The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (32 page)

“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.

“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 imbalance 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.

The women, some of whom were still breastfeeding, modestly covered their heads with colorful scarves that matched their
pagne
, brought their tatty drums out of the tents, and with the babies still suckling their leathery breasts, performed a set of languid songs for us. Their high-pitched voices, tinged with a lamentation tone, seemed to travel far in the dry Sahel air. Their dissonant chants crawled slow and determined under my skin.

It wasn't a happy performance. There were no smiles or joyful interjections halfway through their songs as we had seen and heard onstage at the concert. No one ululated. This was a group of starving women who were called to perform while they were inside their tents fighting for survival. They all looked wounded beyond repair. I felt vulgar and intrusive. But there I was, sitting on the sand, in a dystopian world where it seemed every woman of reproductive age had already reproduced; malnourished children were raising their own malnourished children; scrawny camels had soft humps; and men looked haggard. And only then did I see Tamnana for what they really were: local artists, born in abject poverty, who each January emerged from raggedy tents to dance, make music, and turn dented pots and discarded tin cans into jewelry and trinkets to sell to tourists. They didn't beg and they didn't ask for handouts. Hungry, thirsty, and with basic needs unfulfilled, they went onstage to dance as if their lives depended on each move, which they did. That's who they were underneath their impressive headdresses and their majestic indigo boubous. What else did they have at the end of the night after performing with such vigor and fortitude but protruding ribs, famished livestock, and dreams of rain and rice?

Then again, maybe the secret of their resilience lies in the lack of rain and rice. Maybe, by some cruel happenstance, the Tuareg chose music in the face of drought and starvation. Maybe, when their future as an ethnic group was pushed too close to the edge, they picked a stage over a grave. Sing or die. Or die singing, as the women of Essakane seemed to be doing. And who better to host the most remote music festival in the world than the Tuareg, a nomadic group of people ethnically, geographically, and administratively dislocated from central Mali and the rest of the world?

Truth be told, the festival is not a modern phenomenon. The Blue Men of the Desert have had these traditional gatherings and celebrations of their way of life for centuries. Generation after generation, they have gathered annually to commemorate the end of the nomadic season, celebrate their culture, resolve conflicts, exchange ideas, and discuss challenges facing their traditions. The festival brought families and clans together, and under a spirit of mutual reliance and harmony they celebrated with traditional songs, dances, and demonstrations of manly prowess and female beauty. They gathered to arrange marriages, swap news, race camels, and make music. The difference between then and now is that now the festival has an international audience. Tinariwen was made known to the world in 2007 when they performed alongside the Rolling Stones at Slane Castle in Dublin. Festival guests such as Damon Albarn of Blur, Robert Plant, and Bono, among other Western artists, made the event so popular that its organizers had to put a cap on the number of non-African revelers at 500.

When the Islamist rebels took over northern Mali, they issued a ban on all music, effectively sealing the fate of the festival in Timbuktu—a devastating blow to a country where music is akin to wealth. The Islamists sent death threats to local musicians, forcing them into exile. Live music and cultural venues were shut down; musical instruments and recordings were set ablaze in public bonfires. The Festival in the Desert was relocated to Burkina Faso but later had to be postponed because of the security risk. In 2014, the concert remains in exile from Timbuktu.

The Tuareg haven't lost hope of hosting the festival in Essakane or Timbuktu again. To them, music is the thread that keeps the fabric of their history together. These musicians are storytellers, history-tellers, truth-tellers. They are present at weddings, birth ceremonies, and funerals. They are griots, and as such they perpetuate oral traditions of families and entire villages, conveying with their music what Malians—who are mostly illiterate—cannot always read or say in words.

When I think of Mali, not only do I see the powdery Sahara desert separating Essakane from Timbuktu, dusty children chanting
“Un Bic, donnez-moi un Bic,”
Baba Ali's dark fingers pouring three cups of tea, hungry women, and sly traders, among other memories, I also hear it: the
djembe
drums, the
kora
harps, the
ngoni
, the talking drum, the tales of the griots on- and offstage. I don't hear the savage sound of Kalashnikovs or the war cries of the jihadists. When I think of Timbuktu, I think of the Flame of Peace monument, erected in 1996 to memorialize the ceremonial burning of 3,000 weapons and to celebrate what was supposed to be the end of the last Tuareg rebellion. I see the memorial: white and blue arches and columns supporting the heavy flame of peace, seven steps leading up to the base of the monument where many of the old guns are embedded in cement.