Agadez

Agadez grew where the routes of the Sahara meet the roads of the Sahel. Tuareg groups moving south into the Aïr founded a sultanate in the fifteenth century and made the town its capital, and it became the meeting place of caravans between the Hausa cities to the south and the oases of North Africa, trading salt, dates, leather, cloth and enslaved people. The Songhai Empire took the town in 1515 and held it as part of the empire until 1591, and the Grand Mosque is dated to that same year, rebuilt in the same style in 1844. Leo Africanus, in his Description of Africa, described a walled city of well-built houses with a sumptuous palace.

European travellers reached it in the nineteenth century, by which time the population had fallen and much of the town stood empty, though the caravans to Bilma still ran. French forces occupied Agadez in the early twentieth century; in 1916 and 1917 the Tuareg leader Kaocen besieged the French garrison in a revolt that took months to break, and the repression that followed left deep resentment.

Independence in 1960 was followed by uranium mining at Arlit to the north, which brought road traffic and wage work to the region. A small desert-tourism industry grew from the 1980s, sending visitors into the Aïr and the Ténéré, and collapsed with the rebellions of the 1990s and of 2007 to 2009. In the 2010s the city became the main transit town for migrants crossing the Sahara towards Libya, an economy that employed drivers, guesthouse keepers and fixers until crackdowns from 2016 slowed the traffic. The sultanate itself has survived all of this, and the old town was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2013.

Agadez is the cultural capital of Tuareg Niger. The sultan of Aïr, whose office goes back to the founding of the town, remains a figure of authority, consulted in disputes and central to public ceremony. The tagelmust, the long veil and turban worn by men, is everyday dress, and women hold a strong and public position in family and social life.

The town's craftsmanship is its signature. Smiths of the artisan families make the Agadez cross, the silver pendant known far beyond Niger, along with rings, daggers, locks, camel saddles and tooled leather bags, working in small workshops in the old quarter. Building is a craft too: the banco walls of the old town and the mosque's minaret are maintained by replastering with mud, a skill passed down within the town.

Music runs from the imzad, the single-stringed fiddle played by women, to assouf, the electric Tuareg guitar style that has taken the region's music abroad; the guitarist Bombino was born in the Aïr north-east of the city and began his career here. Weddings are marked with camel parades, drumming and dancing, and hospitality is formal: tea is poured three times, each glass meant to taste different, and a guest is not asked their business until the first has been drunk. The city is also mixed, with Hausa, Zarma, Toubou and Fula residents alongside the Tuareg majority, and Arabic and Hausa are heard beside Tamasheq.

Agadez recorded 110,497 residents at the 2012 census, making it the fifth largest city in Niger and the administrative centre for a region bigger than many countries. People live in compounds of banco or concrete behind high walls, in the old town and in the newer quarters spreading along the roads out.

Work is trade, transport, administration and craft. The city supplies and staffs the mines and gold camps of the north, sells the produce of the Aïr oases — tomatoes, onions, citrus, dates — and handles the salt brought in from Bilma and Fachi. Herders sell animals at the livestock market. Through the 2010s the transport of migrants northwards was a large part of the economy, and the crackdown on it removed the income of many drivers, guides and guesthouse owners without replacing it; migrants still pass through, and the town also receives people returning south.

The day is arranged around the heat and the prayers: business early, a long still middle of the day, and streets that fill again in the late afternoon and after dark under weak lighting. Water, electricity and fuel supply are intermittent, the population has grown with arrivals from the countryside, and the loss of tourism and of the migration trade has left a town with fewer ways to earn than a generation ago.

Desert cooking is simple, filling and made to travel. Taguella, the Tuareg flatbread, is a disc of wheat dough baked in the sand under a fire, then dusted off, broken into fragments and served with a sauce of goat or mutton — the meal offered to guests in camps and in town. Millet porridge with a sauce of baobab leaf or okra is the Sahelian everyday dish, and in the town itself rice or pasta with a tomato and meat sauce is what most people eat.

The oases supply the fresh side of the diet. Gardens in the Aïr valleys send in tomatoes, onions, salad, oranges, grapefruit and above all dates, which are eaten fresh and dried and offered with tea. Camel and goat milk, fresh or soured, is drunk in the camps, and hard dried cheese and strips of dried meat are carried on journeys. Salt from the pans of Bilma and Fachi has reached Agadez by caravan for centuries and is still sold in the market in slabs and cones.

Grilled meat is the town treat: brochettes of mutton or goat cooked over charcoal at stands near the market and eaten with pepper and raw onion. Eghajira, a thick sweet drink of pounded grain, dates and cheese, is made for guests and festivals. Everything ends with green tea boiled with sugar and poured from a height into small glasses, three rounds at a sitting. Alcohol has no place in public life.