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210 CHAPTER 5Not only dietary habits changed, clothing habits changed as well. Mostwomen who had migrated to the Maghreb stuck to their customary dress: Apagne and a tasirnest (melhafa in Arabic), a long veil wrapped around the body,knotted on the shoulders, with the end forming a loosely draped headscarf.Their face remained unveiled, a practice that grew more and more contestedduring the 1990s with the rise of fundamentalist Islam, but which remainedlargely customary nevertheless. Women who had migrated to coastal West Africawere quicker to adopt local dress codes, wearing boubous and headscarves inWest African fashion. The male ishumar dress code differed sharply fromtraditional dress. Sandals were exchanged for sneakers or high-heeled boots.Wide trousers gave way to jeans or ‘flared’ trousers. T-shirts and collared shirts,sometimes completed with a gandoura – a thin burnous – covered the upperpart of their body. More telling were the changes in wearing the eghewid ortagelmust, the male turban and veil. 44 In Tamasheq culture, the eghewid is themost direct instrument available to express male personal honour, dignity andpride. In general, the less of the face visible, the more a man is preserving hishonour. To a Tamasheq, his mouth is a private part. The veiling of a man’s faceis most important in the presence of female company, especially female in-lawsand cousins. The eghewid has always been subject to fashion changes, expressingthe wealth and prestige of the owner. Late 19 th and early 20 th centuryimages depict it as one cloth wrapped around a cone shaped hat or fez (tikunbutin Tamasheq), while in the mid twentieth century the eghewid became a wrappingof two or more cloths, one white muslin and one indigo alasho clothwoven in Kano, which could be as long as twenty metres or more. The ishumardeliberately expressed the turmoil they found their society to be in and theirdesire for radical changes in the way they dealt with the eghewid. The multiplelayers were abandoned for a single cloth of cheap south Asian import, generallyreferred to as Bukstan (Pakistan). The length of this cloth was reduced considerablyto about four metres, which expressed their chosen status as youngand irresponsible men without wealth, but also the loss of honour Tamasheqsociety had faced. This shortened eghewid was wrapped around the head in acareless fashion, which expressed the turmoil of society and their rebelliousstate of mind. 45 The mouth was carefully exposed, instead of covered, as a reminderof the loss of honour Tamasheq society had undergone in the last decades:A lost rebellion; and two droughts forcing them into exile and mendicity,on show to the world as TV crews passed the refugee camps. The lowered veilexposed a moustache and shaved chin, an abhorrence to elder men, who shaved4445Generally known as tagelmust in ‘high’ Tamasheq, the turban and veil are calledeghewid in the dialect spoken in the Adagh.Claudot-Hawad, H. 1993d; Rasmussen, S. 1991.