The Sahara (6 page)

Although it is hard to talk about a “typical” Saharan town, partly because of a surfeit of clichés, many of them do share common characteristics. Apart from some source of water, heat and dust are the most obvious features. The heat - or cold - will vary according to the season and time of day: the dust is more consistent. Consistent too is the ubiquitous breezeblock architecture, the low-level buildings and the unplanned proliferation of power lines and cars. Inevitable links of geography and climate aside, oasis-towns in the Sahara are notable for their differences rather than their similarities.

For example, Timbuktu, a byword for isolation in the non-Saharan world, was for centuries renowned across the region as a major centre of trade and learning. Founded in the eleventh century, the town in Mali is today a Unesco World Heritage Site, whose mud brick mosques were said to have inspired and informed the architecture of Antoni Gaud!. The priceless collection of700,000 ancient scrolls and manuscripts kept here rightly make this remote, medium-sized town a place of pilgrimage for scholars and romantically inclined tourists alike.

By contrast, the town of Arlit, in neighbouring Niger, is ugly, industrial and far from romantic. Founded in 1969, the town currently has a population of about 80,000, but it is only really attractive to those working in the uranium mining business. That tourists will, eleven centuries from now, trek to Arlit to stare into vast holes gouged out in open pit mining seems unlikely, although one never can tell. Surrounded by shantytowns that house African labourers, Arlit’s fortunes and its population of foreign mining engineers rise and fall in line with world uranium prices. The town made international newspaper headlines in 2003 when western intelligence reports indicated that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from the area.

With a population just over half that of Arlit, the oasis of In Salah in Algeria looks in many ways like a “typical” large oasis, complete with a towering sand dune that each year moves approximately one foot closer to burying the town. Almost exactly in the middle of the Sahara’s north-south axis, with more than 200,000 date palms, In Salah was always an agricultural oasis, as well as being on a trade route. Africans and Arabs exchanged slaves and gold for European products here. Although the town sees small numbers of desert tourists, the majority of today’s European visitors come to the region for black gold. The centre of Algeria’s hugely important energy industry, In Salah finds itself sitting on top of some of the world’s biggest oil and gas fields, attracting hundreds of engineers and others involved in its extraction and processing.

On a much smaller scale than Arlit or In Salah, industry is present in many other, otherwise agricultural Saharan oasis-towns. Tessalit, an unremarkable town of a few thousand in the Adrar Mountains in northern Mali, has deposits of gypsum that have pushed the growth of a local plaster industry. Famous for dates, olives and Alexander the Great, Siwa, a town of 20,000 on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, is not the only oasis to host a water bottling plant, in this case taking un-carbonated Siwa Water to the tables of Cairenes who demand a purity not found in their stretch of the Nile. On the banks of the Nile in Sudan, Dongola, where Kitchener enjoyed a famous victory over the Mahdi’s forces in 1896, has also embraced engineering plants, even while it continues to be an important local centre of farming, both agrarian and livestock.

Goat market, Nouakchott

As far from Dongola as it is possible to get in Saharan terms, Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, is probably the desert’s largest city, with a population between 800,00 and two million, and host to the country’s sole university. Such a gap between high and low estimates is mainly due to the large migrant population that comes and goes, from the desert’s interior to the shores of the Atlantic. Since becoming the nation’s capital upon independence, when it was home to some 9,000, the city has grown massively, if not carefully. Today, any further growth in Nouakchott, a Berber name meaning “place of the winds”, faces a unique dual challenge. The sprawling city is hemmed in by both ocean and desert, the Atlantic offering a barrier to any westward expansion, while its eastern borders are steadily being overrun by advancing dunes, a problem that has attracted international attention with, as yet, no permanent solution.

Oasis-Towns

Once centres of trans-Saharan trade, many oasis-towns have been stuck in obscurity for centuries now with their inhabitants making what money they can through trading dates, olives and livestock with poorer oases in the area. The old town of Ghadames in Libya is one such place, and another Saharan town designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Its ingenious architecture consists of hundreds of whitewashed palm tree trunks, filled in with lime, stretching between the rows of similarly whitewashed houses that face each other, forming a series of dark, cool alleyways that give the impression that the town is actually underground. Hundreds of concrete houses were built by the government in the 1970s that, while better equipped to keep the desert sand out, were inevitably inferior to the old buildings when it came to keeping those inside cool.

As the last town in south-western Algeria before one enters Morocco and/or the Western Sahara, Tindouf enjoys an importance out of all proportion to its natural resources. Algeria’s 1977 census found the town’s population to number 6,000. A 2006 estimate puts it at 45,000. These swollen numbers are thanks to an influx of refugees from the Western Sahara who live in seemingly permanent camps, waiting for independence and surviving on aid and water, both of which are brought in by road to this otherwise desiccated spot on the map.

Ghadames

One of these camps, Smara, has its namesake town over the border, in that part of the Western Sahara that is either occupied or integral to Morocco depending on one’s position. Only founded in the mid-nineteenth century, and the sole city in former Spanish Sahara to be established by a local ruler, it has been sacked and almost completely destroyed in its short history. Once it gains independence, the Sahrawi government in exile has said that Smara will become the nation’s capital city. In the meantime, it has remained firmly in Moroccan hands since they overran and expelled Polisario forces from the city.

Like Smara, the remote oasis of Zouar in northern Chad has been variously besieged and occupied over the past four decades, by both Libyan forces and domestic rebel groups. Although far from the Chadian capital, Zouar’s remote location in the Tibesti Mountains, not so far from the Libyan border, means that this otherwise unimportant place not only has an airport but a strong military presence.

Although military considerations might prevent outsiders from visiting certain towns, it is not always the case. The city of Tamanrasset, in the Ahaggar region of Algeria, is one of the Sahara’s larger and better-known oases. It is also the centre of the four-nation Joint Military Staff Committee, whose members - Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and Niger - along with outside support, most notably from the US, are working to combat criminal gangs and terrorist activity in the region. The scale of the desert, combined with low population density, is what makes places like Tamanrasset so remote. It is also why illegal pursuits here are so hard to thwart, and why they are in turn so persistent. The French initially settled Tamanrasset, which they named Fort Laperrine, as a bulwark to protect the trans Saharan routes from banditry.

Long a favourite goal of adventurous tourists, Tamanrasset’s population of nearly 80,000 means that the city is large enough to survive even when numbers of foreign visitors are down. Atar in Mauritania, population 25,000, is likewise large enough and, as a district capital, important enough to survive without tourism, especially crucial given that events such as the Paris-Dakar Rally, which used to have a scheduled stopover here, seemed to contribute little cash to the local economy. For relatively nearby Chinguetti, founded in 777, and the smaller twelfth-century town of Ouadane, tourism has become a staple of the local economy. Unfortunately, tourist income is notoriously unpredictable, making the prospect of financial security and planning for growth as remote as the towns themselves.

There are numerous other Saharan settlements that have neither wonderful mud-brick architecture nor bewitching ruins to attract foreigners, and few have the natural resources of Arlit or In Salah, even where these prove to be a curse instead of a blessing. The majority are humdrum towns, lacking pretension or bustle but ideally offering their inhabitants a peaceful agricultural living, or even modest prosperity for those fortunate enough to run or own some small business such as the grocery shop, cafe or garage. Then again, there are any number of dusty, overlooked and ignored one-donkey towns that lack even these modest offerings. Lucky even to feature on the most detailed map, these hamlets in the Sahara are often literally nothing more than home to a hundred or fewer souls, where the physical horizons may be unlimited but opportunities are entirely absent. Yet none of these places is an unchanging entity. With almost universal access to motor vehicles, steadily improving roads, satellite television and, increasingly, internet connectivity, all oasis-towns are changing as much as the life of those who inhabit them. Perspectives change, and so too do expectations.

Not even in the desert is life frozen in some imaginary past. I remember certain oases without electricity only twenty years ago. Likewise, I recall being startled the first time I heard a mobile telephone ringing in the Great Sand Sea, as the shadow of progress spread reception into the wasteland. It is possible to sympathize with tourists who say they would prefer it if the oasis they are visiting were still lit only by candle-light and oil lamps, but it is telling that one hears such musings as they queue in the oasis’ internet cafe.

From Ancient Egypt to the Arab Invasion

“O Egypt, Egypt, there shall remain of thy religion but vague stories which posterity will refuse to believe, and words graven in stone recounting thy piety... The Divinity shall re-ascend into the heaven. And Egypt shall be a desert, widowed of men and gods.”

Hermes Trismegistus, or the Thrice Great; syncretic deity of Hermes and Thoth

Land Of The Dead

The period following the end of the Green Sahara brought suffering to all Egyptians, except those living along the Nile and its delta which avoided the enduring state of barrenness into which the vast majority of the Sahara had been plunged. To be sure, the farmers had to learn how to manage the annual inundation of the river, understanding that its clear flowing bounty was regular but not always predictable. But overall river-based farmers were clearly better off than those who found their soil becoming increasingly thin each year. Indeed, as the Sahara grew drier and non-Nilotic inhabitants learnt that things were literally greener along the river, swelling numbers moved to settle in the more fertile regions and this steep growth in population led directly to the emergence of the Egyptian Empire, an ancient superpower.

As the waters of the Nile were revered for their life-giving powers, so too the ancient Egyptians regarded the sun as worthy of veneration. Rising each morning, the sun’s daily path was a metaphor for the journey of life, not only that on earth but the more important journey of the soul after death. Before the Old Kingdom, Egyptians buried their dead in the desert, where the remains would be naturally mummified in the moistureless earth. Also during this period, bodies were interred with their backs to the desert, facing east so that even after burial the dead could witness and recall the daily rebirth that comes with the rising of the sun. The setting of the sun in the west, in the heart of the waterless desert, pointed towards the realm in which one’s soul would find its final dwelling for the afterlife. It is by no means a coincidence that all the great Egyptian tombs, whether the Old Kingdom Pyramids at Giza or the Valleys of the Kings and Queens of the New Kingdom, are on the western side of the Nile.