Author Archives: Chris S

Book review: Sahara Unveiled ~ William Langewiesche

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SAHARA UNVEILED
William Langewiesche (1997)

Having got to know Algeria as a commercial pilot (or so one presumes, we learn nothing about the author apart from the existence of a wife and son), William Langewiesche travels from Algiers to Dakar around 1990, as Islamic revolution and Tuareg unrest spread paranoia along the trans-Saharan Highway.

He revisits old friends, including the neglected and now destitute wife of a once respected Mr Fixit who suffered brain damage following a car crash with his mistress. Along the way we learn about former visits to the Algerian desert town of Adrar as well as Mauritania, some cautionary parables à la Paul Bowles, and deserty topics like dunes, rock art, Tuaregs (including the late Mano Dayak), plus the staple of good old Foucauld.

Langewiesche’s local connections provide him with a unique insight into the bitter unravelling of Algerian society at the time. In Tamanrasset he takes an excursion east to explore some remote art, but is used as an unwitting decoy to enable his truly odious guide to smuggle in Libyan arms for the Tuareg cause. The festering acrimony between the two is laid bare after Langewiesche is abandoned in a canyon for a couple of days where he’s forced to confront his own death.

Mirroring local attitudes, he writes without sentimentality about the Sahara and its inhabitants: wily opportunists, smug entrepreneurs, mendacious braggarts, ‘Camel [cig] commercial’ adventurers and sun-fried ex-pats. There’s a lip-smacking ‘I-told-you-so’ sensationalism used to recount several tales of travellers perishing in the desert, embellishing the deadly glamour of the pitiless Sahara.

Having crossed the Sahara and now without the privilege of local friends, the mood grows gloomier and possibly resentful as the author has to fend for himself and becomes preoccupied with the incompetence and corruption of the desiccated Sahel. Weakened by illness, the book speeds towards a quick end in Dakar. A back cover quote from Newsweek suggests the book “makes the desert’s exoticism bloom…”, a nice idea but not how I saw it. Langewiesche writes unsentimentally and with a sparse, gritty realism, whether describing the futility of the Tuareg rebellion and overseas aid, the short-sighted ‘Inshallah-syndrome’ and, ultimately, the desert’s crushing indifference.

Readers familiar with the Sahara will become easily absorbed with the many familiar characters and situations described during this unhappy episode of Saharan history. While Langewiesche prefers to remain studiously enigmatic and, at his worst, comes across as patronising and condescending (other tourists become an easy target, as they do in so many books like this, such as Quentin Crewe’s In Search of the Sahara). But I found this book true to its title and a worthwhile addition of any Saharophile’s library.

Article in the Atlantic by WL on his desert travels

Book review: Sahara Life of a Great Desert – Mark de Villiers & Sheila Hirtle

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SAHARA, THE LIFE OF THE GREAT DESERT
Mark de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle. Harper Collins, 2003

It is generally unavoidable to write about history while not having been there, but it is surely indefensible to attempt to describe the geography of a region with virtually no firsthand experience.The authors start off promisingly by dismissing the customary romanticism laid on the Sahara as “outsider thinking”: the “pitiless sun” being no more than the “pitiless traffic” of Fifth Avenue. Thereafter great empires of West Africa are well accounted for (lifted from a previous book of the authors?) but beyond that, and their visits to Niger and Timbuktu, they get in a complete muddle. The howlers start from page 9 when we learn that the Tanezrouft is an erg and later that In Salah is “an epicentre of the oil industry” and Leptis was dug out of the sand. The nature of the harmattan wind also happens to contradict all previous sources, Ghat is an all but abandoned Tuareg camp and – get this – the canyon of Iherir contains the Sahara’s only perennial river! This is a clanger of Saharan proportions but will hopefully bring some income to the poor village of Iherir when the whitewater brigade turn up.The problem is that the authors have been to the Sahara just a couple of times, more than most it is true but surely not enough to attempt a book such as this?

One gets the impression they fell for the enigmatic Tuareg (as you do) and thought “heck, let’s write our new book about Sahara and those shimmering courtly nomads!” Anyone who would dare take on such a task surely ought to read French and German. Perhaps this is why the authors quote repeatedly from a limited range of the usual English-language sources: Barth, Nachtigal plus Africanus and other ancients and the few Brits like Clapperton that put pen to paper. But they use these 19th century explorers as if they were as reliable as anyone and relevant today – including ancient spellings; have they not even heard of a Mich 953/741 map? Having done a lot of their groundwork fifteen years ago, Porch’s excellent ‘Conquest of the Sahara’ (see below) gets a good work out while Heseltine’s ‘From Libyan Sands to Chad’ (1955, and a great little classic) is the veritable horse’s mouth for Chad and the Tubu (so never mind about Jean Chapelle’s ‘Nomads Noirs du Sahara’ then). And last but not least is the Encyclopaedia Britannica (online version…) for all those last-minute queries. What a give away. Elsewhere the embellishment is irritating if to be expected – though you would have thought not in the “moonscape” Aïr, one of the few places in the Sahara where one suspects the authors have actually been. They certainly do not appear to have visited the desert areas of Morocco, Chad, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania or even Egypt, or have nothing accurate to say about these places. But I liked the section on weather and also got a better understanding of the eminence of Old Ghana in the heyday of the trans-Sahara trading caravans.

In the end though, the authors prove that they too are outsiders – overlooking or skimming vast parts of Saharan geography like the Gilf Kebir (and not just the ‘Western Desert’), the Tassili and Akakus, the distinctive Moorish culture and the Reguibat and the ongoing Tubu rebellion. They extrapolate from maps whose context they misunderstand: we learn that “dunes cover most of Western Sahara” and long-abandoned Tagheza somehow overrules Taoudenni today as a source of salt. They miss out on contemporary political upheavals too, as if they wrote the book 20 years ago. So it is that comprehending the Tuareg rebellion in Niger, (something which has set these people back years and was one of Micheal Buckley’s better achievements in Grains of Sand) isn’t allowed to interfere with eulogies on their preternatural guiding abilities, etc; the same, tired old Tuareg schtick.

The trouble with making stuff up or guessing is that, besides making a fool of the authors, the reader does not know what else is fictitious and so the book’s value is lost. Europe is the source of the greatest works on the Sahara, either through direct historical connection or learning. The definitive work on the Great Desert will, or may already be, written in French or German. This book certainly is not it.

Book review: Sahara, Atlantic to the Nile ~ Alain & Berny Sebe

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Sahara, Atlantic to the Nile
Alain and Berny Sebe, 2003

Alain Sebe has been photographing and privately producing high quality large format picture books on the Sahara for over 20 years, covering the Tuareg, the Tassilis, rock art, Sahara from the air, etc.

With a new publisher he has brought out more general titles at lower prices, but with no reduction in quality. Last year’s we got L’Image du Sahara an overview of 33 years desert travel and now Sahara, Atlantic to the Nile is a virtual photo journey from the Western Sahara to the Nile – and it’s in English too. It’s virtual in as much as this is another repackaging of earlier photos along a route not actually undertaken (I could be wrong here – there is a map in the back). It’s a common practise among photographers and does not undermine the result; a general Sahara picture book from the sub-Atlas Morocco to Tunisia and the Hoggar, the Tassili, Libya and Egypt.

Inside you get a fabulously rich album with text by the photographer’s son, Berny. The printing and paper are as good as it gets, with some stunning images, especially from the Moula Moula aerial collection. Algeria covers a fair slice of the book, as it should, with sections on rock art to adding to the whole Saharan panorama. We do not see the best of the amazing Gilf and Jebel Uweinat though and without Mauritania, Niger and Chad it’s still not the ultimate Sahara picture book I was hoping for. Sahara does not claim to be so and I’m sure the above three countries are in the Sebe pipeline. Then, once a general 400-page collection of those three countries is published along with the ones covered in Sahara, the ultimate Sahara coffee table book will be here.

Book review: Sand ~ Michael Welland

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Sand – A journey through science and the imagination
(US: Sand – The Never-Ending Story)
Michael Welland, 2009

Bagnold’s Libyan Sands is one of the best books on desert exploration around, but I always consciously avoided taking on his better known Physics of Blown Sand, assuming it would be too hard going. So I hoped Michael Welland’s ‘Sand’ might have been an accessible compromise on the substance which any desert traveller inevitably finds fascinating.

Sadly this was not that book. Yes the author knows his science (perhaps too much of it?) and has researched the ‘imagination’ side thoroughly. He writes well too, but I suspect slack editors allowed him to pack just too much in and diverge too often (‘first book syndrome’?). And so you soon get bogged down and lacking any literary sand mats you begin to lose interest. Who else would get away with throwing in an A to Z appendix-like list of anything related to sand, like H for hourglass or C for construction.

I felt the author strayed from the topic of sand too many times to discuss general geological processes or whatever else took his interest. Even the desert landscapes chapter I ought to have devoured was surprisingly unsatisfying; he starts going on about the animals which burrow in the s….. After that I’m sorry to say I gave up and fast forwarded to the epilogue which revives the Libyan Desert Glass enigma and adds yet another personal anecdote. There are too many other good books to read, and I think the much quoted Sand, Wind and War also by Bagnold may be among them.

Book review: Sandstorm ~ Micheal Asher

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SANDSTORM
Micheal Asher, 2004

Michael Asher’s thriller is set in the Spanish Sahara of 1953 when, shortly before being garrotted, a mysterious stranger informs a grieving father in the UK that his son, Billy, survived a plane crash over the desert seven years earlier.

Both father (as well as more sinister agents) then set off in search of the boy who has since been brought up as a Reguibat warrior-hunter, because Billy holds the clues to the location of buried Nazi gold…

By p.27 you pretty much know how the yarn will pan out – maybe that’s the idea with this genre – and the final showdown in the quicksands is statistically a little far-fetched and unsatisfying. Nevertheless the journey to this point is entertaining and informative. Asher bestows the Reguibat (a Moorish tribe of Yemeni origins who make up today’s Saharawi people in Western Sahara) with many of the better qualities and customs of the Bedu of Arabia with whom the author spent many years.

Untypically, Stirling, the boy’s father is a pacifist who did time for his beliefs during WWII, while the baddies are not all scar-faced Nazis, but include other figures closer to home. The real heroes of course are the proud and honour-bound Reguibat nomads who despise our flabby and crass Western values. Like his mentor Thesiger, Asher cannot resist painting them as noble nomadic raiders wanting nothing more than peace with the despicable neighbouring tribes. At one point the Reguibat join forces with the pagan, dog-hunting Nemadi (also a real if extinct tribe, and a long way from Nema, it seems) and there is an amusing exchange tinged with truth when Muslim and pagan nomads belittle each others’ customs, language and dress.

The big themes in Sandstorm are betrayal, courage and loyalty among nomads and westerners alike – ‘honour’ in a word – and in telling its tale, Sandstorm avoids the worst cringe-making clichés of this genre (on which I’m not an expert) while opening a window on a little known people and part of the Sahara. It compares well with Desmond Bagley’s Flyaway (see review) and is much better than Cussler’s dreadful Sahara. Asher generously credits John Mercer’s Spanish Sahara (see review) for much of his information .

Book review: Sandstorm ~ Henry Shukman

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SANDSTORM
Henry Shukman, 2005

With its over-obvious title and gushing back cover reviews of the author’s previous book, Sandstorm looked promising. It’s the tale of Mortimer, a once lauded war correspondent now down on his luck, banging out restaurant reviews. Then one morning in a New York bar he reads an obituary to a French photo journalist, the beautiful Celeste Dumas (has there ever been a butt-ugly French photo journalist?). Flashback: Algeria 1976 and their shared adventure and fleeting romance as they broke the news of a Tuareg uprising – a story which launched Mortimer’s international career (but not their romance, to his everlasting regret). A defining event much later in the same country brings about his professional downfall.

The start offers some suspense as the lovers head south into the desert on the trail of this great scoop. We soon tick off the obligatory “water… water…” scenario in the dunes – but then the actual event which was set to explode on the world’s front pages passes by before you notice. I had to flick back, convinced that some pages were missing. From that point it was difficult to empathise with Mortimer’s dire need to wire in his groundbreaking story (the feeble ‘foreign-oil-company-funds-Tuareg-fight-for-homeland-in-return-for-oil-rights strand might have been pinched off Cussler himself). In the meantime Celeste’s uncertain feelings for Mort are hinted at, as well as her ambivalence towards their seemingly glamourous and important work. After surviving a near-drowning off the western Saharan coast, Mortimer sets his sights for fame and glory, but can’t persuade the still-traumatised Celeste to join him – she just wants to go back home to photograph lambs.

Flash forward 18 years (not 15 as the jacket on my copy said) and Pulitzer-prize winning Mort finds himself back in Algiers covering some riots, but the ‘great error of his professional life’ is another feebly shallow scenario cooked up off the cuff.

We hear that Shukman is an award-winning poet and this novel was expanded from a short story, but Sandstorm seems hampered by its ‘luvey’ literary genre; the low-brow adventure element doesn’t marry with lovelorn Mortimer’s supposed cynicism and subsequent moral failure. It’s telling of the author’s poor grasp of the region, its people and history, that in his book the newspapers describe the revolt as “the most romantic war of the half-century”. Has any 20th-century conflict ever been described so? The reasoning behind the displacement of real Algerian place names is also unclear (one assumes the action is happening around real-life Tindouf, miles from Tuareg country), and the muddling of real historical events is confusing – though maybe only to those who know of them. The location of the real Saharawi wars of the Western Sahara in the 1970s becomes a more bibliogenic Tuareg rebellion which never happened (at least not for another 15 years, and then in Niger and Mali). The desert is rendered with more purple than a bishop at a Prince gig and one has to ask, is the renaming of the real Rio de Oro as ‘Rio Camellio’ a joke – and how long did it take to cook up ‘Food International’ as an aid agency name? About as long as the ‘great error of his professional life’.

I am sorry to report that Sandstorm turns out as lame as a three-legged camellio with concussion.

Guardian review

Book review: The Search for the Tassili Frescoes ~ Henri Lhote

See also:
Tassili N’Ajjer mule trek (gallery)

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THE SEARCH FOR THE TASSILI FRESCOES
Henri Lhote, 1959 (o/p)

There are several picture books describing or including the rock art of the Tassili. The best known though not best admired is this one: The Search for the Tassili Frescoes published (in English) in 1959 and easily available used on the web. It was he who led an expedition to record the art for posterity as the colony of Algeria was slipping out of France’s hands. Unfortunately Lhote and those in his service adopted the practise of wetting the rock art to produce more vivid photographs – something which has accelerated fading in a few decades after surviving millennia on the plateau.

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In this case he may not have known any better, though a little-known Swiss expedition recorded many of the Tassili’s sites in the late 1940s; doing a much more thorough job than the well-publicised Lhote missions. But Lhote was also accused of turning a blind eye and indeed including fakes (painted as a joke) among his recorded discoveries. The slinky quartet known as ‘The Bird Headed Goddesses of Jabbaren’ are known to be one such fake, supposedly included (but excised from later editions and indeed Jabbaren itself) to help attribute the style to ancient Egyptian influences. If anything it was probably the other way round.

Book review: A Season in Hell ~ Robert Fowler

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A SEASON IN HELL
Robert Fowler (2011)

Robert Fowler’s account of his four-month captivity in northern Mali with Louis Guay in 2009 doesn’t so much leap off the page as grab you by the ears and haul you in. I read it over a weekend because here at last is a lucid, thoughtful and detailed description of an experience about which many wonder: ‘how would I cope?’. And before the first page is turned Fowler answers that question: ‘better than you’d assume’.

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Thankfully, a lazy Day 1, Day 2… diary format is avoided. Instead, events or themes are covered over the pair’s months ‘en brousse’, while fending off the malice, provocations and mind games of their captors, as well as navigating their own inevitable mood swings. Some like to dismiss AQIM and similar groups as mere criminals enriching themselves from smuggling and kidnapping. If that’s the case then Fowler’s abductors, led by Moktar bel Moktar (‘MBM’, who went on to organise the deadly gas plant raid in Algeria in 2013) put up a convincing performance refuting that. Not one of the ragged jihadists failed to try and convert the two diplomats to Islam while at ‘Camp Canada’, and vigorous religious debates dominated the gang’s conversations, rather than which Rolex they’ll buy with their share of the loot.

Throughout this episode both Fowler and Guay were put to the test, but astutely deployed their hard-won diplomatic nous to help lessen their misery, as well as using other methods to maintain morale. One topic I thought oddly absent was any obsessive discussion over food. Some emotionally sensitive subjects were proscribed, but you’d think the harmless pleasure in food fantasies would be fun.

After months of uncertain negotiations, unexpected gifts, hurried relocations as well as calls home, somewhere in the desert the two Canadians are finally handed over to shady mediators. With them are two desperately emaciated European women, kidnapped by more brutal rivals who are deeply unsatisfied with the settlement. In a tense denouement the two AQIM leaders face each other down but MBM prevails. The jeeps speed south and diplomatically staged photo calls, long-overdue ablutions and happy family reunions ensue. The book ends with a warning that action must be taken against the scourge then oppressing northern Mali (in January 2013 the French led Operation Serval invaded the area). There’s also an unapologetic swipe at the way the RCMP handled Fowler and Guay’s abduction.

For some the elephant in the room is the matter of ransom payment – denied by the Canadian government. Fowler was kept in the dark but elucidates in appropriately equivocal terms: ‘… there tends also to be a difference between what governments do and what they say, and this seems to me quite reasonable… Many countries adopt what are more or less pragmatic approaches while others proclaim immutable doctrine, but I know for certain that everybody has blinked at one time or another…’
Wikileaks since revealed that €700,000 was paid and AQIM prisoners released, thus prolonging the scourge. The conduit for the cash was the then convenient treasury of Ghadafi’s Libya, in return for unspecified concessions.

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Some speculate about publicity bans put on former Saharan hostages (nearly 100 in the last decade) by their governments; perhaps a condition for covering the usually denied ransoms. If that was the case with Robert Fowler, he ignored it. ‘A Season in Hell’ illuminates their desert captivity in vivid detail, including as far as they could gather, the motivations of the people who abducted them. It might even be read as a manual on how to cope with such an experience. However you choose to take it, it’s highly recommend.

Longer version with more background here.

Book review: Shadows across the Sahara ~ John Hare

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SHADOWS ACROSS THE SAHARA
John Hare, 2003

Possibly of pensionable age but with experience with Bactrian camels as well as living in Africa and speaking Hausa, John Hare sets off to traverse the great trade route from former Borno Kanem (northern Nigeria) to Tripoli. With him are his chums: an even older Kenyan farmer, a Chinese academic and the relatively young Johnny to do the chores, plus Tubu and Tuareg cameleers and two dozen camels.

The organisation and permission for this trip goes unerringly smoothly – even the intractable Libyans are up for it and so the guides and camels turn up on time and the crew sets off reversing the camel prints of Hanns Vischer’s 1906 trek (the author’s inspiration), if not Denham, Clapperton and Oudney’s 1822 expedition. So far so good. But what should have been a stirring account of a historic trans Sahara trek plods along without enough engagement. Interminable quotes from Denham and Vischer fill the gaps, but there is barely a conversation recorded between the protagonists (a Brit upper lip was stiffly maintained, perhaps) while the local guides come across as the customary grumps.

Anticipated highlights like the Bilma Erg slip by in a couple of paragraphs while the dreary Hamada el Hamra is built up to epic proportions. One fails to get an impression of what the undoubtedly arduous three-month trek along a little-known Saharan axis was really like, even on a practical level. It all comes across as too easy and repetitive – perhaps it was, although it’s interesting to learn about the history of this trade route and why it became depopulated. It’s on this level that the book has something to offer, rather than using camels as a mode of travel in the Sahara.

Book review: Sheltering Sky ~ Paul Bowles

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SHELTERING SKY
Paul Bowles (Penguin)

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A cult novel by the Tangiers literary guru based on the author’s own experiences in North Africa. Not a thoughtful gift for a nervy visitor to Morocco, but a thrilling read if you like your desert with a bit of sex, madness, infidelity and death. Bertolucci’s eponymous 1985 film turned out to be a hackneyed desert romance with dashing Tuareg princes, graceful caravans crossing golden dunes and ululating tribes women at every village. While certainly good-looking (filmed partly in the Tenere), it fails to get its teeth into the inscrutable, existential quandaries of the protagonists. Although he appeared in one of the final scenes, Paul Bowles had this to say of the film: It should never have been filmed. The ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad.

The track from the Police’s Synchronicity album, Tea in the Sahara, relates a morbid legend described in this book.