When I sit on this saddle I feel as if I'm sitting on the top of the world
                              (short story from Sahara desert)


He was born in a very small village in the Acacus Mountains Southern of Libya to a nomadic family with two brothers Awaden and Mawli. He had two sisters Djanit and Aicha. His father is a typical Tuareg man who's dignity and honour are praised by people who know him. He is very proud of his culture and is well respected by others, as is also his mother Tinhinan. His father is very tall, like most Tuareg men and has a long moustache. He’s not a talkative person and in accordance with their culture they hardly talk to him about anything, not even about his journeys. These would sometimes take a couple of weeks or even two months without us seeing him at all. He remembers him once saying to him, while he was busy putting a saddle on his camel: ''You know my son, when I sit on this saddle I feel as if I’m sitting on the top of the world'’.    When he'd finished saddling the animal he would ride away into the distance until he finally disappeared over the horizon. He would not show up again until his journey ended three weeks later.  

His mother was also a tall person and had long hair tied in a ponytail. She talked a great deal, about subjects.  In this she was the opposite of their father.  According to their culture, the first thing you have to learn in life as a child is how to read and write using the 'Tifinagh' script. Mothers are the ones who take on this role; every mother in Tuareg society is a teacher.  Along with two of his eldest brothers we had to sit around the fire, for hour after hour, repeating the words while writing them on the sand, until, eventually, we'd all fall fast asleep. 

A Tuareg woman teaching her children Tifinagh

 In the 1970s and '80s drought struck most parts of the Sahara Desert, and many Tuareg nomads, including our family lost their animals and livestock.   New refugee settlements had to be built on the edge of various growing towns and cities in the south of Algeria and Libya. In 1980, three years before Kawcen was born, Colonel Qaddafi invited the Tuareg to what he calls himself  the original homeland of all Tuareg (Libya).  In 1981, two years before Kawcen was born, Colonel Qaddafi made a number of promises to the Tuareg in Libya, including good housing, free education. He even promised Libyan nationality. His invitation even reached as far as Timbuktu. Hundreds of nomads from all parts of the Sahara made their way to Libya. Qaddafi’s people received them in places that looked like refugee camps but with promises that they would provide better accommodation for them and their families. Later however it became clear that Qaddafi’s historic speech was merely political rhetoric and not of any help to the Tuareg, as many had expected at the beginning.  In fact Qaddafi's purpose was to recruit more soldiers for his weak army, to fight his stupid wars in Chad, Lebanon and elsewhere. Qaddafi knew how good and fierce Tuareg fighters were. But many Tuareg nomads who answered Qaddafi’s appeal simply ended up living permanently in refugee camps and ghettos without any citizen's rights.  Against their wishes their children were sent off to fight Qaddafi's hopeless wars, eventually lost, in Chad and Lebanon. Many of them were either killed or just ‘disappeared'.

 Kawcen was only six years old when the family moved into 'Alttyouri Camp', in Sebha, 700 km south of Tripoli.  He calls this horrible place a ghetto. It was one of many camps that the Qaddafi regime established as an open prison in which to gather his victims before sending them off to the front lines in Chad and Lebanon.  It was one of the worst and dirtiest places on the planet. There was only a single well where people could get drinkable water.   All the houses were made of mud and there was no sewage system. The streets were extremely narrow, and the whole neighbourhood was surrounded by a huge wall. This was in order to prevent the people inside from being connected to the outside world. It was also built to hide the appalling and inhuman conditions in which the Tuareg were living. While Kawcen was growing up a lot of questions developed in his head. One of them was this:  'What makes this government treat us like strangers in the land of our birth?