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Salt of the Earth, Soul of the Caravan

by

Lauren Roberts

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I hope my readers will forgive my use of an old column this week. My father collapsed and was hospitalized several days ago, and I have been spending time and energy on that family issue. To compensate, I am re-running a review of one of my favorite books from last year, a travel memoir about a trip to a place, a way of life and a culture unknown to most of us.

As the world speeds (and occasionally lurches) along on its way to becoming more mechanized and Americanized, it becomes harder to find places where nature and humans interact on an intimate, interlocking level. I am talking about places where life exists as it always has, but probably and, sometimes unfortunately, not like it always will. Good or bad? Some of both, no doubt.

Bringing one of those ways of life to life while it still exists is what Michael Benanav does so vividly in Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold by (Lyons Press; $23.95). We meet him in Timbuktu, Mali, and feel fortunate that he is the one who spent nine days traveling there on creaky third-world transportation systems. Here is where we join forces as Benanav bargains his way (not without dread for an adventure he fears he will not survive) into the salt caravan that will take him through Tanezrouft, the oldest and driest part of the Sahara Desert. The extreme harshness is the reason the camel caravan is still mostly free of the modern transportation systems that now serve other routes. The goal of these caravans is an even more inhospitable place, Taoudenni, where the solid blocks of Saharan rock salt known as White Gold are harvested in desolate Stone-Age conditions. The caravan is definitely not the Orient Express.

Mali, located on the western hump of the African continent, is a landlocked country bordered by Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Niger and Algeria. It is also very poor with close to 70 percent of its land covered by the Sahara. The majority of Malians rely on small-scale farming, fishing and herding for their livelihoods—not an easy life. But for those men, and it is just the men, who make their living by working the salt caravan, life is harder and more dangerous.

Benanav is guided by Walid, a former member of the caravan, who has turned to guiding as an easier (and better paid) way to make a living. His job is to get Benanav to the place where he will meet up with and join a caravan on its way to Taoudenni that is Benanav’s goal. Though Benanav and Walid have little language in common (Benanav speaks French and a smattering of “crippled Egyptian Arabic” and Walid his native Hasinaya with less than a half-dozen French words), they form a “natural linguistic connection” and a convivial traveling party.   

Benanav’s first few days introduce him to what will be a part of his routine for the next five weeks: his camel, dorno (“the nomad version of an energy shake”), tea drinking, nearly unbearable heat, making camp, exhaustion, dung beetles, bleeding sores, sand walking, sidewinders (snakes). And more. But his initial worry and uncertainty slowly give way to a sense of connection to the life in which he participates. “At last I could lay down my guard and revel in my environs,” he writes, “watching happily as the sky turned into a swirl of pink and violet and bronze as darkness slowly seeped from the east. I realized that the safest place in the Sahara was not a place at all, but a time: night.”

Water is of course the essential ingredient in desert travel, and wells the lifeline. When they arrive at a large well and he describes the minutes-long greetings among the men, the sawed-off 50-gallon drums half buried in the sand from which the camels drink, the stripped tree limbs, handmade pulleys and goatskin buckets, the routine of hauling water up from the desert’s guts, and his melancholy reflections on the decrepit truck that represents the caravan of the future, he involves us in more than this single experience. He invites us to become a part of the history and the people on a day-to-day journey seen through the eyes of a concerned Westerner.  

“This, I saw,” he writes, “was about as far as I could get from the American proclivity for outsized consumption. Unlike the Saharans, who know the need for balance with the natural world because they live in it, we live as though we’re separate from it, immune to the repercussions of overusing it . . . If their ethic of mutual sustainability is a survival strategy, then ours is a suicide strategy. If survival is the most hardwired biological impulse of all, we’ve got a short in our system . . . Saharans don’t have this problem. They have no misconceptions about their place in the order of things—not because they are ‘noble savages,’ but because with so few resources they reap immediate consequences if they abuse them.”

From a “civilized” perspective, the rituals of life on a caravan are foreign and sometimes in opposition to our ethics. But out here in the desert where life lives by the most fundamental rules, first world ethics are often out of place. Benanav recognizes this, and his acknowledgment of it occasionally lends itself to humor as in his tongue-in-cheek idea for an authentic Saharan cookbook based on the ever-present sand.

Yet his respect for Walid, the nomads and the desert increases. When Walid leaves him temporarily in the care of another guide while he visits his family for a day, Benanav is amazed at the man’s ability to find his way unerringly in a place without a single topographic clue or map. Questioned, Walid, while pointing to his head, replies, “The map’s in here.”

When the connection is finally made with the caravan before it reaches Taoudenni, made much to Benanav’s relief, the pace becomes grueling. But that is soon offset by their arrival at the salt mines—“situated on utterly lifeless desert flays; not a single leaf, or even thorn, grows from the parched, crusty dirt, which is so sharp it bites into the soles of my bare feet.” It is so desolate that it was used as gulag for Malian political prisoners. Huts are composed of stacked rocks cemented with mud. No windows, furniture or decoration exist because the huts are temporary, used only for the duration of a particular mine. When the mine (actually a pit approximately 20 feet square and dug directly into the ground) no longer yields the high-quality salt, they move on and open up another, building a new hut next to it. Yet despite the miners’ appalling living conditions, Benanav finds an unexpected passion in their lives.

“Three strata of rock-solid, commercial-grade salt run horizontally beneath the entirety of Taoudenni,” writes Benanav. “Once all the rubble is removed from above them, the top layer of valuable salt gleams from the floor of the mine like the surface of an icy pond.” Using primitive picks, the miners cut the salt into huge blocks which are transported back via camel. Some trucks are also transporting salt blocks, but Western reports of trucks taking over from camels is Western myth propagated by assumptions and cultural misunderstandings. In talks with the miners, guides, nomads and families who populate the area, Benanav learns each has its own place, its own rules and that they work in harmony, each doing its part to sustain the Caravan of White Gold.

Benanav’s writing is as crisp and rich as the desert he describes. While it makes great adventure reading for anyone who enjoys this genre, the author’s clean, non-judgmental style also reveals a multi-layered story to those who seek to understand the importance of universality. More than a fascinating travelogue or memoir, Men of Salt is a tribute not only to a people and their way of life, but rightful homage to the complex, difficult relationship of nature and human, and to the loss of our humanity along with our environment. This book has my highest recommendation.


Almost since her childhood days of
Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

 
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