Tamanrasset

Tamanrasset is young by the standards of Saharan towns. The Kel Ahaggar, the Tuareg confederation of the Hoggar, used the valley as grazing and garden land, and a small settlement grew at the oasis where the wadi allowed date palms and cereals to be raised. Trans-Saharan caravans passed through the massif carrying salt, dates, cloth and, historically, enslaved people between the Niger bend and the Mediterranean, and the Tuareg controlled the routes and the wells.

French columns reached the Hoggar at the beginning of the 20th century and the Tuareg resistance was broken after the fighting of 1902. A military post was established in the valley to watch the caravan roads, and in 1905 the French priest and former officer Charles de Foucauld settled here, learning Tamahaq, compiling a dictionary of the language and building a hermitage on the Assekrem plateau in 1911. He was killed at Tamanrasset on 1 December 1916. The bordj he had established by 1915 stands on the edge of town.

After independence in 1962 Tamanrasset became the capital of a province larger than most European countries, and grew from a village of a few thousand into a town of tens of thousands. The trans-Saharan highway reached it, an airport opened, and administration, the army and trade with Niger and Mali drew people from across Algeria and West Africa. Tourism to the Hoggar grew in the later twentieth century, fell away during the insecurity of later decades and returns in the winter months.

Tamanrasset is the cultural capital of the Algerian Tuareg. Tamahaq, the northern Tuareg language, is spoken here and written in the Tifinagh script, an alphabet still used for short messages and inscriptions on rock. Men wear the tagelmust, the long veil wound around head and face, more often indigo or white than any other colour, while women go unveiled, a reversal that has struck outsiders for centuries. Descent and inheritance in Tuareg society pass in important respects through the mother's line, and women hold high standing in the community.

Music belongs above all to the imzad, a single-stringed fiddle with a gourd body and horsehair string, played by women to accompany sung poetry at evening gatherings; the tende drum and the guitar-led desert blues of the wider Sahara are heard alongside it. Silverwork is the best-known craft, made in small family workshops, together with tooled leather and woven mats.

Hospitality follows a strict form. Tea is brewed three times over a small charcoal stove and poured from a height into small glasses, and the ceremony is unhurried by design. Beside the Tuareg majority the town holds Chaamba and northern Algerian families, and a large community from Niger, Mali and further south, so Hausa, Songhai and French are heard in the market as well.

About 93,000 people were counted in Tamanrasset at the 2008 census, up from some 73,000 in 1998, and it has kept growing, which makes it the largest town of the Algerian deep south. It sits at about 1,320 metres, high enough for the nights to be cool, and its distance from the coast — some 2,000 kilometres by road — shapes everything: fresh produce arrives by lorry from the north, and prices are higher than anywhere in the Tell.

The provincial administration, the army and the security services are major employers, along with trade, transport and building. The oasis gardens still grow dates, figs, almonds, cereals and vegetables, and herding continues in the valleys of the massif. Cross-border commerce with Niger and Mali is part of ordinary life, and the town is also a stage on the migration routes north, with a large and shifting population from West Africa living and working in it.

The day is split by the sun: business early, a long pause, and a second life from late afternoon until well into the night, when the market streets and tea stalls are busiest. Water, electricity supply, and jobs for young people are the recurring public complaints, as in other southern towns, and the winter season brings a modest flow of Algerian and foreign visitors heading for the mountains.

Everyday eating in Tamanrasset is Algerian — couscous with mutton, chorba, stews with chickpeas and tomato, grilled meat and bread — with the difference that most of the ingredients have travelled a long way to get here. The market sets the town's rhythm of supply, and camel meat, sold from its own stalls, is common on the table.

The Tuareg contribution is the food of the desert journey. Taguella is a thick unleavened bread of wheat or millet flour cooked directly in hot sand under the embers of a fire, lifted out, dusted off and broken into pieces that are soaked in a sauce of meat, tomato and onion; it is the classic meal in camp and the one most visitors remember. Dried and salted meat, goat's cheese, dates and milk belong to the same tradition, as does eghajira, a pounded drink of millet, dates and goat's cheese made for celebrations.

Dates from the town's own gardens and from the oases to the north are eaten through the day, and figs and almonds ripen in the small walled plots. The drink that matters most is green tea, boiled with a great deal of sugar and sometimes mint and poured three times, each round stronger and sweeter than the last, the three glasses described in Tuareg and Saharan tradition as bitter like life, strong like love and gentle like death. Alcohol has no place in public life here.