Sands Of Enigma

Until this point the previous videos made in the series had been very quick productions. After crossing into the Sarah Desert my approach to this project changed dramatically.

I arrived in Nouakchott with an offer to stay at Rafa & Nuria's place, two Spanish aid workers who had a bit a space to spare. It was Nuria who first introduced me to seig, when I started asking about games.

I had been socialising with various ex-pats in Nouakchott when I finally bumped into Julien Vergne, an intrepid French digital nomad, who like myself had also worked as a computer games developer.

If you've ever been to the wastelands of Mauritania you'll appreciate the bizarre if not completely improbable meeting of 2 ex-games developers in such a place.

Like myself Julien was making videos, but his were altogether far more entertaining in that he enlisted the talents of local comedians to make his short slapstick skits under the name of Mad Pigeon.

Julien, being French in a Francophone country, was much more at ease with making contacts and realised he could help me with my production. Julien introduced me to a local production company, Sahara Media. We entered that destitute dusty office like so many other barren places in Nouakchott, and wondered how any sort of production could be made in such a place where the shelves and desks were bare of any tools of the trade. After a short interview with the boss, he grabbed the landline phone and started exclaiming stuff in Arabic to a colleague at the budding new TV station in Dubai going by the name of Al Jazeera. He slammed down the phone and said:

"They want a treatment for a series of TV episodes of games in West Africa. Submit a sample video and a budget for the series."

So off we went and got started.

We came back pretty quick with a test shoot we had shot with some women in Rafa & Nuria's Nouakchott garden,

but the boss was worse than disappointed with our efforts, more like horrified.

"Where is the beautiful Sahara Desert, this is ugly, look at the dirty sand in this garden."

He was dead right of course, we had been eager to show something as quickly as possible without making too much effort.

"It's not easy for us to get footage of Mauritanian women out in the desert."

We pleaded.

His eyebrows still raised, then rested on hearing our excuse, as he knew it was no easy task for foreigners on getting permission to do such a thing.

He made some orders to Lemine, one of his trusty cameramen, and were informed that a date would be set for us to shoot in the desert.

On the second shoot Lemine took us out of Nouakchott into the desert in a company 4x4, unloaded a camera and tripod beside a group of women taking shade under a khaima tent.

We asked the women to start playing the game seig for us whilst Lemine took as many shots as he could. But we all knew that this was not going to be award-winning material, since these older ladies were somewhat timid and well, generally not very entertaining all round.

We packed up and took our commiserations back to the office, but Julien was determined not to let this burn our chances and promised the team he could come up with a more entertaining group of younger women so long as we could still count on Sahara Media for transport, crew, equipment and a pass to shoot in the desert.

Julien chatted with his then girlfriend Awa Watt whose sister, Soya Watt, and friends; Oumoukeltome Mint Abed, Khouraichiya Mint Mohammed, Soukina Mint Sid Ahmed Val, would be enlisted for the job. They demanded payment, which wasn't much, but I stumped up the cash, which I wasn't used to doing on my traveller's budget of next to zero pounds in the bank. But what I hadn't realised is that the young ladies were focused on the quality of the production and their wonderful appearance to be. They spent the cash on new clothes, beads, ornaments and henna tattoos for the hands and feet. We couldn't have dreamed for more devoted subjects.

Finally we had it in the bag, a very entertaining group out in the desert with the beautiful sand dunes. Not only that but friends Philippe Colucci, Youssoupha Camara, Ousman Toure, Jege and Noura Mint Seymali provided us with a song "Tamin" from their forthcoming music album "Tarabe".

We even roped in RFI's Marie-Pierre Olphand to give us some editorial notes and cut the video a little sharper.

It had taken 2 months of getting to know people, research and test shoot to get to this point, and we were pretty happy with the result. However, it took another month to get a response form Al Jazeera who reportedly dismissed the proposal with:

"It's too European."

On account of me presenting the episode in all my Englishness. Yet that didn't really make sense since they could have easily proposed editing my presentation out of the episode and dubbed anything else over the top. Besides, it wasn't too long after that Al Jazeera started using all manner of British toffs to give credibility to their brand.

Though this was a disappointing rejection, I was happy to continue without their support and I had already turned down offers from the BBC and Channel 4 back home anyway.

The video was presented on my birthday at the CCF cinema in Nouakchott with the gracious acceptance and support of Hervé Lenormand.

It was the first time I had shot, edited and presented material in the country of source, so I was really pleased to hear what local people had to say about the video.

"It's so refreshing to see a joyous celebration of our culture"

One man had remarked, and it was certainly true that most material we had seen about Mauritania was quite depressing, very little in the way of positive images in general. I felt somewhat vindicated for my efforts.