A Heart Never Out of Africa

Sketches of hawk-eyed tribesmen and arid villages spill from yellow folders in Leslie Clark’s Ojai studio.

A camel skull stares vacantly from a bookcase. A pair of spent AK-47 shells sit nearby, remnants of a recent close call in the Sahara.

For nearly a decade, Clark has ridden camels deep into the desert with the wandering tribes of Africa. She has painted them and their world, preserving on canvas a way of life that is slowly slipping away.

“I enjoy visiting people who are very, very traditional, and I kind of got stuck in the Sahara,” said Clark, relaxing in the studio of her hilltop home. “I like being completely out of touch. I like the terrain and the open desert. The complete silence is such an incredible thing.”

Clark is founder of the Nomad Foundation, which buys camels, goats, sheep, cows and donkeys for groups roaming the Sahara, like the Wodaabe and the Tuareg.

She even financed the political campaign of the first nomad to run for office. He curried favor by dispensing tea and sugar to local chieftains, but a military coup in Niger nullified the election.

Her home is a shrine to Africa. A hallway is hung with portraits of the Tuaregs, sometimes called “the blue men of the desert” because their indigo turbans stain their skin. And there are paintings of the lean, angular Wodaabe, a tribe that holds beauty contests for men, judged by women.

Clark remembers the first nomad she met as fondly as most people recall their first love. His name was Peroji and he had four wives. Clark met him while passing through a Wodaabe encampment in the Sahara.

“Peroji has become my obsession,” she said. “He has a presence that is incredible, and he is very handsome.”

World travel is nothing new to Clark. She spent years painting portraits and landscapes in the Mediterranean, Central America and India. At 53, she has drunk fermented mare’s milk in Mongolia and hung out with New Guinea tribesmen who kept mummified relatives around the house for company.

But it was the nomads of Africa who touched her heart.

Clark met the Wodaabe in 1993 while traveling in Niger, a country in West Africa that is one of the poorest and most barren places on Earth. The nomads herd cows and live on a diet of milk and millet, giving them radiant white teeth and trim physiques.

“I totally fell in love with them,” Clark said. “I went because they were so exotic, so foreign and so colorful, but I got to know them and I saw how similar we are. They had a great sense of humor and love of family and friends.”

She immediately began painting portraits of the Wodaabe, using broad brush strokes to capture their striking white eyes, their ornate clothing and fine facial features.

“The Wodaabe think they are the most attractive people in the world,” Clark said.

In tribal beauty contests, the men paint their faces and bind their knees, walking with mincing, feminine steps.

Clark became so fluent in Fulfulde, the Wodaabe language, that she compiled a dictionary in the obscure tongue.

While the Wodaabe herd cows, the Tuareg are Muslims who herd camels in Niger, Mali, Libya, Algeria and Mauritania. Clark’s Tuareg paintings show a rugged people whose sharp profiles and dark eyes haunt every portrait. “The Tuareg have dominated the Sahara for centuries because they dominate the camel,” Clark said. “They ride the camel differently than others, putting their foot on the neck. They tell direction by the sun and the ripples in the sand.”

Clark spends three or four months a year with the nomads, who look forward to the medicine she brings. “I once had a line of Tuareg in front of me because I brought Ben Gay,” she said. “They were bathing in Ben Gay. You have 70-year-old men who squat all day in the desert and they get a lot of aching joints.”

But it was Peroji who showed her the fragility of nomadic life. He almost was forced into the city when his last cow died. Clark gave him $200 to buy another.

“A series of droughts in the 1970s and 1980s killed off many animals and changed the character of nomadic life dramatically,” she said. “My puny gift changed somebody’s life.”

In 1997, she established the Nomad Foundation. For $35, donors can buy a goat for a nomadic family; bigger donations buy camels and donkeys. Donors get a signed print from Clark and a certificate. Today, she will hold an annual sale at her Nomad Gallery in Ojai, with proceeds benefiting the foundation.

People contribute for many reasons. “I bought a goat for my niece and nephew for Christmas so they would understand that Christmas is for giving as well as receiving,” said Rebecca Bard of Ojai. “My father and his business partners went in for a third of a goat each.”

The foundation also has built a school and dug wells, facilities to which the nomads return after months of wandering.

Those who know her describe Clark as quiet and unassuming.

‘You see her walking down the street and you would never guess what sort of outrageous life she has had,” said Norman Rem, who helps run Clark’s gallery. “She has 80 million stories, and you just walk away with your head spinning.”