The Tuareg: The Blue-Veiled Desert Warriors (Morocco & Algeria - Full Documentary) | TRACKS

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [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 2,000 miles across the Sahara Desert down to 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 recognize a route for the white man's railway with 105 men and 25,000 bullets the Touareg 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 twenty years no European dared set foot in Turek country the myth was born of the blue veiled warriors of the desert a bad man of many a midnight movie [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was not extraordinary military prowess that defeated Colonel flatters the flatters had been left alone by the Touareg the desert would very probably have gotten anyway 20 years later a better prepared French force marched through that the turret daring to lift a finger against them protected by the French the Touareg became camel caravans in 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 come to ten thousand feet up in the hoggar mountains at the foot of Tejada the highest mountain in Algeria it's almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer and slap in 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 it comes to look almost exactly as they looked 50 years ago the men are no less tall the veils are no less blue the true Touareg is not gonna come galloping avarice and you in some way in real - but if the Touareg seemed to have changed very little the white man has changed a lot 50 miles from this camp is tamanrasset once a French garrison now a mecca for a special kind of tourists they see in the Touareg way of life things that their own lives lack a sense of community the closeness to nature tranquility Oh Lord won't you buy me a mercedes-benz my friends all Drive Porsches I must make a man's works hard my lifetime no help from my friends so all Lord won't you buy me a mercedes-benz Oh Lord won't you buy me ain't night on the town I'm counting on you lord please don't let me down prove that you love me and buy the next round Oh Lord won't you buy me a night on the town the changing pattern of Touareg 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 muhammad'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 Touareg 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 camp supply of grain it involved 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 Hao Jian government they said no they'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] [Music] up until a few years ago City Muhammad kept the camp supplied with grain by going on caravans down in Tunisia 500 600 miles away carrying salt and trading it bartering it for millet but now what happens is the city keeps the camp supply with grain by buying it in tamanrasset 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 had a pretty exorbitant price it's a pretty uncertain sort of business every morning while we were there tahe used to go out from city muhammad's camp to get what little milk she could from the goats tahe is descended from slaves that the Turing's brought back from the south were captured from slave caravans as they trekked across the desert on their way to the slave ports on the coast since our daring independence in 62 the slaves had 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] [Music] sometimes when I sit here with city it all seems so strange we know this where life is rapidly disappearing that's why we've been given the money to make this film to put it crudely to sittin look at the last perhaps traces of nomadic life in this region but city doesn't see it that way he sees it in terms of a day-to-day problem of how you can get a grain out from tamanrasset how you can provide for his family next month he certainly has no conception of this way of life coming to an end [Music] [Laughter] [Music] ha ha [Music] we have this notion of the Touareg being great warriors in fact it was this particular group here who had the last go at the French just over the hill here only a couple of miles away and Tucker willed the old slave she can remember the details of it she laughs and how she remembers the stragglers French stragglers who walked over the hills here and had to eat thali that's a herb like a camel but what really happened a French column was more or less wiped out that 20 of them were killed the Touareg lost eight to ten men but what were we doing it was 1917 at the Somme and they're done we were dying like flies [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 my marriage he may be not only your cousin but also your brother-in-law no the behavior with relationships is fairly institutionalized as formal for example with a cousin one normally holds a relationship that involves quite a bit of joking on the other hand with a brother-in-law behavior is expected to show a certain degree of respect formality so if you are a blood cousin and brother-in-law at the same time which form of behavior you were to adopt the Touareg used the position of their veils as a symbol of social status so that when two people meet they are just or move the veil intuitive 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 I don't know oh yeah the actual tea making ceremony itself is a highly ritualized process it is always done by a man there are always three glasses never to have a four and into the third glass a certain herb is always added to ward off the Keller soothe the evil spirits 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 surround 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 goatherds are taken down to the water holes to drink but the Touareg 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 colour tzuf the evil spirits that live in the water holes the problem is the Touareg themselves see most clearly is that of drought for ten years there has been increasing drought and for the last two years there's been no rainfall whatsoever all of his life City Mohamed 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 with he armed what is happening now is that the pasture is so bad the Kemp's are having to move more and more frequently just to keep the goats alive ended up kissing of course in the past there was drought this is no new thing to the Turing but in the past one has 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 city Mohamed used to have his gardens until independence in 62 the Touareg like city Mohamed had a system whereby the fertile valleys of their land were cultivated on a contract basis by heritance black African gardeners unlike the slaves the Hurricanes were technically free but the contract system meant that the Touareg had got at least four-fifths of what the Hurricanes produced in 1951 a French medical report said that one in five of the Hurricanes was dying directly of starvation at Independence the Aegean 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 city Mohammed'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 tarragon the heritance is not exactly cordial but some of the younger Turek are now just beginning to work the land alongside the Hurricanes and the ex-slaves the young Touareg who took us to the camp city Muhammad's cousin airworthy has more or less left the hills and now he has a house in the village where Sydney Muhammad used to have his garden to irrigate the land which they used to contract out to the heritance the Touareg made their slaves dig Fagaras underground aqueducts sometimes running 2 or 3 miles 10 years after independence Murphy has swallowed his pride and now maintains the fogger a himself 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 happened there was a little incident camped a an old man got involved in a skirmish long with five of his friends they thought they could reclaim their slaves they drew their swords and one of them was shot on the foot but it fizzled out for someone like city Mohamed you'd be quite inconceivable for him to work in the forest or in the gardens like this a job that only a few years ago was reserved for the heritance black cultivators the most menial form of work but now the younger generation men like Ella feel prepared to do this they have taken on the roles the jobs that only a few years ago we're done by what they refer to as the blacks but even though the cultivation of gardens is a tremendous change in attitude for Touring's such as our 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 tamanrasset [Music] this village here of Ella feels here oh [ __ ] it doesn't work there's a brand new pump it doesn't operate is that cop duel and with neera Gatien channels dry there's a schoolhouse that hasn't seen a teacher for two years and when one asks everfeel why these things don't work he ministers after 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 in a completely new social and political organizational structure which our cooperative system demands [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] one morning Murphy came and told us that a child had died and that they were going to bury him longer I've stayed with these people the more I realized 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 there was a funeral and we were quite pleased but something had happened an event an incident and we filmed it but why do we film it to show how Touareg buried their dead or perhaps because on television a burial a funeral is perhaps interesting exciting moving even entertaining [Music] Oh Oh [Music] I said our money boy [Applause] to the [Applause] when I hear an anthropologist or anybody saying that I am one of the tribe is my blood brother and they sort of nonsense my first reaction it's [ __ ] it's when you don't understand their values and beliefs and you see them in their material way of life cooking their bread in the ground things that we and our civilized life sometimes Envy the peace and the quiet it looks very simple it looks very nice it looks very pretty what are they doing with us 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 pump where to get pasture whether to go into tamanrasset if they can get transport with the possibility of buying double-take need worker tried tomorrow one can play with their environment but I mean could you and I do it forever Oh [Music] about eight miles from city muhammad's camp the Algerian government is building a rest house for tourists it's here the Touareg have real contact with the outside world it was here that we found Elfi 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 sea touring building this bloody great edifice of a tourist rest place these people were the great war lords of the Sahara and when they enter our civilization through this building the entry is navvies 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 Touareg left for the people in the hotels to see anything [Applause] [Music] in tamanrasset the government has built a new boarding school when nomads 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 is 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] mr. La Porte the man who runs it he's very conscious of what he is trying to do here his attitude is that the Touareg cannot escape the twentieth 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 and the windows things they never seen before and the stairs what are stairs are they killer soup there these children on their very doorstep is the 20th century they have to learn about trucks pumps irrigation shops money [Music] Ella Phil 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 they could get a better chance to our money but he also thinks that after that one day they will return to the camp [Music] as we left city mohammed was leaving too with Musa 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 who took them to tamanrasset to try and get a lift south on a truck city mohammad in his generation we're not uneducated 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 camels finished it has no no function it's really fit for nothing more than the slaughterhouse [Music] [Music] [Music] in tamanrasset 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 do it gives him a certain prestige it's something that he's always done this what he knows how to do [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: TRACKS

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Keywords: tuareg people documentary, tribes of sahara desert, nomadic tribes of the sahara full documentary, nomadic tribes in morocco, tuareg tribe documentary, tuareg tribe in sahara desert, tuareg tribe girls, surviving in the sahara desert, algerian tribes, north african tribes, north african tribal music, north african traditional music, berber tribe, berber tribe morocco, berber traditional music

Id: C7SL8-uNrIk

Length: 53min 29sec (3209 seconds)

Published: Fri May 04 2018