Agadez, Niger – On a torrid afternoon in July, Elhadj Amadou Dizi Illo sat on a low stool in his souvenir store in Agadez, beads of sweat dotting the skin under his bright yellow turban as he dusted a heap of ornamented knives on the floor.
Opposite the store, a sign on a brown, mudbrick building with lattice doors announced the Hotel Auberge, which has long closed down. Two buildings down, another structure bore the word “Antiquite” written boldly in chalk. It, too, was closed. Outside, women in long, sweeping hijabs and men in turbans walked past, shouting hellos, as a roaming tea seller stopped to prepare glasses of ataya – a mixture of green tea, mint and sugar.
Inside, Illo cleaned and dusted away, focused on his task. At age 63, he is tall and stately with a serene presence. A grey moustache and beard frame his lips, and the sides of his milky eyes crinkle when he smiles, which he does generously.
Illo’s store is one of the last few souvenir vendors still operating in the old Nigerien city.
Packed and stuffy, the mud structure barely has enough room for more than one person. On the shelves are dusty mementos from antique dealers and jewellers across Niger and the region: a bronze cup from somewhere in the desert, silver knives sheathed in dusty green and brown leather cases made by Agadez’s skilled artisans, chunky beaded necklaces from Ghana.
Despite staying open for several hours, no buyers came in aside from two teenage boys. They haggled with Illo over a pair of knives for several minutes before shuffling away in the opposite direction, empty-handed.
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“It’s hard,” Illo said, his French soft and singsongy. Standing up slowly in the cramped space, he braced himself on achy knees. “Life is hard for anyone who works in tourism, but there aren’t many options. We have to endure it.”
Agadez, the ancient city of Tuareg, lodged on the southern edge of the Sahara, has always been a natural crossroads between cultures and continents because of its location. Called the “gateway to the Sahara”, it was in this hot, arid savannah that camel-drawn caravans loaded with ceramics and silk from Arabia, or gold from West African kingdoms in present-day Ghana and Nigeria, stopped to rest during the trans-Saharan trade between the 8th and 16th centuries.
A two-minute walk from Illo’s store, the Grand Mosque – the world’s tallest mudbrick building – stands as a testament to this history. For centuries, its pointed minaret served both as a watchtower and a compass for travellers.
The building itself is built out of wooden beams and mudbricks, called banco. Tuareg artisans travelled as far as Timbuktu in Mali to learn the delicate art of building with the sun-dried bricks. It is the same unique material and technique used throughout the entire old town, earning the area a UNESCO World Heritage Site stamp in 2013.
Travellers and architecture buffs came from all over the world to see the ancient wonders for decades, boosting the local economy. Up until the late 1980s, when a Tuareg revolt led to armed conflict, thousands of tourists streamed in monthly, largely from Europe, to peer at the old mosque and walk through the old town’s gridded streets, which date back to how the early Tuareg settlers organised in encampments based on sub-tribes. The revolt ended tourism.
Today, the building continues to fascinate the few tourists who come by, even though getting to the very top is much harder than it looks. You have to crouch low to the ground and move up the steep stairs of the minaret in slow shuffles, as the narrow passage tightens with every step. Then, you must amble past a colony of shrieking bats before squeezing through a tiny hole to clamber gingerly to the top.
For those who dare, the climb is worth it. Most evenings, the golden glow of sunset bathes the old town in warm hues. Row after row of squat mud structures spread out in all directions, as though paying homage to the mosque. Five times a day, a muezzin solemnly calls the adhan to signal the time for prayer, the sound riding on the breeze. Tut-tutting tricycle and motorbike riders, and squealing from children playing in the courtyards, add to the symphony.
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A once-booming Agadez has fallen on tough times since the revolt, and tourism profits have long faded. Left behind are harsh realities, evident in the lack of customers, shuttered hotels and souvenir shops, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, reflected in the sewage now spilling into sandy streets. It is also evident in the different clientele now plying those old caravan routes: irregular immigrants desperate to brave the desert to reach Algeria or Libya, and eventually, Europe, for a new life.
The best 10 years
Even the veterans of the city sometimes want to leave, at least for a while, to escape the stillness.
“If I could, I would go to Algeria,” said Illo, speaking of how far he would travel to be able to sell his goods and make money. In Algeria, he said, tourism is booming. “But I am not as strong as I used to be. My heart is not strong enough. If I go, I may never come back.”
Illo first began trading back in the 1970s, barely an adult at the time.
He bought goods from locals and sold them to gallery and museum curators visiting from Europe. He even exhibited his collection in several countries. Many of his customers were German-speaking, so when he first got a store space, he named it Schmuck Laden, which means jewellery store.
His first foreign exhibition was in neighbouring Nigeria, followed by another in Germany. On his travels, Illo picked up languages, complete with accents. His German flows with a Bavarian twist. His Yoruba, although jerky, is of the Lagos variety.
Tourism was the region’s bread and butter at the time, so it was not strange for young men like Illo to double as tour guides. He would take travellers around the old city and up into the Air Mountains, about 200km (124 miles) away, which stand out in stark contrast to the low-level dunes of the desert. He took them as far as the black and ochre salt mines of Bilma, a five to six-hour drive from Agadez, where workers loaded the white stuff onto camels to transport down to Nigeria for sale.
“It’s impossible to know how many people I guided or how many were my customers,” he said. Over the years, many have kept in touch with him, sending letters from time to time, all of which he keeps safe in a big canvas bag in his home. “The best month was December because the weather is nicer and cooler. It’s our winter. We had a cook [for the tourists] who would make salads for lunch and a hot meal, like spaghetti, for dinner,” he reminisced.
Of all the years, it was the 10 from 1980 to 1990 that remain most vivid in Illo’s memory. Those were the years of the Dakar Rally, an off-road racing event that began as a race from Dakar, Senegal to Paris, France, but that has since emigrated from the continent to Saudi Arabia due to more than a decade of insecurity from armed groups swarming the Sahel, from Mali to Niger.
Back then, when the cars raced towards Agadez in dust-raising fury, the whole town would line up by the roadside to cheer them on. It was like a party, Illo said. Taxi drivers got more clients in that period, and locals would take the opportunity to rent out their houses for a few nights to the moving party.
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All that excitement, those old days of good money, are over, replaced with a stillness in the city, Illo sighed in his store, wiping his forehead as though wiping the thought away. Resentment and fury at the government spiralled into armed fighting that shut the doors to that life.
Season of rebellion
Trouble began brewing in northern Niger in the late 1980s, when Tuareg armed groups formed, aiming to fight for autonomy. Across the Sahelian countries, Tuareg minority communities have long accused their governments of neglect, despite the mineral profits coming from their land, particularly gold. Famine in the Tuareg regions of Niger and Mali between 1982 and 1985 caused thousands to be displaced, and hundreds to become refugees in camps in Algeria and Libya, although the exact number is unclear. In the camps, those who felt aggrieved that they were experiencing famine while their governments profited from their land met and formed alliances.
The first armed attack was in May 1990. Tuareg separatists attacked a police station in the town of Tchin-Tabarenden, some 400km (248 miles) from Agadez; five people were killed, while 25 of the attackers died. Niger’s military response to the attacks was to deploy soldiers in the area, and the ensuing clashes resulted in “several hundred deaths”, researchers note.
Between 1990 and 1995, as sporadic fighting raged, foreign governments evacuated their citizens, including from the neighbouring town of Arlit, where a French company mined uranium. Western governments like the United States declared Agadez a red zone and issued travel warnings to tourists, delivering a death knell to the city.
Although a peace agreement stalled the fighting in 1995, the armed rebellion would not come to an end until 2007. By then, the local economy had collapsed.
More recently, it is armed militias and bandits that plague the region, locking the insecurity in place. The most powerful militia is the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), which operates across the Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso tri-border area. It was founded by a Tuareg fighter who took part in earlier rebellions in Mali, and it aims to establish a caliphate. Some of the groups are believed to have infiltrated Agadez: two European women have been kidnapped in the town since January. JNIM has denied any involvement.
Political instability roiling Niamey has worsened the situation. Military regimes have come and gone in rapid succession in Niger since independence from France in 1960, but there was hope after the first-ever democratic transition in 2021. A military coup in July 2023 dashed those hopes.
Under General Abdourahmane Tchiani, Niger has grown increasingly isolated, with the knock-on effect falling on the already battered tourism sector. Tchiani’s government cut ties with its ally, France, also expelling French troops, because Paris refused to back the coup. The US, too, has been ejected from its Base 201, the sprawling, expensive drone outpost just behind the small Agadez airport. The base took three years to build and employed hundreds of locals.
Niamey has also been at loggerheads with its regional neighbours, after the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) placed excruciating sanctions on the country and some of its leaders. Instead, Tchiani has banded with fellow military leaders in Burkina Faso and Mali to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). All three have turned to Russia for security and business. At the Agadez airport, Russian warplanes sit on the tarmac, and Russian military men in khaki greens loiter.
Old roads, new travellers
As the city changed, local travel agents who once helped tourists arrive in Niger and travel in the dunes of the Sahara pivoted their trade to the scores of migrants seeking passage to Libya and onwards across the Mediterranean, towards Europe.
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In the crowded bus station on the outskirts of Agadez, passeurs – the agents who transport migrants from all over West Africa – sat at desks peering at papers, counting and recounting the names and numbers of passengers for the next convoy going into the desert. It was after midday, the time when the temperatures usually climb to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) before cooling off in the evening.
Passeurs were not always able to work openly. Under the former civilian government, collaboration with the European Union saw authorities dismantle what they called the smuggling industry that first took off in 2011 after Muammar Gaddafi’s regime fell in Libya. At the time, transporters realised there was unrestrained passage through the leaderless country, all the way to the edge of the Mediterranean.
Quickly, people seeking passage began pouring in and, soon, the population of Agadez doubled to 300,000 from the influx.
While passeurs flourished with the new trade, others grumbled. Migrant communities clash with locals frequently due to deep-seated resentment; locals believe migrants encourage vices like smoking and drugs in their deeply traditional city, but migrants say locals here are not accepting enough of their differences.
The EU deal in 2015 under President Mahamadou Issoufou momentarily criminalised travelling through the desert, forcing passeurs underground. The travels did not stop, passeurs here say, but the journey certainly got deadlier, with drivers taking longer, untested, or long-abandoned routes that got them lost or exposed them to armed groups and bandits. Since the military government took power in 2023, the EU deal has been abandoned. Now, army trucks escort the migrant convoys deep into the desert for protection.
Each passenger pays 150,000 francs ($267), said Addo, a popular passeur with a spacious office that was empty but for a single table and two chairs in a corner. A sign in front read: “Agadez-Dirkou”, referring to the Nigerien city further east where travellers will make a stop. It is only one of four stops on the route, the passeur explained from his seat. Addo’s phone rang often with his fellow passeurs calling to arrange more clients.
Sometimes, people do not make it to the other side because of bandits, or die from thirst: a broken-down vehicle or a driver losing his way could see them trapped too long without water, Addo said. Sometimes, they do, and will then push forward through the sea to Europe, he added.
Thirty minutes from the bus station, in the yard of a gated migrant transit house run by a young man from Agadez, a small crowd of people excitedly loaded their luggage into the back of a green pick-up truck. Young men, women and a handful of children threw their luggage and bottles of water in before clambering into the back of the truck. They were packed tight, knees squeezed together. Drivers handed out sticks to those sitting on the edge of the truck. It is a sort of seatbelt, holding travellers in place as trucks zoom through the desert, going at breakneck speed to avoid bandits and armed groups. Those who do not hold on tight enough sometimes get thrown from the trucks, but drivers rarely stop.
Aminata, a middle-aged woman sitting in the middle of the truck who asked that her real name not be used, looked around, waiting for the vehicle to load. She wore a black jilbab, and her scarf covered part of her face, shielding it from the sun that seemed to be bearing down on the truck. She had been briefed by the passeurs, said Aminata, who speaks rapidly in high-pitched Hausa. She knew the dangers on the road already: the car could break down in the middle of the desert; they could be without help for hours, or even days; armed bandits could attack them. She would spend four long days in this cramped position, in the hot desert heat, and her nights would be in the open. She knew, Aminata said, that some people never make it out of the desert. Still, she was determined.
A native of Kano State, in northern Nigeria, Aminata said she was embarking on the journey to provide for her children, whom she had left back home. There was nothing in Nigeria, she said. She was poor, and the current economic crisis there had made it impossible for her to survive. Yes, the journey could be fatal, but God was with her, she said.
About half an hour later, the loading was done. The truck driver, dressed in a loose grey kaftan and dark aviator sunglasses, got in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. He reversed slowly out of the yard. The trip was not officially approved – this set of migrants was too impatient to wait for the usual military escort, which had been delayed for a day because of some administrative reason. As they drove off in a cloud of dust, the travellers waved goodbye to their counterparts, who had spilled out of the open gates of the house’s yard to see them off. Many here are waiting for their turn to leave. The travellers were still waving when the truck turned a corner and disappeared.
No place like home
In the large, sparsely furnished living room of Illo’s house, the trader sat cross-legged on a prayer mat, examining old documents. Many were letters from his friends abroad, others were odds and ends that reminded him of the good times, like an old Lufthansa plane ticket, and the flyer of an art exhibition from 1993.
One of his eight daughters lounged on a bed spread out in the corner. A fan stood in front of the door, blowing hot air. Out in the yard, a little girl – Illo’s granddaughter – chit-chatted with a friend about something. They spoke in low, serious tones, gesturing.
Modest as it is, building his home was one of Illo’s proudest moments, judging by how frequently he mentions the feat. He was barely 30 when he completed it. Before then, as a teenager, he lived with his neighbours: his father died when Illo was 16, and his mother moved back to her hometown away from Agadez, leaving just him. Illo did not want to leave the old town, though, so he simply moved next door until he saved enough to buy land and build his house.
“I stayed there [without paying rent] until I got married and got my own house,” he said, reflecting on how generous people can be in the town. “If not in Agadez, where are you going to find something like that?” Yes, it is harder these days for most people to afford to be as hospitable as they were in the past, but that spirit of giving is still strong, he added.
Picking up one folded missive, Illo smiled as he examined the fading print. It was from 1982, from a man called Michel in Geneva. He started to read it aloud.
“I received your letter of March 18, in which you’re not happy,” he read. The full exchange tells of Illo asking Michel to send him 100 Swiss francs in exchange for a “promised gift”. In the end, Michel says he sent him 50 Swiss francs but never received the parcel.
“I was barely 20,” Illo laughed bashfully, rummaging again through the heap of letters before him – evidence of a lifetime of friendships the sexagenarian has built because of the city and his work.
But much of that has now changed, Illo knows.
He has heard of how hard it is for foreigners to get a visa to Niger under the military government. Authorities even seize passports from nationals of African countries they consider hostile, such as Nigeria, for a few days upon arrival.
The growing hostility to outsiders has changed the demographics of people visiting Agadez – and it is affecting locals, too. It means fewer sales at Illo’s souvenir shop, and more than that, it means some of his foreign friends may never be able to make it back to visit.
“That’s the administration, not us,” Illo said, with a rare frown. If Niger had not been open once, he would not have met his clients, made such long-lasting friendships, or travelled widely the way he has.
Loud banging on the gate of his compound interrupts Illo’s letter reading, causing him to rise and walk slowly towards the yard. A group of about 20 young men dressed in flowing purple robes, complete with elaborate headgear that fanned out like a peacock’s comb, poured into the yard, singing. They were part of the procession celebrating the Biannou Festival, which used to be held yearly, but is now every other year. The Tuareg festival often features three days of dance performances, parades and prayers, led by young men. Sometimes, performers take the party to the homes of notable people like Illo, who is revered as a sage of sorts.
One of the performers banged on a drum as the men launched into a dance, encircling Illo. The vendor reached out to take the drum and hit up a fiery beat, earning him cheers from the small crowd. After a few more minutes of dancing and drumming, the men said their goodbyes and filed out of the yard. Illo’s teenage daughter ran after them.
“That one, she’s crazy,” Illo laughed as he lowered himself back onto the mat, before reflecting that it is little moments like these that help him remember why he had always chosen to stay put here in Agadez, even when he could have left for Libya, Algeria, or somewhere else.
Like him, his children and grandchildren can travel and see the world – even though he will never allow them to join the desert travellers. But after having journeyed far and wide, the best patch of the world, he said, is right here.
“The world is full of problems right now, there’s no other place you can go that’ll be this quiet,” Illo said. “Despite all the difficulties, I can’t leave.”