Artist Going to Aid of Nomadic Tribes

It used to be so easy. Buy a camel, cow or goat and keep a nomad wandering.

But life has become more complicated for Leslie Clark, an Ojai painter who set up the Nomad Foundation in 1997 to sustain the lifestyle of some of Africa’s traditional peoples.

No longer happy to simply raise funds for livestock and paint portraits of Saharan nomads, Clark has evolved into a one-woman aid organization who has helped build the first school for Wodaabe nomads in Niger and set up sewing cooperatives for nomadic women. She is working on irrigation and medical projects for the Tuareg nomads of West Africa.

Clark recently bought a house in Agadez, Niger, in the Sahara Desert, where she hopes to paint and teach nomads how to use sewing machines. “It has water, electricity and trees,” she said enthusiastically.

When not dealing with wandering people, Clark’s mind is on wandering animals. News has reached her that a herd of elephants is plodding around Mali alongside Fulani and Tuareg nomadic tribesmen, with all camping together at watering holes. Clark plans to find and paint this harmonious interaction of man and pachyderm in March.

“If you look all over Africa where the herds come in contact with people, there are problems, and elephants generally lose out,” Clark said. “This herd has been coexisting with these nomads for centuries.”

Clark, 54, spends at least three months a year with the nomads, whose portraits she paints and sells at her Nomad Gallery in Ojai, where she will hold a fund-raiser today.

But after seven years of visiting Niger she has realized that the nomadic way of life is imperiled by both too few animals and too little education, which handicaps nomads in disputes with government and landowners.

“Every time there is a fight between a farmer and the nomads, the nomads lose,” Clark said. “If they can read and write French, they can communicate with government officials.”

Last year, after a fund-raiser at her gallery, a school for the Wodaabe tribe was funded and built around a tribal well. When she visited Niger this year, Clark found the government had replaced the reed hut school with a concrete one.

“The government saw our commitment and built a school building,” said Clark, surrounded by colorful paintings of African and Indian nomads in her airy mountaintop home. “In all the years I’ve gone to Niger, I never saw the government do that before.”

On her last visit, Wodaabe children ran to her, showing off their counting, reading and French-speaking abilities.

Clark wants to remedy another hardship facing the tribe of about 200,000 nomads. Each year the women travel throughout the region selling traditional medicines, for an annual profit of less than $100.

“We want to use the skills they have, so we founded an embroidery co-op,” said Clark, who dresses in flowing African gowns.

Clark hopes to sell clothes made by the women of the co-op at her gallery and use the profits to form other cooperatives. She also wants to provide irrigation for the Tuareg village of Tibelelik in Niger through her “Adopt a Tuareg Village” campaign.

The Tuareg, known as the “blue men of the desert” because their indigo-dyed turbans stain their skins, are Muslims who herd camels from Libya to Mauritania.

“If they can get their gardens growing, they can have supplemental income to get through the hard times,” Clark said.

Clark, whose family has lived in Ojai for four generations, has been painting people and landscapes in distant places for decades.

She started out in the Mediterranean countries and moved on to Central America, India, Mongolia, New Guinea and finally Africa.

She met the cattle-herding Wodaabe in 1993 while traveling in Niger, a poor, barren country in West Africa. The nomads’ colorful clothing, sense of humor and unique customs grabbed her attention.

One such custom is the male beauty pageant, where men paint their angular faces, bind their knees and show off their white teeth to win over female judges.

It was here that Clark met Peroji, who had just sold his last cow in order to survive. He faced the prospect of leaving his traditional nomadic life for an uncertain future in the city until Clark intervened and gave him $200.

“The next year [the villagers] told me the reason Peroji was still a nomad was because of the $200,” she said. “A light went off in my head. A small amount of money could make their lives so much easier.”

Clark started the Nomad Foundation a few years later.

For a $35 donation, a person can buy a goat for a nomadic family. Larger donations can purchase cows, camels and donkeys. Donors get a signed print from Clark and a certificate.

“I have given a whole herd of goats,” said Margaret Menninger of Ojai. “Whenever someone has a birthday, I get a goat or a cow. People want something with a long-term impact and they are always delighted. Leslie’s enthusiasm is contagious. I go to her gallery and her slide shows and feel like I’ve been to Niger.”

Clark doesn’t want to change nomadic culture, but hopes to provide education should change be forced upon the tribes.

“There is no way I can stop time,” she said. “If they have to make a transition, they are at least prepared to make the transition with pride in their traditions and culture rather than simply being deprived of their land and ending up beggars in the city.”

In preparation for her latest fund-raiser at the gallery, Clark has been giving slide shows and talks. Along with raising money to buy livestock, she hopes to fund the cooperatives, teacher salaries, a nurse and the irrigation project.

She says she returns each year to the remotest parts of Africa because the people and landscape offer something Western society can’t manufacture.

“On the last trip, I went deep into the Sahara,” she said. “Dunes were rising up everywhere. It’s the most powerful landscape imaginable. You come across Neolithic sites, petroglyphs and dinosaur bones. I have my best ideas there, the ones that transform my life. Nothing else compares. It’s living the kind of life we have lost.”