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art.

Saharan Urban
     

     
    A number of Sahara towns have locations that are among the most dramatic, wild and beautiful on earth. Some have been inhabited, without interruption, for thousands of years. Several enjoyed high status in the ancient world, about which Herodotus and others wrote, noting the oracular wisdom imparted there. One was an unrivalled seat of learning in the medieval world, and several were ruled over by kings whose wealth was equal to that of Croesus. Today the majority are simple, unremarkable places, quiet, isolated and frequently forgotten by outsiders. Yet many of these plain and dusty towns have other charms that draw visitors to them. The allure of an ancient name, a place of legend or mystery, is easily more powerful than that of a younger, brassy locale. Timbuktu has nothing to fear from Las Vegas.
    Art in the Sahara is not what it was, however. Taste has changed since ancient artists scored and painted the record of their residence. The people who live in the oasis-towns today may still adorn their walls with pictures, but they no longer feature hunting or round-headed aliens. It is more likely that one will come across an Alpine scene, an eight-by-twelve foot photographic image delivered in a roll, as wallpaper. I have seen these pictures - snow-capped peaks and green pastures, or the common variant of a limpid, palm-fringed lagoon - adorning walls in homes, offices and cafes across the desert. Such images are obviously not found solely in the Sahara, but their very incongruity here reminds one of the desert dwellers’ love of water and cool places, which many will only ever experience through Chinese made posters, in themselves a wry nod to globalization.
    Although it is hard to talk about a “typical” Saharan town, partly because of a surfeit of clichés, many of them do share common characteristics. Apart from some source of water, heat and dust are the most obvious features. The heat - or cold - will vary according to the season and time of day: the dust is more consistent. Consistent too is the ubiquitous breezeblock architecture, the low-level buildings and the unplanned proliferation of power lines and cars. Inevitable links of geography and climate aside, oasis-towns in the Sahara are notable for their differences rather than their similarities.
    For example, Timbuktu, a byword for isolation in the non-Saharan world, was for centuries renowned across the region as a major centre of trade and learning. Founded in the eleventh century, the town in Mali is today a Unesco World Heritage Site, whose mud brick mosques were said to have inspired and informed the architecture of Antoni Gaud!. The priceless collection of700,000 ancient scrolls and manuscripts kept here rightly make this remote, medium-sized town a place of pilgrimage for scholars and romantically inclined tourists alike.
    By contrast, the town of Arlit, in neighbouring Niger, is ugly, industrial and far from romantic. Founded in 1969, the town currently has a population of about 80,000, but it is only really attractive to those working in the uranium mining business. That tourists will, eleven centuries from now, trek to Arlit to stare into vast holes gouged out in open pit mining seems unlikely, although one never can tell. Surrounded by shantytowns that house African labourers, Arlit’s fortunes and its population of foreign mining engineers rise and fall in line with world uranium prices. The town made international newspaper headlines in 2003 when western intelligence reports indicated that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from the area.
    With a population just over half that of Arlit, the oasis of In Salah in Algeria looks in many ways like a “typical” large oasis, complete with a towering sand dune that each year moves approximately one foot closer to burying the town. Almost exactly in the middle of the Sahara’s north-south axis, with more than 200,000