Timbuktu’s Three Cups of Tea

Almost immediately upon arrival in Timbuktu, we were invited to join a small group of Toureg men for their morning tea.  Sitting down in the sand, as the charcoal was lit for the kettle, the men explained that "Toureg tea" consists of three cups, brewed one at a time and drank roughly 20 minutes apart. The tea leaves are added to the kettle only once, and then in successive rounds of brewing with additional water and sugar, three cups are produced.

The first cup, "strong like death", is the most potent and tastes like chewed tea leaves. The second cup, "sweet like life", is an even blend of tea and sugar. And the third cup, "sugar like love", is like the sticky last swig of the kool aid pitcher.

It is through this lens, Timbuktu's version of three cups of tea, that we reflect back on our experience in the city at the edge of the world.

Cup 1: Strong Like Death

Timbuktu's inaccessibility is as much its allure as its thorn. One needs either 5 hours by car, 2 days by boat, or 3 days by camel to reach Timbuktu from any of the nearby villages, and to live in a place so remote, you have to be strong. And to continually fight a climate inhospitable to crops, with bleaching sun and blustering sand storms, you live on the edge. You protect yourself from the elements by wearing long boubous and covering your head and face with a lengthy turban.

There are two industries in Timbuktu, each with brutal conditions of scarcity and competition: tourism and salt mining. One report that we read notes that Timbuktu’s tourism industry has been in a devastating free fall during the past two years. In 2009, 49,000 western tourists visited the city. In 2010, 6,000. And, by the end of June 2011, less than 1,000.  For a town where 70% of its 33,000 inhabitants rely on tourism for their livelihoods, this decline has been catastrophic and is attributed to western governments imposing warnings advising people against travel to Timbuktu because of a heightened threat of kidnapping.

While we can only assume the validity of the numbers, the lack of tourists became eerily apparent the moment we got off the boat. Within 30 minutes of arriving at our hotel (between our first and second cups of tea), a guide came by to look for us, claiming that he had been sent by “our French friend, Mike” who had told us about him 4 days earlier in a town 400km away. A heated argument ensued between the guide and the hotel owner’s brother, ending in the guide being escorted out of the gated courtyard yelling “I just want a chance to do my job.”

This wasn’t the first time we experienced two men fighting over the scarce tourist attention. It wasn’t the first time we felt in the middle of a situation that was hard for everyone: we deserved the right to feel protected within the walls of our hotel, the proprietor had the right to determine who could be on his property, and the entrepreneur had the right to ask if we wanted his services. In an environment where the supply of guides far exceeds the demand of tourists, and there are few other options, no one wins. Combine this dynamic with endemic poverty and a history of ethnic and religious conflict, and it’s no surprise that Timbuktu is shroud in a callousness necessary to survive.

Two days after the exchange between the guide and the hotel owner’s brother, a group of armed men barged into a hotel restaurant directly across the sand road from Timbuktu’s “Flame of Peace” monument and abducted three men and killed one western tourist. While no one has claimed responsibility for this attack, it is widely assumed that it was carried out by an extremist group of outsiders from Niger, Mauritania or Algeria.  Compounding AQIM, Mali and its Sahel region neighbors face a spate of men returning after fighting in Libya, now armed and without a benefactor.

Timbuktu was a hard place for us. We had a constant feeling of being watched, and whether it was by honest people trying to make an honest living or by others wanting to do harm, we will never know. Fortunately, we left Timbuktu hours before the kidnapping occurred and we were safely hundreds of miles away before we heard the news.

We were frightened: the restaurant was the same one we tried to eat lunch at the day before and it was just blocks from our hotel; was the Dutch abductee one of the women we went on a sunset camel ride with the night before? were the kidnappers heading south and targeting hotels in other tourist towns? We were confused: how was it possible that in such a tightly knit community, this was really an outside job? was the guide involved? was it politically motivated because the Malian president was scheduled to visit the Netherlands a week later? And, we were certain: this incident destroyed the future tourism industry for the majority of hardworking men and women who live in Timbuktu.

 

Cup 2: Sweet Like Life

After the second cup of tea was poured, the Toureg men asked to show us the treasures of the desert, each with a story, each at a good price.

The men had arrived the day before with a salt caravan, a brutal 800 km trek through the desert with anywhere from 30-200 camels carrying 60 kilo salt slabs from the faraway mines. These trips take 40 days, with the camels and men traveling at night by way of the stars to avoid the heat of the day. Occurring only in the cool months (October-March), these salt caravans have, for centuries, linked Timbuktu with the Mediterranean. With its strategic positioning at the edge of the Sahara Desert and at the top of the bend of the Niger River, Timbuktu is a perfectly situated terminus of the salt caravans to access markets throughout Mali and West Africa.

Virtually unchanged for centuries, these caravans still continue to produce generations of Toureg men on the move for months at a time and well-versed in many languages. Each camel hauls four slabs of salt, cut from a dried lake, and is carried across the desert to sale.  We rode camels to have dinner with this young guide in his semi-Nomadic village on Thanksgiving night.  There, he explained the languages he needs for his trade: "I speak Toureg, French, Arabic, English, Berber, Bambara, and Camel." "I'm sorry; did you say 'camel'?" "Yes, it is very important for the Toureg people to speak camel, because when we are out in the desert, far away from water, the camels know how to find it. But only when we ask for help." [Then we told him about the wonders of Google translate.]

Timbuktu was once a bastion of Islamic scholarship. In the 16th century, it was home to one of the largest universities (25,000+ students) of Arabic learning in the Muslim world. Now, several public and private libraries preserve the rich history of scholarship in the region. We visited one library, funded partially by the Ford and Carnegie foundations, that housed, translated, and catalogued over 23,000 Islamic religious, historical, and scientific texts. The oldest manuscripts date from the 12th century and others include some of the few written histories of Africa's great empires and texts carried from Spain when Muslims were expelled in 1492. Some experts believe that there are over 5 million manuscripts in the Timbuktu region, preserved by the dry desert air and stored away in family homes.

Tangentially related to both the salt caravans (he uses camel hide) and the tourism industry (we bought 2 boxes), and the manuscripts (his boxes are used to preserve the ancient papers), Mohammed is a skilled leather artist. Born and raised in a small village 80km outside of Timbuktu, Mohammed learned his craft from him father beginning at age 5 or 6. Today, he has a small workshop (mats on a cement floor) and four apprentices, and he sells his works to tourists and in exhibitions throughout Europe. Part zoot-suit wearing OG from West Oakland, part sophisticated artist from the galleries of Paris, Mohammed was a fascinating contradiction. Mohammed was the first Malian we met who showed us equal parts global mobility and a commitment to his home. He yearned for a show in New York or San Francisco, and lamented the lack of foreigners visiting Timbuktu. He used century old tools and drove a Japanese car made for French roads. He found us by showing up at our hotel in the dark wearing a near face-covering turban and introduced himself as "Peace Corps Mohammed." He seemed to delicately straddle the ever advancing European world, while keeping a foot firmly in the pre-historic ways in Timbuktu.

Cup 3: Sugar Like Love

We booked our stay at Sahara Passions, a hotel on the northern outskirts of Timbuktu, a few days in advance, but when we arrived we found neither co-owner Toureg Shinhouk or Canadian Miranda.  Instead, at this remote desert hotel, inn-keeper assistants Aziz and Ibrahim showed us to the rooftop accommodation, and they set about to making tea.  After tea, they walked us to the passport office for that ever-important stamp, and then the guys wrapped us up like Tuareg women with a new blue scarf from the grand market.  Hungry and hot from the noon sun, we returned to the hotel to share fistfuls of rice, butter and meat from a communal bowl. Not quite the Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing we were thinking of, but the generosity of the portions and of the hosts would rival any table set that day.  We then began our next round of tea.

That night, as the sun set, we packed up the tea leaves, bottled water, plastic bag of raw sugar, a kettle and three small glasses.   Aziz and Ibrahim walked us into the Sahara dunes, in hopes of seeing the evening salt caravan.  The men said their fifth prayers of the day and then lit the charcoal right on the sand.  Ibrahim, who is responsible for making tea on the salt caravan, tried to teach Sara how to pour the kettle – from a distance so far from the cups that the sugar mixes into the brew, and then is poured back into the kettle for another tall mixing pour.  On brewing the second cup, Ibrahim wrapped his head in a scarf as he had at each other time we had seen him brew the second cup, out of respect for “the sweetness of life.”

Before the final cup, a car rolled over a dune in the near distance, and Ibrahim packed us up immediately to head back to the hotel -- perhaps a forewarning of the violence to come later that night and next day.  The final cup of tea we took back at the hotel on the roof, under the brightest star Sirius, used to guide the salt caravans.  We pulled out the iPad, and Aziz and Ibrahim were convinced it was magic to see the image on the screen flip around when the device moved.  We don’t think they were wrong.  We showed them photos of our trip and played the few African songs we had on the iPad.  They told us a story from last year's Festival au Desert when they shook the hand of their famous Malian heroine, Oumou Sangare. From the roof, Aziz belted out “Aicha” from the top of his lungs. 

The next day, when we were ready to part, the guys were saddened to see us go.  Was it their hospitality? they asked. We took a crooked photo with the camera balanced on the hood of a car and all kissed goodbye.  We told them we would be back.  “Like family” they kept saying.