Sahara Man: Travelling with the Tuareg
Purchase on AmazonJeremy Keenan travelled to Algeria in search of the Tuareg, the fearsome indigo-veiled nomads of the Central Sahara with whom he had lived as a young anthropologist.
A chance meeting set him on his way to the Tuareg traditional fortress, the vast mountainous area of Ahaggar, in the tracks of bandits, his tent pitched beside caves decorated with pre-historic paintings. Here he discovered that the Tuareg, who had learned to survive as tourist guides after the horrors of Algeria's war of independence, were now being starved out of their livelihood by the violence in the north.
This vivid and fascinating book takes us into the heart of the Sahara and into the lives of the Tuareg, into Keenan's own past and into the fearful history and present day experience of Algeria itself.
Reviews & critics
This is an excellent piece on the modern Tuareg in Algeria. It is hard to characterise the book as it is a story of the author's re-visit of the Tuareg after an absence of over twenty years, and clearly there have been many changes. It is predominantly a part-travel, part-historical and part-anthropological look at the Tuareg laced with diversionary looks at the vandalism of neolithic art sites by tourists and locals. The author, although no longer a spring chicken himself, is far from an armchair adventurer. He has a clear soft spot for the Tuareg and this makes them so much more real. There are also some points of high drama, which I will not spoil here, and the modern Tuareg who still live semi-nomadically have not lost their skills of survival.
Brilliant book and very good read. Thoroughly recommended if you want to know more about the Tuareg way of life.
I travelled with the Tuaregs in Niger Sahara (Air, Tenere, Iferoen, Djado, Grand Erg og Bilma, Timia, etc.) more than 25 years ago before the Sahara tourism collapsed. I had always assumed that I would one day return and again travel with the Tuareg, but given the state of things in the Sahara these days I am not even sure if I can ever return there in this lifetime. I had understood that Jeremy Keenan's book deals with Algerian Sahara and the Tuareg there, not Niger Sahara and Niger Tuareg, the people who I traveled with and were my friends, but I was nonetheless hungry for his account of his travels in the Sahara. Having opened the book, I just couldn't stop. I read voraciously, like a Sahara traveler by the day who finally reached a guelda, or fish just returned to water. Keenan's account puts me right there. Just wonderful.
I arrived at this book via Sahara Unveiled by William Langewische, Fergus Fleming's The Sword and the Cross, one personal, and the other historical, both of which I would recommend to those who loved this book and want to immerse themselves in the Sahara some more.