By Marina de Regt – This morning three beautiful pictures of the Sahara showed up on my phone, sent by Ahmed, who I met a few weeks ago while making a desert trip in Algeria. Algeria, the southern town of Tamanrasset and the Tuareg (nomadic pastoralists who call themselves Imuhagh) had fascinated me since I read Kel Rela (De Cesco 1980), a novel about a young Swiss woman who accompanied a professor in archaeology to the Sahara and fell in love with a Targui (a male member of the Tuareg). I was 15 years old and determined to follow this young woman’s footsteps and go and live with the Tuareg. Their nomadic lifestyle, wandering around with their camels and goats in the desert; images of veiled men dressed in clothes dyed with natural indigo (which gave them the name “les hommes bleus”), and stories about equal gender relations (the Tuareg were traditionally matrilineal) inspired this teenage fascination. These were definitely Orientalist images and ideas, romanticising an “exotic” group of people, something I am not proud of now.
When a high school teacher told me about anthropology, I knew that this was the right study for me, and my way to get to the Sahara. If possible, I would do fieldwork among the Tuareg for my final thesis. Throughout my studies I had heard the name of Angeline van Achterberg, a Dutch anthropologist married to a Targui, who lived six months of the year in Tamanrasset where she ran a travel agency with her husband. I was very pleased when Angeline was willing to meet me during a stay in the Netherlands and had high hopes. I vividly remember her apartment in Amsterdam, and us sitting on her couch. I looked at an enormous Tuareg saddle bag hanging on the wall and could not believe that I had finally met Angeline. She told me about her marriage and life in the desert, but also stressed how difficult it would be for me to do fieldwork with the Tuareg. While I had hoped that she would offer her help and invite me to come to Tamanrasset she did not. She probably did not want to be responsible for a 24-year-old young woman, who, like so many other young women had become fascinated by the Tuareg. I was disappointed and decided to do fieldwork in Morocco instead, a country I had visited several times. It was definitely Plan B but thanks to my research among carpet workers in Morocco, I found a job as a development worker in Yemen. The Tuareg faded into the background.
Over the past decades, I made many short desert trips in Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, and Mali. Deserts are beautiful but also very tough places, and it might have been for the better that I had not gone to the Sahara as a young anthropology student. Occasionally, I would ponder whether visiting Algeria and meeting the Algerian Tuareg was something that I still longed for and then concluded that that wish had disappeared. But six months ago, the possibility presented itself to travel to Tamanrasset and make a desert trip with a small group of six people, accompanied by Tuareg drivers and guides. I immediately said yes even though it was going to be a costly trip and I was not sure whether I would enjoy spending seven days in the desert without wifi and a shower and toilet. I am not really fond of camping and also wondered whether I would be able to make the long hikes that were on the programme. These were not things I considered when I was a romantic teenager dreaming of life in the desert.
We flew to Algiers and then travelled on by plane to Tamanrasset. At the airport we were received by the Tuareg travel agent who had organised our trip, and after a day in the town, which was much less interesting than I had expected, we spent seven days in the Sahara. We started our days early, before it got too hot, and drove for hours over kilometers-long plains, passing occasional rocks, ridges, and sand dunes, and through acacia trees and bushes. We saw age-old rock paintings, hidden in caves that only a skilled desert guide was able to find, and spent the nights camping in breathtaking places.
But more than spending time in the desert, I enjoyed meeting the Tuareg who were travelling with us. Ahmed was one of the drivers and he enjoyed answering my questions about his life and the life of other Tuareg. While agriculture was something the Tuareg looked down upon in the past as they were traditionally pastoralists, Ahmed told me that many of them now had gardens which were their main source of income, next to tourism. He grew various vegetables and fruits and loved being in his garden much more than driving through the desert. When I asked about Tuareg women, he said they were “taking care of the house and the children”, and proudly said that polygamous marriages were quite common. Gender equality and matrilineality are clearly no longer part of Tuareg society.
Ahmed’s pictures this morning made me happy. He was proudly showing water dripping in a well, the flowers in his garden and a group of Tuareg on their camels. Short tourist trips are definitely not the best way to become well acquainted with “local people”, as anthropologists know better than anyone else. Yet, this trip has brought me a bit closer to a people that I have cared about for so long. It has, however, also left me with many questions about my teenage dreams, the changes that have occurred in my life, and romanticising “far away” places and people.
Marina de Regt is working at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the VU.