By Stephen Williams

Sahara Man -Travelling with the Taureg

By Jeremy Keenan

£18.99 John Murray

ISBN 0-7195-6162-2

Last autumn Jeremy Keenan flew to Algeria, a country that had been virtually closed to the outside world throughout the 1990s by a bloody civil war. He was in search of the Tuareg, the fearsome indigo-veiled nomadic war-lords of the Central Sahara with whom he had lived as a young anthropologist during the 1960s.

Few knew more about them than Keenan, but even then their way of life was under threat and after he left in 1971 he could not bear to return, afraid of what he would find. Now, 30 years later, and against all advice, he was going back.

Landing in Tamanrasset, which he remembered as a small French colonial town, Keenan found a sprawling concrete jungle and despaired of ever making contact with his Tuareg friends, until a chance meeting set him on his way. Travelling with them into the vast mountainous area of Ahaggar, in the tracks of bandits and sleeping beside caves decorated with prehistoric cave paintings, Keenan discovered that the Tuareg who, after the horrors of Algeria’s war of independence had learned to survive as tourist guides, were now being starved out of their means of livelihood by the violence in the north.

Yet still, much that he recognised remained.

This vivid and fascinating book takes us into the heart of the Sahara - into the lives and minds of the Tuareg, into his own past and into the fearful history and the present-day experience of Algeria itself.

Jeremy Keenan has lectured all over the world on social anthropology. His film ?The Tuareg’ won an award at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, and his book ?The Tuareg People of Ahaggar’ is considered the definitive work on the Berber nomads of the Central Sahara. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

South from Barbary

Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

By Justin Marozzi

£17.99 HarperCollin

ISBN 0-00-257053-X

Justin Marozzi and his travelling companion, Ned Cecil, had never travelled in the desert - or ridden camels - before embarking on a 1,500 mile journey along the slave-trade routes of the Libyan Sahara. Encouraged, however, by a series of idiosyncratic Touareg and Tubbu guides, they learnt the full range of desert survival skills and undertook a gruelling two month journey across some of the most inhospitable territory on earth.

The two explorers, with five camels and a guide, faced difficulties and adventures in the form of freezing nights, burning days, constant hunger and obstreperous camels, but despite these hardships, they found themselves growing ever closer to the land and its people.

Tripoli had captivated Marozzi on his first visit there; in 1992. Ever since he had longed to cross the Sahara, by camel, in the footsteps of early nineteenth century British explorers and campaigners against the slave trade.

As a result, South from Barbary is as much a history of the Saharan slave trade as it is a travelogue. It makes use of evocative nineteenth century eyewitness accounts of the Slave trade in action and chronicles the long-running moves in Britain and the West to put an end to ?the most gigantic form of wickedness the world ever saw?.

The book draws heavily, perhaps too heavily, on the writings of a host of engaging characters. Quotations run through the book, from Herodotus to Sir Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, from Strabo to Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Muammar al Gaddafi. But in the main, the book is readable, evoking the true spirit of an immensely beautiful region of the world.

?Here was silence and loneliness, the glory of wide African skies, unbroken plains of sand and rock; loyalty and companionship, adventure, treachery and betrayal.’

Regrettably, Libyan officialdom (which briefly results in hotel arrest) comes in for some frequent and unjustified criticism. The author seems to have a blind spot over just why two Englishmen travelling across the desert by camel (without their passports, which they have left in Tripoli for visa extensions,) should arouse suspicion.

What sort of reception he thinks two Libyans without passports - trekking across, say, the Yorkshire Dales - would receive from the British authorities?

Hunting Pirate Heaven

By Kevin Rushby

£16.99 Constable

ISBN 0-09-480010-3

Kevin Rushby book describes a personal odyssey whose ultimate objective is to locate the descendants of the legendary 16th century pirates who carved kingdoms for themselves in the remote jungles of north-east Madagascar. Hitching rides on freighters, dhows, yachts and fishing smacks, he sails up the east African seaboard from South Africa to northern Mozambique before setting east to the islands of the Comoros and then Madagascar.

Along the way he meets up with a motley assortment of crack-pot dreamers, tough settlers, the fighters and failures who live on the coast and islands today.

It’s a romantic tale full of colourful incident: voyages to Indian Ocean islands where old Portuguese forts lie covered in jungle, places where men have tried to shoot their way to paradise, and where the ever present ocean can destroy lives and dreams as quickly as men and women create them.

Rushby’s description of present day Comoros is particularly vivid. The way he describes the tensions on the islands, their recent history of coups, counter-coups, conspiracies and invasions, are tales as epic as the era of rum-soaked pirates, galleons and treasure chests of pieces-of-eight, gold and precious gems.

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