Bororo and Tuareg

The spectacle I witnessed during the days spent in Niger unleashed in me a set of splendid emotions, so much so that it is difficult if not impossible to describe them in a story. For this reason I will write to you only about the main part of the trip, which is in fact the reason I went to Niger, leaving each of you the chance to imagine what I felt. For some time I knew that during the month of September an ethnic group of Niger, the Bororo, organise a ceremony that allows the girls to choose their own man (husband or simply lover): the Gerewol or "beauty festival". In one of the most desolate areas of the planet (the belt on the border between the temperate zone to the south and the Sahara to the north) various Bororo tribes (nomads) gather to celebrate "beauty", dancing for whole days.

The difficulty was, of course, how to find the meeting place, considering that there is no calendar indicating the day and place where the festival is held. The only thing I knew was that the most likely area was the bush near a village called InGall, 200 kilometres south of Agadez. Through an Italian organisation specialising in "particular" trips we arrived in Niamey and there a local contact of the organisation took us to InGall.....