The Nomad's Path

Book excerpt: The Manga is one of Africa's most wild and remote regions: a hostile and unforgiving landscape inhabited by nomads. Situated in south-eastern Niger, in the shadow of the Old Salt Road, it has been mislaid by the modern world; no westerner had been seen there in living memory. The Nomad's Path is a beautifully-rendered account of a journey across this inhospitable region at a time of Tuareg insurgency in 2004 and 2008 . Carr sets out to explore the centuries-old link between the Barbary Coast and the Sahel along the Old Salt Road, while conjuring to life a lost wilderness and those who survive within it. At its heart is the story of a daring journey across the Sahel with the Tubu nomads. With tales of rebellion, lost civilisations, explorers - both intrepid and eccentric - and an epic seventeenth-century odyssey, Carr captures a sense of the intangible nature of the Sahel and delivers an evocative portrait of the Tubu - a people living on the tide-line of the Sahara and the edge of the world.