The Sahara Page 14
The formal agreement reached in Berlin was an enormous alteration in terms of European intervention; from what has been called “informal imperialism” based on economic and military control to the formalization of the process and direct rule by the governments of Europe. From a European perspective, which was the only one under consideration at the time, such a formalization of their relationship to one another in Africa would prevent wars. It would be much better to focus expansionist inclinations against less well-armed and distant peoples than one’s militarily competent neighbours, as the concerned parties were to discover between 1914 and 1918.
In many cases, European nations seemed to be interested in grabbing any land they could, simply to deprive their rivals, and the race for the Sahara was just as bitter as it was elsewhere in Africa. Under the terms of the General Act, Spain was awarded the “Spanish Sahara”, today’s Western Sahara, where the locals continue to fight for independence, now against the independent Kingdom of Morocco.
By 1890 France controlled the majority of Saharan land, to which the then British prime minister Lord Salisbury, affecting sublime insouciance, said it was nothing more than, “light soil in which the Gallic cock can scratch”. In response, Jules Cambon, governor-general of Algeria said, “Very well, we will scratch in this sand. We will lay railway-lines, we will put up telegraph-poles, we will make the artesian water-tables gush to the surface, and in the oases we will hear the Gallic cock crowing his most melodious and happiest fanfare from the rooftops of the Kasbah.”
French forces went on to appropriate Mali in 1892, as well as occupying parts of Niger and Chad during the 1890s, taking full control of Chad in 1900. During the same period the French claimed administrative control over Mauritania in a policy that went by the innocuous-sounding title of “peaceful penetration”.
The last slice of the Sahara to be swallowed by Europe was “Italian North Africa’’, that is Libya, which did not become a colony until1912, after the Italian invasion of the previous year. So, just two years before the start of the Great War the Sahara was entirely a European political entity without any native independence, although there were still some resistance movements fighting on, notably in Libya. As a result, for a small number of adventurous Europeans and Americans, the Sahara was about to become the latest playground for the leisured, offering visitors a little taste of the East, albeit a taste that the occupiers had started to sanitize, outfitting the ports and oases with western amenities.
War and Peace and War
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.
(Out of Africa there is always something new.)
Pliny the Elder
Whereas in 1800 the majority of the northern Sahara was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the southern Sahara and Sahel were ruled by various independent states, by 1900 every one of the modern Saharan nations, north and south, were to a greater or lesser extent under European control, with France claiming the largest portion of the desert. It was not until 1848, eighteen years after the French invasion of Algeria, that it was officially declared French territory. Resistance to occupation, which had been especially stiff until the capture of Abd al-Qadir, gradually tailed off. In 1900 French Algeria was granted administrative and financial autonomy and placed under a governor-general. Ten years later, resistance to occupation had effectively ceased.
In 1881, using a Tunisian raid into French Algeria as the excuse to launch a counter-invasion, a 36,000-strong French force marched on Tunisia. With the country swiftly occupied, Muhammad III as-Sadiq, Bey of Tunis, had no choice but to sign the Treaty of Bardo, which made Tunisia a French protectorate. Determined to carve out far larger claims in North Africa, three French military expeditions were sent out in 1898: the Voulet-Chanoine Mission headed east from Senegal, the Foureau-Lamy Expedition moved south from Algeria and the Gentil Mission set out from the Middle Congo to meet up with the other two. Working in concert, by 1900 the missions had successfully conquered the whole of the Chad Basin and united French territories across the Sahara from West Africa to the border with Sudan and north to the Mediterranean, incorporating the modern Saharan countries of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Algeria and Tunisia.
To the east of France’s massive Saharan territories, the British were in control of Egypt since occupying it, and Egyptian Sudan, from 1882. The rebellion in the Sudan led by Muhammad ibn Abdalla, the Mad Mahdi, forced the withdrawal of Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1885, after which he established an independent theocracy there. Britain retook the whole of the country in 1898, after a military campaign led by Lord Kitchener. Although technically the British were only present in Egypt in an advisory capacity, in light of the time and energy spent in regaining it Britain decided to maintain formal control in the Sudan. To satisfy the convoluted imperial politics of previous agreements with the Egyptians, this led to the formation of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium in 1899, under which the Egyptians would appoint a British governor-general to rule the Sudan on behalf of the Egyptian khedive, who was in reality also under British control.
In 1900 Libya and Morocco were both just managing to hang on to their independence from European control. The three Ottoman wilayats - semi-autonomous states - of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan would not become united as Libya until the 1911 Italian invasion, which Rome claimed was aimed at freeing the North Africans from Ottoman oppression. Attempts by Morocco to develop closer links with Europe and the US, begun in the mid-nineteenth century, only really led to greater interference by France and Spain. Although France and Spain recognized Moroccan independence at the 1880 Conference of Madrid, two crises in the first decade of the twentieth century, prompted by a rise in Anglo-German tensions, led to Morocco being carved up into French and Spanish protectorates at the 1911 Treaty of Fez.
Imperial guns keeping order in the desert
War, meanwhile, was just beginning in Libya. Although greatly outnumbered by regular Italian troops with the latest arms, resistance from Ottoman Turkish troops was fiercer than the Italians were expecting, forcing the invaders to increase their troops from 20,000 to 100,000. The Italian-Turkish war is notable for the first use of aerial bombing as a weapon of war when, on 1 November 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, flying at 600 feet, dropped four hand grenades on a Turkish camp. Although Gavotti did not kill or injure anyone in the attack, his actions earned him a small, if dubious, footnote in the history of warfare.
Even though the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne ceded the provinces of Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica to Italy, Bedouin attacks against the invaders grew in number and vigour after that date. The fight dragged on for twenty years, during which time the Italians held the cities but rarely had effective control in the rest of the country.
Born in a small village near Tobruk, Omar Mukhtar, the man who would become the most famous Libyan resistance leader, was an unlikely national hero. Before the Italian invasion he taught the Quran to children in the local school. After the invasion he became known as the Lion of the Desert. Mukhtar owed his success against Italy’s superior numbers to avoiding large-scale, direct confrontation with the enemy, and his knowledge of local geography. Leading small bands on raids against Italian outposts and their lines of communication, Mukhtar was also adaptable, developing new tactics whenever the Italians changed their own strategy. Mukhtar was eventually captured by Italian troops in September 1931. His trial was swift and he was hanged in front of thousands of his countrymen in a concentration camp at Suluq, which was built for resistance fighters. When, before his execution, Mukhtar was asked if had any last words, the teacher-turned-national hero replied with a verse from the Quran: “From Allah we have come, and to Allah we shall return.”
Eighty years after his death, Omar Mukhtar’s legend is still strong in Libya. His image is ubiquitous, appearing on the Libyan ten-dinar banknote and on car bumper stickers. In June 2009 the theatrically inclined Muammar Gaddafi wore a photograph of Mukhtar as an Italian priso
ner on his lapel when he met Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
It is striking that the guerrilla resistance led by Omar Mukhtar lasted five times as long as the First World War, although the impact of that conflict in the region was minimal because there were virtually no German colonies in Saharan Africa. Getting to North Africa was a different matter, as Edith Wharton noted: “In 1918, owing to the watchfulness of German submarines in the Straits and along the northwest coast of Africa, the trip by sea from Marseilles to Casablanca, ordinarily so easy, was not to be made without much discomfort and loss of time.” How inconvenient war can be to one’s travel plans!
The armed opposition to the Italian invasion continued in the desert regions of Libya throughout the Great War, and in Egypt’s Western Desert the Sanussi periodically harried British troops. In response, the British were forced to deploy the newly created Imperial Camel Corps and the Light Car Patrols in offensive engagements and reconnaissance missions against the religiously-inspired Sanussi. Today this minor piece of soldiering on the fringes of the larger conflict is almost entirely forgotten, but thankfully not entirely. For one thing, there is a small bronze memorial to the Imperial Camel Corps in Victoria Gardens on the Embankment in London. The statue features a soldier atop his war-camel and on the plinth is inscribed, “To the Glorious and Immortal Memory of the Officers, NCO’s and Men of the Imperial Camel Corps-British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian-who fell in action or died of wounds and disease in Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine, 1916, 1917, 1918.”
T E. Lawrence was also in Egypt for a part of the First World War, before Arabia. Based in Cairo with the Arab Bureau, it is curious to note that Lawrence spent more time in Egypt than he did in Arabia, working in the Cairo Intelligence Department, a unit of British intelligence formed after a suggestion by Sir Mark Sykes, whose name was later attached to the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Lawrence spent his time preparing maps and writing the daily intelligence bulletins for, as he put it, “the edification of 28 generals”. A life-long lover of desert places, before the war Lawrence spent time working on an archaeological dig close to the Nile and although he never wrote a great deal about this time, it certainly contributed to his reputation for being able to work in harsh conditions. The Arab Bureau was also responsible for running a network of agents in the Sahara, who were supplying information about the Sanussi and gun-running operations in the Western Desert.
Tied to Lawrence by friendship, the poet, novelist and translator Robert Graves spent the first half of 1926 in Egypt, teaching English literature at Cairo University. When Graves wrote to Lawrence for advice about his forthcoming move to Egypt, Lawrence replied that “Egypt, being so near Europe, is not a savage country,” which he followed up by advising Graves to “Roam about - Palestine. The Saharan oases... Wilfred Jennings Bramley’s buildings in the Western Desert.” It was not a happy time for Graves, and he and his family and his mistress, who all travelled to Egypt together, left again after six months.
Short though it was, Graves’ Egyptian interlude inspired his most famous short story, The Shout. Set in a mental asylum, Graves said the idea for the story came to him “while I was walking in the desert near Heliopolis in Egypt and came upon a stony stretch where I stopped to pick up a few misshapen pebbles; what virtue was in them I do not know, but I somehow had the story from them.” Graves ventured into the Sahara a number of times fostering his life-long fascination with Egyptian, and Greek, mythology.
Motors, Mars and Planes
“People condemn the motor-car as unromantic. I am afraid this is natural, for no one can become fond of a thing he does not really understand, and the ordinary person understands a camel, if in concept only, because it is an animal like himself.”
Ralph Bagnold, Libyan Sands: Travels in a Dead World (1935)
From the first upright steps of homo sapiens to the birth of motor transport, the greatest speed people had experienced was on the back of a galloping horse. For most, their maximum speed was limited to however fast they could propel themselves. The development of the motorcar radically changed this. With the arrival of motorcars, large areas of the Sahara were accessible for the first time. The arrival of the car did not, however, herald the end of camels or cameleers.
Even as some said camels would become obsolete in the face of motorized transport, some of the most adventurous camel-powered desert exploration was taking place. In the winter of 1920 the Oxford-educated Egyptian diplomat and politician, two-time Olympian and grandson of the last admiral of the Egyptian fleet, Ahmed Hassanein Bey, set off for the oasis of Kufra, in the heart of the Libyan Desert. Accompanied by the English travel writer Rosita Forbes, the small band crossed the Sahara from Ajdabiya, near the Gulf of Sirte, without a car in sight.
Forbes’ account of the journey, Kufara: the Secret of the Sahara, was rightly criticized for not giving sufficient credit to Hassanein for his central role in the expedition. Yet she did dedicate the book to him, the father of Egyptian exploration: “To Ahmed Mohammed Bey Hassanein. In memory of hours grave and gay, battles desperate or humorous, of success and failure in the Libyan deserts.” Walking through the winter, the coolest and so best time for Saharan exploration, the pair and their retinue headed south towards the famously closed oasis.
Apart from its geographical isolation, the oasis had stood aloof from outsiders since becoming home to the Sanussi brotherhood in the 1890s. Hostile to all foreign occupation of the Sahara, the Sanussi clashed at various times with the French, Italians and British. Part of Forbes’ motivation for making the journey was because it was forbidden. As she says, “For a year I had worked and plotted to reach Kufara because the thought of this holy oasis, nucleus of the greatest Islamic confraternity, rigidly guarded from every stranger, the centre of the mighty influence against which every European Power has battled in turn, stirred my imagination.”
The book charts their four-month round trip of more than a thousand miles to Kufra and back via Jaghbub and Siwa, and contains all the requisite elements for a gripping yarn including fractious camels and disgruntled guides. Forbes remembers with fondness the journey’s privations and expresses a common desire to return to the magical: “Some time, somehow, I knew not where or when, but most assuredly when Allah willed, I should come back to the deserts and the strange, uncharted tracks would bear my camels south again.”
Although Forbes was the first non-Arab woman to visit the Sanussi’s home oasis, she was not the first European to do so. The German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs and the botanist Paul Friedrich August Ascherson travelled there from Dakhla in the winter of 1873. En route, they came across Abu Ballas, Pottery Hill, so-called because of the remains of hundreds of smashed pots that litter the desert there. The legend is told that the oasis of Dakhla suffered regular raids from the west, an area of completely waterless desert. The raiders were only able to attack Dakhla if they kept a supply of water on their path through the wilderness. After one raid some Dakhla inhabitants followed the raiders. Although they failed to catch them, they did find the raiders’ water-filled pots, and smashed them all. The raids stopped, the raiders presumably dying the next time they approached Dakhla and finding their vital supplies gone.
Writing about the trip that he and Forbes made, Hassanein said that the journey “only whetted my appetite for more”, which is why he set out again, in 1922, on a longer, more perilous journey. On his second expedition Hassanein skirted the Great Sand Sea, which stretches across the Egypto-Libyan border, before heading south through Darfur to al-Obeid in the Sudan. This impressive trek took Hassanein eight months and covered 2300 miles. In the process he discovered Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Uweinat in the extreme south-western corner of Egypt, the so-called lost oases of the title of the book he later wrote about the trip. If the scale of Hassanein’s journey was not impressive enough, he also discovered the exceptional collection of rock art that occurs in the isolated Gilf-Kebir, Great Barrier, region that straddles
Egypt, Libya and the Sudan.
Writing in the Geographical Journal, Hassanein outlined the hard daily routine of a camel-powered expedition: “Twelve to thirteen hours of walking, [that] if conditions have been good, bring us to the end of the day’s trek, though sometimes we cannot go on so long. The order is given to halt, the camels, with grunts of satisfaction, kneel to have their loads removed ... The men of the caravan are not slow to prepare and eat the evening meal, to feed the camels and then to dispose themselves for sleep. But I must compare my six watches and wind them, record the photographs and geological specimens taken and collected during the day, change the cinema films in the darkness, and write up my diaries.” For this journey Hassanein was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 1924.
Even as Hassanein was presenting his findings in London, the Sahara was opening up for cars as well as aircraft, which offered a completely new perspective on the great desert. With technological developments allowing aircraft to cover greater distances, trans-Saharan journeys became possible which did not even require the traveller to set foot in the desert at all, unless things went badly wrong.
Among the pioneers of aerial trans-Saharan routes was Captain Rene Wauthier, a Frenchman who in the early 1930s flew across the Sahara on numerous occasions, including to Lake Chad and Agadez via Tamanrasset and In-Guezzam. Wauthier’s experiences at the vanguard of desert flying were retold in Air Adventure: Paris-Sahara-Timbuctoo by the American occultist, asylum inmate and one-time cannibal, William Seabrook. Notorious in his day, Seabrook wrote about flying when the experience was still a novel one and the glamour of flight still made heroes out of flyers. Conversely, however, its newness meant that risks were still acute.