Blow­ing Dust off the Trails: An Itin­er­ary Through Trans-Saha­ran Lines.

It is fool­ish to build on sandy grounds, says the old tru­ism. Le Cor­busier argued there were two spa­tial strate­gies across the Sahara at the time of his writ­ing Air­craft (1935) [ 1 ]; one on top of the oth­er, in the same page, Le Cor­busier chose a pho­to of a water­hole for nomadic car­a­vans and one of a fuelling sta­tion for air­planes. Mir­ror­ing each oth­er, both refer to a log­ic of halt­ing along the road. Their com­plic­i­ty is that both are phys­i­cal points reveal­ing invis­i­ble trans-Saha­ran lines that the cam­era can­not cap­ture: for the eyes of the nomad and pilot, the desert is tra­versed by mul­ti­ple sen­so­r­i­al lines of trav­el. Le Cor­busier select­ed a cliché image for the nomad—to the point of not even iden­ti­fy­ing it1—and a curi­ous one for the pilot. ​“Nerve-cen­tre on the impe­r­i­al high­way,”2 as he foot­notes; ​“Le Bidon 5” sym­bol­ised the French project for con­nect­ing the colonies to the north with those to the south of the desert. Con­clud­ed just some three years before Le Corbusier’s pub­li­ca­tion, the high­way was to join the 1,300 kilo­me­tres that sep­a­rat­ed Reg­gane, in south-west Alge­ria, from Gao in the Niger riv­er. Tra­vers­ing a sea of sand, it was an abstract north-south line that extend­ed the road from Oran, in the Mediter­ranean, to Sudan. But while this line across the desert was more an axis, the par­tic­u­lar point that Le Cor­busier high­light­ed was set fol­low­ing the itin­er­ant line of the nomads. It was lieu­tenant George Esti­enne who anchored the point of the Bidon 5. Pres­i­dent of the Com­pag­nie Générale Transsa­hari­enne at the time, Esti­enne began a search for the quick­est route between north and south. For that he fol­lowed the route estab­lished by the trans-Saha­ran trade. The Bidon 5 became sig­nif­i­cant in that, when in 1926, fol­low­ing the ancient trails through the Oued Namous 3, he con­tin­ued the roads south from Adrar until he decid­ed to take a dra­mat­ic turn south off-the-road. Up to then he had been fol­low­ing the water­hole to water­hole itin­er­ary of the nomads to reach Ouallen, the last well in the merid­i­an direc­tion. With the detour he entered a sec­tion of the Tanezrouft region in which no water source was to be expect­ed. Of course, the fact that the expe­di­tion was formed by four Cit­roën cars and his own Nieu­port-Delague air­craft helped the tra­vers­ing of the Tanezrouft to Tessalit—the clos­est water point in the south­ward direction—without inci­dents. Nev­er­the­less, the 500 kilo­me­tres of detour required two days, part­ly through the soft sur­faces of the ergs and part­ly along the rough stony sur­faces of the hama­da. The expe­di­tion spent the night midway—the station—point that became the first iter­a­tion of Bidon 54.

The pho­to­graph select­ed by Le Cor­busier with its oil pump for cars was anachron­ic by the time of the pub­li­ca­tion, as Bidon 5 was upgrad­ed by the Société Anonyme Fran­caise des Pétroles Shell in Jan­u­ary 1934 to include a fuelling sta­tion for air­planes5. Nev­er­the­less, what the pho­to does include is the char­ac­ter­is­tic pro­file of the seem­ing­ly derelict body­work of two twin coach­es. In their hey­day they were paint­ed white, and reflect­ing the sun shone while in motion upon the Saha­ran land­scape. Sub­sti­tut­ing their seats for beds, they were the stark accom­mo­da­tion for the tem­po­rary vis­i­tors, giv­ing a vivid expe­ri­ence of being ​“more than 500 kilo­me­tres away from any human, ani­mal or veg­e­tal life”—as Shell pro­mot­ed the place among desert-lovers6. It might have caught Le Corbusier’s imag­i­na­tion as a par­a­dig­mat­ic ​“machine à habiter”. In any case, it pre­sent­ed an inter­est­ing mir­ror image to the nomadic tents of the pho­to above it. Estienne’s Com­pag­nie Générale Transsa­hari­enne incor­po­rat­ed a log­ic of the nomadic car­a­van in its retrac­ing of the Trans-Saha­ran trails. Esti­enne, him­self a pilot, would have eas­i­ly made his own words from those of Antoine de Saint Exupéry, who iden­ti­fied him­self with the nomads in his famous desert trav­el­ogue Ter­res des Hommes (1939). The author of The Lit­tle Prince might have enjoyed the spar­tan shel­ter at the Bidon 5, as he remem­bered his days fly­ing over the Sahara in the ser­vice of the air­mail car­ri­er Aéro­postale as the aus­ter­i­ty of the Trap­pist7. Nev­er­the­less, in their tech­nol­o­gy of trans­port becom­ing habi­ta­tion, the peri­patet­ic Euro­pean ush­ered in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent log­ic to the nomadic lines. While lucid in its coach trans­formed to couch, it was unlike­ly that a camel would define a sim­i­lar con­ver­sion for the nomad.

But locat­ing the images in the same page was beyond the act of trac­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties. Here the impe­r­i­al line works in a very dif­fer­ent way to that of the trans-Saha­ran nomadic lines. Even though depart­ing from the trail routes, the line was axi­al, and its dots were defined by con­di­tions oth­er than pres­ence of water. The high­way Reg­gane-Gao was the first Euro­pean com­plet­ed project to tra­verse across the Sahara, before the sec­ond line that crossed it from Alger to Zin­der through the moun­tains of Taman­ras­set8. Bidon 5 was para­mount in that it rep­re­sent­ed a mid-point, an almost Carte­sian ​“mid-dis­tance between the water points of Ouallen and Tes­salit and between the inhab­it regions of Reg­gan and Tabanko­rt”9—as Esti­enne described it. A point that was con­cep­tu­al­ly defined on the charts rather than on the ground. [ 2 ]

But it was not only in the abstract log­ic of French car­tog­ra­phy that they dif­fered; in their rela­tion­ship to bor­ders, they were worlds apart. While for the French empire the ques­tion of the line was to estab­lish bor­ders, the nomadic line traced rela­tion­ships through porous bound­aries. Research­ing the trad­ing car­a­vans that crossed the Sahara, Ghisalaine Lydon observed how the nomads con­nect­ed the north and south edges of the desert. While the itin­er­aries criss­crossed, the trade was oper­at­ed by clans that not only had mem­bers mov­ing through the routes, but also those who set­tled in var­i­ous mar­kets. The clans were unit­ed by fam­i­ly, finan­cial, com­mer­cial and cul­tur­al ties that were made cohe­sive by a shared home­land10. The tight-knit com­mu­ni­ty of traders scat­tered through the land­scape was not reduced to the extend­ed fam­i­ly, but also encom­passed a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of fam­i­lies and eth­nic­i­ties, and even var­i­ous religions—including Mus­lim and Jews. It was the place of ori­gins, a home­land region that con­nect­ed them all and formed the most impor­tant iden­ti­ty mark­er11; in a cer­tain sense, a home­land that depart­ed from a cen­tre but dis­persed around the mar­kets. This way, Lyn­don uses Abn­er Cohen’s ​“trad­ing dias­po­ra” mod­el to analyse the organ­i­sa­tion of long-dis­tance trans-Saha­ran trade12. She describes the trans-Saha­ran trails as a series of net­works that con­nect­ed points, but also inter­sect­ed each oth­er. The trails might have orig­i­nal­ly con­nect­ed water sources, but the net­work had strong com­po­nents cre­at­ing a frame­work for oper­a­tions. In the con­text of nine­teenth cen­tu­ry West­ern Sahara, where no sin­gle state or over­ar­ch­ing pow­er ruled supreme, the sys­tem was not that of bor­ders, but of networks.

The nomadic net­work might seem slight­ly para­dox­i­cal in that the lines con­nect­ing the mar­kets were ill-defined. The roads were tracks most­ly run­ning in the same direc­tion and loose­ly delim­it­ed by dunes, rocks or oth­er non-nav­i­ga­ble ter­rains. This vague­ness of the road opens up to con­sid­er how space was defined. In his L’Herbe et le Glaive: de L’Itinerance a l’Errance: La Notion de Ter­ri­toire Chez les Touarges [The Grass and the sword: from itin­er­an­cy to wan­der­ing: the notion of ter­ri­to­ry among the Tuaregs], André Bour­geot defines how ter­ri­to­ry is under­stood by the nomadic peo­ple of the Sahara by two key con­cepts: mobil­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty13. Mobil­i­ty refers to the sys­tem of dis­place­ments that are artic­u­lat­ed through the annu­al cycles due to cli­mat­ic and eco­log­i­cal con­di­tions. The car­a­vans are organ­ised with regard to the pro­duc­tion of trad­ing goods that vary dur­ing the year and tran­shu­mance dis­place­ments accord­ing to the pres­ence of graz­ing ground that varies accord­ing to the rainy sea­sons. Flex­i­bil­i­ty has to do with the con­di­tions of the mem­bers of the net­work, many times more relat­ed to the dots in the network—markets and regions of origin—that make the mobil­i­ty depend on the polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic affairs. Thus, the nomadic ter­ri­to­ry of the Tuareg doesn’t depend on the trac­ing of lines; the net­work is com­posed of itin­er­ant lines. It is not only the nomads that move, but the lines of the net­works them­selves dis­place affect­ed by eco­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­di­tions and are acti­vat­ed on and off accord­ing to cycles. For the nomadic line, the impor­tant thing in the desert is to move14. For the impe­r­i­al line it was to arrest, being capa­ble of con­trol­ling through the draw­ing of a bor­der. Dur­ing colo­nial times, the two lines strug­gled to appro­pri­ate the desert. 

In the intro­duc­tion to Air­craft, Le Cor­busier also talks about his encounter with a peo­ple of the Sahara. It was 1933, “(w)ith my friend Durafour,” the text goes, ​“I left Algiers one sun-drenched after­noon in win­ter and we flew above the Atlas towards the towns of the M’Zab (…).” After a time of unevent­ful desert-crossing:

The prin­ci­ple he men­tions in the text is that the towns of the M’Zab had a cycli­cal rela­tion­ship to cli­mate. Each of the towns in the M’Zab is divid­ed in two: an urban dense con­glom­er­a­tion of hous­es, and a scat­tered set of hous­es in the adja­cent palm groves. In the win­ter, the Moz­abites inhab­it the towns. When the hot sum­mer arrives they move to the oasis, aban­don­ing their town­hous­es, defin­ing a per­pet­u­al cycle that reflects the cli­mat­ic depen­den­cy of the nomad16. For Le Cor­busier, “[t]he les­son is this: every house in the M’Zab, yes, every house with­out excep­tion, is a place of hap­pi­ness, of joy, of a serene exis­tence reg­u­lat­ed like an inescapable truth, in the ser­vice of man and for each. (…) In the M’Zab it is not admit­ted that any fam­i­ly should be with­out arcade and gar­den.”17

But more cru­cial than the summer/winter log­ic was the tech­no­log­i­cal lens through which he was look­ing through at the val­ley. Two years before, in the sum­mer of 1931, Le Cor­busier had vis­it­ed the M’Zab, that time by car. From the trav­el­ogue he pub­lished in Plans mag­a­zine, he only men­tions the archi­tec­ture of Ghardaïa, largest of the oasis/towns in the val­ley18. This time, air­borne, in an up and down spi­ral itin­er­ary, Le Cor­busier could observe not only the scale of the court­yards, but also the larg­er scale of the val­ley. And he dis­cov­ered that Ghardaïa was not alone; rather, it belonged to a larg­er sys­tem of five towns that com­pose one ecol­o­gy. The sys­tem has been tra­di­tion­al­ly called the pen­ta­pole city19. Hav­ing start­ed in the 11^th cen­tu­ry, the pen­ta­pole log­ic might be sim­i­lar to the nomadic line in its net­work con­nec­tion between towns and cycli­cal dis­place­ment with the sea­sons. But for Le Cor­busier, it was the air­plane that enabled the re-dis­cov­ery of the typol­o­gy. He jot­ted that div­ing-in-div­ing-out trace of the air­plane in his note­book [ 3 ]. And, arguably, the next step was to con­tin­ue that tra­jec­to­ry fur­ther out. Incor­po­rat­ing the log­ic of the pen­ta­pole city and tak­ing it with him air­borne, in his Poésie sur Alger [Poem on Algiers] (1950), Le Cor­busier presents the draw­ing of a line that cross­es over the out­line of Europe and North Africa and threads a con­nec­tion between five poles in the Merid­i­an Paris–El Golea–Gao [ 4 ]. The draw­ing could be read as an attempt to use the log­ic of the M’Zab’s pen­ta­pole as a guid­ing line for a ten­ta­tive project—a par­ti of a sort. But in any case, the zoom-in-zoom-out process he was devel­op­ing in the Sahara was final­ly tak­en to a transcon­ti­nen­tal scale20. The air­plane enabled a merid­i­an form of vision. The pen­ta­pole organ­i­sa­tion was bor­rowed from M’Zab to analyse Fran­co-Alger­ian rela­tions. The poem doesn’t indulge much in the project, but Manière de Penser l’Urbanisme (1946) had already put name to the poles [ 5 ].

In the pen­ta­pole scheme, he was miss­ing the African pole. Le Havre, Paris, Lyon, Mar­seille; they are the ones organ­is­ing the line in France. Alger, cap­i­tal of Alge­ria, was an appen­dix, an exten­sion of the project towards the south. It was then thought of as a project for increas­ing the ​“grandeur Française.” The con­cern was with lift­ing up France from its dev­as­tat­ed con­di­tion after the war22. Nev­er­the­less, the lines after the war need­ed to recon­sid­er the pre­vi­ous kind of lines France had attempt­ed to draw over the desert. Alger didn’t fig­ure in Le Corbusier’s Manière de Penser but it was giv­en its own poem. One that was intend­ed to con­sid­er colo­nial rela­tions oth­er­wise. Weary of the con­stant rejec­tion by the colo­nial gov­ern­ment of his numer­ous projects for the city, Le Corbusier’s final project was to trace a line, one that might have rede­fined pre­vi­ous merid­i­an lines traced by France across the desert. ​“Poet­ry is, at the end of the day, Mr. Gov­er­nor, Mr. Pre­fect, Mr. May­or, the essen­tial nour­ish­ment of the peo­ple (…) poet­ry is in Algiers, ready to enter, to mate­ri­alise in urban and archi­tec­tur­al facts” was the clos­ing line of the poem, admit­ting defeat; the Merid­i­an was the coun­ter­pro­pos­al. Very much a colo­nial project in its inten­tion of per­pet­u­at­ing French pres­ence in the con­ti­nent, how­ev­er, not exact­ly in the same terms in which the French had devel­oped the north-south lines of Bidon‑5.

The post-colo­nial cri­tique has approached Le Corbusier’s Meri­di­en in terms of impo­si­tion, read­ing it as a colo­nial axis. This is the case pro­fes­sor Çelik, who describes the draw­ing quot­ing Coter­au, an engi­neer work­ing for the city of Algiers in 1933: ​“the city must be ren­o­vat­ed by means of a sane archi­tec­ture, fol­low­ing Aryan tra­di­tions,’ because of ​‘its posi­tion on the axis of France.’”23

How­ev­er, Le Corbusier’s merid­i­an-pen­ta­pole-city shows a sub­tler form of colo­nial­ism that escapes these post­colo­nial accounts. Le Cor­busier was not trac­ing an Aryan axis. The main para­dox is that the line he was trac­ing was bor­rowed from the M’Zab. And this is not the typ­i­cal man­ner in which colo­nial­ist ide­olo­gies were appro­pri­at­ing the oth­er. Le Cor­busier was not import­ing cliché Ori­en­tal­ist ideas. His project departs from a dis­cov­ery in the desert—the pen­ta­pole—and uses it back home. The poles he pro­posed were ​“designed to ensure the best exer­cise of an indis­putable func­tion: the exchanges.”24 They can arguably be seen as func­tion­al nodes of eco­nom­ic and bureau­crat­ic exchanges, but also inter­cul­tur­al ones, as he saw the merid­i­an in his first jour­ney of 1931:

Arguably, the pro­pos­al was already oper­at­ing an exchange, incor­po­rat­ing the log­ic of the Moz­abite city into the Carte­sian axis. 

Although Le Cor­busier might be seen as chal­leng­ing the colo­nial lines through his merid­i­an across the desert, Maghreb, Mediter­ranean and France, the post-colo­nial lines devel­oped in a dif­fer­ent way. Inter­est­ing­ly, Bour­geot departs from the cliché in order to under­stand a shift in the notion of ter­ri­to­ry for the Tuareg in post-colo­nial rela­tions. His analy­sis starts with the drom­e­dary. In his argu­ment, the drom­e­dary was cru­cial for the under­stand­ing of Tuareg space-key ele­ment in trad­ing, sea­son­al migra­tions, war and raids.26 Post-colo­nial polit­i­cal con­di­tions, as he con­tin­ues, cre­at­ed a shift in the read­ing of the drom­e­dary, and as such, a shift in the under­stand­ing of Tuareg ter­ri­to­ry. Look­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly at the Kel Ahaggar—Tuareg whose ter­ri­to­ry extends in the south of Algeria—Bourgeot affirms that since the inde­pen­dence of the coun­try, ​“the drom­e­dary is trans­formed into a mate­r­i­al and liv­ing sym­bol whose sig­ni­fi­er becomes a cul­tur­al ref­er­ent: it reac­ti­vates, in an illu­so­ry way, the past, and con­sti­tutes an imagery of iden­ti­ty in which the Kel Ahag­gar recog­nise them­selves.”27 The drom­e­dary, before enabler of the Tuareg mobil­i­ty, has now come to be con­sid­ered as fixed to the ground, clos­er to the body­works of Bidon‑5. Nev­er­the­less, it still re-enacts the strug­gle of the Tuareg. For Bour­geot, the Kel Ahag­gar became pri­mar­i­ly a sig­ni­fi­er of lines of trade and mobil­i­ty; and the con­trol over the lines was no longer on the lev­el of the ​“polit­i­cal space” of war and raids, but part of the pol­i­tics of identity. 

How­ev­er, fur­ther south, the Tuaregs of Kel Adagh—northern Mali region—offer a con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly dif­fer­ent move­ment across the desert. Bour­geot describes it as the shift from itin­er­ance [itin­er­an­cy] to errance [wan­der­ing]. The her­itage of the colo­nial rule, includ­ing the rebel­lion and repres­sion at the begin­ning of the 1960s, has left the Tuareg in the North­ern Mali region as an ​“iso­lat­ed eth­nic”28; a con­di­tion that was accen­tu­at­ed by a shift from a ​“tra­di­tion­al” eco­nom­ic sys­tem to a cap­i­tal­ist one, one that is not helped by the lack of pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions. The prod­uct is the emer­gence of what Bour­geot calls ​“lumpen-nomad” that para­dox­i­cal­ly evolves in ​“nomad land”; a life of ​“wandering”—of aim­less­ly search­ing for a job—“defined by the bor­ders inher­it­ed by decoloni­sa­tion.”29

The con­di­tions described by Bour­geot in 1986 have noth­ing but inten­si­fied. Trapped along the post-colo­nial bor­ders between Alge­ria, Libya, Mali and Niger, the Tuareg have strug­gled for hold­ing their porous con­di­tions with regards to those bor­ders. In June 1990, a group of Tuareg rose in arms against the Malian state. The con­flict had its roots in the 1963 insur­gency, in which con­test­ed mean­ings of inde­pen­dence and nation­al­ism marked the process of decoloni­sa­tion in the desert part of the new Malian state30. The ear­ly 1990s revolt, fore­ground­ing the two con­di­tions that Bour­geot highlighted—“politics of iden­ti­ty” and ​“errance”—yielded a dis­pute that was nev­er ful­ly resolved, and since 2012, re-emerged in an ongo­ing con­flict. This last iter­a­tion would be too broad to address in this arti­cle, involv­ing inter­na­tion­al actors beyond the Malian bor­ders in what is per­ceived as a con­flict between ​“Rad­i­cal Islam” and ​“the West”, and whose lines are no longer desert-bound.

How­ev­er, while the Tuareg insur­rec­tion in Mali high­lights the unre­solved encounter between the nomadic line and shift­ing colo­nial bor­ders in the process of decoloni­sa­tion, the migra­tion lines through the desert ​“rede­fine”, as Julien Bra­chet argues, ​“a new Saha­ran geog­ra­phy”31. Focus­ing on the routes that con­nect Agadez to the north—one of the main routes for the migrant move­ment, as it is locat­ed at the inter­sec­tion of the routes going to the south of Alge­ria and the south of Libya—Brachet analy­ses the increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple mov­ing from one side to the oth­er of the Sahara since the ear­ly 1990s. The wan­der­ing around the desert is no longer a Tuareg ques­tion, but rather one of an expand­ed inter­na­tion­al cir­cuit. Eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal con­di­tions in the Sahel and fur­ther south in West Africa, along with Libya wel­com­ing African migra­tion to the country—following the 1992 UN’s embargo—and the appli­ca­tion of the Schen­gen Agree­ment in 1995, influ­enced the con­fig­u­ra­tion of this ​“new geog­ra­phy” of the desert, though its routes are deeply root­ed in the trans-Saha­ran trad­ing trails32. The main tra­jec­to­ries used in migra­tion towards Europe make use of the past traces erased by the sand. The Tuareg and Teda car­a­van­ers, due to their knowl­edge of the trails that cross that part of the desert, became guides and trans­porters of the migrants mov­ing north33. The camel might have been lost as an emblem of iden­ti­ty; pick-up trucks and lor­ries that reac­ti­vate the ancient tracks have sub­sti­tut­ed it34. The pro­tag­o­nists con­fig­ur­ing the new geog­ra­phy are migrants, trans­porters, and state agents. Their rela­tion­ships vary accord­ing to time and depend­ing on the legal con­di­tions of the jour­ney. While the trans-Saha­ran trade tracks delin­eate a nav­i­ga­tion­al route, the lat­ter varies depend­ing on the sta­tus of the migrants and the open­ness of the bor­ders with Libya and Alge­ria. Over the out­line of a same trans-Saha­ran trail, the Tuareg and Teda dri­vers might fol­low the offi­cial route under the pro­tec­tion of the con­voys to mit­i­gate the risk of being attacked by armed ban­dits in the region; or they might re-trace a detour from the main ancient route depend­ing on the ​“clan­des­tine” con­di­tion of its trans­port. Tak­ing one of Brachet’s illus­tra­tions, the trail between Agadez (Niger) and Seb­ha (Libya), the ​“offi­cial” trans-Saha­ran route unrav­els in mul­ti­ple ​“smug­gling lines” [ 6 ]. This gives a stri­at­ed char­ac­ter to the migrant line, or the line’s traces—as Bra­chet defines it—“un espace ​‘feuilleté’”[a lam­i­nat­ed space]35.

For the new geog­ra­phy of trans-Saha­ran migra­tions, Europe also has its recourse to hold­ing con­trol over the lines by halt­ing. Per­ceived from Europe as a ​“migrant cri­sis”, the Euro­pean Union is devel­op­ing a set of mea­sure­ments for gain­ing con­trol over the flux of migrants across the Sahara towards the Mediter­ranean. What is inter­est­ing here is the strat­e­gy is not that of cre­at­ing a new axi­al line in a colo­nial vain. Nei­ther is it just by enforc­ing con­trol of bor­ders, but rather new forms of cap­tur­ing the nomadic line. The city of Agadez is an inter­est­ing inter­sec­tion where to observe how the new geog­ra­phy of migra­tion is giv­ing over to new forms of post-colo­nial Euro­pean con­trol in Africa. It is in the knots, rather than along the line, that con­fronta­tions are played. The ancient city of Agadez is not only one of the most impor­tant cross­roads where the migra­tion flux from West Africa joins the one of Cen­tral Africa en route towards Libya and south­east Alge­ria, but it is fur­ther­more the inter­sec­tion between the reac­ti­vat­ed trans-Saha­ran trails and the new forms in which the Euro­pean bor­ders are acti­vat­ed. The Schen­gen Agree­ment might well have been a fac­tor in the rise of inter­na­tion­al migrancy; between 2000 and 2010 it has induced a sit­u­a­tion where the south­ern bor­ders of Europe have been exter­nalised and pro­gres­sive­ly moved south down the Sahara36. If Bour­geot described the Tuareg space in terms of mobil­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty, Bra­chet pro­pos­es two oth­er con­cepts to under­stand the Euro­pean Union’s engage­ment in the Sahara. He quotes the words of Jean-Pierre Guen­gant at the begin­ning of the Euro-Mediter­ranean part­ner­ship between the EU and the coun­tries of North Africa, one year after the imple­men­ta­tion of the Schen­gen Agree­ment: ​“the two new par­a­digms on mat­ters of inter­na­tion­al migra­tion: ​“con­trol” as means for con­tain­ment of migra­tion, and ​“devel­op­ment” as means of stop­ping, stop­ping its essen­tial cause: pover­ty, seem to be based on a sim­plis­tic view of the phe­nom­e­na at work.”37 Dur­ing recent involve­ments of the EU in Agadez, con­trol and devel­op­ment thread back the Tuareg pol­i­tics of identity. 

Fol­low­ing an increas­ing con­cern over the migrant cri­sis, and hav­ing closed a deal with Turkey to shut down the migrant jour­neys across the Aegean Sea, the EU aimed at con­tain­ing the migra­tion of the Cen­tral Mediter­ranean in its regions of ori­gin. The 2015 Val­let­ta Agree­ment became instru­men­tal for this pur­pose, launch­ing a Part­ner­ship Frame­work to work with the coun­tries of ori­gin. Niger is one of the core frame­work coun­tries, receiv­ing ​“finan­cial sup­port and devel­op­ment and neigh­bour­hood pol­i­cy tools [that] will rein­force local capac­i­ty-build­ing, includ­ing for bor­der con­trol, asy­lum pro­ce­dures, counter-smug­gling and rein­te­gra­tion efforts.”38 In 2015, the Nige­rien state banned activ­i­ties relat­ed to ille­gal traf­fic of migrants, and in August 2016 the arrest of smug­glers and the seizure of vehi­cles took place in Agadez. The seizure of the dri­vers seems a way in which the EU gains ​“con­trol” over the post of Agadez, the line of mobil­i­ty crossed by the gen­er­a­tion of a sta­t­ic post. How­ev­er, the way in which the EU gen­er­ates this, its south­ern­most bor­der, doesn’t remain in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of estab­lish­ing halts. Rather, its stop is assist­ed by ​“devel­op­ment”. The Pro­jet d’Intégration économique et sociale des jeunes: emploi pour le pat­ri­moine d’Agadez works in uni­son with the deten­tion of the smug­glers. Fund­ed by the EU Emer­gency Trust Fund for Africa estab­lished fol­low­ing the Val­let­ta sum­mit39, the project seeks the social rein­ser­tion of the young peo­ple of the Region of Agadez involved in irreg­u­lar migra­tion. For this, the project teach­es tra­di­tion­al build­ing tech­niques to the for­mer smug­gler Teda dri­vers. The dri­vers are returned to the local mar­ket as masons. How­ev­er, since the inser­tion of the old town of Agadez in the UNESCO World Her­itage List in 2013, the Tuareg tra­di­tion­al tech­nique nec­es­sary for the restora­tion of the pro­tect­ed city has been in dis­pute. This was part­ly due to the ten­sions gen­er­at­ed dur­ing the works car­ried in the Great Mosque and the Sultan’s palace, which were not direct­ed by the local Tuareg mas­ter masons but by CRATerre, a French con­sult­ing firm spe­cial­ized in clay architecture—who was select­ed by the French embassy in Niamey that was financ­ing the works40.

The for­mer Teda dri­vers emerge as a human means of alle­vi­at­ing the ten­sions through archi­tec­ture. While the pro­gramme can be crit­i­cised as a short-term solu­tion (pre­cise­ly the EPPA project belongs to the Plan d’Action à Impact Economique Rapi­de à Agadez), what is inter­est­ing is how tra­di­tion­al tech­niques are at the cen­tre of the dis­pute. The local ver­nac­u­lar lan­guage is no longer a means of coun­ter­ing coloni­sa­tion through archi­tec­ture. Rather, the UNESCO pro­tec­tion por­trays a ten­sion between the local and the glob­al. It is the Tuareg that teach their tech­nique to the Teda, hold­ing them fixed in Agadez, sus­pend­ing the trans-Saha­ran move­ment. It is the EU that appro­pri­ates the iden­ti­ty strug­gles of the Tuareg to estab­lish a bor­der to the south. The archi­tec­ture of the old town in Agadez forms a knot in which the unrav­elled lines of the ​“lam­i­nat­ed space” of the migrant routes are laced togeth­er through halt. Seem­ing­ly a small action of putting up mud bricks brings togeth­er a num­ber of ten­sions in cross­ing the Sahara. The ver­nac­u­lar Tuareg iden­ti­ty strug­gle is appro­pri­at­ed by the EU as a means for fix­ing the Teda dri­vers to the ground, get­ting hold of the nomadic trails. This case in which the invis­i­ble lines of the desert are mate­ri­alised into hybrid iden­ti­ties syn­thetis­es a his­tor­i­cal trend cut­ting through the move­ments of the desert. The con­flicts are not formed by direct colo­nial strug­gle between the spa­tial con­cep­tion of the nomads and the Euro­peans. Rather, they can be bet­ter per­ceived as moments when the two merge, one becom­ing the other. 

Join­ing north­ern and south­ern Sahara, the minaret of the Great Mosque in Agadez is arguably one of the few exam­ples in which the pecu­liar archi­tec­ture of the M’Zab41 influ­enced the south­ern desert. To the north, the archi­tec­ture of the M’Zab influ­enced Le Cor­busier. As opposed to the oppo­si­tion with which we nor­mal­ly see the colo­nial strug­gle [nomadic vs. impe­r­i­al lines] this essay asserts that a sec­tion­al line cuts across colo­nial and post-colo­nial peri­ods in order to see inter­sec­tions in the desert. It is not enough to visu­al­ize the two lines in a dip­tych, as Le Cor­busier laid them out. Per­haps we can turn through a num­ber of pages in his Air­craft to find anoth­er line in the desert [ 7 ]. It is the sketchy, snaky trace of a water­course in the desert of Boghari—just at the north­ern edge of the Sahara. A line that in Pre­ci­sions (1930) gives room to the ​“law of the mean­der”, with the para­dox that the flu­id­i­ty of water is observed fly­ing over the desert. Seem­ing­ly a blank slate, the lines cross­ing the desert leave con­stant­ly erod­ing flu­vial traces. The lines we have observed do not emerge in the vir­gin sur­face of a map but are rather built one on top of the endur­ing palimpses­tic ves­tiges of the oth­er. Let­ter­ing the mean­der­ings A and B, Le Cor­busier high­lights moments in which the waterbed wraps itself to the point of touch­ing. In the line this essay has traced, I have looked at moments in which the tra­jec­to­ries inter­sect. Like the Bidon 5 inher­it­ing the nomadic trail but mov­ing slight­ly off its course, or Le Corbusier’s merid­i­an bor­row­ing the pen­ta­pole scheme, and the EU restora­tion of Agadez incor­po­rat­ing the iden­ti­ty strug­gle of the Tuareg. These are inter­sec­tions in which there are not two lines in oppo­si­tion, but rather lim­i­nal moments between dif­fer­ence and iden­ti­ty; cross­roads where one becomes the oth­er, gen­er­at­ing a hybridised line. While trac­ing a line in sand might seem a seam­less task, the trans-Saha­ran lines are full of junc­tions that high­light nation­al and inter­na­tion­al ten­sions. That build­ing on sandy ground is fool­ish is a cliché, in the same way as think­ing there is no rel­e­vant archi­tec­ture in the desert. Built through the encoun­ters between mobil­i­ty and halt­ing, nomadism, seden­tarism, migra­tion, post-colo­nial states and inter­na­tion­al actors, Bra­chet uses the oxy­moron­ic ​“désert cos­mopo­lite” [cos­mopoli­tan desert] to evoke its con­tem­po­rary sta­tus42. A cos­mopoli­tanism that is sneak­ing unno­ticed to many archi­tects, a poten­tial vast land­scape for research on cos­mopoli­tan life. The mul­ti­ple trans-Saha­ran lines are a com­plex land­scape with­in which to research. The Sahara is not emp­ty, but full. The Sahara is, as Bour­geot defined it, a new ​“cen­tre périphérique” [a periph­er­al cen­tre]43.