had started one night, many years previously when, sitting by the fireside, he had first heard the story of the “great caravan” and its seven hundred men and two thousand camels that were swallowed up by a “white smudge” and never seen again.

  It had been on its way to Gao in Tripolo and was considered one of the best caravans ever to have been organised by the rich Haussa merchants, guided by men with the highest knowledge of the desert. It carried with it, on the backs of carefully chosen meharis, a veritable fortune in marble, ebony, gold and precious stones.