Every winter, from October to February, caravans of dromedaries leave Agadez to cross the Ténéré to the salt pans of Bilma, 600 kilometres away, laden with the millet that will be bartered there for salt and dates. But the Tuareg of Niger are no longer only caravaneers. Droughts have driven herders towards the town and towards the gardens of the Aïr, and Agadez also lives off another traffic: that of the migrants heading north to Libya. Between the bush and the town, everyone is looking for what being Tuareg still means.
The Tuareg regard the dromedary, which they call a camel, as “the most perfect animal in creation”.In the middle of nowhere, not even a tent: Asha’s caravan is getting ready where the fodder grows. It takes a week to cut the grass that will feed the camels for the whole crossing. Asha, the caravan leader, ties bales of about eighty kilos, one on each side to balance the animal, which will carry up to 250 kilos with the millet and the wood. Ropes are plaited from palm leaves to lead the animals or make muzzles, and the ameitals, odd goatskin bags, are filled with millet. Asha has been doing the caravan for twenty-five years, almost fifteen times. For him, a Tuareg, “if he doesn’t stay in the bush and doesn’t work with the camels any more, it’s not like a Tuareg”. Those in Agadez are Tuareg too, of course, but only a Tuareg can set off by day or by night to look for “a place in the bush, to sleep alone”. “A real Tuareg has a hard heart.” At the well, the animals are watered and water is taken for the eight days to the next oasis. The dromedary, which the Tuareg call a camel, can go three weeks without drinking; its flesh, its milk, its hair keep the men of the desert alive, and all wealth there is measured in camels.
To Asha, Christophe tells of his round-the-world journey by bicycle, two and a half years, and of his promise to come back one day and spend time with the nomads.
For the first two days, the caravan will make short stages, to check that the load does not hurt the animals and does not tilt.
Other cameleers, relatives or friends, will join Asha’s caravan to form a single one, of more than a hundred camels.In a camp less than ten kilometres away, the men have left for Agadez; the women remain, shy at the arrival of a stranger. The Tuareg are monogamous. In Tamasheq, getting married is called “pitching the tent”, and the tent belongs to the young woman; the man brings the animals, his only capital. If they divorce, he is the one who leaves: she keeps the children, the tent and part of the herd. For every meal, a single recipe, half a litre of water, a dash of camel’s milk, two handfuls of millet. Agadez, 80,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the Tuareg, the refuge of the Kanuri, the market of the Fulani, the last stop before the desert for lorry drivers and traffickers. Since the droughts of the 1980s, nomads have pitched their tents in the middle of town, because herds no longer survive in the bush; a few goats are kept, mats are woven for the market. Issouf Ag Maha, who turned down the post of Minister of Tourism, points out that “Tuareg” is a foreign word: they call themselves Kel Tamasheq, those who speak the language, or Kel Tagelmust, those who wear the turban. As for the Ishumars, guitars on their backs, whose songs carried the rebellion, they take their name from the word “chômeur”, unemployed.
Among the Tuareg, tradition has it that the visitor sleeps away from the camp; in the morning, it is the women who show him the track to Agadez.
In Tamasheq, Agadez means “meeting”; the town grew over time thanks to the caravans.
“The young people from the bush, they love it”: in the evening, radio blaring, people dance to the music of the Ishumars.
In Agadez, the settled nomads sometimes live in harsh conditions, but “the way of life has changed fairly little”.Agadez is the hub of every kind of trafficking: some seven hundred people pass through each week on their way to Europe. On the back of a pick-up, the migrants all look back, in silence. Those who drive them across the desert are Tuareg, who have travelled this caravan route for hundreds of years. One of them has been doing this work since 1994. The passage to Algeria or Libya costs 30,500 francs per person, fifty euros. “That’s what feeds us,” he says. “All of Agadez lives off it.” Then: “It’s poverty that brings all this.” It takes two months to reach the Mediterranean, and some will never get there. After two days on the track, Iferouane, an oasis in the Aïr, where herders settled two or three hundred years ago, when droughts decimated the herds. Onions, tomatoes and carrots are grown there, with barely two months of rain, July and August. Even today, those who live from herding alone end up settling and going back to the land. A gardener puts it his own way: the Tuareg “is like his camel. He doesn’t fear thirst much. He withstands hunger.”
The passage of migrants does not only keep Agadez alive: “I’ll tell you, even most of Niger”.
The migrants are wary of anyone who wants to travel part of the way with them; their own journey is long, hard, and made in very precarious conditions.
From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, the Ishumars sang of revolt against the authorities who oppressed them, pen in one hand, Kalashnikov in the other.At Fachi, the staging oasis where caravans take on water, there are salt pans too, but the caravaneers prefer the salt of Bilma, better, they say, for the camels. The caravan that sets off again numbers more than a hundred and fifty animals. It never stops, neither to eat nor to pray: departure around nine, halt around eleven at night, bed at one, up before five. Only twelve days from Agadez to Bilma. Tea opens each day, the youngest prepare the food and pound millet for hours on end; the sons of the two lead guides have already made the journey four and three times. In Bilma, millet is precious, nothing grows in soil this salty: with a woman from the village, Asha trades his millet for dates, one for two. The salt, for its part, is not dry, it would take seven days, and the caravan does not have time. In the salt pans stand salt loaves of thirty or thirty-five kilos, at five hundred francs each. The seller takes care not to say which is better, Bilma’s or Fachi’s: “It’s the person himself who says, me, I need this.” Abadji, who oversees the salt working in his quarter, shows how the salt rises from the ground with the water, which the sun evaporates.
The salt caravans are not one or two a year: they are true convoys, crossing paths in the Ténéré.
In the morning, a dish of millet, “and some salt already, and some sand”; after that, the moving caravan offers barely one chance to drink.
“In the middle of the desert, salt is a reason for the journey, a justification for the passing of time.”
The salt pans are two kilometres from the village; that is where trading takes place between the inhabitants and the caravaneers.
In the middle of the desert, you walk from one well to the next: towards water, then towards salt, “the salt of life”.“There are many stars that form a line from east to west.”Asha