The Tuareg: A People Without Borders

An encounter with the indigenous people of the Sahara

“Tuareg Culture is written in people, not books”, says my guide Tito, as I leaf through a flimsy pamphlet at the Museum of Tuareg Culture in Djanet, Algeria.

Nearby, a sign on a wobbly stand proclaims, “Intangible cultural heritage lives only within and among people.”

I begin to wonder why bother with the museum?

Whilst lovers of antique tents, picked fish and small asteroid fragments might pass a pleasant 10 minutes here, the true riches of the Tuareg lie outside the walls.

To Tito, the Sahara Desert is a vast repository of signs, history, art, and texts written into stone and sand–an intimate ancestral geography spread over a desert landscape of thousands of miles.

At each camping place: a memory, at each grave: a story to be retold, at each strangely shaped rock: a myth.

Signs written in Tomachek (the Tuareg language) on sandblasted rock tell where water can be found, and who has passed this way.

Tito tells me that the Tuareg are “the original nomadic wanderers of the Sahara”, and “do not recognise borders”.

When Algeria gained independence in 1962, it secured its frontiers and ended the Tuareg’s cross–border wanderings.

Tito’s family are now scattered across Algeria, Libya, and Niger.

But news, and people, still travel across the vast porous borders–after an encounter with a nomad on the Tassilli plateau, Tito tells me that “a European man without a guide has arrived in Timbuktu”.

Timbuktu! I’m tempted to ask Tito to fire up the Toyota, but I know in troubled Mali, my luck–certainly my travel insurance–might run out.

Later, Tito takes me to his house, a high-ceilinged, windowless place on a quiet street in Djanet.

He says, “My grandfather was a nomad and built this house when he settled in Djanet”. I look around the living room and–save for a table and chairs set aside for tourists–see nothing that would look out of place in a nomad’s tent.

Tito has a fitted kitchen, yet he cooks on a gas burner on the floor. Tea is prepared, desert style, on open coals in a portable cast iron grate. Tuareg guests sit on traditional rugs on the floor.

It seems that inherited nomadic instincts run deep.

As Bruce Chatwin wrote: “If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert–then it is why possessions exhaust us”.

With thanks to Piora Klinger and Tito Khellaoui.

Text excerpt from The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.