Anigouran

There was a time when the stone was soft. The giants who walked the Sahara then left their footprints in the rock, and they spoke a heavy, clumsy tongue, and they were not wicked so much as simple. The Tuareg remember them under several names, Ijobbaren, Ixazamen, Isebaten, and they remember that their age ended. The stone hardened. The land set. And into that harder, clearer world walked a man who could read a camel’s life from its droppings.

In the Aïr mountains and among the southern Tuareg of Niger and Mali he is Aniguran, written Anigouran in French, a name its own speakers explain as eni guran, “proverb or riddle, being understood”. Further north, in the Ahaggar and the Tassili n’Ajjer, the same man is Amamellen, “the one who possesses clarity”. Sometimes he becomes Aliguran. The names change with the dialect; the man does not. He is not a god and not a king. The stories call him an ordinary free man, of no special rank, whose single weapon is that he thinks faster than anyone else alive.

The Tuareg credit him with a great deal. The finished Tuareg language, polished out of the giants’ coarse dialect, is his work. So is tifinagh, the old Tuareg script of dots and lines. Poetry, the courtly literature of evening gatherings and the art of the violin are all laid at his door. The first rock engravings, the ones showing scenes of nomad life that any herder would still recognise, are said to belong to his era, and many of them are read as illustrations of his adventures. In parts of the desert his name is simply what old inscriptions are called. A traveller who finds a line of tifinagh scratched into a boulder may be told, quite matter-of-factly, that it is an Aniguran.

His great antagonist is a boy. Around Aniguran the stories gather a whole household: a wife, a daughter, a son, an enslaved woman and her child, an artisan and his wife. But the relationship that drives the cycle is the one with his sister’s son. Tuareg society traces descent through the mother’s line, and the man who stands to inherit a leader’s place is not his own son but his sister’s. That nephew is his heir, and he is also his permanent rival. The boy goes by different names in different regions: Batis, “his father does not exist”; Adelasegh, a word some groups use to mean “intelligent”; Elias in the north. Whatever he is called, he is every bit as clever as his uncle, and that is precisely the problem.

The version written down by Adolphe Hanoteau in his grammar of Tamachek, first published in 1860 and reissued in 1896, begins darkly. Every time his sister bore a son, Amamellen killed it. So when she gave birth on the same day as the woman who served her, she handed her baby to the slave and took the slave’s child as her own. Amamellen came in, seized the infant he believed to be his nephew, and killed it. The real nephew grew up in the servant’s tent and became a man called Elias.

After that the uncle never stopped trying. There was water hidden in the mountain, and Amamellen, who knew where it was, would not tell. He watered his herds at night and came home before anyone woke, over bare rock that held no footprints. Elias took the sandals of Amamellen’s herdsmen and rubbed them with grease. At first light he followed the shine of fat on the stone all the way to the pool. As he bent over the cold water to drink he saw, trembling on its surface, the reflection of his uncle behind him, drawing a sword to strike the back of his neck. He sprang across to the far side and ran.

Another time Amamellen laid a trap of pure knowledge. He walked the feet of dead animals through a valley to fake the tracks of camels, goats, sheep and donkeys, and he left three old camels there: one blind in one eye, one mangy, one with its tail cut off. Then he sent Elias to look. The young man came back and reported everything. The tracks were made by dead feet, he said, because a living foot kicks sand backward and a dead one does not. The half-blind camel had grazed only the trees on the side of its good eye. The mangy one had scratched itself against every trunk it passed. And the tailless one had left its droppings in a heap, because a camel with a tail swishes them apart.

The last attempt came in a meadow of cut grass. Amamellen raked it into piles, told Elias to gather them all next day, went out ahead in the dark and buried himself in one of the heaps with a javelin. Elias collected every pile but that one. His companions asked why. “That one is breathing,” he said, “and the others are not.” His uncle burst out of the grass, threw the javelin, and missed. Then he gave up. “Go,” he said, “I bow to you, son of my sister.” It is a fine line, and a very Tuareg one: the uncle admits defeat only by naming the bond that made the boy his rival in the first place.

That is the shape of the whole cycle. The uncle tries to push the nephew aside; the nephew survives, and the very intelligence that should mark him as a threat is also the proof that he belongs to the same line. In the Tuareg phrase, the two of them have drunk the same milk. Later collections from Niger keep the pattern, with tales of Anigouran’s attempts to eliminate his nephew and of his success and then despair.

In some regions another figure stands in the hero’s place. The Niger Tuareg tell of Amerolqis, a giant civilising hero who is really the pre-Islamic Arab poet Imru’ al-Qays, born around 500 CE, pulled into the Saharan storytelling world because his legendary chivalry and his values, well outside the Islamic ideal, suited the part. Hélène Claudot-Hawad, writing in the Encyclopédie berbère in 1986, treated this as a local substitution rather than the root of the cycle. Aniguran himself remained the figure known everywhere among the Tuareg.

His power is reasoning, pure and unmagical. He reads tracks, riddles, droppings and silence; he invents a way of writing down speech so that it can travel without a messenger. He has no charm against death and no spirit at his command. His weakness is equally human. He cannot stand to be surpassed, and the one person he most wants gone is the one person clever enough to see through every scheme he builds. He loses to his own reflection, which is more or less what the nephew is.

The name has travelled beyond the camps. In Michel Ocelot’s 2012 animated film Kirikou et les hommes et les femmes, a young Tuareg of the Aïr is called Anigouran. In the camps themselves the older Anigouran never really went away. His riddles, proverbs and parables, reworked for each new situation, remain an everyday point of reference in Tuareg camp life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anigouran in Tuareg mythology?

Anigouran, also spelled Aniguran or Aligouran and called Amamellen in the north, is the founding culture hero of the Tuareg. He is an ordinary free man whose only power is intelligence, and his story cycle is set just after the age of the giants. His proverbs, riddles and reasoning are still quoted in Tuareg camps.

Did Anigouran invent the tifinagh script?

Yes, Tuareg tradition credits Anigouran with creating tifinagh, the Tuareg alphabet, along with the finished form of the Tuareg language, poetry and the art of the violin. Old rock engravings and tifinagh inscriptions in the desert are said to date from his time, and in some areas they are simply called by his name.

Why does Anigouran try to kill his nephew?

Anigouran tries to kill his sister’s son because, in the matrilineal Tuareg system, that nephew is his heir and therefore his rival. In Adolphe Hanoteau’s 1860 version, Amamellen kills every son his sister bears until she swaps her baby with a servant’s child. The surviving nephew, Elias, escapes every later trap through his own cleverness.

How does the story of Anigouran and his nephew end?

In the version Hanoteau recorded, Amamellen hides in a heap of grass to ambush his nephew, but Elias notices that the heap is breathing and leaves it alone. Amamellen throws his javelin, misses, and finally gives up, saying he bows to the son of his sister.

What does the name Aniguran mean?

Tuareg speakers explain Aniguran as coming from eni guran, meaning “proverb or riddle, being understood”, which fits a hero famous for riddles. The northern name Amamellen is explained as “the one who possesses clarity”. Both names point to his defining trait, which is intelligence rather than strength or magic.

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