The Sahara Read online

  To travel as a Christian will, perhaps, be impracticable for at least five years to come, for it is incredible how deep and strong an impression the expedition of the French has made on the minds of the pilgrims to and from Mecca: dispersed to their several homes they will carry an aggravated prejudice against Christians far and wide, and to the very heart of Africa.

  Al-Jabarti’s own reaction to the invasion was to retreat into a more conservative mode of behaviour, returning to what he saw as traditional practices. An educated man, al-Jabarti’s views were not those of the people, and while he admitted to being intrigued by many aspects of European culture, which he was encountering for the first time, he also believed that resisting the invaders was the right thing to do. Al-Jabarti was convinced that in fomenting jihad, Egypt might witness a return to the earliest days of Islam, when Islamic victories were numerous and defeats unknown.

  Although militarily the invasion and partial occupation of Egypt was little short of disastrous for the French, who were expelled by British and Ottoman forces just three years after their arrival, Napoleon’s scheme was far grander than a simple military one. Travelling with him from France was a team of 167 scholars, Enlightenment savants who represented many branches of art and science including archaeology and botany. Their studies were recorded by a team of artists and engravers on a scale never before assembled for a military campaign, and the breadth of their research was impressive and its impact on Europe, when published, huge. Napoleon - himself something of an intellectual - always spoke highly of the world of academe, declaring that “The real conquests, those that leave behind no regrets, are those made over ignorance.”

  Egyptomania

  Although al-Jabarti’s Arabic account was the first into print after the invasion, it did not gain a wide audience until it appeared in translation. For European readers the first bestselling account of the invasion was Dominique Vivant, Baron de Denon’s, Voyage dans la basse et haute Egypte, published in 1802 and which appeared in English the next year. Of even greater impact, however, was the monumental and perennially impressive multi-authored Description de l’Egypte, the first volume of which came out in 1809, with the complete 23-volume collection, including twelve volumes of plates and one of maps, finally being published in 1829. Between them these two works more than any other revealed the wonders of Egypt to audiences in Europe and America, launching Egyptology as an academic field and precipitating the more populist embrace of all things Egyptian in an explosion of what became known as Egyptomania.

  Nascent Egyptomania was clear from Napoleon’s decision to travel with his band of savants. For Napoleon, the creation of an Institute of Egypt and the cataloguing of the country were almost as important as military conquest, at which he ultimately failed. When the Description came to be produced, Count Simeon wrote in the Preface, ‘‘A great number of designers, painters, able printers, artisans, and almost 400 engravers have been occupied, with admirable steadfastness, in the execution of this monument that unites the souvenirs of ancient Egypt with the glory of modern France.”

  While it is appropriate to acknowledge the Egyptian influence in the heights of artistic creation, the opera Aida for example, it is also important to note that Egyptian style also enjoyed a far wider reach. When the Crystal Palace exhibition halls were built in 1854, the Egyptian Court created by the designer Owen Jones was one of the most popular re-creations of foreign settings. In the thirty years after it opened, the Egyptian Court received approximately two million visitors annually. Egyptian themes also became common in advertising, selling everything from cigarettes to bed linen. Egyptian motifs were prevalent in fiction too, and for the burgeoning middle class there were any number of Egyptian-inspired designs in such household items as dinner services.

  One of the oddest phenomena of the day was the vogue for mummy parties, in which the host bought a mummy that the guests would then unwrap. The idea of re-animating a mummy with electricity also inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write a satire on the subject. Published in American Review in 1845, “Some Words with a Mummy” relates a conversation between a group of educated American men, keen to prove the superiority of their culture, and an Egyptian mummy that the men shock back to life with electricity. In the course of the conversation it becomes clear that modern civilization does not surpass ancient knowledge, except in the production of cough drops, which the mummy is forced to concede he did not have in his day.

  The rediscovery of Egyptian culture received a characteristically unique interpretation upon reaching America. A new nation, the United States was still developing an original national identity of its own, and if one of the world’s first nation states could help in this task, it was to be welcomed. The American doctor, occultist and writer Paschal Beverly Randolph encapsulated this view of Egypt when he wrote in 1863, “For America, read Africa; for the United States, Egypt.”

  The importance of the Egyptian Revival in architecture can most obviously be seen in the decision that the national monument to George Washington would be an obelisk. The design was selected in a competition in 1836. The winning entry, by Robert Mills, sometimes referred to as America’s first trained architect, for an Egyptian-style monument was what the judges thought most fitting to honour the first president and Father of the Country. Mills’ original design also called for an Egyptian winged-sun motif above the monument’s main entrance, but this was later dropped in favour of the less ornate and less costly design we see today. Upon completion in 1884, more than thirty years after building work started, the 555-foot Washington Monument was the tallest structure in the world; it remains the world’s tallest obelisk.

  Modern creations or purloined originals, obelisks remain the most obvious ancient Egyptian monumental structures, partly because of the prominent position they enjoy in cities where they were erected. The earliest obelisk to be removed from Egypt for re-erection in Europe is in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, and did not come to the city in the nineteenth century, but in 37 CE on the instructions of the Emperor Caligula. While a cross now crowns the Vatican obelisk, the monument was once topped by a metal ball, which was said to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar. The Cleopatra’s Needles on the bank of the Thames in London and in New York’s Central Park are a pair originally from Heliopolis, via Alexandria, and were unveiled to great public acclaim in 1878 and 1881 respectively. The Luxor Obelisk in Paris was erected in 1836 by King Louis-Philippe in Place de la Concorde, on the spot where a guillotine operated during the French Revolution. This obelisk’s former home for 3300 years was the entrance to the temple in Luxor.

  Obelisk plundered by Caligula, in Vatican City

  More contemporary creations that demonstrate an abiding love of Egyptian styles would include the glass pyramids erected in the main courtyard of the Louvre museum, designed by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, in 1989. Considering Napoleon’s role in Egypt, and the fact that there are more than 50,000 items in the museum’s Egyptian collection, the striking glass pyramids can hardly be said to be wholly out of place. The large main pyramid and its three smaller satellites were controversial at the time of their construction, not a difficulty encountered by the larger, more affected Luxor hotel and casino in Las Vegas which failed to ruffle any feathers when it opened in 1993. One supposes that whereas the feeling in Paris was that such a modern design was not in keeping with the French and Italian classical and Renaissance architectural styles making up the Louvre, the same was not true of the post-modern brashness of the Luxor Las Vegas, which does seem to fit rather comfortably in its environment.

  Far less ostentatious in size or construction material, the so-called Rosetta stone uncovered by workmen digging in the Nile Delta in July 1799 remains the most important ancient relic exported from Egypt. Shipped back to London in 1802 aboard the captured French frigate L’Egptienne, renamed HMS Egyptienne, the stone shows the same text in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphic, Egyptian Demotic
and classical Greek. Translation of the Greek was straightforward but the Egyptian languages proved more taxing, with two scholars, Thomas Young and Jean-Franois Champollion, working for years on the puzzle and finally completing the translation in 1824. Breaking the code of the ancient Egyptian texts allowed a flood of translations to be made of as many other Egyptian texts as scholars could manage, a task that remains incomplete today.

  Between them the African Association and Napoleon’s army of scholars had made an impressive start to achieving their shared missions of exploration and discovery, and although neither completed their self-imposed task, far more important was the impact on those who followed them. For the rest of the nineteenth century the Sahara became the plaything of Britain and France - European rivals who watched each other so carefully that they almost totally overlooked the local populations who, it would become clear, had their own ideas about these foreign interlopers.

  Further Horizons - Exploration and the European Land Grab

  ‘‘And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers.”

  Frederick Engels, after the 1847 capture of the Algerian resistance leader, Abd el-Qadir

  If eighteenth-century exploration marked Europe’s first forays in the Sahara since ancient times, the following century was concerned with extending those footholds to the furthest horizons. Spurred on by the reports and achievements of the African Association’s explorers, subsequent generations produced similar justifications for their Saharan expeditions: the discovery and opening of new markets; the pursuit of scientific knowledge and a need to overcome geographical ignorance; the missionary imperative; and a growing sense of imperial entitlement to other people’s lands. None of these was mutually exclusive: geographical discovery, trade and missionary activities frequently complemented one another. Of the litany of validations offered only imperial entitlement was inherently detrimental to local interests.

  Some who believed the European cultural model was inherently superior to all others used the theory of evolution, as propounded by Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace and others, to prove this. While the theory was itself both a revolutionary and blameless work of science, it did produce in some readers a powerful sense of their natural superiority over foreign places, typically those populated by people of a different colour who did not have modern weapons. The pursuit of pure science or honest trade was commendable, but such potentially laudable goals had always been subject to the demands of more covetous appetites.

  The passing of the Slave Trade Act by parliament banned, but did not stop, the slave trade in the British Empire. The act only made the trade in slaves illegal, not the institution of slavery per se: slavery itself did not become illegal until the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. In the case of the United States, similar legislation was not passed until 1865. While the Royal Navy patrolled the seas, looking for any of the many ships breaking the law, they were naturally unable to do anything about the overland transportation of slaves. According to one source, each year between 1800 and 1860 approximately 10,000 slaves crossed the Sahara. Upon reaching the north coast, they would be sold at the slave markets that were a feature of most port cities, the largest of which was in Tripoli. The slaves were then shipped by their new owners to various parts of the Ottoman Empire, which still included the Balkans at this time, and beyond.

  Although to modern eyes the abolition of slavery was a wholly good thing, those Africans, Arabs and Europeans alike who had made a living through it now had to find other commodities in which to trade, and this often meant finding and opening new markets. As a result there was a new impetus to explore the African interior, until then among the least-known places on earth. Suddenly the task of penetrating the Sahara and sub-Saharan Africa became an obvious and urgent endeavour. It was in this atmosphere that the major intra-Saharan expeditions of the nineteenth century took place.

  One of the most important of these was a five-year mission sponsored by the British government that set out from England in 1822. The expedition’s leader was Walter Oudney (1790-1824), a Scottish doctor, sometime naval surgeon and naturalist. Travelling with him were Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827), like Oudney a Scottish-born naval officer, and Dixon Denham (1786-1828), a British Army officer from London who had fought against Napoleon in Spain and at the Battle of Waterloo.

  The mission proposed by the government was to accurately determine and map the course of the River Niger, which at least since Park’s journey was known to run eastwards. If it seems strange that two of three officers on this Sahara mission were navy men, it should be remembered that they were given the task of charting a waterway and establishing how much and what parts of it were navigable. Perhaps it also makes sense, then, that the officers were accompanied by a shipbuilder, William Hillman, who was in charge of the expedition’s stores.

  Having sailed to Tripoli, the expedition entered the Sahara, the officers on horseback accompanied by 32 camels, a pair of mules and a couple of dogs. Notably, they did not travel in disguise, as certain explorers both before and after did. Such an open display of their foreignness emphasized not just that they were well-armed, but also underlined the new-found confidence Europeans felt in pressing forward into the Sahara. As Clapperton proudly wrote in his journal, “[we] were the first English travellers in Africa who had resisted the persuasion that a disguise was necessary, and who had determined to travel in our real characters as Britons and Christians, and to wear, on all occasions, our English dresses; nor had we, at any future period, occasion to regret that we had done so.” As events transpired, it became clear that the greatest threat to the men’s safety came not from angry native tribesmen but from among themselves.

  Whatever else the Bornou (sic) Mission, as it was called, became known for it was sadly not for any collaborative spirit among its main participants. Oudney, Clapperton and Denham were men of wildly differing temperaments. The authorities in London had not thought it important to consult the men about their travelling together, and none of the three relished the prospect when ordered to do so, each wanting to be in charge of his own destiny. They failed to reach an equitable division between the civil and military aspects of the mission, and disliked taking orders from one another.

  The further into the Sahara they travelled the worse the feuding became. At one stage Denham made the almost certainly unsubstantiated allegation that Clapperton was conducting a homosexual relationship with - heaven forbid! - one of their native servants. The increasingly acrimonious disputes meant that Denham and Clapperton stopped talking to one another, only communicating via official letters, sent back and forth from their respective tents. These missives would be hilarious if found in a novel, rather than during a dangerous mission in a harsh and alien environment. One letter from Clapperton, dated “Tents, Jan 1st, 1823”, signals his unwillingness to take orders from Denham, a naval officer, whose jurisdiction over him he did not accept: “Sir, I thought my previous refusal would have prevented a repetition of your orders.” Clapperton goes on to explain why he will continue to ignore any further orders, signing off, “I have the honour to be Sir, Your most Obedient humble Servant, Hugh Clapperton.” Their first New Year in the Sahara was not to be ushered in to the strains of Auld Lang Syne.

  Against all odds and in the face of the complete collapse of any rapport between the officers, the mission was a greater success than it had any right to be. Having made a successful north-south crossing of the Sahara, they discovered a large lake on the desert’s southern shores. In spite of Denham’s hope to see it named Lake Waterloo, it was to become known as Lake Chad, from a word in the local Bornu language, tsade, which means a large body of water; so “Lake Lake” was christened.

  Oudney died shortly after this, halfway between Lake Chad and Kano, Nigeria, where he was heading with Clapperton. Clapperton pressed on alone to the Sokoto, a tributary of
the Niger from which he was now just five days distant. But in Sokoto - the newly established capital of the Fulani’s so-called Sokoto caliphate - the sultan forbade him to go any further. For one thing, the local rulers were still active in the slave trade and were fearful of any British interference in this lucrative business. Unable to find a guide willing to break ranks with the ruler’s orders, he was forced to retrace his steps to Lake Chad.

  While Clapperton was absent, Denham had unsuccessfully attempted to circumnavigate Lake Chad, and had instead headed back to Tripoli. Clapperton too made the journey back to the coast, arriving in Tripoli in January 1825 and then returned to England to make his reports to the government and the African Association, which remained, until its incorporation into the newly formed Royal Geographical Society in 1831, a significant force in Saharan exploration.

  Caillie, Barth and Rohlfs

  Among the early solo explorers of the Sahara, Rene-Auguste Caillie (1799-1838) holds a special place as the first European to reach Timbuktu and return alive. Before him, the fate of the few western travellers who made it to the city, dying or being killed on the return journey, resulted in a paucity of information regarding Timbuktu, which served to highlight the city’s extreme isolation in the desert over which these pioneering explorers roamed.

  By his own admission, Caillie was inspired to a life of exploration after reading Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s novel about a shipwrecked sailor on a desert island. Such are the seemingly small events that unveil kismet. Caillie started his trans-Saharan journey from Freetown, travelling through Conakry, Guinea and onto Tieme and the upper reaches of the Senegal river. During the four months he spent there he suffered from a more typically naval affliction, scurvy: an inauspicious start to his adventure. Once recovered, Caillie set out alone for Timbuktu, travelling in trading canoes along the Senegal and Niger rivers. En route, a further bout of illness saw him stranded for a further five months.