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Photo credit, Getty/Anthony Ham
As the sun approaches the horizon, before the last call to prayer of the day, Azima Ag Mohamed Ali begins his night walk through the sandy streets of Timbuktu, Mali.
Along the way, a first friend, then a second, start walking by his side.
The greetings continue long after the friends have met, with gentle handshakes moving closer and further apart as each inquires, again and again, about the health of their friends and family.
These exchanges continued in conversation, as calmly as their rhythm. Dressed in voluminous indigo robes, they cross the streets of Timbuktu and continue into the sand dunes, just beyond the western outskirts of the city. Finally freed from the city, they sat in the sand and brewed a cup of tea as the heat of the day blew away. “The first tea is always strong as death,” says Ag Mohamed Ali. “The second is sweet as life. And the third,” he smiles, “is sweet as love. You have to drink all three.”
Like many Tuaregs, the once nomadic people of the Sahara Desert, Ag Mohamed Ali was born in the desert, far beyond Timbuktu. His birth certificate indicates he was born in 1970, but this is an estimate used only for official records. No one is really sure. “I think I’m much older than that,” he says.
As a child, in the Sahara, danger was never far from a big sandstorm: “One day, when I was a little boy, I went to fetch water on my camel. On the way to the back to camp, there was a sandstorm,” he said. “The sky was black and I couldn’t even see my hand. There was no warning, maybe five minutes at most. I sat and waited for the storm to pass. It lasted about three hours. Then I went back to the camp. But then we had to go get my dad because he was looking for me.”
Ag Mohamed Ali was a teenager when he first saw the city that would become his home. “I couldn’t believe the lights!” he remembers. His family members still lead a semi-nomadic existence in the desert. But as an adult, drought and the need to earn a living led Ag Mohamed Ali to Timbuktu, where he set up shop as a guide for tourists wanting to experience the Sahara.
His heart remains in the desert even when he has to be in town. He refuses to have a landline for fear of depending on it and not being able to leave it. When he runs out of customers, he escapes to the desert, where he spends months camping, drinking tea with his friends, and sleeping under the stars. When he has to be in town, the nightly foray into the dunes just outside of town is his escape.
Traveling between the desert and the city, Ag Mohamed Ali crosses geographical spaces and crosses the ages, moving between an era of ancient desert traditions and the demands of modern life. Before tourists stopped coming to the Sahara, he was a tour guide, but among his own people he remains a keeper of traditions and a storyteller. And passing on these stories has become an obsession.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Now a dusty, ramshackle city, Timbuktu once stood at the confluence of some of Africa’s most lucrative trade routes.
“My children were born in the desert, as is our custom,” he says. “We live in Timbuktu and I want them to go to school, not like me.” Ag Mohamed Ali can speak seven languages although he never learned to read or write. “But one day I will also take them to the desert for a long time, so that they learn about the desert and know it well, so that they do not lose the connection.” It has been almost ten years since Ag Mohamed Ali n couldn’t show the beauty of the region to travelers. Rebellions and conflicts across the Sahel and Sahara have halted the flow of tourists, causing great hardship for desert peoples, especially guides like Ag Mohamed Ali. His stories resonate today like echoes of the prosperous period of Saharan travel. Even faced with such difficulties, Ag Mohamed Ali looks forward to the day when travelers can return. For Ag Mohamed Ali and his children, the Sahara and Timbuktu are their home. To the outside world, these places represent the confines of the known world.
In the Middle Ages, Timbuktu lay at the confluence of some of Africa’s most lucrative trade routes. This is where the great salt caravans from the Sahara met the trade that took place along the Niger River. Salt, gold, ivory and European luxuries like linen, perfumes and glass all passed through a city that was, at the time, one of the wealthiest on the planet. In the 16th century, Timbuktu had more inhabitants – 100,000 – than London. The city had nearly 200 schools and a university that attracted scholars from as far away as Granada and Baghdad. It was known for its libraries containing invaluable manuscripts. Ag Mohamed Ali introduced travelers to the secrets of Timbuktu. He took them to the private family libraries which still contained manuscripts from Timbuktu’s golden age – biographies of the Prophet Muhammad on pages of gold leaf and scientific treatises by the great Islamic scholars of the time. He showed them the Dyingerey Ber Mosque, where no one has dared open an ancient palm-wood door since the 12th century; when the door opens, a local legend warns that evil will escape into the world. By sharing Timbuktu’s stories with visitors, Ag Mohamed Ali came to understand the outside world’s obsession with the city. He watched tourists trying to reconcile Timbuktu’s fabled past with modern sandy streets and dilapidated mud dwellings. He took them to markets where camels still arrived with slabs of salt from the deep Saharan mines of Taoudenni. And he rushed them to shelter as the harmattan, a red desert wind, turned the sky dark in a blizzard of sand.
Photo credit, Getty Images
Now a dusty, ramshackle city, Timbuktu once stood at the confluence of some of Africa’s most lucrative trade routes.
As a guide, Ag Mohamed Ali made friends from all over the world, and he visited some of them in Europe. For him it was a foreign world, just as Timbuktu is for many people around the world. “The first time I went to Europe, he said, and saw water lying on the ground, I thought those people were crazy. And everything was moving at an unthinkable speed in the Sahara “In the desert, we have endless time but no water,” he said. “In Europe, you have plenty of water but no time.”
And yet, even so far from the desert, Ag Mohamed Ali found a connection: “The first time I saw the ocean in Barcelona, I cried because it’s like the desert. You can’t see the end.”
Ag Mohamed Ali’s travels also helped him understand the allure of Timbuktu, as Paris and Barcelona were as incredible to him as Timbuktu is to much of the rest of the world. He attended a football match at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona. “In one place there were more people than in all of Timbuktu,” he recalls. He would later found a Timbuktu section of the FC Barcelona fan club.
When travelers wanted to see more of the Sahara, Ag Mohamed Ali took them to Araouane, a town drowned in the sand, 270 km north of Timbuktu. To get to Araouane, travelers must cross the Taganet sand sheet, which stretches, without interruption, to the distant horizon. On the last 100 kilometers, there is not a single tree.
Araouane itself looks like a shipwreck. A number of its buildings have disappeared under the sands. Many of the houses that remain, and even a mosque, are half-submerged by the dunes that envelop the town. For weeks, the wind blows relentlessly, sounding like ocean waves crashing on the shore. Women carry water from the well, leaning into the wind. Without the wells, life would be impossible here; sometimes it does not rain in Araouane for decades. Sand is everywhere, and nothing of value can grow here except a single wild date palm.
Photo credit, Anthony Ham
“Before, to show that you were strong, you were nomadic,” says Ag Mohamed Ali, when asked why people live in such a place. “Now, to show that you are strong, you stay in one place, you become sedentary. That’s why people from Araouane stay here. It’s to show that Araouane exists.”
And yet, for the tourists who visited it, there was undoubtedly more than that. There was something here that produced a feeling close to elation. It was the fear of great skies and great horizons. It was the intimacy of the lantern twinkling on the mud ceilings as Ag Mohamed Ali told stories of salt caravans lost in sandstorms, stories that told of the uncanny ability of desert guides to find their way in a world devoid of landmarks; sometimes they did this by tasting the sand or judging its color. It was the ridges of sand perfectly sculpted by the incessant winds, or the runic patterns written by the wind on the sand. And in this delicious remoteness hid an austere end-of-the-world beauty.
Although the conflicts in North and West Africa currently prevent visitors from traveling to Timbuktu and Araouane, Ag Mohamed Ali would not change the place where he lives for the world. “When I’m in the desert, I feel like a free man. I feel safe and I’m never afraid. Here I can think. Here I can see everything. This is who I am. I never want to leave. This is my home.”