— Have you any idea what’s going on here?
— Go to Laoni and you will understand.
— Where is that?
— Three days’ walk, south-west of here.
— Laoni?
— Yes, Laoni, the gold mine.
— What about it?
— The gold extracted from the mine is transported to Tamanrasset and from there it’s sent on to Algiers.
— I don’t see the problem.
— The gold never arrives in Tamanrasset; your friend Saïd commandeers it for his friends in high places.
— Is this true?
— And that’s not the whole story: Algiers denies that there is a secret American military base in the area and so Saïd is told to supply it on the quiet. He has dollars coming out of his arse.
— How do you know all this? No one in Paris has heard anything about it.
— Why wouldn’t I know? I occasionally work as a guide for Saïd and the Americans.
Over the days that followed, other harragas arrived at Saïd’s place, and eventually there were a dozen of them. Ahmadou and Abu-Bakr lost their starring roles in the documentary. The camera fell upon the newcomers, beardless boys with big eyes, a Malian, a Nigerian, a Ghanaian, two kids from Togo, one a pregnant girl, a Sudanese boy, an Ivoirian, a Senegalese, a Congolese and a Guinean, the last three having travelled the same route via Gao, the second largest trafficking hub in the Sahel after Tamanrasset. They all told the same story, they were all looking for the promised land. The tragedy — though they did not yet know this — was that they have come too far to get there in this life.
While they waited for the people smuggler to arrive, Saïd set them to work for the customs inspector. They repaired his roof in exchange for some bread and a little water. ‘A man must earn his keep,’ Saïd says to the camera, a smiling Good Samaritan. The camera takes the opportunity to rile him a little.
— How much do you make on the transfers to Tarifa? They say you bleed these people dry and very few make it there alive.
— That’s just malicious gossip, I do this out of Muslim charity. They want to have a little fun, the little black bamboulas, so I help them out.
As he says this, the people smuggler jumps down from his Land Rover. He takes off his keffiyeh and drinks down mint tea. Oh, he looks evil! He is just back from an expedition he is reluctant to discuss. The camera insists. ‘I was on holiday with friends in Tamanrasset,’ he swears, looking greedily at his new clients. In the camp, there is much talk about a group of Ugandan mercenaries who have been turned over to Gaddafi who, bored as a dead rat, dreams of opening up a new route. It’s crazy how much goes on in the middle of the desert.
Dawn the next morning, the immigrants are woken with a boot, loaded on to the back of the truck, covered with a tarpaulin, then they’re off. The camera has rented an air-conditioned 4x4, a driver and a guide. The voiceover does not mention the fact, but it clearly belongs to Saïd. The Toyota drives behind or in front of the truck, as filming dictates. The little convoy raises clouds of dust. They take no precautions, they drive at top speed, they have no need to worry since everywhere within a five-hundred-kilometre radius is controlled by Saïd. At military checkpoints, they are greeted with honours. Further north, as they enter another private fiefdom the truck pulls off the road before it reaches the checkpoints. Regardless of the faction they’re allied to, truckers stick together and so oncoming trucks flash their headlights to warn of an upcoming roadblock. Once means danger is 1km ahead, twice means 2km ahead and so on. Sometimes they stop, regroup and draw up a plan of battle. After the first few deaths, they negotiate over a pot of mint tea. It is perfectly timed and the Toyota, pretending to be a tourist who has broken down, manages to film the magnificent jamboree that takes place around the fire in the shadow of a cave.
Every time the truck slows and leaves the road, the harragas huddle together. The government does not take kindly to foreign intruders. They are beaten and then killed after a period working as slave labour for an officer. This is one of the perks offered to ranking officers, all of whom have palm groves that need tending or roofs that need mending.
The convoy arrives at the oasis town of El Oued, the ‘City of a Thousand Domes’. In the desert, it stops to visit a famous marabout, a bizarre old man, a dwarf in rags named sidi Abdelaziz who stands on solid-gold stilts and calls himself ‘El Mahdi’ — the Guided One. The little bastard has considerable influence, he hawks his bullshit prophecies from douar to douar and the people lap it up. His fame has spread far and wide, all the way to New York where people wonder what it’s all about. To some, he is a great prodigy, to others a vulgar charlatan. He looks to me like a lunatic, I thought, the first time I saw him shimmying around his kubba jabbering bits of marabout gibberish. Time is short. A confab takes place between the people smuggler and the master of the house. They high five, El Mahdi clicks his fingers and from a deep well hidden among the cacti, soaked to the skin, frantic and half-blind, twelve puny little runts appear. These are boys from the area around the fields who protested against poverty and found themselves being hunted down by the police and the Americans. They were looking for work, waving banners outside the Hassi Messaoud oil base. They have endured terrible dangers in order to get here to the meeting point, they have nothing but the clothes on their backs. ‘We will continue on foot, steering clear of the main roads,’ announces the smuggler. Northern Algeria is tightly controlled, there are roadblocks everywhere, and everywhere there are spies, barons, emirs, armed factions, dishonest officials, brazen bounty hunters. Dear God, what a journey, what terrors they must face; it’s enough to break your heart.
They trudge on for two weeks — a century and a half in any normal country. Long funeral marches between two alerts, two watches. The straggling group looks barely human now, a ragman would reject them. I felt wretched and ashamed as I watched them founder, unable to do anything to help.
Finally, just beyond the horizon, the border looms. On the far side is Morocco — the Kingdom of the Alaouites as they say in high places here in Algeria to imply God knows what. It is the same land, the same sun, the same peoples practising the same religion, the same food; but there the air is different, there a man can breathe. The group feels a sense of relief, this is like stepping into a picture postcard, one of the hand-tinted photos of long ago so charmingly idyllic that tourists felt a sudden need to siesta in the shade of a palm tree, or saddle the nearest donkey. All along this uncertain line established in endless treaties, everyone is in the business of contraband and smuggling; under the watchful gaze of both armies, oil is exchanged for kif. The soldiers keep a friendly eye on each other, a state of war with no war; it is a godsend, everyone gets to line their pockets and no one gets hurt.