The Conquest of the Sahara: A History

INTRODUCTION

The Sahara did not fall easily to European conquest. But for French as well as British soldiers at the dawn of the twentieth century, such tasks had become just another day at the office. In 1875, only scattered coastal enclaves in Africa fell under European domination. By 1905, when the Ahaggar Tuareg ceased to resist the French, only Morocco and Ethiopia remained free of imperial suzerainty. In 1896, C. E. Callwell, a veteran of the Second Afghan War and of the intelligence service of the War Office, explained the tactical process through which most of the world had fallen under Western dominion. Today, Callwell’s Small Warsa is considered a minor classic, not least because it offers an encyclopedic survey of how imperial forces mastered nineteenth-, and some eighteenth-, century resistance movements. In its day, Small Wars was pitched as a colonial officer’s primer, so useful in fact that it went through three updated and expanded editions. It needed to because by 1904, when the final edition of Small Wars appeared, Callwell was a colonel and a veteran of the Second South African (Boer) war, which had required almost half a million British troops to win. Meanwhile, the imperial ambitions of Russia and Japan had collided in Manchuria and Korea in 1904-05. The result was a huge bloodbath that shook the very foundations of the Czarist empire, while firmly establishing upstart Japan’s claims as an Asian power. In short, wars fought beyond Europe’s periphery may have been imperial, but they were no longer small. Indeed, the clashes in Southern Africa, Manchuria, and, eventually, Morocco, resembled in many respects a warm-up for the main event in 1914-18.

If doubt yet lingered in 1904, the Great War appeared to establish Small Wars as a distinctly period piece, a nostalgic string of Boy’s Own episodes drawn from an uncomplicated, bygone era confident of its values and certain of its future. Although Callwell emerged from that war a major general with a distinguished record as Director of Military Operations, he, and his book, seemed charmingly anachronistic in an era of industrialized warfare. Furthermore, T. E. Lawrence, the hero of the Arab Revolt, had demonstrated at least to his satisfaction that, with proper organization and strategy, indigenous resistance could triumph over a modern—or at least modernized—regular force. Given the dearth of military heroes to emerge from the undistinguished butchery that had characterized fighting on the Western Front, it was Lawrence, not Callwell, who was chosen to write the entry on Guerrilla Warfare in the 1929 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Not surprisingly, Lawrence argued that, under optimum conditions, the pendulum of victory had swung conclusively to the insurgent: Here is the thesis, he wrote. Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them the perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.b

Lawrence’s confidence in the inherent superiority of insurgency can hardly have been algebraical because, by 1929, few resistance movements had triumphed, including Abd el-Krim’s Rif Rebellion, and those that had owed victory to contingent factors. Nor did he seem willing to acknowledge that, in the final analysis, the Turks in the Middle East had been defeated by a conventional British army, not submerged by the Arab Revolt. Indeed, Callwell’s view that native revolts simply offered a collection of operational, tactical, and technical problems to be overcome still had legs. And in the Sahara, those problems, familiar to colonial soldiers of that era, were outsized.

Callwell’s first principle, that terrain offered the primary challenge to any colonial campaign, would have found no dissenters among Saharians. Imperial conquests were fundamentally campaigns against nature. Men required to pursue an elusive foe across thousands of square kilometers of tumultuous, unmapped, scorched topography had to be fed, watered, and supplied. Expeditions large enough to guarantee victory required a huge tail of porters, pack animals, camel handlers, and guards, which created a vulnerability all its own and which compromised mobility. The best option from a logistical perspective was to follow rivers, or even to build railroads to supply expeditionary forces as the British did during the 1868 invasion of Abyssinia, and in the Boer War of 1899-1902. In the Sahara, neither was an option, especially after attempts to construct a Transaharian Railway proved illusory. Biskra was the rail head, beyond which everything had to go by wagon, and then camel—not exactly a flowing pipeline of logistical largesse. Therefore, commanders who looked to throw a force into the cauldron of the desert had two options, both of them with significant disadvantages: go big—that is, organize large expeditions that no native force could overwhelm, but which threatened simply to collapse under their own weight—or go small, like Gaston Cottenest’s force at Tit, which might have lessened logistical constraints and increased mobility, but which threatened to replicate Custer’s fate at Little Big Horn. As this book will show, the choices they made were not always the correct ones.

Of course, conventional wisdom holds that, by the second half of the nineteenth century, if not before, technology gave the invaders advantages beyond numbers that no indigenous resistance could match. And to a certain extent, that is true. However, the impact of technology on imperial conquest, and on warfare generally, has been misunderstood. Change came incrementally. Breech-loading rifles introduced in the 1860s, followed by machine guns in the 1880s, caused Hilaire Belloc to chortle, Whatever happens we have got / the Maxim gun and they have not. But the reality on the ground was less obvious. Imperial forces were often the last beneficiaries of a weapons upgrade, which might put them on a par with indigenous resistors who found no shortage of merchants of death willing to sell them the latest surplus from Europe—more than 16 million firearms were imported into Africa in the course of the nineteenth century. Of course, the British suffered the most egregious surprise in the early days of the Boer War, when they were virtually shot off the field by modern Mauser rifles, fired with devastating accuracy. But Boers aside, the indigenous forces were usually poor shots because they lacked firing technique—the Dahomians, for instance, sat on three-legged stools with the butts under their arms, or stood with the rifle butts on their thighs, and so shot high—or because their objective was simply to create a racket that would demoralize and confuse the enemy rather than to cause significant casualties.

Machine guns gave Europeans an advantage in defensive positions. But early versions like the mitrailleuse and the Gatling combined excessive weight with unreliability, to the point that the unfortunate Custer chose to leave his Gatling behind when he set out for Little Big Horn. The Maxim, which did not make its appearance until the 1890s and then only in relatively small numbers, had a disappointing impact on dispersed or invisible opponents. Machine guns also performed badly in sandy conditions—a distinct disadvantage for desert warriors. It was finally the Russo-Japanese War that revealed the advantages of machine guns. But that comes only at the end of our story.

Light mountain guns had been a staple of French campaigns in Algeria since the 1840s. But these guns, disassembled and carried on mule or camel back, were cumbersome—just one more thing, together with their ammunition, to drag around the countryside. Nor, truth be told, did they pack much of a punch. Larger guns like the Creusot 75 or Krupp 77 were useful as fortress busters in places like southern Morocco. But they traveled badly to remote battlefields. Naval artillery, like that which supported Kitchener’s 1898 victory at Omdurman, was the best option. Unfortunately for the French, the Nile does not flow through southern Algeria. Firepower worked best for the Europeans when the enemy obligingly stood and fought, thereby offering a target for concentrated firepower. Cottenest’s victory over the Tuareg at Tit falls into this category. But even these set-piece engagements might go badly wrong when the European contingent—which, like Cottenest’s command, invariably contained a majority of half-trained native levies or contracted auxilliaries—lacked discipline or was poorly led. Firepower superiority meant that dividing one’s forces was not usually a problem in imperial warfare. But, on occasion, commanders paid the ultimate price for splitting their command, as did Custer in 1876, Chelmsford at Isandlwana in 1879, and Baratieri at Adowa in 1896.

What is often ignored is that, for imperial expeditions, technology proved more important to the logistical tail of expeditions than to their steel tip. Imperial commanders like Wellesley and Bugeaud had recognized that sound organization and good intelligence were more important to the success of a campaign than was firepower. But from the 1860s and 1870s, increased firepower allowed Europeans to reduce the size of their expeditions while retaining their punch. From this time, it became possible for the Europeans to combine detailed planning with innovations that included tinned food, potable water, quinine, portable field hospitals, way stations, sufficient pack animals, and porters, which kept troops healthy and insured a maximum number of rifles on line. Wolseley’s Ashanti campaign of 1873-74 and Dodd’s 1892 Dahomey expedition proved to be models of organization in which battle was practically incidental to the success of the campaign.

Still, both Ashanti and Dahomey were empires with rulers, capitals, and standing armies that fought in predictable ways that offered identifiable targets. Guerrillas fell into a different category, an elusive enemy that regular armies, even those with significant experience in colonial warfare, found difficult to nail down. Indigenous mobility and stealth nullified European advantages in firepower, forcing commanders to reorder their contingents into light, mobile, flying columns. With good intelligence, in the French case supplied by the bureaux arabes—created in the 1840s and guided by native auxiliaries familiar with the terrain—these mobile columns could move fast and strike quickly.

That was, at least, the theory. French colonial soldiers seconded Callwell’s opinion that mounted troops offered mobility and reconnaissance to the invader. They probably also shared the British colonel’s view that savages, Asiatics and adversaries of that character have a great dread of the mounted man. Hernando Cortés certainly did, and little had intervened between the fall of Montezuma and that of Morocco in 1912 to alter European opinion. Experienced colonial commanders like Hubert Lyautey understood that, in Africa, mobility was the best defense. However, the Sahara was not cavalry country. So, in a pre-motorized era, the French had first to master the temperamental dromedary if they aspired to conquer the desert.

In practice, Europeans adapted only partially to demanding imperial environments. European forces lacked stamina and could never match local mobility, in great part because their logistical requirements remained comparatively significant, and they were expensive, which raised the costs of expeditions and risked provoking opposition at home. These problems could obviously be curtailed, if not eradicated altogether, by substituting locally recruited forces. As this book demonstrates, this solution ran the gamut from incorporating groups of irregulars under their own headman, to loose formations of what today we would call contractors who enlisted on short contracts and who supplied their own mounts and weapons, to formal units of trained indigenous soldiers like the tirailleurs or sepoys. These troops did invaluable service. Apache and Filipino scouts played a vital role in the success, respectively, of American generals Crook in Arizona in the 1870s and Funston in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Loosely organized Chaamba Arabs won the Battle of Tit for the French, and so broke Tuareg resistance. The list of mercenary victories is endless, even if European gratitude was circumscribed. It is no exaggeration to say that without locally recruited forces, there could have been no empires.

But from a tactical and operational perspective, there were tradeoffs to be made—often significant ones. For what the Europeans gained in stamina, mobility, and economies, they paid for in discipline, efficiency, and even loyalty. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, of course, remains the mother of all acts of indigenous ingratitude. However, Germans in South-West Africa, too, lamented that they had recruited the Bavarians among the Hereros while the resistance monopolized the Prussians. The British defense at Isandlwana was compromised by the flight of a poorly trained native contingent who traveled under the morale-boosting name of the Natal Kaffirs. Sanusi troops in Tripolitania demonstrated their appreciation in 1915 by turning on their Italian benefactors. Laperrine never really trusted his Chaamba Saharians, although he depended on them. What sort of man, after all, would volunteer to serve the invader unless he was on the wrong side of the social hierarchy, or of the law? It wasn’t just whites who had a foreign legion. Indigenous forces lacked officers and NCOs knowledgeable in the languages and culture of their troops. The priorities of locally recruited forces—pillage and enhancing one’s personal reputation—were often at odds with the European mission civilizatrice. The Volet-Chanoine expedition of 1898 was simply the most devastating example of indigenous levies running amok. But the conqueror’s reflex was to turn a blind eye.

Imperial warfare was not just about European forces adapting to unforgiving environments. Indigenous forces, too, were challenged to respond to a new sort of enemy—technologically advanced, tactically and operationally experienced, and, above all, relentless. They were generally unsuccessful. Technology played a part in this for sure, for at least three reasons. While Africans could acquire the weapons with little difficulty, they lacked the munitions, spare parts, and logistical systems that could supply the battlefield. Second, the proliferation of weapons empowered local chiefs, who might challenge central authority, fragment resistance into competing and rival clans, and disaggregate strategies of response. Finally—and most important—the resistance would usually incorporate weapons into familiar tactical systems, rather than fit the system to the technology, a reflex that is hardly the monopoly of primitives. Ashantis, Dahomians, and Zulus went into battle in an arch, or cow horns formation, with one’s position in the line determined by social standing. This was designed to surprise and envelop villages at dawn, and proved an effective technique if one’s goals were slave raiding and empire expansion, and it even worked against the British at Isandlwana. But to change tactics would have meant a reordering of the social system, so the Tuareg remained wedded to their traditional tactics even after they acquired rifles—advance on camel back, hurl the lance, then slip to the ground and advance slowly, methodically on foot. This was meant to intimidate the opponent, and put him to flight. At Tit, even though they held rifles, they hacked at the French with their swords, probably to conserve munitions. But these were tactics designed to fight African, not European, opponents. So long as the defending force kept its discipline, to mass and attack was as suicidal for Africans as it proved to be for Europeans on the Western Front. The difference was that the Africans lacked the compulsory system, and perhaps also the ability to suspend belief, to allow them to sustain a long war of attrition with defective tactical systems. Rations and munitions ran out, important chiefs were taken out, discipline crumbled, and tribes and clans, burdened with widows and orphans, sought to cut deals with the invader. The resistance splintered, even though a few bitter-enders might fight on for a time.

So, the incapacity of indigenous societies to stand toe-to-toe with Western invaders on the battlefield was ultimately a cultural and political problem. The primitiveness of indigenous African societies, while it made them tenacious military opponents, ultimately doomed their resistance. These were not nation-states fighting for survival. Rather, these were aggregations of peoples unified by weak bonds of clan, culture, and language. They were accustomed to negotiation, compromise, and accommodation. That was how they evolved and survived. Astute European commanders with a refined sense of politics were able to shatter opposition by offering deals, promising a light hand of government, buying off leaders, and incorporating groups and factions into their own forces with the promise of pillage and the prestige of victory. Nor were these societies accustomed to war to the knife. Violence was a seasonal pursuit, a sport like basketball or baseball, an activity practiced in bursts and calculated to gain the applause of the gallery. These were exercises carefully negotiated in advance and controlled by convention. One had to live to fight again another day. Otherwise, why bother?

Indigenous empires appeared impressive on the surface, and even counted significant achievements. But Cortés set the gold standard of imperial takedown between 1519 and 1521 when he recognized that the most impressive indigenous constructions were little more than fragile coalitions susceptible to fragmentation by clever conquistadors. What followed were simply variations on the theme of cooptation rather than conquest. Some resistance leaders shine by their brilliance—Abd al-Kadir in Algeria, Shamil in what is today Chechnya, and Samori in the Western Sudan. All were good warriors, brilliant politicians, good tacticians and organizers, and effective strategists. But ultimately they succumbed to the imperial juggernaut. But none of them were bitter enders, men willing to die for the cause, because there was no cause. They recognized that they must ultimately accept some sort of protectorate. The problem lay more with the invaders’ unwillingness to negotiate than with the determination to resist à outrance.

So Callwell is correct to a point. Resistance movements could be mastered with clever tactics and well-organized operations. However, ultimately, power was not imposed by force of arms. Laperrine would have recognized that. The best tactics worked because they merely supplemented good politics. This was because win/lose, conqueror/ conquered offers misleading and inadequate paradigms. Imperialism was part of a process of interaction, exchange, and compromise, what today we would call globalization. The invaders catalyzed events, accentuated trends, and in the process laid the foundation for a more permanent, transformative enterprise. But essentially government—even imperial government—depended to a degree on the consent of the governed. It was a perpetual negotiation, a give-and-take arrangement.

It is equally true that Lawrence was incorrect to argue that the victory of resistance movements was algebraical. Nevertheless, he highlights the fact that the innovational advantage of Europeans has been exaggerated. Resistance movements did win, and not infrequently. One need think merely of the American and Latin American Revolutions, and the success of Toussaint l’Ouverture’s resistance in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Mexico bid the French bon voyage in 1867 after an often-bitter five-year struggle, and Cubans expelled the Spanish in 1898, albeit with an assist from the United States. The Italians were delayed by resistance from Abyssinians and Tripolitanians. But success owed much to contingent factors—outside intervention, inept policies, bad strategies, the presence of absence of naval power—as much as to dogged resistance.

In retrospect, the French domination of the Sahara from 1905, though virtually unnoticed, closed out an era. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial warfare would become more, not less, destructive, as rivalries between the great powers increased the stakes in the game of conquest and as ideology kicked in as an increasingly potent factor in the cohesion of a resistance movement. So, while Lawrence exaggerates the algebraical certainty of insurgent victory, it is equally true that insurgencies are not, and probably never were, merely a set of tactical and operational problems to overcome.

I

THE MIRAGE

In the center of an earth which cartographers like to depict in blues and greens lies a substantial area of khaki that stares like an eye out of the globe. Even here in this semifanciful, semiidealized world, this patch appears desolate and uninviting. The lighter brown of plain and dune swirls and twists among the darker ribs of ridge, plateau and mountain. Across this chaos of light and shade is written in large black lettering: Sahara Desert.

The geographical position of the Sahara has given it an enormously important role to play in history. The Sahara separates two continents—Europe and Asia—from the more populous and richer areas of Africa. Its vastness is almost inconceivable: 3,500 miles divide Cap Blanc on the Atlantic from Port Sudan on the Red Sea. These, of course, are 3,500 miles as the crow flies. But crows do not often fly across the Sahara. If you want to cross the desert from west to east on foot, or on a camel, or even in a Land Rover, the distance is considerably increased. The English writer Geoffrey Moorhouse attempted such a trip in the last decade, but gave up after several months at Tamanrasset in the Ahaggar massif of Algeria. While this is hardly an inconsiderable achievement, he had covered barely one-third of the distance he had originally set himself¹. Had he set out from London to accomplish successfully the same journey at a more northerly latitude, his camel would have taken him across the Urals and into Outer Mongolia.

It is easier to cross the desert from north to south. For one thing, the distances are far shorter. From the oasis of Biskra on the southern slopes of the Saharian Atlas where, as the tourist brochures proclaim, the desert begins, to the fabled and decrepit town of Timbuktu, within spitting distance of the broad, sluggish Niger River, where in theory the desert should end (it obstinately refuses to do so), is around 1,350 miles. If you set out in a westerly direction from Manhattan Island, you might arrive in a small town on the south fork of the River Platte in western Nebraska with the Arab-sounding name of Ogallala before you had exhausted the distance. But again, these are crow-flying measurements. The true mileage might put you closer to Montana’s Little Bighorn—in more ways than one.

The map resolutely proclaims that two roads cross the Sahara from north to south through the pie-shaped wedge of Algeria. This is partially true. The more popular eastern route is a surfaced road which will take you as far as the unattractive red mud town of Tamanrasset. From there, however, you are on your own, free to follow the confusion of faint tracks which head off in all directions, race across bone-hard plateaus, sink up to your axles in sand or simply to lose your way in a blinding sandstorm. With luck, and a good vehicle, you might arrive in Timbuktu.

During this long, hot, dusty journey, travelers with a sense of history have the leisure to reflect, indeed, to wonder, why in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the French coveted this wilderness. The variety of the Saharian landscapes is obscured by the vast distances; hour passes upon monotonous hour: The plains of sand give way to the dunes, and the dunes to the plains, wrote Frédéric Bernard, who accompanied the first Flatters expedition in 1880. Nothing but sand … .² Even the normally ebullient English tourist W. J. Harding-King, who journeyed southward from Biskra at the turn of the century, complained that There was always the same sandy soil, the same small bushes, the same level horizon, the same desert larks, the same hawks and ravens, the same little lizards scuttling about the sand. It was very monotonous.

Nineteenth-century travelers assumed that the Sahara had once been covered by ocean. Although this theory has since been rejected by geologists, it is a charming and, on the face of it, an altogether plausible notion. Today, if one flies over the Sahara, it looks like a land deserted by the sea. The plains, wadis (water courses) and dunes might well have been sloshed and rippled by tides and currents of a past geological age. If one walks or rides across the Sahara, the conclusion is irresistible that mammals could not find this a hospitable land. The few lizards and snakes that pad and twist over the sand are like refugees from an undersea world; the empty silence is more reminiscent of a place where water, not air, is the principal medium.

Yet, amazingly, men have adapted to this blasted land. The limestone plateaus that stretch southward from the Saharian Atlas, the last sentinels of the Maghreb, contain numerous depressions which are well watered and densely populated. In these oases, sometimes running for hundreds of miles, a mixture of Arabs, Berbers and blacks coax a few melons and tomatoes from the thin soil, raise scrawny chickens and goats, boil up locusts when a plague descends upon them, and rely mainly on the date palms for both shade and sustenance. Without the date, men could not live in the desert.

Beyond these pockets of cultivation, men manage to survive, but only just. In the north-central Sahara, Chaamba Arabs drift with their flocks of camels and sheep, seeking out pasture in the broad, shallow valleys where, from time to time, a freak shower of rain or rare collection of moisture causes low vegetation to appear, more gray than green.

The true desert men, however, are the Tuareg (singular, Targui). While the Chaamba seldom stray too far from the oases which, though poor, are essential to life in the desert, the Tuareg occupy the heart of the Sahara. As geographers are at great pains to point out, the image of the desert as an endless succession of dunes—an immense beach in search of its ocean—is quite inaccurate. The topography of the Sahara is extremely varied. Dunes there are aplenty—seemingly illimitable wrinkles of sand hills called ergs. But there are also plains, flat, waterless and dreaded tanezrouft upon which the sun’s rays beat as upon an anvil. Low, flat-topped hills called gour (singular gara) sometimes dot the horizon like aircraft carriers whose flights have deserted them. Wadis, or watercourses, usually dry, carved out by long-forgotten storms, slice through the hammada, or high plateau. There are hills of respectable size, all brown, boulder-strewn and denuded of vegetation. Occasionally a ridge breaks the monotony of the plateaus—those which tower over the oasis of Djanet in the Tassili n’Ajjer rise to 2,500 feet. But by far the most impressive feature of the Sahara is the great massifs—the Adrar des Iforas, the Air, the Tassili and, above all, the Ahaggar whose tallest peak, Tahat, rises to 9,573 feet. These stand out like islands in a parched sea, relatively well watered and virtually inaccessible. These are the redoubts in which the Tuareg make their homes.

The Tuareg are a Berber people who occupy the central Sahara from the Tuat oases in the north to the Hausa country of northern Nigeria; from Lake Chad and the Libyan desert in the east to what is now modern Mauritania in the west. For centuries, this tall warrior people made the desert their inviolate sanctuary, accessible only to the caravans which were willing to pay the price of passage. Even the Arabs, who conquered so much of Asia, Africa and even Europe, were unable to impose their language or, in any serious form, their religion on these fiercely independent nomads. This was why they called them the Tuareg—the abandoned of God.

Despite its bleakness, the Sahara is a land of great beauty, as any traveler to the desert will readily admit: It was the awful scale of the thing, the suggestion of virginity, the fusion of pure elements from the heavens above and the earth beneath which were untrammelled and untouched by anything contrived by man.³ This, for Geoffrey Moorhouse, was the attraction of the Sahara. Others found beauty in the startling contrasts of the desert’s varied landscapes: the chaos of peaks and needles of the Ahaggar massif which the sun transforms from funereal black into mountains that seem to burn with an interior fire. The 700-mile-long Tassili ridge whose crags appeared to men camped beneath to be medieval fortresses; the oases with their date palms of deep green nestled among powder gold dunes.

But the scenic attractions of the Sahara, great as they are, hardly justified its inclusion, at great expense, in the French colonial empire. Why did the French want to occupy it? The short answer is that they did not; or, more accurately, the government had no designs on the desert, no plans to garrison and colonize it. If you had asked a French politician in, say, 1880, or even in 1900, if he wished for his country to conquer the desert, he would most probably have given you an emphatic no! If he was a sensible chap and had not been drawn into the Colonial Party in the French Chamber of Deputies—a hundred strong at the turn of the century, organized and directed by Eugène Etienne, the deputy for Oran in Algeria—he would have told you that colonies do not pay.

The budget for Algeria, France’s most populous colony (in terms of European population), was in deficit by 93 million francs in 1910. Paris poured 3 million francs each year into the Saharian territories of Algeria, which returned to it 300,000 francs in taxes annually. Attempts by zealous government officials to increase the tax burden on the native population provoked howls of protest from officers of the Armée d’Afrique who garrisoned Algeria and administered the tribal areas of the Sahara. They realized—as the boffins of the Ministère des Finances, oblivious to everything but the bottom lines of their ledgers, did not—that Arabs, especially desert Arabs, equated taxation with slavery: Taxes degrade peoples. The surest way to push an Arab beyond the bounds of tolerance was to transfer a portion of his meager wealth to Paris. When, in the 1890s, the French attempted to tax the Chaamba of Ouargla, the Arabs simply moved 500 miles further south to In Salah⁴; beyond the reach of French officialdom, and of the French army, they took up their old profession as raiders, making life intolerable for the French-held oases further north. Perhaps tomorrow man will be able to influence the climate and the rain, he will utilize solar heat industrially, by ways impossible to foresee he will modify the present situation of the desert, the Saharian specialist E. F. Gautier forecast in 1910. But today, to those who have seen the Sahara, and even those who have loved it, it is impossible to pretend that it has a value in itself.

Gautier was not alone in his opinion. Even many of the men on the spot thought the idea of conquering the Sahara an absurd one: When one has never visited and lived in these regions, one cannot imagine their desolation, wrote Major Jean Deleuze, dispatched in 1901 to report on the feasibility, and the wisdom, of establishing a permanent garrison in the newly conquered oasis complex of the Tuat. The words: infertility —desert—void—do not do justice to the place. I am in agreement with Monsieur Foureau to employ the expression ‘waste,’ the ‘Saharian waste.’ The expression is not too strong. The desert populations were small, miserable, wandering across the immense deserted regions and jealous of their independence. Some saw the conquest of the Sahara as vital to link the French empire in Chad and the Western Sudan with Algeria: But what is the utility of that? Deleuze asked. Lake Chad was just a bog surrounded by more desert. Anyone who thought that the Sahara could ever be made to pay its way was following a mirage d’illusions and simply digging yet another hole into which we shall pour millions.

Deleuze was no fool. He knew exactly where to place the blame for all of this mad talk about the conquest of the desert. A few hotheads like Captain Théodore Pein could, by taking unscheduled local initiatives, put the army in embarrassing situations, provoke fights and oblige Algiers to dispatch punitive expeditions. But the real culprits were the armchair colonialists in Paris who supported them, covered for them, excused their indiscipline. Colonial expansion has become a sport, and a very fashionable sport, which is practiced mainly in Paris by politicians, soldiers and intellectuals, Deleuze wrote with remarkable acerbity. "Their action coloniale is limited to writing articles in newspapers or haranguing explorers who depart or return, posing as partisans of ‘la plus grande France.’" If they ever troubled to study more closely the places which they urged Frenchmen to explore and acquire, if they ever bothered to venture south of the Place de la Concorde, they might realize that la plus grande France was a charade, a papier-mâché world, large, exotic, but worthless, a poor joke played on the French people. ⁵

Deleuze certainly had his point of view, and it was one shared by the majority of Frenchmen. As an economic proposition, the colonies were almost everywhere a write-off. Few Frenchmen wanted to emigrate there. Few capitalists wanted to invest in them. (In the decade before the Great War, Russian railway bonds offered a far more tempting—and ultimately an equally disastrous—investment.) When the Compagnie de l’Oued Rirh tried to exploit commercially the date palms of the southern Algerian oases, they reckoned to make a profit of only 3 francs 50 per palm tree. Many French patriots saw the colonies as a gaping maw which devoured men and matériel desperately needed to bolster the vulnerable eastern and northern frontiers with Germany.

Why did France, then, conquer the Sahara? The question is probably best answered in terms of what a diplomat or strategist would call a power vacuum. Power vacuums always tempted neighboring states to intervene. Most of the wars in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were fought over those places where states were weak or fragmented —Poland, the German states, Italy, the Balkans. Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans would probably start the next war, Bismarck had predicted before his retirement. But the Balkans apart, Europe had largely resolved the problems of power vacuums by 1875. In a real sense, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 can be seen as one of the last European wars fought over a power vacuum. When Bismarck provoked a confrontation with Emperor Napoleon III of France ostensibly over the succession to the Spanish throne, in reality both men had their ambitions firmly set on the four kingdoms, five grand duchies, six duchies, seven principalities, three free cities, and the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which made up Germany. With Europe distracted by the war in the north, Italian Prime Minister Cavour seized the opportunity to tidy up his borders by eliminating the Papal States which cut the peninsula in half.

With the question of power vacuums largely settled on the Continent, European states began to look outward, to search out new fields of conquest. Their motives were varied. But it is certain that economic ones were less important than, until a few years ago, historians once thought. While politicians paid lip service to trade and industry, things like prestige, national honor or whatever tag one likes to apply to the wave of national fervor which swept European countries before 1914, were the raw material of ringing editorials. rousing speeches and electoral victories. Unless one understands this, then the steeplechase to the unknown—as French Prime Minister Jules Ferry labeled the mad rush for African lands which began in the 1880s—becomes inexplicable. Colonialism was not, as Lenin claimed, the highest stage of capitalism. Rather, it was the highest stage of nationalism. ⁶

National tensions resulted in the expansion of the armed forces of Europe, and these, in turn, contributed their own impetus to the cause of imperial expansion: all those men, guns and ships lying idle in an age when nationalism flowed toward its spring tide. It was like a number of football sides searching for a field upon which they might compete, and no country fielded keener competitors than did France. In this way, European nationalism gave birth to imperialism, and imperialism acquired its own rationale beyond those of economics. But within these great historical currents which swept Europe in the fifty or so years before the Great War, there was plenty of room for individual initiative. Of no place was this more true than of the Sahara.

II

THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI

A glance at a map of the Mediterranean will confirm that it forms, in fact, two seas divided by the boot of Italy and the triangular wedge of Sicily. The finger of land called Cap Bon on the northeastern tip of Tunisia lies barely fifty miles across the Sicilian Channel from the town of Marsala. It is even said that until well into the nineteenth century, lookouts were regularly stationed on the heights behind Marsala to give warning of pirate boats sailing out of the Gulf of Tunis.

This division of the Mediterranean is important because the African shores of the western and eastern seas are so different. To the west, the mountains of the Maghreb rise up like a wall from the azure waters. These are the Atlas Mountains, which form a series of high ridges running west to east from Tangier to Tunis. Close to the Mediterranean shore, these mountains are covered with trees of pine and carob. In the broad valleys and plains which separate them, European settlers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries managed with success to cultivate wheat and grapes. As one moves south from the coast, through the city of Constantine which sits on a pinnacle of rock, past the clear lakes of Tinsilt and Mzouri, the mountains become sharper, more barren, like jagged pieces of glass made pink by the rising sun. Across the plain of Ain Touta, the clouds clinging to the mountains, one begins to feel the first hints of the savage immensity of the Sahara. A thread of palm trees follows a wadi of limpid water through the folds of the Kantara Gorge, called the mouth of the desert by the Arabs. As one descends to the oasis of Biskra, the hazy line of the Aurès Mountains, bathed in mellow sunlight, stretches away to the northeast. To the south, across the salt-flecked Chott Melrhir, the Sahara runs—flat, speckled like the hide of a panther—until it disappears in a blue line on the horizon.

The southern shore of the eastern Mediterranean is very different. Here there are no mountains to keep the desert at bay, or to provide a thick strip of habitable coastline. In the east, the Sahara creeps, sandy and hot, to the sea. Despite the uninviting appearance of this coast, it was here in what is today Libya that European explorers usually caught their first glimpse of Africa. The reason for this is quite simple—Tripoli served as the major entrepôt of trade between the African interior and Europe until well into the nineteenth century. Caravans regularly brought cargos of gold, ivory, ostrich feathers, leather goods, pepper, kola nuts, live parrots and, especially, slaves from the bowels of Africa to be sold in Tripoli. They then returned south carrying cloth, rugs, copper kettles, iron and steel tools, needles, swords, rifles and shot, Venetian glassware and, according to Captain George Lyon of the Royal Navy, who traveled south from Tripoli in 1819, handsome girls from Abyssinia educated in Mecca or Egypt. ⁷

Most explorers chose Tripoli as a starting point because a well-established trade route into the interior already existed. By joining a caravan bound for Lake Chad or Timbuktu, one would—barring accident—be whisked into the African heartland. Alternative routes from the west coast of Africa were also tried. But the absence of established avenues of trade and the prevalence of tropical diseases which turned the swampy coasts of West Africa into a white man’s grave meant that connoisseurs of African travel preferred Tripoli as a point of entry.

But this tells us little about why explorers wanted to go to Africa in the first place. And why to the Sahara? There is no ready answer to this question. The lure of wealth was minimal. True, there were stories about the fabled riches of Timbuktu. But any hardheaded businessman examining the wares that caravans brought to the coast must have been skeptical even before the French explorer René Caillié visited the place in 1829 and declared it a dump. Far easier fortunes waited to be made in Asia and the