Tuareg

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 can bring a gazelle that was killed in vain, back to life.’