Read Desert Divers for Free Online

curfew was proclaimed. The Spanish Foreign Legion erected barbed wire all around Saharan neighbourhoods. Saharan soldiers were dismissed from the army. Petrol stations stopped selling petrol to Saharans. In a week, twelve thousand Spanish civilians were flown out of the country. Even corpses were evacuated. A thousand dead were dug up out of the local cemeteries and flown to the Canary Isles. The animals in the zoo went with them.
    The Spaniards persistently denied ‘rumours’ that they were going to hand over power to the King of Morocco. But in secret they had already done so.
    By the time Moroccan troops marched in, the majority ofSmara’s Saharan population had fled across the border into Algeria, 150 miles east. Smara, the main centre of the Saharan liberation movement, became the main base for King Hassan’s war of conquest in the Sahara.
34
    ‘Problems? In that case, it’s the goats,’ says the governor.
    We are invited to dinner at the governor’s palace. A roast sheep with its ribs exposed like a shipwreck is carried in as we sit there on the sofa, all men, all Moroccans, except me and a Saharan poet. Chicken with orange peel and olives comes next, then sweet rice with almonds, raisins and cinnamon completing the meal.
    ‘The nomads make their way from the drought in to the water and electricity of the towns,’ says the governor. ‘They settle, motorized herdsmen tending their herds from Landrovers and keeping their families wherever there is a school for their children and healthcare for their old.
    ‘It is worst for the women. They know nothing except about goats. The woman belongs with goats. Goats are closer to her than her husband, yes, even closer than her children. Her way of bringing up children is out of date, her cooking primitive, and only goats give her a
raison d’être
. So she can’t live without goats. She takes them with her into town. The whole town is full of goats and that creates hygiene problems. It’s simply impossible in modern apartments. I have no hesitation in saying that goats are the greatest social problem we have to contend with at the moment.’
    ‘And the solution?’
    ‘I have issued a goat order and appointed one person responsible for goats in each neighbourhood. He sees to it that the neighbourhood is kept free of goats. Each neighbourhood has also been allocated an area outside town, where the goats are allowed. It keeps the women busy – it’s a long walk there to do the milking.’
35
    The Saharan poet Yara Mahjoub is a handsome man of about fifty with brilliant white teeth and a skipper’s wreath of short white hair. He can’t write, not even his name. He carries the whole of his repertoire within him.
    ‘Is it ten poems? Or a hundred?’ I ask.
    ‘Oh, many many more! I’d be able to recite them to you all night and all the next day and still have many unspoken.’
    ‘What are they about?’
    ‘Give me a subject and I shall sing the praises of it.’
    I suggest ‘the judgement of the international court’ and he is immediately prepared.
    ‘
Sahara reunited with the mother country
    the profound connection
    between Saharans and the throne –
    the evidence now in the hands of the Hague
    where it’s been confirmed by the court
    so everyone must be convinced
.’
    He turns to the assembled company and recites the poem with great bravura, an artist used to performing. Every gesture is part of a stage language, every line in the verse demanding applause.
    ‘When did you compose your first poem?’
    ‘It was during the vaccination year, which is also called the “year of the summer rain”. I was eighteen and in love for the first time. This is what it sounded like:
    ‘
Oh how beautiful it is,
    the bridge leading to the hill!
    Oh how lovely is the hill’s blue
    in her eyes!
’
    ‘That was in the days of the Spaniards. Did you compose poems in their honour?’
    ‘I had my camel and my goats. I didn’t need the Spaniards. Father was a goldsmith. So