Salt Trade
Not everyone who lives in the desert is a pastoral nomad or an oasis farmer. These images show salt workers in Taoudenni, Mali. Even in the 21st century, desert traders take a six-month long, 1500-mile trek by camel caravan across the desert to trade salt for other goods. Some trade routes go from Tombouctou north to Cairo, others from Bilma and Taoudenni towards Nigeria. Although most of the trade is now carried out in trucks, there are still groups whose livelihood is to make salt and walk with the camels to trade it for necessary supplies.
Salt-making is a centuries-old tradition in the Sahel. Taoudenni is a makeshift mining settlement about 430 miles north of Tombouctou, Mali. It is populated by a few hundred men who spend about half the year living on salty water and rice so they can earn a small living though mining salt the traditional way, using only their hands and archaic tools to cut salt from the ground. Each man digs a pit in the ground, and fills it with water from a nearby well. The water is rich in chemical compounds (known collectively as salt) and evaporates quickly in the hot sun, leaving behind solid salt. The men cut blocks of about 80 pounds each, and load four of them onto each camel for the trek across the desert.
The journey itself is difficult for the men and the camels. They wake at 3 am and start to walk around 4 am, eating meals of dates, millet and goat-milk cheese and drinking tea as they go. Once the camels are loaded, it is too time-consuming to unload them until nightfall. The men walk or ride through the hottest part of the day, then stop at sundown to feed the camels and rest. Camels can go for a week without water, but need to graze every day in order to retain their strength and carry the salt. Camels who are not strong enough are abandoned along the way. As you can see in the picture, the camels do not have a lot of choice in grazing fodder. The men watching this caravan are Toureg, easily identified by their blue robes. They are well-known as the fiercest fighters and most able camel-men in the Sahara.
