The Timbuktu School for Nomads

Starred review from December 5, 2016
Jubber (Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah’s Beard) journeys through Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Mali in this insightful, warm, and humorous account of his travels with and among North African nomads. Underscoring “how complicated life can be when the margins of survival are so tight,” Jubber enlists locals from a variety of nomadic communities to teach him basic skills, including goat-milking, navigating dunes by starlight, preparing tea, and saddling a camel. Even in the most isolated villages, he finds environmental pressures and climate change threatening the inhabitants’ way of life, and Saudi-trained clerics importing interpretations of Islam that conflict with ancient indigenous traditions. Jubber’s travels to Timbuktu bookend the militant Islamist faction Ansar Dine’s violent occupation of the region, and his guides are on edge and divided among themselves. But Timbuktu is no stranger to turmoil; in the 19th century it “earned the nickname ‘White Man’s Grave.’ ” The contrast and subtle interplay between the region’s earthy ethos and its distinguished intellectual history offer an unexpected takeaway. The desert outpost of Chinguetti is home to a handful of libraries, whose extant volumes are now moth-eaten and yellowed, that for centuries surpassed anything found in Europe. Jubber’s serious engagement with nomadic cultures is a welcome addition to an underwhelming body of literature on North Africa.