Fada

The Ennedi has been inhabited far longer than any town on it. Rock paintings and engravings in the plateau's shelters and canyons record a wetter Sahara of cattle herds, hunters, giraffe and elephant from several thousand years BC, and the gradual drying that followed left the highland as a refuge of springs and permanent pools in an otherwise waterless desert. The Toubou, and the Bideyat of the north-east, have herded camels and goats across it ever since, moving between wells, pastures and the gueltas.

Fada itself grew where shallow groundwater allowed date palms and gardens at the western edge of the plateau, on the routes crossing between Borkou, Ounianga and Darfur. Caravans carried salt, dates and slaves along them, and the Sanusi religious order from Libya established lodges in the desert during the 19th century. France took the north slowly and by force in the early 20th century, garrisoning the oases of the north; the Ennedi was administered under a military regime that continued long after Chad's independence in 1960.

The region was drawn into the wars that followed. Northern rebellion, Libyan intervention in the 1970s and 1980s, and the fighting that ended with Libya's withdrawal left the area militarised, with garrisons, wrecked vehicles and mines still part of the landscape in places. Fada itself saw a battle in 1987 that is counted a turning point of the Chadian–Libyan conflict. In 2016 the Ennedi Massif was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its landscape and its rock art, and management was taken on by African Parks with the Chadian government in 2018; a far larger Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve was declared by Chad in 2019. Fada, as the administrative centre of Ennedi-Ouest, is where that work and the small expedition trade are based.

Fada is a Toubou town, part of the Daza-speaking world of Borkou and the Ennedi, with Bideyat and Zaghawa families from the east and traders from elsewhere in Chad. The Toubou are known across the Sahara for independence, endurance and their camel culture, and social life still runs along lines of clan and kinship, with bride-wealth paid in camels and disputes settled between families as much as by the state.

Islam is universal here, and the desert's Sanusi tradition left its mark on religious practice in the north. The calendar's fixed points are Ramadan and the two Eids; otherwise the year is measured by pasture, by the state of the wells and by the movement of herds. Hospitality is not optional — a traveller who reaches a camp is fed and given water — and tea, boiled strong with sugar and poured in three rounds, is the form that welcome takes.

Dress is practical and modest: long robes and turbans that can be wound across the face against sand and sun. The plateau's rock art is a living part of local identity as well as an archaeological record, and the gueltas are managed by custom, with herders taking turns to water camels and camps kept away from the water so that animals can reach it. Visitors are expected to follow those rules rather than their own.

Fada is a small town — its population was counted at about 24,000 in 2005, spread between the centre, the palm gardens and the scattered compounds at the desert's edge — and it is the main settlement for a very long way. Life rests on herding camels, goats and sheep across the plateau, on the dates and vegetables of the oasis gardens, and on the salaried work that an administrative centre provides: the provincial administration, the garrison, a clinic, schools and the staff of the protected area.

Everything else arrives by truck across the desert — flour, sugar, tea, fuel, rice and manufactured goods — which makes prices high and supply irregular. Water comes from wells and pumps, electricity is limited to generators and solar panels, and a mobile signal is not to be relied on. The rhythm of the day is set by the heat: early starts, a long pause through the afternoon, and activity again in the cool of the evening around the market and the tea stands.

Herding families move through rather than live in the town, coming in for supplies and to sell animals. The pressures are drought and thin pasture, the distance to any hospital or secondary school, and the wider insecurity of northern Chad. The small flow of expeditions during the cool months brings a little work as guides, drivers and cooks, and the Ennedi's World Heritage status has added conservation jobs, but the economy remains overwhelmingly pastoral.

Desert food is simple, portable and built around what keeps. Dates from the town's own palms are eaten every day, often with camel or goat's milk, and they travel well enough to be the standard provision on a journey. The staple cooked dish is boule, a stiff porridge of millet or sorghum brought in from the south, eaten by hand from a shared bowl and dipped in a sauce of dried meat, dried okra or baobab leaf. Rice and pasta appear where trucks have got through.

Milk is the other constant. Fresh and soured camel's and goat's milk are drunk daily and used in cooking, and butter is clarified to keep in the heat. Meat is for guests and festivals: a goat or sheep killed and grilled over charcoal, or cut into strips and dried in the sun as charmout, which is then pounded into sauces during the long journeys between wells.

Tea is the essential drink and the essential ritual. Green tea is boiled hard with a great deal of sugar, poured from a height to raise a froth and served in three small rounds, the first bitter and the last sweet, over a conversation that is not meant to be hurried. Water, sometimes flavoured with dates, is otherwise what people drink; alcohol has no place in the town.