Tuaregs in the Sahara

In our headlong rush to drive Islamic jihadists out of Mali and Algeria, Canada and its allies should take care to distinguish between al Qaida-linked militants and the largely peaceful (if sometimes rebellious), native Tuareg nomads. Tuaregs have legitimate grievances. From the early Islamic period on, they operated vast caravan networks across the Sahara. Besides commodities such salt and silver (Tuaregs are renowned for their silver craftsmanship), they traded books. Wealthy trade centres such as Timbuktu became centres of scholarship. The 600 year-old university there was capable of housing 25,000 students and had one of the largest libraries in the world with half a million or more manuscripts. Today the university, mosques and private collections still hold a treasure trove of ancient knowledge and history, earning UNESCO designation as a World Heritage Site. The colonial powers in the 19th and early 20th Centuries developed farming communities in the Sahel, the broad grassland that runs right across Africa south of the Sahara. They brought black slaves and serfs from further south northward to farm, depriving the Tuareg and other Saharan/Sahelian nomad peoples of their dry-season foraging areas. After the Colonial period, the traditional Tuareg homeland was divided among half a dozen modern nations. In the 1960s, misguided international aid agencies drilled wells and further encouraged “sedentarization” of the nomads, resulting in overgrazing around natural oases and water developments. Resulting desertification disrupted the pastoral patterns and caused large-scale loss of wildlife habitat—this is why big game animals such as addax, oryx, gazelles, ibex and Barbary sheep, which were a key part of Tuareg culture, have disappeared. Loss of forage for livestock resulted in repeated famines in various parts of the Sahel since 1968. The famines of 1973–1975 and 1984 were especially severe and burned into our minds the plight of starving people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Biafra (now returned to Nigeria) and other Sahelian countries. Climate change that began to be felt in the 1980s, first identified by Canadian wildlife biologists A. R. E. Sinclair and J. M. Fryxell in a 1985 journal article, made it worse. The human tragedies were caused not by lack of rainfall, but by massive starvation of livestock because of overgrazing. Tuaregs resisted French colonial invasion of their homelands in the late 19th Century and some have been rebelling off and on in various Northern African countries ever since. But many just want to make a living and keep their culture. Although largely prevented from migrating south in the dry season, they still bring their livestock north to the mountains of Morocco, where their camps and flocks of sheep, goats and camels, sometimes numbering more than 1,000 animals, are a colourful part of the scenery. The markets in towns all along the northern edge of the Sahara are enlivened with Tuareg nomads selling beautiful handicrafts. For a modern view of Tuaregs, read “In Search of Nomads” by John Ure,” 2003. The nomads are not the aggressors in the current crisis, but victims. If anyone doubts this, just recall only months ago when foreign jihadists took overran Timbuktu. In an echo of the Taliban destruction of the giant Buddha sculptures at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001, al Qaida-linked militants began destroying ancient monuments in Timbuktu that the Tuareg people had proudly maintained for centuries. This is not to say that Tuareg individuals or groups have not joined the Islamists’ militancy; or vice- versa for pragmatic reasons on both sides. But Islamists need Tuaregs (for their camel transport and desert refuges) more than Tuaregs need Islamists. Nomadic cultures, a crucial step in human evolution and a unique component of modern cultural diversity, are disappearing everywhere that they occur because of their inherent conflict with expanding settlements and development. If Western governments and our African allies treat Tuaregs sensitively, there is an opportunity to separate the Islamists from their local support while addressing long-standing governance issues.