Niger

"Today, queues of enormous, heavily loaded trucks stretch to the fringes of the town, a meeting point of Sahel roads from the south and from the north, roads towards Algeria or Libya. Other populations, deriving from new migratory phenomena, converge along the same axis: in one direction, migrants fleeing conflicts, people exiled by drought or poverty, gather on the paths to the Maghreb, and sometimes Europe, and in the other direction, those turned away from these lands. Songhay was the dominant language in the 19th century, and gradually got mixed up with the Tuaregs’ Tamasheq. Today in Agadez, idioms from the south are spoken (…). For around twenty years, Tebu, Beriberi and Arabic languages from the east and northeast of Niger, Chad and Libya have also been heard.

Finally, we come across the languages of those impromptu travellers who go off and come back, migrants from West and Central Africa, the Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Ghana, up to Lingala from the Democratic Republic of Congo… Agadez is a Babel of the desert, where, paradoxically, a strikingly gentle lifestyle reigns. But we can also make out the jargon of the international expatriates from Frontex – the European Union’s sentry – or the International Organization for Migration. Newcomers who now roam about and make the – entirely antidemocratic – claim of limiting the fundamental right of each and everyone to move about as he pleases."

Extract from Retour à Tombouctou, 2015, Éditions Gallimard