Salt Town’s Harsh Way of Life on Verge of Dissolution

From a distance, this town is nearly invisible. The squat, salt-block shacks barely dent the horizon. The piles of earthen crust, debris from dozens of hand-dug mines, are lost amid the emptiness of the desert.

The men who live here appear as little more than faded blue robes bent against the wind.

It is only the caravans, long lines of camels that have journeyed 15 days from Timbuktu and straight into the heart of the Sahara, that indicate Taoudenni is a place that matters.

For this sand-scoured outpost of misery is the heart of an ancient but disappearing culture. It spans an area so vast it could swallow entire European nations and still have emptiness to spare. It is among the last vestiges of one of the world’s great trade roads.

More than 1,000 years after their ancestors first crossed the desert from North Africa, the nomads of the Sahara--Tuaregs and Moors--are struggling to keep alive the remnants of desert life. With every generation, their flight gains speed as the sons of camel herders and caravan drivers are forced out by drought, the advancing desert and the lure of town life.

For those who remain in this part of the Sahara--throughout northern Mali and into Mauritania, Algeria and Niger--the key to survival is the salt of Taoudenni, prized for centuries across West Africa as a spice and preservative.

“If there was no salt, no one would come to the desert,” said Mbaye Al-Djounnai, 73, a miner with leather-like hands who has spent a lifetime hacking out 80-pound salt blocks. “What would they do here? Nothing.”

Industrial salt production has devastated the Taoudenni trade, but the 15-foot-deep mines still provide a tiny cash economy, allowing the dwindling nomad community to avoid selling off their camels. A scholar in Timbuktu, Sidi Mohamed Ould Youbba of the city’s main library, estimates it is worth less than $750,000 a year. That’s less than one-quarter of what it was 15 years ago, but still enough to sustain thousands of nomads in the desert.

Along the 450-mile salt road, which is really an unmarked path that can leave the unprepared lost in minutes, life looks much as it did centuries ago. Nomads still lead camel caravans from Timbuktu to Taoudenni, going days without passing a town or a tree or a bush or a blade of needle-sharp desert grass. They pass endless sand dunes and rocky lunar landscapes that drop over the horizon.

They arrive in Taoudenni to trade with the miners in elaborate, ancient systems of barter and sale.

But recently a new sound has reached the desert, and some fear it could deal a final blow to the delicate web of camel herders, caravan drivers and miners.

It is the roar of enormous trucks bashing along the salt road every couple of weeks.

Camel caravans need a month for the round-trip journey; trucks do it in a week. A camel can haul four bars of salt; a truck can carry hundreds. Every year, more trucks and fewer camels make the journey.

The result? “People are afraid,” said Mohammed Ul Al-Mustaphe, a businessman and former nomad.

Once, Taoudenni was a stop along one of the world’s great trade routes, a trans-Saharan highway that went from Timbuktu to the Mediterranean coast, tying the Arab world to black Africa. Centuries ago, caravans up to 1,000 camels long brought cloth, books and weapons from North Africa, and slaves and gold from the south.

Nomads traded and raided across the desert, hauling goods, raising animals and enslaving blacks (the olive-skinned Tuaregs and Moors, descendants of Arabs and Berbers, do not view themselves as African).

Everything came together in Timbuktu, the West’s image of the end of the world, but then and now the cultural and commercial center of the Sahara.

The desert trade, though, has been crumbling for 300 years, crippled by changing commerce, the advent of colonialism and the rise of modern states and borders.

These days the salt caravans are about all that remain.

“Here, salt is the only business, it’s all there is to do,” said Would Moulaye, a 40-year-old salt trader in Arouane. The oasis town of a couple of hundred people, many of them semi-nomads, is slowly being consumed by the spreading Sahara. In Arouane, nearly everyone is connected to the salt trade--camel herders, miners, caravan drivers and weavers of grass cords used to rope salt blocks to camels.

“In Mali, this is the only riches we have,” said Moulaye, whose finely woven clothing and sprawling mud compound reflect his status as a member of the desert’s small bourgeoisie.

For many nomads, the desert days are gone. They watched their animals die en masse in a 1973 drought, and again when a years-long drought began in 1984. They fled a Tuareg rebellion that flared across the Sahara until the mid-1990s.

“We are tired of the nomad life,” said Hama Ould Ali, whose small camel herd was wiped out in 1984. He now supports his family, barely, as a charcoal maker.

He’s found a new dream, though, in a whitewashed classroom east of Timbuktu, where his children learn basic reading and math in a mixture of Arabic and French.

“I want their lives to be different,” he said, waving his hand around his reed-roofed tent, where prayer rugs, pillows, hand-woven blankets and metal camel trunks are neatly arranged. “I’d rather change everything and go into town.”

But in small camps scattered across the Sahara, bands of nomads are resisting the changing world.

Near a tiny desert oasis known simply as the Area Around the Tree, Sidi Mohammed Ould Al Hassan, whose family spent generations herding camels and hauling salt, prays for rain. His camels, weak from the year’s poor rainfall, aren’t strong enough to reach Taoudenni.

“This is my life. It was my father’s life. This is where I belong,” Al Hassan said, squatting outside his tent and sharing his meager rations--a bowl of camel’s milk and millet--with visitors. “Even if God were to suddenly give me some money, I’d stay here.”

His sons, though, want something different--to trade their tents for houses, their muddy wells for faucets.

Instead, all they have is poverty.

“They can’t afford it, so they’re obliged to stay at home,” Al Hassan said.

But if nomadic life is changing fast, Taoudenni remains a window into its own history.

It is a village with no women, no freshwater wells and no cooking fuel except dried camel dung. Empty spaces are piled with chunks of earth and the desiccated offal of slaughtered camels.

There are no telephones, no medicine, no mail. The nearest electrical outlet is a seven-day walk through the desert.

The miners are hard men. For the best paid, one day’s work can bring up to $3--not bad in one of the world’s poorest nations, and more than what they’d earn as itinerant camel herders. For many others, some working off debts, mining is semi-slavery: six days working for their creditors, one day mining their own salt bars, one day off.

Then the cycle begins again, for the four to six months it is cool enough to live in Taoudenni.

The toll is evident; many of the men seem little more than glassy stares and bloody hands.

A council of elders appears to have only nominal control, and it’s clear that exhaustion and hunger are all that keep some men in line.

“The work here is a fight,” said Al-Djounnai, the 73-year-old miner. “If you want to fight, you fight the soil. If you want to show how strong you are, you fight the salt.”

Here, salt is everything. It is used to pay the miners and to build their shoulder-high hovels. It’s in the water and crusted over the hard ground. It dusts skin, robes and turbans. It invades the tiniest cuts, leaving tough men in constant pain.

“There’s nothing here that doesn’t have salt in it,” said Sidi Hamed Ould Baya, who, desperate to feed his family, has spent two seasons in Taoudenni. “A lot of people who come here, it’s because they have nothing.”

After centuries of nomadic life, though, soon even the destitute may no longer make the journey to Taoudenni. And the desert could be left to the camel bones, washed by the sun to a chalky white.