South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara. Justin Marozzi
al Wahab walked at the head of the caravan, leading the five camels roped together. I brought up the rear, watching the five great bottoms – three white, one brown, one beige – swaying regularly beneath their awkward-looking loads. Ned wore a Moroccan porkpie hat that cut quite a dash but completely failed to protect either his face or neck from the mid-morning glare. When his nose had been burnt red, he exchanged the hat for the more practical cotton shish, the best protection against the desert sun. Abd al Wahab was already wearing his tagilmus. For the next two weeks he would rarely be seen without it, day or night.
For centuries, his ancestors had derived their living from escorting caravans through the desert. Merchants had been ‘encouraged’ to retain guides or armed guards for the journey through areas under Touareg control. Charges were based on the estimated value of the goods in transit and the supposed wealth of the owners. Those caravans which did not co-operate ran the very real risk of being plundered by the same men who had offered themselves as escorts. This payment might be in addition to the fees levied by tribal chiefs mentioned by Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century traveller and diplomat from Granada. ‘If any carouan or multitude of merchants will passe those deserts, they are bound to pay certaine custome vnto the prince of the said people, namely, for euery camels load a peece of cloth woorth a ducate,’ he noted. The Touareg supplemented these earnings by raiding neighbouring territories for booty, livestock and slaves, trading salt with merchants from the north, and maintaining herds of camels, sheep and goats.
Richardson, who was among the first Europeans to come into contact with the Azger Touareg, or ‘Touarick’ as he called them, was not impressed by their manners. They showed, he thought, ‘an excessive arrogance in their manners. They look upon the Ghadamsee people with great disdain, considering them as so many sheep which they are to protect from the wolves of The Sahara.’ What struck Lyon most about the Touareg was what he regarded as their extraordinary lack of personal hygiene. ‘No people have more aversion to washing than the Tuarick generally have,’ he sniffed.
Many attempts were made by us to discover the reason why they kept themselves in such a dirty state; but to all our inquiries we obtained the same answers: ‘God never intended that man should injure his health, if he could avoid it: water having been given to man to drink, and cook with, it does not agree with the skin of a Tuarick, who always falls sick after much washing.’
Richardson’s attempts to establish their historical origins met with little success. One Ghadamsi told him the Touareg were ‘formerly demons’, another that they ‘sprang out from the ground’. He cited one scholarly opinion that they formed one portion of the tribes expelled from Palestine by Joshua. After their first rendezvous at Oujlah, near the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, they then dispersed south and west to people these arid regions.
The Azger Touareg, who have long enjoyed a reputation for courage and derring-do, are regarded by some scholars as the purest of the Touareg. They were known to Leo as the Lemta, one of the four divisions of the Muleththemin (People of the veil), and occupied the desert and steppe between Air and Tibesti, from Ouargla and Ghadames in the north to Kano in the south, an area that encompassed Ghat and western Fezzan in modern Libya. Over the centuries the Touareg drifted south-west under pressure, first from the east and later, with the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, the north. The southern portion of Lemta territory, which reached Lake Chad, as well as the Kawar road and the steppe north of Chad, was lost to the Azger Touareg as the Kanuri and Tubbu tribes swept across from the east. This ethnic pressure on their eastern borders forced the Touareg to look elsewhere for their expansion. Some moved to Air, others to Tademekka.
The exact origin of the Touareg is probably unfathomable. It may be, as one historian surmised, that their claim to have reached Africa during the Himyaritic migration from the east coast of the Red Sea, is no more than an attempt to root themselves firmly in the history of Arabia and thereby strengthen their links with the Prophet. This might be compared with the scattered evidence that the Touareg were once Christian. The symbol of the cross features widely among Touareg accessories. Swords, shields, spoons and ornamental strips around doors all bear the cross, as does the Touareg saddle. The latter, in particular, is worth comment since it patently has no practical use. Watching Abd al Wahab swing his legs awkwardly over the crucifix-like fork protruding from the saddle in his flowing jalabiya, while twisting his camel’s upper lip to ensure it remained kneeling as he mounted, confirmed that. Certain words in the Touareg’s Temajegh language also suggest a contact with Christianity. Mesi for God; anjelous for angel; arora for dawn (from the Latin aurora). The German traveller Dr Henry Barth, who accompanied Richardson on the latter’s second expedition to the African interior in 1849, thought the word Touareg came from the Arabic tereku dinihum, meaning ‘they changed their religion’.
The Touareg’s use of the veil has also baffled scholars for years. The confusion stems from the curious anomaly that the classical authors never referred to the veil when writing about the ancestors of the Touareg. It has to wait until the Arab writers for recognition. ‘They that will seeme to be accounted of the better sort, couer their heads … with a peece of blacke cloth,’ wrote Leo, ‘part whereof, like a vizard or maske, reacheth downe ouer their faces, couering all their countenance except their eies; and this is their daily kinde of attire.’
Sociologists and historians have agonized over its significance. If, for example, it is simply to protect against the sun, why is it then that only the men wear the tagilmus and Touareg women remain unveiled? Whatever the answer, the veil has remained a defining, some would say romanticizing, symbol of the Touareg. ‘Almost all Tuareg, unless they have become denationalised, would as soon walk unveiled as an Englishman would walk down Bond Street with his trousers falling down,’ observed Francis Rodd, author of People of the Veil, the seminal study of the Touareg, in 1926. The slit left for the eyes and part of the nose was no wider than an inch, Rodd observed, and sometimes less. To judge by Abd al Wahab, such strict sartorial standards have slipped somewhat and it is no longer the heinous offence it once was for a Touareg to let another man see his mouth. The Touareg used to lift up the lower part of the veil to eat but would cover their mouth with their hand as they did so. Abd al Wahab, a gentle and well-mannered man in his early forties, was not so prudish.
We had walked for three or four hours on our first day when Abd al Wahab suggested we stop for lunch. Here, in a small patch of pasturage, we received our first ominous insight into what a camel trek involved. All five camels first had to be couched and unloaded, a slow and awkward process for the inexperienced. To prevent them escaping, they then had to be hobbled. To us, this looked a formidably difficult and dangerous undertaking. With one hand holding the head-rope, Abd al Wahab crouched down alongside the two colossal forelegs and plaited an already doubled length of rope about a foot and a half long around the ankles. A large knot in one end fitted neatly through a loop at the other, and the hobble was complete. He then loosened the knot that kept the mouth-rope firmly attached, the camel happily lowering his head to help get rid of this undignified halter. With a firm slap on the rump the animal was encouraged to go off to feed, a stimulus that was rarely necessary. He was already making a beeline for the nearest morsel of unappetizing-looking scrub. Trailing thick twines of frothy saliva, the head-rope was thrown to the ground and the whole process repeated on the next camel. Hobbling the camels enabled them to move about grazing without, in theory, wandering too far. The scope for disaster – such as a swift hoof in the head – seemed huge. Not the least of the difficulties was getting the camel to stand still while the hobble was tied. Every time Ned or I approached one, he would shy away with a flustered flick of the head. Abd al Wahab would not let us attempt it for now. ‘The camels do not know you yet and they are frightened,’ he said. ‘They have to become familiar with you first. You must wait for a few days.’
The sun was fierce and the shade elusive as we fell upon our first lunch of tuna fish sandwiches. I watched the camels receding in the distance, moving ever onwards to the next patch of food. I began to think we had bought fine specimens, for in no way were they ugly animals, as many people suppose camels to be. Perhaps ours was an unusually vain caravan, but together they formed an extremely handsome group. When not hobbled they walked proudly with carefully placed steps, always minutely aware of the slightest obstruction on the ground. Even the darkest and least elegant of