The Tuareg: Sahara’s Evasive Tribe | Disappearing World | TRACKS

[Music] um [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i am [Music] as the white man expanded his way across america and wiped out the indians so he tried to put his way down through the hot awful country of desert africa in 1880 the french decided that they wanted to build a railway two thousand miles across the sahara desert down through the country of the touareg the local natives one day the natives found an armed column marching down into their homeland it was colonel flatters trying to reconnoiter a route for the white man's railway with 105 men and 25 000 bullets the tuareg offered to guide him and took him deeper and deeper into the desert there they poisoned his water supply and poisoned his dates persuaded him to split up his men and when they had him alone they killed him struggling back his men became so desperate for food that they ended up eating each other as a result for 20 years no european day had set foot in turig country the myth was born of the blue veiled warriors of the desert the bad man of many a midnight movie [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was not extraordinary military prowess that defeated colonel flatters if flatters had been left alone by the tuareg the desert would very probably have got him anyway twenty years later a better prepared french force marched through without the turret daring to lift a finger against them [Applause] protected by the french the tour egg became camel carabanas and for 50 years their way of life changed hardly at all the family group that this film is about still camp where they've always camped ten thousand feet up in the hogan mountains at the foot of tahat the highest mountain in algeria it's almost exactly on the tropic of cancer and slapping the center of the sahara desert the group is a family parents children grandparents cousins living in one of the most ungenerous landscapes on earth together with their black african former slaves about 20 people in all the camps still look almost exactly as they looked 50 years ago the men are no less tall the veils are no less blue the true tour egg is not going to come galloping over a sand dune somewhere in reel too but if the tour eggs seem to have changed very little the white man has changed a lot 50 miles from this camp is taman rasit once a french garrison now a mecca for a special kind of tourist they see in the turret way of life things that their own lives lack a sense of community a closeness to nature tranquility oh lord won't you buy me a mercedes-benz my friends all drive porsches i must make amends worked hard all my lifetime no help from my friends so lord won't you buy me a mercedes benz oh lord won't you buy me a night on the town i'm counting on you lord please don't let me down prove that you love me and by the next round oh lord won't you buy me a night on the town the changing pattern of toureg life has been studied by an anthropologist jeremy keenan i've been studying these people now for about seven years and in a camp like city mohammed's here things still look much the same as they did 50 odd years ago but in fact the whole economic basis has changed the environment in which the tuareg live offers them very little there's pasture for the goats but they've always had to bring in from outside of the area most of their basic food products millet wheat and dates the economic system that developed to keep these camps applied with grain it involved a form of slavery it also involved the exploitation of the black gardeners this system was tolerated by the french but in 1962 with the new algerian government they said no we're not tolerating this we won't have it and since that time since 1962 the whole economic basis of these people of these camps has more or less collapsed [Music] [Music] mohammed kept the camp supplied with grain by going on caravans down into niger 500 600 miles away carrying salt and trading it bartering it for millet but now what happens is the city keeps the camp supplied with grain by buying it in tamaracid and the money to do this comes from the leather junk that is made in the camp by his wife and other women and sold to tourists at a pretty exorbitant price it's a pretty uncertain sort of business every morning while we were there tahei used to go out from sidi mohammed's camp to get what little milk she could from the goats tahei is descended from slaves that the tour eggs brought back from the south were captured from slave caravans as they trekked across the desert on their way to the slave porch on the coast since algerian independence in 62 the slaves have been free most of them have left the camps to work in the gardens or on the road but some of the women have stayed living as they always have done it was hard enough for us to try and talk to them at all but to try and talk to them about things in our kind of concepts like slavery and freedom is hopeless they see things in terms of practical and economic reality where could i go to who would look after me who would feed me [Applause] [Music] oh foreign of life is rapidly disappearing that's why we've been given the money to make this film to put it crudely decision look at the last perhaps traces of nomadic life in this region but the city doesn't see it that way he sees it in terms of a day-to-day problem of how he can get grain up from tamaracid how he can provide for his family next month he certainly has no conception of this way of life coming to an end i will do [Music] oh oh [Music] [Laughter] foreign [Music] my [Music] we have this notion of the touareg being great warriors in fact it was this particular group here who had the last guard the french just over the hill here only a couple of miles away [Music] and tacowilt the old slave she can remember the details of it she laughs at how she remembers the stragglers the french stragglers who walked over the hills here i had to eat tahle that's a herb like a camel but what rarely happened [Music] a french column was more or less wiped out about 20 of them were killed the tuareg lost eight to ten men but what were we doing it was 1917 with the somme at verdun we were dying like flies [Music] [Music] [Music] when you first look at a society like this and it may look fairly free and fairly easy it's very difficult to see and understand the social complexities of it take for example when a visitor drops in he may be related to you in more than one way by blood and by marriage he may be not only your cousin but also your brother-in-law now the behavior with relationships is fairly institutionalized it's formal for example with a cousin one normally holds a relationship that involves quite a bit of joking on the other hand with the brother-in-law behavior is expected to show a certain degree of respect uh formality so if you are a blood cousin and a brother-in-law at the same time which form of behavior are you going to adopt as a symbol of social status so that when two people meet they adjust or move the veil into a different position to symbolize what relationship what form of behavior they are adopting when someone comes to visit you always have the same little ceremony you always have tea not to quench thirst but to provide a formal social situation a ritual in which a certain amount of fencing a certain amount of feeling out can take place okay foreign [Applause] [Music] yes the actual tea making ceremony itself is a highly ritualized process it is always done by a man there are always three glasses never two never four and into the third glass a certain herb is always added to ward off the keller soof the evil spirits [Music] i can remember when i first entered this country alone i was a complete stranger i had a certain fear of becoming lost in this in this landscape of possibly even dying of thirst but to these people to them it's home the mountains for example each one has a name it's male or female they marry they divorce they move away it's in their mythology the land itself reflects the social order and if one looks around in these rocks there are several hundred types of plant which can be used for medicinal purposes nutritional purposes and of course pasture every two or three days the goat herds are taken down to the water holes to drink but the tuareg rarely drink this surface water they dig holes or wells in the valley floor partly because it's cleaner but also there's the fear of the keller soof the evil spirits that live in the waterholes so the problem that the touareg themselves see most clearly is that of drought for 10 years there has been increasing drought and for the last two years there's been no rainfall whatsoever [Music] has been dependent on camels he's used camels on his successive caravans 500 miles south to niger to bring back millet for the camp but this year alone through drought he has lost all 17 camels that he owned uh what is happening now is that the pasture is so bad the camps are having to move more and more frequently just to keep the goats alive [Music] foreign is [Music] of course in the past there was drought this is no new thing to the touring but in the past one just died now there are alternatives you can leave the camps leave the mountains you can just go as you come down out of the mountains into the valleys some soil begins irrigated by man-made ponds and channels it was here that sidi muhammad used to have his gardens until independence in 62 the tour egg like sidi mohammed had a system whereby the fertile valleys of their land were cultivated on a contract basis by heritains black african gardeners unlike the slaves the heritains were technically free but the contract system meant that the touareg got at least four-fifths of what the heritains produced in 1951 a french medical report said that one in five of the heritage was dying directly of starvation at independence the algerian government said that no such system was going to operate in their country and gave the land to whoever worked it it was the end of one of sidi muhammad's chief sources of food we asked him to come down with us to his old gardens but he wouldn't feeling between his generation of turig and the heritains is not exactly cordial but some of the younger tuareg are now just beginning to work the land alongside the heritains and the ex-slaves the young touregg who took us to the camp sidi mohammed's cousin elwefy has more or less left the hills and now he has a house in the village where city muhammad used to have his garden to irrigate the land which they used to contract out to the heritains the tuareg made their slaves dig foggerers underground aqueducts sometimes running two or three miles ten years after independence edward has swallowed his pride and now maintains the fogara himself so when i first came here just after independence it looked as if the touareg might have tried some sort of revolt against the changes that were being made but it didn't happen there was a little incident an old man got involved in the skirmish along with five of his friends they thought they could reclaim their slaves they drew their swords and one of them was shot in the foot but it fizzled out for someone like siddi muhammad you'd be quite inconceivable for him to work in the foggers or in the gardens like this a job that only a few years ago was reserved for the heritains the black cultivators the most menial form of work but now the younger generation men like elwood field are prepared to do this they have taken on the roles the jobs that only a few years ago were done by what they refer to as the blacks but even though the cultivation of gardens is a tremendous change in attitude for toure eggs such as elva field he himself realizes that in economic terms the garden is not enough to support his family and he spends much of his time looking for means opportunities to earn a bit of money such as by working as a guide with tourists or joining a labour gang in taman russic so [Music] me this village here of our fields hirofolk it doesn't work there's a brand new pump it doesn't operate there's the co-operative land with an irrigation channel it's dry there's a schoolhouse that hasn't seen a teacher for two years and when when asked i will feel why these things don't work immediately the government's fault but it's not the government's fault one can't expect these people to move out of their traditional way of life in the mountain camps just like that and fit in with a completely new social and political organizational structure which a cooperative system demands [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] one morning luffy came and told us that a child had died and that they were going to bury him the longer i've stayed with these people the more i realize that one is not one of them their culture their values are different and inevitably one finishes by in a sense using them one writes academic monographs books makes films this morning a young boy died it was a funeral and we were quite pleased that something had happened an event an incident and we filmed it but why did we film it to show how tuareg buried their dead or perhaps because on television a burial a funeral is perhaps interesting exciting moving even entertaining [Music] [Music] what [Applause] i said um [Applause] foreign [Music] foreign oh thank you um what's up when when i hear an anthropologist or anybody saying that i am one of the tribe i is my blood brother and this sort of nonsense my first reaction is [ __ ] it's when you don't understand their values and beliefs you see them in their material way of life cooking their bread in the ground things that we in our civilized life sometimes envy the peace and the quiet but it looks very simple it looks very nice it looks very pretty what are they doing when they're sitting around they're meditating they're contemplating problems problems which do you and i we probably haven't even considered where to get water from where to get pasture whether to go into taman rasa if they can get transport with the possibility of buying dumplings hate need worth of dried tomatoes or something uh one can play with their environment but i mean could you and i do it forever um oh um [Music] [Music] okay about eight miles from city muhammad's camp the algerian government is building a rest house for tourists it's here the tour egg have real contact with the outside world it was here that we found elwafi earning some money making the tea some people get very sentimental about change but i don't really it's i can think of it as being inevitable but when i came up here this time i felt quite sad to see this see tuareg building this bloody great edifice of a tourist rest place these people were the great warlords of the sahara and when they enter our civilization through this building they enter it as navis if they go on building these hotels which seems inevitable and the tourists come here and the present rate of progress there won't be any turret left for the people in the hotels to see anyhow so [Applause] hello foreign foreign oh [Music] right in taman rasit the government has built a new boarding school where nomad children are encouraged to come and live many parents think of this building almost as a hotel where their children will be well clothed well fed there's one less mouth to feed in the camp but now there's a distinct change in attitude and some parents can see the practical advantages [Music] [Music] the man who runs it is very conscious of what he is trying to do here his attitude is that the touareg cannot escape the 20th century what he is trying to do for these children is to give them the opportunity to learn how to cope with it the port is very much aware of the problems facing six-year-old boys who've left the camps for the first time the fear they have the shock on being confronted with double-tiered bunks with showers with radiators taps the glass in the windows things they've never seen before and the stairs what are stairs are they killer souffle these children on their very doorstep is the 20th century they have to learn about trucks pumps irrigation shops money [Music] once said to me that he would like his children to come here for five years to learn french and arabic and so on so that they can get a better chance uh to earn money but he also thinks that after that one day they will return to the camp [Music] but i ain't no foolish as we left city muhammad was leaving two with moosa his cousin on the great journey south to fetch more camels it's a journey that he's made many times before but this was the first time that he hadn't a camel left alive to go on we took them to town to try and get they were taught by their parents all about camels about pasture the hundreds of different types of herbs they knew everything about the environment in which they had to cope the camel's finished it has no no function it's really fit for nothing more than the slaughterhouse [Music] [Music] huh in tamman russet city muhammad found a truck and paid the driver to take him south when he comes back with camels what will be the economic the financial gain if the drought continues the pasture remains as it is they too will probably die like the 17 that he's already lost this year but why does he go it gives him a certain prestige it's something that he's always done and it's what he knows how to do another [Music] [Music] so [Music] foreign

Channel: TRACKS

Views: 14,720

Rating: 4.8290596 out of 5

Keywords: TRACKS, tracks travel channel, tracks travel, Documentary movies - topic, full documentary, travel documentary, culture documentary, african tribe documentary, tracks, disappearing world, disappearing world full episodes, lost tribes, The Tuareg, berber tribe sahara desert, sahara tribe, desert tribes of the sahara, desert tribes, tuareg people, sahara desert, sahara desert documentary, tuareg tribe, sahara desert music, sahara desert secrets, sahara desert facts

Id: JOJfYSL96DM

Length: 53min 23sec (3203 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020