AFP
In the Nigerien Sahara, the ancestral salt trade is looking for a future
At the edge of an oasis swallowed by the dunes where rare caravans still pass, the desert is studded with holes. The Kalala saltworks, located near Bilma in northeastern Niger, were once an essential stop on caravan routes. Long before uranium and the gold rushes, salt was for a long time the main wealth extracted from the subsoil. -soil of the Nigerian Sahara. A once flourishing trade, which seeks to survive in a disrupted regional economy. From this prosperous past and now gone, there remain hundreds of wells dug by force of arms, where the extraction methods have not changed for centuries. The salt worker Ibrahim Tagaji and an employee struggle with a crowbar at the end of the day when the heat reaches 45 degrees in the shade, at the bottom of the red and black basins. Barefoot in the water where the precious crystals float, the two associates dig, crush, harvest with a calabash then fill date palm molds to form “loaves” ready for export. Hard work, with fluctuating pay, depending on the buyers who pass through town. “When someone brings the money here, you earn a lot! Otherwise, it’s a lot of work and the gain is small”, breathes Ibrahim Tagaji between two shovelfuls. The local economy offers few alternatives, and half of the population of Bilma still works in the saltworks more or less permanently, according to the local authorities. “As soon as you drop out of school, you are forced to work here. Each family has its own well. You are with your wife, your children, you come and you work”, explains Omar Kosso, a longtime salt worker. In the oases of Kawar, an isolated and desert region, the economy as existence remain partly frozen in time.- “The world has changed” – The camel caravans still stop in Bilma, where the vast majority of citizens live in traditional houses with walls of salt and clay fired nearby quarries. And it is always the “mai”, the traditional authority, who assigns the plots to be farmed and sets the selling prices. attributes: a ritual sabre, a parchment-leather war drum, a white flag covered in surahs, the same one his grandfather displayed in the early 1920s in an old black-and-white photo pinned to the wall of the house family. The corn defends the virtues of the salt produced in its locality. “Sea salt must be iodized to avoid deficiencies. Our salt is 90% iodized, so we can eat it directly without risking getting sick”, he assures. But unfortunately for Bilma and its saltworks , all around, “the world has changed”, insists Kiari Abari Chegou. “Before the caravanners came, daza, haza, Tuaregs, now it’s not like before,” he says. Tuareg traders are gradually abandoning nomadism to devote themselves to agriculture in the fertile foothills of the nearby mountains. Aïr. “It’s more profitable than getting tired of traveling 10 days to come to Bilma, then 10 days to come back. It is better to buy salt bread for 2,000 francs in Agadez (the regional capital located 540 km ) than coming here for 600 or 700 francs”, explains Kiari Abari Chegou. Libya, a country ravaged by a civil war since 2011. Traffickers and criminals take advantage of the porous borders. The transporters must arm themselves or travel in convoys under military escort because of the highway robbers who hold the vehicles to ransom. “The bandits stop our trucks, they take our phones and money, and then they let us pass,” says Ahmed, a transporter who is about to face the track at the wheel of a truck full of sacks of salt in from Bilma. In Bilma, carriers like Ahmed are rare. A large part of the clientele is made up of occasional customers who are reluctant to negotiate, traders or traffickers passing through.”It’s a black market here, we don’t have good customers, apart from a few buyers who come and pay at any price. There is no fixed price”, laments the salt worker Omar Kosso. Offers difficult to refuse for the inhabitants of this poor region. The European Union has financed the purchase of several trucks to open up the salt-producing municipalities, but the heat of the track and the conflicts between the members of the local cooperative have got the better of this fleet. Kiari Abari Chegou dreams of a “well put together” cooperative that would make it possible to buy vehicles, store production and maintain prices. While waiting for this uncertain future, the caravans continue to walk between the dunes of Kawar.clt/pid/cpy/emp
2023-07-07 18:42:05
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