Tuareg Hygiene

When my two dogs have emptied their plates, they go lick each other’s. Hygiene is of course of no concern to them. And why should it, if it’s not an issue for so many people?

This reminds me of a scene that I was unable to photograph because it made me laugh so uncontrollably that, to avoid offending anyone, I had to move away.

It happened while I traveled with a Sahara Tuareg salt caravan. One man discovered before sitting down with his eight companions around a bowl of millet gruel that he had lost his spoon. I offered him the use of mine, but he rejected it as being too small. It was a metal table spoon. The other men had all larger spoons carved out of wood. If he used my spoon it would leave him at a disadvantage. He would be eating less than the other men. Those men worked way too hard for anyone of them to be forced to eat less than his already meager portion. But they had a ready solution. They simply passed their spoons around the circle. After each man had eaten a spoonful of millet, he passed his spoon to the man to the right, and took the one coming from the man to the left. And on and on until emptying the bowl. What was so comical was the matter-of-factness with which they did it.

Poor Tuareg! They have so little water, and it’s always so far from camp, that they can rarely bathe. I once saw them cool a dirty feverish baby in a big wooden bowl of water, after which they returned the used water to the drinking-water goatskin.

What You See May Not Be What You Think

While sitting one evening around the fire with a group of Tuareg men, Sahara nomads bound from Niger to Lybia with camels and sheep to sell there, a man walked into the edge of the circle of light. Tuareg men veil their faces, but in our intimacy some had lowered them somewhat. At the sight of the man, they immediately raised them back to their eyes.

Now the man felt confident to move forward. We saw that he was a stranger. Politely he exchanged greetings with us. Finally he said that his water bag was empty and that he had been thirsty for a very long time. A bowlful of water was poured, and he gulped it down after pronouncing the Moslem ritual praise to God.

“Since sunset,” he said. “I have been following sounds of pestles hitting mortars and of children crying, but every time I thought I was reaching an encampment, the sound stopped suddenly—only to start somewhere else.”

“Djinnen,” the men murmured, and the man nodded.

Though I do not believe in evil spirits, I was not in the least skeptical of the dangers our guest faced while he was lost. A Djinn could have got me killed too some weeks earlier.

At that time I was sharing the daily lives of a large Tuareg encampment of the noble Iullimiden tribe and the people of lower castes employed by them. One evening, I brought water in my collapsible canvas bucket to a thicket, away from Tuareg families, to bathe. I put the bucket down in the dark at the foot of a thorn tree, and as I did so, saw the vague shape of a man squat 15 paces away. He watched me intensely as I undressed and hung my clothes on a branch above my head, washed, and dried myself.

As I turned around to grab my clothes, a heavy branch hit my head, nearly knocking me out. There was no big branch that I could have brought down with my clothes, and the man had disappeared. He had obviously thrown the branch at me, though for what reason I could not fathom. I decided to tell Radwane, the Chief’s son, about that voyeur and his aggressive behavior.

“Let’s find him and beat him up,” Radwane said.

“Victor!” we suddenly heard from a terrified voice. “You gave me the fright of my life. I was passing through the scrub when I descried that tall unearthly silhouette (in the darkness the clothes above my head had added to my height) moving under a tree. Fear paralyzed me, and when I heard water running where there had never been any, I knew I was facing a djinn. At last, summoning my courage, I grabbed a thick branch and threw it at what had to be a djinn with all the strength I could muster.”

He concluded that to dare to dwell in dark thickets at night without absolute necessity I either had to be a super amahar (noble warrior) or be protected by powerful gris-gris.

“But do not laugh, Victor,” he scolded “Had I had a spear, you would be dead now.”

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