Faya-Largeau

Faya-Largeau exists because of water. A shallow aquifer under a depression in the Borkou desert allows date palms and gardens where nothing else grows, and the oasis has been settled and cultivated for centuries by Toubou and by families who worked the groves. Caravans crossing between the Lake Chad basin, Kufra in Libya and the Nile used the oasis as a halt, carrying dates, salt, ivory and slaves, and the Sanusi religious order from Libya extended its influence into the Borkou oases during the 19th century.

French forces took the oasis in 1913, during the conquest of northern Chad, and it was held under a military administration that continued long after Chad became independent in 1960; the town's double name pairs the oasis with that of a French officer of the period. As the only substantial settlement for hundreds of kilometres, it became the administrative seat of Borkou and a permanent garrison, with an airstrip that gave the north its only reliable link to the capital.

That strategic position made it a target. Northern rebellion from the 1960s, and then Libya's occupation of the Aozou Strip and advance southwards, turned Borkou into a war zone; the town changed hands repeatedly between 1975 and 1987, when Libyan forces withdrew during the campaign known as the Toyota War. Wrecked vehicles in the sand are still part of the landscape. Since then the town has returned to being what it was — an oasis, a garrison and a market — while the gold rush in the Tibesti and the traffic towards Libya have added new pressures to the north.

The town belongs to the Toubou world, and specifically to the Daza of Borkou, camel-herding people known across the Sahara for endurance and independence, with Teda relatives in the Tibesti to the north-west. Social life runs through clan and kinship: marriages are arranged between families with bride-wealth in camels, disputes are settled between elders as much as through the state, and obligations to relatives reach across hundreds of kilometres of desert.

Islam is universal and unremarked, part of the day rather than a separate category, with the Sanusi tradition in the background of religious practice in the north. Ramadan and the two Eids are the year's fixed points; the rest of the calendar belongs to the date harvest, the state of the wells and the movement of herds. Hospitality is an absolute rule of the desert — nobody who arrives is left without water, tea and food — and it is offered without fuss.

Dress is practical: long robes, and turbans that can be wound across the face against sun and blown sand. Tea, boiled strong with sugar and poured from a height into small glasses in three rounds, is the medium of every conversation, and hurry is bad manners. Garden plots and wells are family property with carefully remembered boundaries, and courtesy about water is the most important local rule a visitor can learn.

Faya-Largeau is a small town by any measure, but it is the largest in northern Chad and the centre of a province larger than many countries. Its economy is the oasis and the road: dates, vegetables and fodder grown under the palms; natron dug from the ground nearby and traded on; camels, goats and sheep herded in the surrounding desert; trade in goods trucked up from the south; and the salaried work of the administration, the garrison, the schools and the clinic.

Supply defines everyday life. Flour, rice, sugar, tea and fuel all arrive by truck across a thousand kilometres of desert, so prices are high and shortages routine. Water is drawn from wells and pumps in the groves, electricity depends on generators and solar panels, and telephone coverage is patchy. The day is shaped by heat: work in the early morning, a long still afternoon, and life returning at dusk around the market and the tea stands.

The town sits on a route north towards Libya, and that traffic — of workers, migrants, traders and smugglers — passes through. Its other pressures are the drought and sand that threaten the palm groves, the distance from any hospital beyond the local one, and the insecurity of the far north, from the gold-mining areas of the Tibesti to the border. For all that, the oasis is a fixed point: people from far out in the desert come here for everything they cannot grow or carry.

The oasis diet begins with dates. Borkou's palms produce the fruit eaten every day here, fresh in the harvest season and dried the rest of the year, taken with milk and carried on journeys because it keeps and needs no cooking. Camel and goat's milk, fresh or soured, is the other staple, and butter is clarified so that it lasts in the heat.

Cooked food follows the Chadian pattern, with the grain brought from the south: boule, a stiff millet or sorghum porridge, eaten by hand from a shared bowl and dipped into a sauce of dried meat, dried okra or baobab leaf. Rice, pasta and wheat bread appear when the trucks have come through. Meat is the food of guests and festivals — goat, sheep or camel, grilled over charcoal or stewed — and charmout, meat dried in strips in the sun, is pounded into sauces and taken on the road.

Tea is the drink that matters: green tea boiled with a lot of sugar, poured from height to raise a froth and served in three small rounds, the first bitter and the last sweet. Water flavoured with dates and soured milk are the everyday alternatives. Vegetables from the garden plots — onions, tomatoes, carrots and okra — vary the sauces, and nothing alcoholic is part of public life.