The Changing Nomadic Life of the Berber Tribe: Tuareg | Our World

As the white man expanded his way across America and wiped out the Indians, so he tried to put his way down through the hot, awful country of desert Africa. In 1880, the French decided that they wanted to build a railway, 2,000 miles across the Sahara Desert, down through the country of the Tureg, the local natives. One day, the natives found an armed column marching down into their homeland. It was Colonel Flatters, trying to reconnoiter a route for the white man's railway The Tureg offered to guide him and took him deeper and deeper into the desert. There, they poisoned his water supply and poisoned his dates, persuaded him to split up his men and, when they had him alone, they killed him. Struggling back, his men became so desperate for food that they ended up eating each other. As a result, for 20 years no European dared set foot in Tureg country. The myth was born of the blue-veiled warriors of the desert, the bad man of many a midnight movie. It was not extraordinary military prowess that defeated Colonel Flatters. If Flatters had been left alone by the Tureg, the desert would very probably have got him anyway. 20 years later, a better prepared French force marched through without the Tureg daring to lift a finger against them. Protected by the French, the Tureg became camel caravans and for 50 years their way of life changed hardly at all. The family group that this film is about still camp where they've always camped, 10,000 feet up in the Hogar mountains at the foot of Tahat, the highest mountain in Algeria. It's almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer and slap in the centre of the Sahara desert. The group is a family, parents, children, grandparents, cousins, living in one of the most ungenerous landscapes on earth together with their black African former slaves, about 20 people in all. The camps still look almost exactly as they looked 50 years ago. The men are no less tall, the veils are no less blue. The true Tureg is not going to come galloping over a sand dune somewhere in reel two. But if the Tureg seem to have changed very little, the white man has changed a lot. 50 miles from this camp is Tamanrasset, once a French garrison, now a mecca for a special kind of tourist. They see in the Tureg way of life things that their own lives lack, a sense of community, a closeness to nature, tranquillity. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends. Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends. So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town? I'm counting on you Lord, please don't let me down. Prove that you love me and buy the next round. Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town? The changing pattern of Tureg life has been studied by an anthropologist, Jeremy Keenan. I've been studying these people now for about seven years, and in a camp like Sidi Mohamed's here, things still look much the same as they did 50 odd years ago. But in fact, the whole economic basis has changed. The environment in which the Tureg live offers them very little. There's pasture for the goats, but they've always had to bring in from outside of the area, most of their basic food products, millet, wheat and dates. The economic system that developed to keep these camps supplying the grain, it involved a form of slavery. It also involved the exploitation of the black gardeners. This system was tolerated by the French. But in 1962, with the new Algerian government, they said no, we're not tolerating this, we won't have it. And since that time, since 1962, the whole economic basis of these people, of these camps has more or less collapsed. Up until a few years ago, Sidi Mohamed kept the camp supplied with grain by going on caravans down into Niger, 500, 600 miles away, carrying salt and trading it, bartering it for millet. But now, what happens is that Sidi keeps the camp supplied with grain by buying it in Tamaracid. And the money to do this comes from the leather junk that is made in the camp by his wife and other women and sold to tourists at a pretty exorbitant price. It's a pretty uncertain sort of business. Every morning while we were there, Tahe used to go out from Sidi Mohamed's camp to get what little milk she could from the goats. Tahe is descended from slaves that the Touaregs brought back from the south or captured from slave caravans as they trekked across the desert on their way to the slave ports on the coast. Since Algerian independence in 1962, the slaves have been free. Most of them have left the camps to work in the gardens or on the road. But some of the women have stayed, living as they always have done. It was hard enough for us to try and talk to them at all. But to try and talk to them about things in our kind of concepts, like slavery and freedom, is hopeless. They see things in terms of practical and economic reality. Where could I go to? Who would look after me? Who would feed me? Sometimes, when I sit here with Sidi, it all seems so strange. We know that this way of life is rapidly disappearing. That's why we've been given the money to make this film. To put it crudely, to sit and look at the last, perhaps, traces of nomadic life in this region. But Sidi doesn't see it that way. He sees it in terms of a day-to-day problem of how he can get grain up from Tamanrasset, how he can provide for his family next month. He certainly has no conception of this way of life coming to an end. We have this notion of the Tuareg being great warriors. In fact, it was this particular group here who had the last go at the French. Just over the hill here, only a couple of miles away. And Takawelt, the old slave, she can remember the details of it. She laughs at how she remembers the stragglers, the French stragglers who walked over the hills here and had to eat tahale. That's a herb, like a camel. But what really happened? The French column was more or less wiped out. About 20 of them were killed. The Tuareg lost 8 to 10 men. But what were we doing? It was 1917. At the Somme and Verdun, we were dying like flies. When you first look at a society like this, and it may look fairly free and fairly easy, it's very difficult to see and understand the social complexities of it. Take, for example, when a visitor drops in. He may be related to you in more than one way, by blood and by marriage. He may be not only your cousin, but also your brother-in-law. Now, the behavior with relationships is fairly institutionalized. It's formal. For example, with a cousin, one normally holds a relationship that involves quite a bit of joking. On the other hand, with a brother-in-law, behavior is expected to show a certain degree of respect, formality. So, if you are a blood cousin and a brother-in-law at the same time, which form of behavior are you going to adopt? The Touareg use the position of their veils as a symbol of social status, so that when two people meet, they adjust or move the veil into a different position to symbolize what relationship, what form of behavior they are adopting. When someone comes to visit, you always have the same little ceremony. You always have tea. Not to quench thirst, but to provide a formal social situation, a ritual in which a certain amount of fencing, a certain amount of feeling out can take place. The actual tea-making ceremony itself is a highly ritualized process. It is always done by a man. There are always three glasses, never two, never four. And into the third glass, a certain herb is always added to ward off the kelesuf, the evil spirits. I can remember when I first entered this country alone, I was a complete stranger. I had a certain fear of becoming lost in this landscape, of possibly even dying of thirst. But to these people, to them, it's home. The mountains, for example, each one has a name. It's male or female. They marry, they divorce, they move away. It's in their mythology. The land itself reflects the social order. And if one looks around in these rocks, there are several hundred types of plant, which can be used for medicinal purposes, nutritional purposes, and of course, pasture. Every two or three days, the goat herds are taken down to the waterholes to drink. But the Tureg rarely drink this surface water. They dig holes or wells in the valley floor, partly because it's cleaner. But also, there's the fear of the kelesuf, the evil spirits that live in the waterholes. The problem that the Tureg themselves see most clearly is that of drought. For 10 years, there has been increasing drought. And for the last two years, there's been no rainfall whatsoever. All of his life, Sidi Mohamed has been dependent on camels. He's used camels on his successive caravans, 500 miles south to Niger, to bring that millet to the camp. But this year alone, through drought, he has lost all 17 camels that he owned. What is happening now is that the pasture is so bad, that the camps are having to move more and more frequently just to keep the goats alive. Of course, in the past, there was drought. This is no new thing to the Tureg. But in the past, one just died. Now, there are alternatives. You can leave the camps, leave the mountains. You can just go. As you come down out of the mountains into the valleys, some soil begins, irrigated by man-made ponds and channels. It was here that Sidi Mohamed used to have his gardens. Until independence in 62, the Tureg, like Sidi Mohamed, had a system whereby the fertile valleys of their land were cultivated on a contract basis by Haratins, Black African gardeners. Unlike the slaves, the Haratins were technically free, but the contract system meant that the Tureg got at least four-fifths of what the Haratins produced. In 1951, a French medical report said that one in five of the Haratins was dying directly of starvation. At independence, the Algerian government said that no such system was going to operate in their country and gave the land to whoever worked it. It was the end of one of Sidi Mohamed's chief sources of food. We asked him to come down with us to his old gardens, but he wouldn't. Feeling between his generation of Tureg and the Haratins is not exactly cordial, but some of the younger Tureg are now just beginning to work the land alongside the Haratins and the ex-slaves. The young Tureg who took us to the camp, Sidi Mohamed's cousin Elwafid, has more or less left the hills, and now he has a house in the village where Sidi Mohamed used to have his garden. To irrigate the land which they used to contract out to the Haratins, the Tureg made their slaves dig foggeras, underground aqueducts sometimes running two or three miles. Ten years after independence, Elwafid has swallowed his pride and now maintains the foggera himself. When I first came here, just after independence, it looked as if the Tureg might have tried some sort of revolt against the changes that were being made. But it didn't happen. There was a little incident, Khabte. An old man got involved in a skirmish along with five of his friends. They thought they could reclaim their slaves. They drew their swords and one of them was shot in the foot. But it fizzled out. For someone like Sidi Mohamed, it would be quite inconceivable for him to work in the foggeras or in the gardens like this. A job that only a few years ago was reserved for the Haratins, black cultivators, the most menial form of work. But now the younger generation, men like Elwafid, are prepared to do this. They have taken on the roles, the jobs, that only a few years ago were done by what they refer to as the blacks. But even though the cultivation of gardens is a tremendous change in attitude for Turegs such as Elwafid, he himself realises that in economic terms, the garden is not enough to support his family. And he spends much of his time looking for means, opportunities to earn a bit of money, such as by working as a guide with tourists or joining a labour gang in Tamanrasset. This village here of Elwafid's, Hirafuk, it doesn't work. There's a brand new pump, it doesn't operate. There's the cooperative land with an irrigation channel, it's dry. There's a schoolhouse, it hasn't seen a teacher for two years. And when one asks Elwafid why these things don't work, he merely says it's the government's fault. But it's not the government's fault. One can't expect these people to move out of their traditional way of life in the mountain camps just like that and fit in with a completely new social and political organisational structure which a cooperative system demands. One morning, Elwafid came and told us that a child had died and that they were going to bury him. The longer I've stayed with these people, the more I've realised that one is not one of them. Their culture, their values are different. And inevitably, one finishes by, in a sense, using them. One writes academic monographs, books, makes films. This morning, a young boy died. It was a funeral. And we were quite pleased that something had happened, an event, an incident. And we filmed it. But why did we film it? To show how Turek buried their dead? Or perhaps because on television, a burial, a funeral, is perhaps interesting, exciting, moving, even entertaining. Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar. Assalamu alaikum. When I hear an anthropologist or anybody saying that I am one of the tribe, I is my blood brother, and this sort of nonsense, my first reaction is bullshit. It's when you don't understand their values and beliefs and you see them in their material way of life, cooking their bread in the ground, things that we in our civilised life sometimes envy, the peace and the quiet. It looks very simple. It looks very nice. It looks very pretty. What are they doing when they're sitting around? They're meditating. They're contemplating problems. Problems which to you and I, we probably haven't even considered. Where to get water from? Where to get pasture? Whether to go into Taman Ras if they can get transport with the possibility of buying, darkness hate these words, dried tomatoes or something. One can play with their environment. But, I mean, could you and I do it forever? Hey! About eight miles from Sidi Mohamed's camp, the Algerian government is building a rest house for tourists. It's here that the Touareg have real contact with the outside world. It was here that we found Elwafi earning some money making the tea. Some people get very sentimental about change, but I don't really. It's, one can think of it as being inevitable. But when I came up here this time, I felt quite sad to see this, to see Touareg building this bloody great edifice of a tourist rest place. These people were the great warlords of the Sahara. And when they enter our civilization, through this building, they enter it as navvies. If they go on building these hotels, which seems inevitable, and the tourists come here, at the present rate of progress, there won't be any Touareg left for the people in the hotels to see anyhow. In Tamanrasset, the government has built a new boarding school, where nomad children are encouraged to come and live. Many parents think of this building almost as a hotel, where their children will be well clothed, well fed. It's one less mouth to feed in the camp. But now there's a distinct change in attitude, and some parents can see the practical advantages. Monsieur Laporte, the man who runs it, is very conscious of what he is trying to do here. His attitude is that the Touareg cannot escape the 20th century. What he is trying to do for these children is to give them the opportunity to learn how to cope with it. Laporte is very much aware of the problems facing six-year-old boys who've left the camps for the first time. The fear they have, the shock, on being confronted with double-tiered bunks, with showers, with radiators, taps, the glass in the windows, things they've never seen before, and the stairs. What are stairs? Are there kelesufa? These children, on their very doorstep is the 20th century. They have to learn about trucks, pumps, irrigation, shops, money. Elwafil once said to me that he would like his children to come here for five years to learn French and Arabic and so on, so that they could get a better chance to earn money. But he also thinks that after that, one day they will return to the camp. As we left, Sidi Mohamed was leaving too, with Moussa, his cousin, on the great journey south to fetch more camels. It's a journey that he's made many times before, but this was the first time that he hadn't a camel left alive to go on. We took them to Taman Rasid to try and get a lift south on a truck. Sidi Mohamed and his generation were not uneducated. They were taught by their parents all about camels, about pasture, the hundreds of different types of herbs. They knew everything about the environment in which they had to cope. The camel's finished. It has no function. It's really fit for nothing more than the slaughterhouse. In Taman Rasid, Sidi Mohamed found a truck and paid the driver to take him south. He comes back with camels. What will be the economic, the financial gain? If the drought continues, the pasture remains as it is, they too will probably die like the 17 that he's already lost this year. But why does he go? It gives him a certain prestige. It's something that he's always done. And it's what he knows how to do.