A Book Like Rain in the Desert

Photo: Hamida Abdullah.

as a swedish writer of youth novels and children’s books I have visited many schools in Sweden and in other countries, but only once have I started crying in a classroom. It was on a sweltering day in a small school in the Sahara desert. The children who made me cry were all refugee children living in the huge Sahrawi refugee camps in the Algerian part of Sahara.

My tears started trickling down my cheeks when I saw the normally disciplined school children standing up, waving their arms, shouting.

On the blackboard the teacher had written. Language: Arabic. Subject: Hadara.

The teacher was reading aloud from my book The Boy who Lived with Ostriches in Arabic. She now and then stopped to ask a question that made the children stand up and frantically wave their arms.

They all wanted to answer the question.

And they all looked so happy.

Had I really written a book that was the cause of such joy? It was now my tears started running.

The story of the book the teacher was reading is the strangest and most wonderful story I have ever come across.

I had heard it told by storytellers when I was travelling through the Sahara desert as a reporter. Having visited the tents of nomad families in the liberated part of Western Sahara and also many families in the huge camps with refugees from Western Sahara in Algeria I had learnt that the proper way of greeting a visitor is with three glasses of tea and a good story. On two occasions I heard a story about a small boy who was lost in a sandstorm and was adopted by ostriches. He grew up as part of the flock and was the favorite son of the ostrich couple. At the age of 12 he was captured and returned to his human family. The storytellers I heard telling the story of the Ostrich Boy finished by saying: “His name was Hadara. This is a true story.”

Of course I did not believe it was a true story, but it was a good one so I published it in the magazine Globen as an example of storytelling amongst the Sahrawi in the desert. In the same magazine I also had several articles about the life of the children in the refugee camps. When the magazine was published I was invited to the Stockholm office of the representatives of Polisario, the organization of the Sahrawi refugees. They thanked me for writing about their sad plight, about them living in refugee camps in the most inhospitable and hot part of the Algerian desert since 1975 when their country was occupied by Morocco. However, they said, they were especially grateful that I had written about Hadara.

“He is dead now”, one of them said.” Was it his son that told you the story?”

“What?” I said flabbergasted. “Is it a true story?”

“Yes”, the two men said with conviction.” Didn’t you see the refugee kids dancing the ostrich dance? When Hadara returned to live with human beings he taught everyone to dance the ostrich dance because ostriches always dance when they are happy.”

Having said that, the two men started dancing Hadara’s ostrich dance, flapping their arms and craning their necks among the tables and computers of their office.

Afterwards I could not forget the two dancing men who had claimed that the Hadara story was a true one. They had tried so hard to convince me that a small West Saharan Bedouin boy had grown up with animals like Tarzan, that he had been the Mowgli of the desert.

A few years later I decided to return to the Algerian desert to try to find out if there was a grain of truth in the story. The problem was that I did not know where to look; the Sahara Desert is rather big after all. I flew to the desert town of Tindouf as I had decided to start looking for the story among the West Saharan...