After hours on the road in the Nigerian desert, they appear like mirages in the middle of a tangled palm grove. Fortresses of salt and clay erected on rocky outcrops, besieged by the sands. Behind the crenellated walls slumber winding streets, guard towers, underground galleries, footbridges, attics, wells, testimonies of the genius of forgotten builders. Generations of travelers have dreamed before the remains of the forts of Djado, in the northern reaches of Niger, more than 1300 kilometers from Niamey. Without ever solving their puzzles.
Who built these ksars, fortified villages built of salt stone whose remains haunt the oases of Kawar, a desert and isolated region in the northeast of the country? At what time? And why were they abandoned? No excavation, no scientific dating has ever been undertaken in the area to definitively answer these questions.
“Since 2002, there are no more foreign tourists. At the time when tourism was going well, it was an economic potential for the community”, deplores Sidi Aba Laouel, mayor of the commune of Chirfa, which includes the sites of Djado. In 2014, the discovery of gold deposits in the area breathed new life into the town and attracted nationals from all over West Africa.
This westward rush, however, has also attracted a swarm of bandits who have their lairs in the nearby mountains. The Kawar, formerly an important junction of the caravan routes, is today a corridor for trans-Saharan arms and drug trafficking. Because of insecurity, researchers and tourists have deserted for twenty years this troubled region which adjoins the borders of Libya and Chad. And the strange ruins that dot these landscapes hardly interest these new visitors.
In Chirfa, the mayor prefers not to go into the history of the municipal heritage. He refers to old photocopies buried in the cupboard of his office: those of a work by Albert le Rouvreur, a French soldier who was stationed in Chirfa during the colonial era and tried unsuccessfully to elucidate the mystery. When the first Europeans arrived in 1906, the ksars had lost what remained of their usefulness, namely to protect the inhabitants against the raids and invasions that devastated the region for centuries.
The Sao are the first known occupants of Kawar. This animist people established in the region since Antiquity may be at the origin of the first fortifications. But the palm roofs that remain here and there in the ruins of Djado, seem to indicate more recent constructions, in particular kanouri, a people who settled in the area between the 13th and 15th centuries. The Kanouri oases were ravaged in the 18th and 19th centuries by successive raids by Tuareg, Arab and Toubou nomads. The latter took root in Djado and established one of their strongholds there, until the arrival of the French soldiers who definitively conquered the area in 1923.
Kanouri and Toubou are today mixed race, but the traditional authorities of the region, the maï, are still descended from the great Kanouri lineages. They are the customary owners of the ksars and custodians of the oral tradition, likely to provide some answers. Kiari Kelaoui Abari Chegou, mai of Bilma and its ruined ksar, however, came up against the same enigmas as passing travellers. “Even our grandfathers did not know. We did not keep our archives, ”he laments.
Three hundred kilometers further south, another jewel of regional heritage rests in the hollows of a sea of dunes. The oasis of Fachi is famous for its fortress and its old town, with almost intact walls. Some symbolic buildings of the ancient city are still used for traditional ceremonies. The local muezzin is its ultimate inhabitant. Fachi’s traditional authority, Kiari Sidi Tchagam, estimates the age of his fortress at “at least 200 years”. Many ksars in other Saharan countries were actually built between the 17th and 18th centuries. “According to the information we received, there was an Arab who had come from Turkey, it was he who gave the idea to people to build this fort,” he says.
In Dirkou, where the ruins of another ancient city are located, it is Agi Marda Taher, former deputy, who is an authority on the history of the local heritage. According to him, the Turks established in neighboring Libya, were involved in the construction of several ksars and in particular those of Djado. The Kanuri would then have erected their own fortifications at Dirkou, Bilma, and Fachi, the main oases in the region. A pride for their descendants, worried about the preservation of these fragile salt architectures threatened by the rains.
“It is really imperative to register this as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This fort allows us to find ourselves, it is part of our culture, of our whole history, ”says Kiari Sidi Tchagam. Since 2006, the forts of Djado have been vegetating on an indicative list with a view to a possible application for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Abandoned in the silence of the desert, the citadels still defend their heirs against oblivion.
