A Call Between Caravans

The Word has been a long time in coming to the Tuareg, a nomadic tribe roaming the central and lower Sahara. The area's tribal dialect, Tamahaq, is written without vowels, and permits any word to be spelled forward, backward or inside out. Thus, in their alphabet, the Tuareg capital city of Tamanrasset can be written:

+ CM0+ or +0M3+, or even "-L- ?-

Just about the only people who can write the language are members of the Tuareg's first families, and they usually develop writer's block once they have learned to set down their own names.

Someone else writes Tamahaq. too. Steadily at work since the autumn of 1935, when she made the eight-day bus journey from Algiers to settle in a Tamanrasset mud house, Yorkshire-born Mabel Frances Wakefield has completed a Tamahaq translation of both the Old and New Testaments. (The 170,000 people of the Tuareg are mostly Moslem.) Why had she taken on such an all but impossible task? "I felt I was called."

Two Kinds of Forceps. A Quaker, Mabel Wakefield had been called before, first to Nigeria (1907) as a young missionary with an M.D. from Edinburgh and advanced training in tropical medicine. Only missionary survivor of a leper colony at Zaria, she was evacuated on a stretcher, later moved on to missions in Egypt ("tame"), Morocco ("fierce") and the Sudan.

Having learned Arabic, Hebrew and Hausa along the way, Mabel Wakefield became so at home in the Middle Eastern landscape that she began traveling as a sort of freelance missionary-physician with Bedouin caravans. "In those days I could do the trick of jumping onto a galloping camel," she recalls. Her companions were "some of the richest, most powerful sheiks of Saudi Arabia, and sometimes the retinue was nearly one thousand strong. I carried only two items of medical equipment: forceps for extracting teeth and forceps for delivery. One sheik asked me to marry him. I explained I could not change my faith."

One day between caravans in Beersheba, Missionary Wakefield first saw the characters of the Tamahaq language, felt her call to the 25-year labor she has just completed. Settling down at Tamanrasset, she consulted Tuareg dialect experts, told them she intended to add vowels to the written language to make it more intelligible. They advised her against it. She went ahead with her plan.

Monumental Mistake. The finished manuscript fills copybooks stacked to the ceiling of the small bedroom in her two-room hut, and it will stay there. A French sociologist who lives in Tamanrasset describes his friend's work as "a monumental but quite useless labor of love"; and a British Bible society has refused to publish it, noting that the script is practically a language of Miss Wakefield's own invention.

HaL'-blind with double cataracts, 80-year-old Mabel Wakefield unbitterly concedes that the attempt to vowel the Tamahaq language was "perhaps a mistake." She adds: "People may think all this work has been an incredible waste of time. All I can say is, I felt the call to do this. In spite of everything, I still do. Who knows? If the summer is not too hard, I may begin a new translation."

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