The Shadow of the Sun

Salt and Gold

In Bamako I live in a guest house called the Centre d’Acceuil, run by Spanish nuns. The rooms are cheap — a bed, mosquito netting. The bad thing about the Centre d’Acceuil is that although there are ten rooms for rent, there is only one shower. Moreover, it is constantly occupied these days by a young Norwegian, who came here not realizing just how hot it gets in Bamako. The African interior is always white-hot. It is a plateau relentlessly bombarded by the rays of the sun, which appears to be suspended directly above the earth here: make one careless gesture, it seems, try leaving the shade, and you will go up in flames. For newcomers from Europe, there is also a psychological factor at work: they know they are in the depths of hell, far from the sea, from lands with a gentler climate, and this feeling of distance, of exile, of imprisonment, makes life here even harder for them to bear. The Norwegian, after several suffocating, sweltering days, decided to leave everything and return home. But he had to wait for the plane. And the only way he could survive until then, he concluded, was by never coming out from under the shower.

There is no question: the temperatures here during the dry season are overwhelming. The street where I live is dead still from early morning. People slump motionlessly against walls, in passageways, beneath entrance gates. They sprawl in the shade of eucalyptus and mimosa trees, beneath a great, spreading mango and a tall, flaming amaranthine bougainvillea. They sit on a long bench in front of the bar run by a Mauritanian, and on empty crates in front of the corner grocery shop. Despite having observed them all at length on several occasions, I have been unable to determine what exactly it is that they are doing. Perhaps that’s because they are not doing anything. They don’t even talk. They resemble people sitting for hours in a doctor’s waiting room. Although this is perhaps not the best comparison, because in the end the doctor will arrive. Here no one arrives. No one arrives, no one leaves. The air trembles, undulates, stirs restlessly, like over a kettle of boiling water.

One day a fellow countryman from Valencia, Jorge Esteban, arrived to stay with the sisters. He had a travel agency back home and was driving around West Africa collecting materials for a tourist brochure. Jorge was a cheerful, merry, energetic man, naturally convivial. He felt at home everywhere, at ease with everyone. He spent only one day with us. He paid no heed to the scorching sun; the heat only seemed to energize him. He unpacked a bag full of cameras, lenses, filters, rolls of film, and began walking around the street, chatting with people, joking, making various sorts of promises. That done, he placed his Canon on a tripod, took out a loud referee’s whistle, and blew it. I was looking out the window and couldn’t believe my eyes. Instantly, the street filled with people. In a matter of seconds they formed a large circle and began to dance. I don’t know where the children came from. They had empty cans, which they beat rhythmically. Everyone was keeping the rhythm, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. People woke up, the blood flowed again through their veins, they became animated. Their pleasure in this dance, their happiness in finding themselves alive again, was palpable. Something started to happen in this street, around them, within them. The walls of the houses moved, the shadows stirred. More and more people joined the ring of dancers, which grew, swelled, and accelerated. The crowd of onlookers was also dancing, the whole street, everyone. Colorful bou-bous, white djellabahs, blue turbans, all were swaying. There is no asphalt or pavement here, so billows of dust soon began to rise above the dancers, dark, thick, hot, choking, and these clouds, just like ones from a raging fire, drew more people still from the surrounding areas. Before long the entire neighborhood was shimmying, shaking, partying — right in the middle of the worst, most debilitating and unbearable noontime heat.

Partying? No, this was something different, something bigger, something loftier and more important. You had only to look at the faces of the dancers. They were attentive, listening intently to the loud rhythm the children beat on their tin cans, concentrating, so that the sliding of their feet, the swaying of their hips, the turns of their arms, and the bobbing of their heads corresponded to it. And they looked determined, decisive, alive to the significance of this moment in which they were able to express themselves, participate, prove their presence. Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed, and important. They existed. They created.

All the while, Jorge was photographing. He needed pictures in which the street of an African town makes merry and dances, beckons and invites. Finally, he grew weary, stopped shooting, and with a gesture of his hand thanked the dancers. They stopped, adjusted their clothing, wiped off sweat. They talked, exchanged comments, laughed. Then they started to disperse, seek out the shade, vanish inside houses. Once again the street reverted to a still, scorching emptiness.

I was in Bamako because I wanted to see the war with the Tuareg. The Tuareg are eternal wanderers. But can one really call them that? A wanderer is someone who roams the world searching for a place to call his own, a home, a country. The Tuareg has his home and his country, in which he has lived for a thousand years: the interior of the Sahara. His home is just different from ours. It has no walls or roof, no doors or windows. There are no fences or walls, nothing that limits or confines. The Tuareg despises whatever hems him in, strives to demolish every partition, destroy every barrier. His country is immeasurable — thousands upon thousands of kilometers of burning sand and rocks, an immense, treacherous, barren expanse, which everyone fears and tries to bypass. Its border is where the Sahara and the Sahel end and the green fields, villages, and houses of the sedentary societies hostile to the Tuareg begin.

Wars have been waged between them for centuries. For often the drought in the Sahara is so severe that all the wells vanish, and then the Tuareg must wander with their camels beyond the desert, to the green regions, toward the Niger River and Lake Chad, to water and feed their herds and also to find a little something to eat.

The sedentary Bantu peasants treat these visits as invasions, raids, acts of aggression, hecatombs. The hatred between them and the Tuareg is fierce, because the latter not only burn villages and steal livestock but also enslave the villagers. The Tuareg, who are light-skinned Berbers, consider the black Africans a low and abject race of wretched subhumans. These, in turn, hold the Tuareg to be bandits, parasites, and terrorists, and wish that the sands of the Sahara would swallow them up once and for all. The Bantu have fought off two colonialisms in this part of Africa: the external French one and the intra-African colonialism practiced by the Tuareg, which has existed here for centuries.

The two societies, the settled, agricultural Bantu people and the restless, fleet Tuareg, have always had divergent philosophies. The source of strength, of life, for the Bantu is the land — the domain of the ancestors. The Bantu bury their dead in their fields, often in close proximity to their houses, and even beneath the floors of the huts in which they live. In this way, the one who has died continues symbolically to participate in the existence of the living, watches over them, advises, intervenes, blesses, or metes out punishments. The tribal, familial land is not only a source of livelihood, but also a sacred thing, the place from which man sprung and to which he will return.

The Tuareg — a nomad, a man of open spaces and limitless horizons, the cavalryman and Cossack of the Sahara — has a different relation toward the ancestors. The one who died is erased from the memory of the living. The Tuareg bury their dead in the desert, in arbitarily chosen locations, making sure of one thing only: never to pass that way again.

Between the people of the Sahara and the sedentary tribes of the Sahel and the green savannah there had existed for centuries in this part of Africa a form of commerce known as silent trading. The inhabitants of the Sahel traded salt and received gold in return. This salt, a highly coveted and priceless commodity, especially in the tropics, was carried from the interior of the Sahara on the heads of the black slaves of the Tuareg and the Arabs, probably to the River Niger, where the transaction took place. “When the Negroes reach the river, they proceed as follows,” tells a fifteenth-century Venetian merchant, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto. “Each of them forms a little hillock out of the salt he brought, and marks it. Leaving the salty piles arranged in one straight line, they retreat a half day’s travel time in the direction from whence they came. Then, people from another Negro tribe arrive. They come on large boats, probably from nearby islands, disembark, and place next to each mound of salt a certain amount of gold. Then they, too, withdraw, leaving behind the gold and the salt. When they are gone, those who brought the salt return, and if they deem the amount of gold to be sufficient, they take it, leaving the salt; if not, they take neither the gold nor the salt, and go away once again. Then the other ones come back and take those piles of salt that have no gold next to them; next to the others they place more gold, if they consider it appropriate, or leave the salt. In this manner they conduct their commerce, never seeing one another and never speaking. This practice has gone on for a very long time already, and although the whole business sounds improbable, I assure you that it is true.”

I read this story on the bus on which I’m traveling from Bamako to Mopti. “Go to Mopti!” friends advised me. The idea is that from there I might be able to get to Timbuktu, which is already on the threshold of the Sahara, hence of Tuareg territory.

The Tuareg are perishing, their way of life is ending. In the past, a portion of them lived by robbing caravans, which these days are both infrequent and well armed. Most important, severe and constant droughts are pushing them out of the Sahara. They must go where there is water, but all those regions are already occupied. The Tuareg live in Mali, Algeria, Libya, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria, as well as a few other Saharan countries. But they do not consider themselves to be the citizens of any state, do not want to subordinate themselves to anyone else’s government, to any authority.

There are around a half million of them left, perhaps one million. No one has ever counted this mobile, mysterious, reclusive community. They live apart, secreted not only physically but also mentally in their impenetrable Sahara. The outside world holds no interest for them. It does not occur to them to explore the oceans, as the Vikings did, or to tour Europe or America. When a European traveler they had captured told them that he was headed for the Niger, they refused to believe him: “Why the Niger? Are there no rivers in this country?” Despite the fact that the French occupied the Sahara for more than half a century, the Tuareg had no desire to learn French, were interested neither in Descartes nor in Rousseau, in Balzac or Proust.

My neighbor on the bus, a merchant from Mopti called Diawara, does not like the Tuareg. He is afraid of them and pleased that in Mopti the troops have dealt with them successfully. “Dealt with them” means that some of the Tuareg were killed, and others chased so deep into the Sahara that they would soon die from lack of water. When we arrive (the bus trip lasts a whole day), Diawara will ask his cousin, one Mohamed Kone, to show me the traces of the Tuareg’s presence. Mopti is a great port on the Niger, and the Niger is one of the three largest rivers in Africa, after the Nile and the Congo. For two thousand years Europeans argued about which way the Niger flows, and into which lake, river, or sea it empties. The reason for these controversies was the strange course of the river, which originates not far from the western shores of Africa, in Guinea, flows deep into the continent, toward the heart of the Sahara, until suddenly, as if encountering in the great desert some insurmountable barrier, it turns in the opposite direction, south, and on the territory of present-day Nigeria, near Cameroon, empties into the Gulf of Guinea.

As seen from the high bank upon which Mopti is situated the Niger is a wide, dark brown, slowly flowing river. It is an extraordinary sight: all around, blazing hot desert, and then suddenly, in a stony channel, this immense expanse of water. Moreover, the Niger, in contrast to other Saharan rivers, never dries up, and this image of an eternally flowing stream amid limitless sands inspires such awe and devotion in people, that they regard the waters of the river as miraculous and holy.

Mohamed Kone turned out to be a young boy with no clearly defined occupation, a typical bayaye, living off whatever he could. He had a friend called Thiema Djenepo who owned a boat (he later gave me his business card — Thiema Djenepo, Piroguer, BP 76, Mopti, Mali) and took us, rowing with difficulty against the current, to a little island on which stood the scattered remnants of recently demolished mud houses: vestiges of a Tuareg attack on a village of Mali fishermen. “Regardez, mon frère,” Mohamed said to me in a familiar way. “Ce sont les activités criminelles des Tuaregs!” I asked him where would be the best place to meet them, in response to which Mohamed just laughed and looked at me with pity: to him, this was akin to my inquiring about how best to commit suicide.

The most difficult thing was getting from Mopti to Timbuktu. The road through the desert was closed by the army, for battles were still being fought somewhere in the interior. One could get closer to them, but this would take weeks. The only real option was a small Air Mali plane, which flew sporadically, sometimes once a week, sometimes once a month. In this part of the world, time has no measure, no reference points, shape, or tempo. It spreads, melts, and it is difficult to seize it, to give it form. I secured a seat by bribing the manager of the Mopti airport. One flies over the Sahara — moonlike, surreal, full of mysterious lines and signs. The desert is clearly telling us something, communicating something, but how can we understand it? What do these two straight lines mean, which appear suddenly in the sand and just as quickly vanish? And those circles, an entire chain of them, symmetrically positioned? And these zigzags, broken triangles, and rhomboids, followed by arched lines and twisting ones? Are they the traces of lost caravans? Of human settlements? Of campgrounds? But how could one possibly live on this sizzling pan? Along what road would one have traveled to arrive here? And which way would one flee?

We landed in Timbuktu straight into the muzzles of the antiaircraft guns guarding the runway. The town consists of clay houses built on sand. The clay and the sand are the same color, so the town looks like an organic part of the desert — a fragment of the Sahara shaped into rectangular blocks and elevated. The heat curdles the blood, paralyzes the body, stuns. I did not encounter a living soul in the narrow streets and back alleys. But I found a house with a plaque informing that here, from September 1853 until May 1854, lived Heinrich Barth. Barth was one of the greatest travelers in the world. For five years he journeyed alone through the Sahara, keeping a diary in which he described the desert. Several times, sick and pursued by bandits, he bade his life farewell. Dying of thirst, he would cut his veins and drink his own blood to survive. Eventually he returned to Europe, where no one appreciated the unique feat he had accomplished. Bitter, worn out by the hardships of his voyage, he died in 1865 at the age of forty-four, not understanding that the human imagination is incapable of traveling to the frontier he had crossed in the Sahara.