Desert Divers by Sven Lindqvist Read Free Book Online

driving on camel shit to honour his mother.
    Arabic oaths are often descriptions of the sexual behaviour with camels of the mother of the person concerned. Anyone who manages to combine the anal insult with the sexual gains extra points.
    The road slices up the mountainside in sharp turns like a fretsaw. The R4 has no strength to fall back on – the trick is to accelerate between gears, as in the old days of double-declutching, and keep the engine running. Then the tough little car manages the Atlas mountains, and when I finally reach level ground, we get up to 60 mph, even 70 in successful moments.
    It rumbles and it sways, but I can’t help liking the R4 for the wind whistling through the coachwork and the sewing-machine buzz of the engine as it patiently carries me towards Laghouat.
    Algeria is in the middle class of the world’s countries. That is clear from the road, which is not dominated by shepherds and flocks of sheep but by heavy transporters – steel girders, pipes, cement. Roadworks occupy more machines than people – though the unemployed, currently 17%, would fight to be allowed to shovel macadam.
    In the villages I try to buy some food for lunch, but there is only bread. There is always bread, subsidized by billions, very cheap to buy and sold in great quantities. Fresh morningbread has already been thrown away at midday to be replaced by even fresher afternoon bread. Even far out in the countryside, these bread habits have been adopted from the French and are considered sacred – Algeria literally throws away her oil income in the form of dry bread. A country which on liberation in 1962 was a great exporter of food now produces only 35% of what its people eat or throw away.
    ‘
C’est
la crise, c’est normale
,’ they say in the shops as an explanation for there being no tea, no coffee, no sugar, no eggs – well, more or less nothing but detergents and powdered milk.
    But there are schools. Everywhere I see children on their way to or from school. The first shift begins at dawn, the last is on its way home as the sun sets. Caring for the children and giving them an education despite 3.2% annual growth in population is the heroic feat of the schoolteachers – minor intellectuals who for twenty-five years have accepted these triple shifts, these remote posts in the countryside and these low salaries, to cope with the great task of teaching the people to read. But who feel themselves more and more deceived and abandoned as the years go by and others enrich themselves.
    What did their sacrifices give them? When will things get better? In twenty years, when the oil runs out?
    I stay with a teacher’s family in Laghouat. My friend Ali, whom I got to know in the rue Valetin gym in Algiers. His brother Ahmed is leader of the big band ‘Desert Brothers’. Like most young Algerians, they are enraged by the corrupt misrule.
    ‘Before independence, we had five parties in the country. Now we’re not considered mature enough to have more than one. What people lack is not maturity, but power!’
    All evening we sit round the big couscous dish until themeal is concluded with milk and dates. Then we all sleep together in the best room.
    The moisture from our breathing glistens on the cold walls. Outside, the stars sparkle as brightly as only desert and darkness can make them. The silence is boundless, and the occasional distant barking of a dog makes it audible.
41
    Early in the morning, I go up onto the roof. It is a beautiful day. White clouds have accumulated on the horizon like a further layer of sediment on dark mountains.
    This is where Fromentin stood 130 years ago. The landscape we see is the same. The same sun, the same desert.
    But not the same people. His Arabs were closed, menacing, hostile. Those I have met are open, lively, hospitable people.
    Under the same sun.
    Fromentin was wrong to think the merciless sun had marked the people of the desert for ever. Perhaps he actually knew that himself. In