Bilma

Bilma's history is the history of salt. Springs at the foot of the Kaouar escarpment have allowed dates and vegetables to be grown in an otherwise waterless desert, and the brine of the surrounding flats has been evaporated into salt for many centuries, giving a remote oasis a commodity the Sahel needed. The Kaouar oases were known to Arab geographers in the medieval period, and Bilma lay on the great caravan trail between Bornu and the Fezzan, which drew the oasis into the orbit of the Kanem–Bornu Empire to the south.

Salt tied the oasis to the great caravan routes. Tuareg caravans from the Aïr, the azalai, crossed the Ténéré each year to load salt and dates and carry them south and west to the Hausa markets, returning with millet, cloth and other goods; caravans north linked the town to the Fezzan in what is now Libya. The Toubou of the Kaouar and the Kanuri farmers of the oasis lived alongside each other, with periodic raiding across the desert.

Under French colonial rule Bilma was the site of a major if isolated military post, Fort Dromard, and the town spent the period as a remote garrison and administrative post. Independence changed little. Lorries gradually took over the salt trade, shrinking but not ending the camel caravans, and in recent decades the routes through the Kaouar have carried migrants and smugglers north towards Libya, bringing traffic, money and danger to a town that has always lived off the desert crossing.

The oasis is shared by Kanuri and Toubou families, with Tuareg traders and herders passing through and Hausa and Arabic heard in the market. Kanuri is the language of the older gardening families, Tedaga of many Toubou, and Hausa serves for trade; French belongs to the school and the administration. Islam orders the week, and the small mosques of the old town fill for Friday prayer.

Work gives the town its culture. Salt-making is organised by family and by pan, with rights to particular basins passed down, and the shaping of the salt into cones and slabs is a skill learned young. The palm gardens are held in the same way, each plot with its owner and its share of water, and disputes over water and inheritance are settled locally as much as officially.

Hospitality is formal and serious in a place where a visitor may have crossed hundreds of kilometres of desert to arrive: tea is made at once, in three rounds, and food is offered before questions are asked. Weddings bring drumming, singing and shared meals that draw in the whole oasis, and the arrival of a caravan or a convoy is an event in itself. Older men still tell the desert routes as knowledge — where the wells are, how many days to the next water — and that knowledge remains a source of standing.

Bilma recorded 4,016 residents at the 2012 census and is the administrative seat of a department covering some 670,000 square kilometres of north-eastern Niger. Households live in earth-built compounds between the gardens and the escarpment, and most combine several kinds of work: a plot of palms, a share in the salt pans, a government or garrison wage, a stake in transport.

Salt and dates remain the products that leave the oasis, carried out by lorry and still in part by camel. Goods come in the other direction from Agadez or Dirkou at prices that reflect the distance, and fuel, flour, sugar and tea are the staples of the market. The movement of migrants and of smuggled goods along the Libya routes has been a significant source of income in the wider Kaouar, and the crackdown on it has been felt here as in Agadez.

The day is shaped by heat: work in the gardens and the pans from first light, a long pause through the middle of the day, and life resuming in the late afternoon and evening. Water, electricity and supply of almost everything are uncertain, medical care is minimal and distant, and dust, sand encroachment and the drying of wells are constant concerns. The town's isolation is the largest fact of daily life — the nearest city is days away across sand.

Food in Bilma is what the oasis grows and what the desert allows to be carried. Dates are eaten fresh at harvest and dried for the rest of the year, given to guests, traded and taken on journeys; the gardens also yield tomatoes, onions, peppers, a little wheat and fodder for goats and camels. Millet and sorghum come in by lorry from the south and are cooked into a stiff porridge served with sauces of okra, dried tomato or baobab leaf.

Taguella, the desert flatbread baked in the sand under embers and broken into a meat sauce, is the food of the caravan and of hospitality, and goat or mutton is grilled for festivals and for guests. Milk from goats and camels, fresh or soured, is drunk where animals are kept, and dried meat and hard cheese are carried by anyone crossing the Ténéré. Rice and pasta with a tomato sauce are the convenient modern meal in a town supplied by truck.

Bilma's own salt, from the pans on the edge of the town, seasons everything and is also sold in blocks as a mineral lick for livestock, which has long been a large part of the trade. The tea ritual closes every meal and fills every pause: green tea boiled with sugar over charcoal and poured from a height into small glasses, three times over, strong first and sweet at the end. Alcohol has no place here.