Teda Drivers on the Road Between Agadez and Assheggur Taking Over an Ancient Tuareg Caravan Route
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chapter 9 Teda Drivers on the Road between Agadez and Assheggur Taking over an Ancient Tuareg Caravan Route Tilman Musch1 Nous sommes libres, nous sommes les maîtres du Sahara. With these words, young Tubu Teda defined themselves when talking to me. They are the driv- ers of Toyota Hilux pick-ups who transport West African migrants and who ‘smuggle’2 goods on the road from Agadez (Niger) to Sabha (Libya) and back. With these words, they also expressed their claim of ‘ownership’ over a vast desert space. The Teda live in northeastern Niger (Manga, Kawar and Djado), northwest- ern Chad (Tibesti) and southern Libya (Fezzan). They may have some common origin in the Tibesti, where their ‘supreme chief’, the derde, still lives today. Many Teda are camel pastoralists, but they also own and exploit date palms; they may do gardening or work as merchants, in particular in Libya.3 Formerly, 1 I express my gratitude to all the travel and ‘sedentary’ communities who contributed to this research: the Teda drivers who shared with me the journeys through the Tenere; other Teda who always received me with the great hospitality which is so proper to peoples of the desert; inhabitants of Dirkou, Bilma, Agadez and other places of Niger who showed no less hospital- ity in receiving me; the soldiers, customs officers and other state authorities who supported my research in their own way; the migrants, who gave me some important insights into their dreams of a better life; and not least, the Tuareg with whom I have also been working for several years. I also thank Kurt Beck and his team who edited this volume for accepting my paper and for contributing to improve it. 2 The quotation marks should relativise the negative connotation of the term. In fact, a driver who considers himself as the master of the desert and who considers the Sahara as his home- land divided by arbitrary (colonial) borders is not ‘smuggling’ but only transporting goods. The current political mainstream is considering the transportation of migrants and ‘smug- gling’ as ‘illegal’. It is for the same reasons that I will refrain from mentioning the names of my interlocutors. 3 Despite some seemingly ‘sedentary’ activities Teda engage in, most of them always maintain the option of mobility. Thus, a garden can be abandoned or left to a family member for sev- eral years (until the owner ‘returns’), and a merchant may travel to acquire merchandise. The most prominent example for ‘agricultural’ mobility are the date palms – many Teda families own plantations in several places at far distances from each other (for example Kawar and Djado), whereas the owners themselves may stay in a third place (for example Manga) with © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/9789004339040_0�0 <UN> Teda Drivers on the Road 221 the Teda controlled the caravan trade between the Manga, the Kawar and the Fezzan (Fuchs 1983: 131–132), and they have conserved an excellent knowledge of the topography of these regions. One may be surprised that the western part of the space that the Teda cross on their ventures (see illustration 1) includes tracks used and perhaps estab- lished by the Tuareg’s famous salt caravans leading through the Tenere desert. The Teda did not participate in these caravans which were almost exclusively organised and avidly protected by Tuareg. Furthermore, most Teda with whom I discussed the matter of travelling through the Tenere conceded that, for them, crossing this space was not without risk as some people considered them as foreigners. Crossing the Tenere desert and coping with the communities of its (former) ‘owners’ can thus be a challenge for the Teda drivers. They seem to manage this challenge rather well: they take over the desert space by means of their extremely high mobility and their ability to appear and disappear. In this chapter I explore how the Teda take over the ancient caravan track, focusing in particular on the ways in which they combine long-standing experiences of travelling with modern means of driving. I also show how they come to shape ‘their’ road by interacting with other travel communities. Theory, Methods and Travel Context Most of the Sahara, with the exception of oases, is hostile to human life. Nev- ertheless, humans are present in the desert, and they claim, appropriate or use its space. As I will show, the traveller from Agadez to Assheggur does not cross a no man’s land but rather spaces, which different groups consider as ‘theirs’. What does it mean exactly to ‘claim’, ‘appropriate’ or to ‘use’ space in the con- text of the desert? Due to the hostility of the environment, claiming, appropriating or using desert space can only be realised by movement. Caravans crossing the Sahara, for example, have to do it as rapidly as possible otherwise they would lack pro- visions, which are carefully restricted so as not to overcharge animals (Cha- pelle 1982: 114; Fuchs 1983: 174–178). In a contemporary context, Klute (2009b) shows that the control of time in desert wars is calculated, among others, ac- cording to the rapidity of a vehicle. This is more important than the control of space, emphasising at the same time that the two concepts are closely linked. In the context of deserts, crossing the space is essential, as staying in it would their livestock. Family members (mostly women) will travel to the palm-yards only during harvest. <UN>.