Haboub shrugs, flashes a big white-toothed grin, flicks open a leather pouch and fills his pipe.
We reach Mejik a little before nine. Though there is a well-lit UN compound near by, we are booked once again into a barracks, set in a crumbling concrete-walled enclosure. Someone has at least made a stab at brightening up the place. The narrow, unroofed strip of passageway outside our rooms has been laid with crazy paving, and along it runs a dried-up garden bed decorated with Russian shell-cases. The accommodation, consisting of two large unfurnished dormitories, a lavatory and washroom, is much the same as at Tfariti, except that, instead of a plastic jug, this lavatory has a luxury attachment, a flush.
I pull it. Nothing happens.
Day Twenty-One
MEJIK TO ZOUERAT
Slept soundly and am now packing to make ready for the crossing into Mauritania.
The border is only 15 miles away. Bachir says that we will be the first foreigners ever to cross it at this point, after negotiations made possible because of the currently cordial relations between Mauritania and the Polisario.
Over a last meal of bread and coffee he expands on this.
‘We have nothing in common with the Moroccans. We have everything in common with the Mauritanians - culture, language, songs, dance.’
The UN mission here, frustrated by both sides in its attempt to organise a referendum on the future of Western Sahara, has run up costs of $250 million and may well lose patience. Doesn’t he think there will come a time when they will have to reach a compromise?
Bachir doesn’t hesitate.
‘There can be no compromise. We will be like a camel’s thorn to the Moroccans.’
He is smiling, a little grimly perhaps, but not without some relish.
‘The more a camel tries to get a thorn out of its foot, the deeper it goes in, and the harder it is to get rid of it.’
At eleven, a line of vehicles emerges from the swirling sand to the south and soon we’re shaking hands with a new set of escorts. Compared with the Saharawis, the Mauritanians, marked out by their billowing pale blue robes, which they call boubous, carry with them a worldliness, a touch of confidence and panache, which comes, I suppose, from having a country of your own.
Cassa is dark, attractive, in his thirties, I should imagine, and seems to be in charge of the operation, alongside an Englishman, Bob Watt. Abdallahi, pale-skinned, more Arab than Berber, is our official helper from the Mauritanian Ministry of Communications. Rumour has it that he’s the Minister himself.
Mohammed Salim, so ebullient at desert draughts yesterday, is subdued. He has some problem with his eye and we’ve left him medicine from our filming kit. Nevertheless, he hugs me with surprising force as we begin our long farewells.
The fort at Mejik and the waving Saharawis are quickly obscured by a violent sandstorm. I still have my dry desert cough, which the sand hissing against the windows and squeezing in through the floor isn’t doing anything to improve. Visibility drops to a hundred yards. It feels as if we are in limbo, and the lack of any point of reference increases the unreality of anything we glimpse outside. Did we really pass a new-born camel, still wet from its mother, lying on the sand? Or a UN border patrol in four immaculate white Land Cruisers, their aerials swinging and bending in the wind like fishing rods?
Then, three short, sharp shocks in rapid succession - a line of concrete houses, a railway line and a hard-top road. Never mind water in the desert; after days of being thumped and jolted and flung about, it’s tarmac in the desert that sends the spirits soaring.
The controversial Mauritanian border is not marked, and there is nothing to indicate a change of country until we reach a checkpoint, a metal rondavel, clanging violently in the wind. Two tall, loose-limbed guards peruse our passports, with more bewilderment than suspicion, and then we are free to enter the town, nay veritable metropolis, of Zouerat, where there are bicycles and motorbikes and cars and garages and shops and sports grounds and, at last, a hotel, the Oasian. The Polisario camps were much cleaner than Zouerat, and young boys there did not flock round, hands out for money or presents, as they do here.
But, for now, the promise of cold beer and a hot shower makes up for everything.
There is no hot water, owing to a problem with the boiler, but the beer is awfully good and I’m able to get through to Helen on the satellite phone and tell her I was dying but survived. She tells me that last night she dreamt I was in bed beside her, sent back home by the BBC for being physically not up to it. I’m quite touched by the fact that we should be having the same anxiety dreams.
MAURITANIA
Day Twenty-Two
ZOUERAT
One significant change since we crossed the border is the appearance of baguettes and croissants at the breakfast table. For the first sixty years of the twentieth century, first as a protectorate and later as a colony, Mauritania, land of the Moors, was a neglected part of the French empire in Africa. La Mauritanie, as big as France and Spain put together, with a population barely that of Paris, became a place of exile, a dustbin for troublemakers, sidelined from the real French interests in Senegal and Morocco. But the French brought their boulangeries and the Mauritanians kept them when they became an independent Islamic republic in 1960.
It’s interesting to see what survives of the colonial presence in these countries. In Western Sahara the Spanish legacy lives on in the Polisario, in their education and their political allegiances, and yes, I did have some chorizo with my camel one evening, but that’s about it. Here in Zouerat, the French influence seems superficially stronger, extending beyond baguettes to lycees and gendarmeries, pastis in the bar and French news on the television.
After breakfast I walk outside to take a look at the town. Seeing me coming, a gauntlet of salesmen rise effortlessly from their haunches to enjoin me to buy this or that ornament, scarf, ring, necklace, leather pouch. I smile widely and appreciatively and do not stop. When I reach the gate, I pause for a split second, which is long enough for a young man to enquire solicitously about my health before showing me some postcards. I make for the street. Before I can reach it two young boys leap off a donkey cart stacked with charcoal and race towards me, all big smiles and outstretched hands.
‘Donnez-moi un cadeau. Donnez-moi un Bic!’
When I decline they scamper off and leap back onto their cart, aiming a couple of wild blows at the donkey.
Zouerat is a frontier town, with all the mess and brutality that goes with the sniff of money. In the cluster of jagged peaks to the south of the town is enough iron ore to last 200 years, a resource that has transformed this corner of the desert into a multi-milliondollar asset, supplying 40 per cent of Mauritania’s foreign earnings.
All the jobs, houses, public transport and associated support trades are in the domain of SNIM, Societe Nationale Industrielle et Miniere, the once French, now Mauritanian-owned company that mines the ore. Without SNIM Zouerat would be no more than a collection of tents.
Which, in the poorer parts, it already is.
The backstreets of Zouerat are open rubbish tips, lined with low, shabby buildings, but when the doors are open, business spills out everywhere, like the desert after rain. Barbers, garages, telephone points and lots of quincailleries (ironmongers). Cutting, fabricating and panel beating seems to be going on in every corner. I watch a middle-aged, red-robed man, using only an axe, hammer and his own sandaled foot for purchase, transform a BP oil drum into a 6-foot length of fencing in less than five minutes.