The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (31 page)

The site of the concert appeared on the horizon behind a cloud of haze, like a mirage. The drivers parked the caravan of 4x4s atop the highest dune around, from where we could take in the amazing feat of ingenuity before our eyes. The concert was in the middle of nowhere. There were no sources of electricity or running water nearby, either before or after the concert. The generators, the portable toilets, and the personal allocation of bottled water and goat mutton were short-lived luxuries meant to last only for the duration of the festival. I found it hard not to be awestruck and humbled by the whole endeavor: a group of rugged Tuareg with few resources and a limited budget had planned and were about to run a multicultural festival without sponsors, vendors, or the sale of alcohol.

The high dune provided an excellent vantage point from which Mahmoud proceeded to allot the tents already pitched down below. Walking in the Sahara desert is a treacherous affair. Its powdery sand and the constantly shape-changing peach-colored dunes give the place a dreamlike air . . . until you try to walk on it. Taking a step is hard work. You sink no matter how fast or how slowly you walk. And you sink fast. The soft sand swallows your feet, your ankles, your calves. It's like quicksand without the danger of drowning. My husband and I had to lean on each other as we laboriously made our way from our 4x4 to the tent. Exhausted from the journey, the sun, and the sand, we collapsed on our thin twin mattresses, the only items inside the tent.

We woke up to the voice of a little boy shouting in French, “The Tuareg are coming!” A full moon was already out and an orange dusk enveloped the desert when my husband and I took another short but arduous walk from our primitive tent site to the amphitheater, a flat valley of soft sand surrounded by sloping dunes.

The amphitheater filled up as Malians interspersed with Western faces. At first we couldn't see anything other than the cheering crowd of tourists and locals scattered across the open desert and a few Tuareg working the lights and sound system powered by electrical generators. Then I felt their presence before I could see them. The sand trembled under my feet and the dunes reverberated and changed form as the Tuareg approached. It was like the millions of wildebeest I had seen migrate across the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Like the sound of a cavalry charge. Like thunder. Then, in the distance, a cloud of dust billowed in a manmade dust devil.
The Tuareg are coming
. They arrived on the backs of camels running at full speed, the beasts' four feet coming off the ground simultaneously, making them look as though they were flying, pushing their way toward the arena in front of the stage.
The Tuareg are coming
. They had their faces and heads wrapped in dark indigo
cheche
; they rode barefoot, their legs wrapped around the colorful wooden pommels of their saddles. They raced each other—wielding their swords in the air, waving their daggers, shouting their Tamasheq war calls. They were terrifying and regal and handsome. Some of them dismounted their camels and sat on the sand; a few others stayed atop their animals and gathered to one side of the stage in an improvised camel-parking spot. We sat on the Saharan sand, among the Tuareg and under a savage sky bursting with stars. We tapped and cheered and clapped along with the music delivered by each of the artists. Their bluesy music filtered up into the night. I was high at the concert. High on Mali, on desert, on music.

Khaira Arby, Timbuktu's reigning queen of Malian soul, sang. It was easy to feel small where everything seemed bigger: the vastness of the desert, the infinity of that starry firmament, the stone-cold-sober crowd of Tuareg revelers, all under the spell of Khaira's supernatural, high-pitched voice. Maybe it was the fact that there were no seats and the audience was sitting on the bare sand; maybe it was the constant physical contact with the Tuareg around me, but by the time the concert was in full swing, I was filled with a borrowed, if not clichéd, sense of belonging like no other. We hummed to the same tunes, we exchanged pleasantries in French, we applauded enthusiastically the performers we liked best and we shouted
encore, encore
in unison. By midnight, a few of the revelers started to doze off. Sitting on the sand, they leaned on each other as the night wore on; a few propped their heads on a neighbor's shoulders, some were collapsed on one another's laps. After the closing act, the valley around the stage was dotted with Tuareg men sleeping in the fetal position, with nothing above them but yards of
cheche
shining under the full moon.

Six years later, in 2012, another loud rumble would be heard in northern Mali, not from a group of enthusiastic Tuareg marking the beginning of the Festival in the Desert, but from the Islamic Mujahideen, an al-Qaeda offshoot determined to impose a strict sharia law. My heart sank as CNN aired footage of these Islamists, armed with pickaxes and hoes, demolishing the cultural heritage of the fabled city so dear to my heart. I had to remind myself that these machine gun–wielding fighters were zealots, unlike the gentle Malians I had met in 2006 who were artists using music as their way to extricate themselves from their region's history of rebellion, hunger, isolation, and underdevelopment. The jihadists marched into small villages first, and later into bigger towns like Timbuktu. From my own living room I followed the destruction of Mali on TV: images of robed and turbaned men destroying half of Timbuktu's legendary Sufi mausoleums and shrines, along with sections of the town's grand mosques, Sidi Yahya, Djingareyber, and Sankore. I heard news broadcasters and friends alike use the words
Islamist, al-Qaeda
, and
Tuareg
interchangeably, committing a gross semantic error that tormented me beyond words.

By the time I opened my eyes the morning after the festival's opening, he was already inside my tent. I was still giddy from the concert. He sat on the floor cross-legged and hummed a high-pitched tune under his breath. For a moment I couldn't decide whether I was still asleep, though the Sahara sun was already out and hitting the sand hard, sending a blinding light pouring into the tent.

My husband wasn't lying next to me; he must have gone looking for water so we could brush our teeth. I pulled the sleeping bag up to my chin and stared at the man as he caressed the leather handle of his
tellak
—the short dagger Tuareg men keep in a sheath attached to the left forearm. Now I was fully awake.

“Bonjour, mon amie,”
he said, smiling. He had dark lips, teeth white like the flesh of a coconut, a prominent nose, and sad squinty eyes. I looked at the dagger, at this turbaned man sitting a mere foot from my mattress, back at the dagger, and at the cloth bag he carried across his chest. His brown fingers were stained with hues of blue dye. I waited for my fight-or-flight instinct to kick in, while outside the desert wind picked up a bit and a camel—presumably this man's—made whistling noises by grinding its teeth. Someone from another tent played traditional music.

“Ahh, Salif Keïta,” the man said, referring to the albino singer known as “the Golden Voice of Africa.” And I'll never know if it was the music, his camel fussing outside, or the cool January wind that soothed me, but I curled up inside my bag and watched him rock his head softly to the beats of Salif Keïta's song as he absentmindedly emptied the contents of his bag on a piece of cloth over the sand and proceeded to polish an array of Tuareg jewelry as if my tent were his workshop.

I dozed off.

The chaos that follows the coup d'état in Mali puts this war-ravaged country on the map. Everyone with a TV knows now where Mali is, including my Afrikaner neighbor who stops by for coffee and finds me reminiscing about my time there. I have pictures, notes, maps, routes, and a few pieces of Tuareg jewelry spread over my dining table. She finds me trying to reconcile the splendor of this African country before my eyes with the pictures of destruction diffused on the news. My neighbor can't understand why Mali is so dear to me. I tell her about the demolished historic buildings and the loss of ancient manuscripts. She gives me a sideways look that I can't decipher. So I tell her about the current human suffering in Mali and how much I fear for the fate of those Tuareg whose lives we shared in 2006.

I tell her about Oosman, a little boy who pestered us in Mopti as soon as we arrived in Mali until we agreed to use him as a guide. The three of us took a taxi from outside our modest hostel and drove downtown. Minutes into our ride, after my asking Oosman in rudimentary French what this or that building was, it became apparent that he had never been there before and was simply trying to make some money. We decided to rely on our Lonely Planet book, and instead of using Oosman as a guide we saw the trip as an opportunity to get to know him better, to let him be what he was: a Tuareg boy pretending to be a man. In one corner of the market—a vibrant shantytown of dusty stalls where salt slabs competed for space with dried fish, shea butter soap, secondhand clothes, goat meat, and calabash containers—we found the
cheche
section and we asked Oosman to choose one for himself. Immediately wrapping the long indigo-dyed cotton around his head, he looked uncannily mannish.

The following morning he was waiting for us outside our bedroom, sitting with legs spread wide apart on a rickety chair, both hands crossed over his lap. He was visibly upset. We owed him money, he said, for the services he had rendered the day before as a tour guide. Hadn't he been the best guide we could have asked for?

Oosman managed to catch a ride on one of the 4x4s from the convoy driving our group from Mopti to Timbuktu. At our first stop, I noticed the soles and tips of Oosman's shoes were in shreds, his cracked feet pelted with cram-cram desert barbs. I gave him an extra pair of trainers I had. In exchange he gave me one of his splendid little smiles. We were friends again. I also noticed he wasn't wearing the
cheche
.

“Where is your
cheche
?” I asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders. He didn't know.
“Je l'ai perdu.”
He had lost it.

“We'll get you another one in Timbuktu, OK?” He smiled coyly, as if he had known all along that we'd buy him a new
cheche
. He had been wearing the same pair of tattered red jeans since the day we arrived in Mopti. By the time we reached Timbuktu, Oosman was wearing my shoes, my trousers, and my husband's fleece jacket. An English woman in our group was wearing a brand-new
cheche
, which she said Oosman had sold her for a very good price.

My neighbor makes a
tsk-tsk
noise. Her husband was a cop in South Africa during the apartheid. She's seen too many Oosmans, she tells me. After an awkward silence I tell my neighbor about Baba Ali, the old Tuareg who invited us to his home for tea the first day in Mopti. We sat on thin mattresses laid on the dirt floor, exchanged pleasantries, and talked about family and country, the concert, and the ways tourism had changed his Tuareg culture. Then came teatime.

Following tradition, we had three cups of black tea: for the first cup, bitter as life, we were considered strangers. Fifteen minutes and many awkward silences later, Baba Ali added sugar to the teapot and poured the second cup, not quite as bitter as the first one but smooth, smooth as death, he explained—and with that one we became friends, true friends. Baba Ali's hospitality was heartfelt and sincere. He was extremely delighted that we had traveled from so far away just to have tea with him—a statement I was not about to debate. And so he added a good helping of sugar to the teapot and poured the third cup, sweet as love, and with this cup we joined his family, and for his family Baba Ali was prepared to do anything. “Even die,” he said with a grin that I couldn't quite understand.

He looked noble in his Tuareg regalia: the tagelmust, which he refused to call
cheche
—a word he considered too hip for his old age—concealed his entire head and face excluding a set of scrutinizing eyes and the top of his prominent nose. “I die for you, my friend, yes?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said, moved.

“And you?” he asked.

No
, I thought.
I like you, Baba Ali, I really do, but I would not die for you. I barely know you
. I was about to spill a courteous lie when Baba Ali finished his question. “And you? You buy nice silver from an old friend that die for you? Look, nice silver,” he said as he displayed before our eyes an array of cheap Tuareg knickknacks made out of tin for which our friend wanted every penny we had ever worked for. We refused politely. Baba Ali seemed offended or hurt, mostly offended, and he whispered something in Tamasheq that sounded like a desert curse. “I die for you. You buy silver from me. Not fair, but OK with this old man. No problem.”

“Typical,” my Afrikaner neighbor says, and the word comes out with enough sand for me to discover that she carries scars and grudges from the apartheid. So I tell her about Mohammed, the handsome teenager who traveled with us to the festival and who wanted to become the first Tuareg physician, but more than anything wanted to sell me his own stash of Tuareg jewelry, each piece carved with symbols whose meanings and histories varied with his mood. A little squiggle meant a desert dune one minute, and the next it meant the hump of a camel, or the Niger delta, or the vast sky, or the branches of a baobab. Mohammed was a relentless salesman and on Day 1—after he had offered me morning specials, afternoon bargains, and evening deals—I caved in and bought a pair of splendidly blue earrings. They were lapis lazuli. Or opal. Or malachite. Mohammed couldn't make up his mind. We settled for Very Nice Blue Tuareg Gem.

From then on, whenever we ran into each other, he greeted me with, “Necklace for you?”

“No, Mohammed, I'm not buying anything else from you,” I said every time, feeling slightly offended that this boy was not interested in me, only my money.