Djanet

The record of human life around Djanet is far older than the town. On the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau above it, thousands of paintings and engravings show wild animals and hunters, then herds of cattle, then horses and chariots and finally camels — a sequence that tracks the drying of a Sahara that was once grassland with lakes and rivers. Later the oasis lay in the country of the Kel Ajjer, one of the Tuareg confederations, who grazed the plateau, held the wells and taxed the caravan traffic crossing between the Niger, the Fezzan and the north.

The oasis itself grew as separate ksour on defensible spurs above the palm grove — El Mihan, Adjahil and Azelouaz among them — each with its own community, gardens and water rights. Ottoman and then Italian authority in Libya and French expansion from the west made the Ajjer a contested frontier. French troops under Captain Charlet occupied Djanet in November 1911 and built Fort Charlet, which was besieged in 1916 by a force gathered at Ghat during the First World War.

Modern attention to the rock art began in the 20th century, above all with the expeditions of Henri Lhote in the 1950s, whose copies and books made the Tassili famous internationally; the plateau was inscribed by UNESCO in 1982. Since independence Djanet has become the capital of Djanet Province, with an airport and a tourism season built on the plateau and the dunes, interrupted by long periods when travel to the region was restricted.

Djanet is a Tuareg town, and the Kel Ajjer traditions are visible in daily life: the tagelmust worn by men, the Tamahaq language, the Tifinagh script used for inscriptions and short messages, and a social order in which descent and inheritance run in important respects through the mother's line. Women are the traditional players of the imzad, the single-stringed fiddle that accompanies sung poetry at evening gatherings.

The town's own ceremony is the Sebiba, held at Ashura. The two old quarters of the oasis meet on open ground: men in the costume made for the occasion perform a slow, measured dance while women drum and sing in answering lines, in a ritual generally explained as the replacement of an old rivalry between the quarters by a contest in music and bearing. UNESCO recognised it in 2014, and it draws families back to Djanet from across the country.

Hospitality is formal and unhurried, and tea is its instrument, brewed three times over charcoal and poured from a height. Craft here means leatherwork, silver, and mats and baskets of palm fibre. Guiding is itself now part of the local culture: many families have someone who works the plateau and knows the shelters, the routes and the water, and there is a strong local insistence that the paintings are left untouched.

Djanet is a small place — about 15,000 people were counted at the 2008 census, up from some 9,700 in 1998 — set far from any large city and not far from the Libyan border. That distance governs everything. Flour, vegetables, fuel and building materials arrive by lorry or by air, prices are high, and shortages are part of ordinary planning.

The oasis gardens still produce dates, figs and vegetables under family ownership worked out over generations, and goats and camels are kept in the valleys around. Beyond that, work is with the province's administration, schools and clinic, with the army and border security, or in tourism: agencies, drivers, cooks, guides and guesthouses, which between them support a large share of the town in the winter months and very little for the rest of the year.

The day divides around the heat, with business early and late and a long quiet middle, and evening life takes place outside on terraces and around tea stalls. A strong seasonal rhythm runs through the town: preparations and arrivals from autumn, the busy season through winter, then a hot and near-empty summer. Water, electricity, work for young people and the town's dependence on a single airport are the recurring concerns, and the Sebiba is the fixed point of the year that brings the community together.

Cooking in Djanet combines the Algerian everyday — couscous with mutton or goat, chorba, stews with tomato and chickpeas, bread with everything — and the Tuareg food of the desert journey. Goat and camel meat are the usual meats, vegetables come in by lorry, and dates from the oasis gardens are eaten at every hour and offered to guests as a matter of course.

Taguella is the dish visitors remember. A stiff dough of wheat or millet flour is shaped into a disc and buried in hot sand beneath the embers of a fire; when it is cooked the bread is dug out, beaten clean, torn into pieces and soaked in a sauce of meat, onion and tomato, then eaten from a shared dish. Around it sit the other foods of the nomadic Sahara: dried salted meat, goat's cheese, milk, and eghajira, a pounded drink of millet, dates and cheese made for celebrations.

Tea is not a drink here so much as a sequence. Green tea is boiled with a lot of sugar, sometimes with mint, and poured three times from a height into small glasses, each round different in strength, a process that can take an hour and is the frame for most conversation in the town. Alcohol has no place in public life, and water — carried, rationed and shared on desert trips — is treated with a seriousness that visitors quickly learn.