This is my unapproved translation of the letter that won Moussa (Ag Assarid) 15,000 km of train travel through Europe (see my previous post). It can be found in his book, “Y'a pas d'embouteillage dans le desert !” and the passage embodies to a certain extent both what is good and what is slightly annoying about the book: his snapshots of European life and values are sometimes very sharp, and his descriptions poetic, but at times he becomes very moralizing, and makes vast generalizations – both about French and Western people, and, I think, about his own nomadic people, and their culture and values.

Papa,

Let me tell you my current feelings and impressions. I write to you from a high-speed train (TGV) that leaves Montpellier, where I study, for Paris, where I will tell Touareg stories and legends at a library. It is a blue train (the color that you love), very fast and very comfortable, that travels a thousand times faster than your big white dromedary and is as long as a caravan of one hundred camels. In less than four hours, I cross France from south to north, around 800 kilometers like between Timbuktu and Tamanrasset!

Outside the window, everything parades by at an enormous speed. Often, I cannot manage to make the distinction between the cows and the sheep. But papa, these sheep do not resemble yours: in France, they are fat and hairy and are not as free as at home. Here, the animals have the possibility to eat at will. The landscape is all green. The fields are shaped in beautiful geometric formations, a little like our saddle blankets. The climate varies along my journey: thoroughly sunny at the outset, rainy mid-way through and cold at the point of arrival.

Inside, the comfort is absolute with large reclineable seats and little tables for writing or eating. The passengers sit next to each other but they do not speak enough for my taste. Everyone has something to read or to do. It is a pity. But today's western world would do good to draw some lessons from us. And here, every person is their own TGV except that he “does not take the time to go fast,” does not take advantage of the beauty of the nature and walks right by what is essential.

Papa, you know, even with the luxury and the comfort here, I would prefer to live the nomadic life with you and the camels, the goats and the sheep, free like the wind and to go where I wish like a hirondelle on the moving sand dunes of the Sahara. But, despite this, while I wait to return, the fantastic magic of the TGV allows me to remain nomad in an incomparable manner.

I kiss you, and until we meet again, soon, under the tent.

Many of his criticisms of the west are my own (apart from a few places where our views strongly diverge), and one pearl of advice on raising children comes from how Moussa's father punished him when he wouldn't listen. “He never hit me, but he would refuse to speak to me, figuring that if I weren't listening to him, it served no good.”

It will be interesting to see how the book is received in Mali, as it could be seen as a paradoxical finger-pointing to those Malians striving for a better life, often in the image of French lifestyles they can witness on television. He admits believing, when he was younger, that having a TV would make his life better, but now he has realized that all those material goods he has access to in France are worth little, that the relationships that exist between people in the desert are what make life worth living. It is the kind of assertion that is just that much easier to make when you have all those things at your fingertips...