The Sahara Read online

  Once successfully introduced, the camel became indispensable for desert travel, its dominance being guaranteed once its usefulness as a draft animal was grasped. The Romans, enthusiastic developers of innovative military technology, soon understood the potential uses of the camel as a military vehicle. When Julius Caesar defeated the Numidian king Juba in 46 BCE, among the spoils he took were 22 camels. While not a large number of animals, they are important as the first textual record of camels in North Africa. Having first come across camels in Syria and Egypt, the Romans were soon putting them to use against the Garamantes and other tribes who were keen to attack Rome’s desert frontiers. Once the Romans took camel-mounted troops into battle, first in 69 CE, the isolation that had previously been the Garamantes’ main strategic advantage disappeared, and raiding from the Sahara likewise tailed off.

  Dromedary (left) and Bactrian camels

  As for the camel being an uncomfortable mount, this rather depends how accustomed one is to riding. The author Paul Bowles, a city dweller, did not find riding a camel a comfortable experience. Writing in Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue: Scenes from the non-Christian World, he says, “Of course, the proper way to travel in the Sahara is by camel, particularly if you’re a good walker, since after about two hours of the camel’s motion you are glad to get down and walk for four. Each succeeding day is likely to bring with it a greater percentage of time spent off the camel.”

  One of Rudyard Kipling’s most memorable Just So Stories, “How the Camel Got His Hump”, begins:

  In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself. So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most ‘scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said “Humph!” Just “Humph!” and no more.

  The Ship of the Desert is unique, and should be respected as such. The only animal capable of ferrying people and their produce across the Sahara, through sun and sandstorms, it has been responsible for more significant social change across the desert than any other animal. In spite of this it is too often misrepresented as a recalcitrant and unyielding beast. It is no wonder that Kipling’s camel speaks as it does: Humph indeed!

  Christian North Africa

  Christianity came to the Sahara at two distinct periods: first under Roman rule, when the empire adopted it as the state religion; secondly, more than 1500 years later, with the arrival of the European invaders. When Christianity was first introduced to the Sahara it spread slowly but steadily. Starting out in the easternmost parts of the desert, which is where the earliest churches are to be found, it was established in Alexandria in about 43 CE under the evangelizing mission of St. Mark. Honoured as the man who introduced Christianity to Africa with his arrival in Egypt, St. Mark is most commonly represented in Christian iconography with a lion in the desert. Not only was he the first Bishop of Alexandria, where he was martyred, but he also saw the first entry of Christianity into the desert.

  Among the oases of the Western Desert, Bahariya was an important early centre of Christianity, where St. Bartholomew was sent to preach and to convert the locals. According to the Synaxarium of the Coptic tradition, Bartholomew, one of the twelve Apostles, not only preached in Bahariya but was martyred there. In spite of his death, his mission obviously met with great success, Bahariya having its own bishop until the fourteenth century.

  Local tradition also states that the headless corpse of St. George was brought to the oasis from Syria for safekeeping. A former senior officer in the Roman Army, the Syrian-born St. George became a Christian martyr in 303 CE, decapitated on the orders of the Emperor Diocletian for refusing to pay tribute to the pagan gods. The traditional date of his death, 23 April, has become his feast day, and he remains one of the most widely venerated saints in both the eastern and western Christian traditions, and the patron of numerous countries from England to Malta, as well as cities from Moscow to Beirut. St. George’s patronage also extends to agricultural workers, knights, and those suffering from the plague and syphilis.

  While in North Africa at any rate Judaism is sometimes called the religion of the marketplace, Christianity is the religion of the countryside. The Jewish presence in the Sahara revolved around trade, rather than missionary zeal which characterized much later Christian activity there. Just how far-reaching the Jewish presence in the Sahara was is clear from the numbers of Hebrew inscriptions found across the desert. When Biblically literate Victorian explorers first encountered these Hebraic inscriptions on graves from Morocco to Egypt, the more romantically inclined became convinced that the Berbers, Tuareg et al were in fact a lost tribe of Israel.

  When Christianity arrived in North Africa it benefited from another monotheistic religion - Judaism - already having been established. The Jewish presence meant that the first Christians quickly got across their message of monotheism. They initially focused their proselytizing efforts on the Jewish faithful. By delivering the message that Jesus was in fact the Jewish Messiah, the Promised One whose return was anticipated in Jewish theology, many were persuaded that this faith was not a challenge but rather the fulfilment of their beliefs. Many of those Jews who converted subsequently became harshly critical of their former co-religionists. Evidence for this can be seen in the earliest Christian text found in the Sahara. The second-century Letter of Barnabas, likely written by a convert from Alexandria, contains much that is nothing more than an anti-Jewish diatribe, noted more for its virulence than its theology.

  The Letter of Barnabas also offers a clue to the very early internationalism of Christianity: literacy. Apart from the movement of Jewish merchants, literacy and the written word were of paramount importance among early Christians, with epistles being written, copied and transmitted by land and sea, quickly spreading the message of the new religion throughout the Mediterranean world. If the new religion was slow to dominate the religious landscape of the Sahara, at least those communities of believers that were there had textual foundations, which could be referred to when needed, settling doctrinal disputes and bolstering faith.

  A long-standing dispensation from the Roman emperor exempted Jews from military service in the imperial army. They were also unique in being granted an exemption from making sacrifice to the emperor. So, when many early Christians, as Jewish converts, adopted the same exemptions for themselves, they were able to do so because the Roman authorities saw them as a Jewish sub-sect rather than a new religion. Even so, the growth of Christianity in the empire set it on a collision course with Rome. Once Rome understood that Christianity was not another Jewish cult but a distinct missionary faith intent on promoting un-Roman views of belief in a single God rather than the whole gamut of Roman gods-including the emperor-the empire struck back.

  The first Christian martyrs in North African were seven men and five women from the hamlet of Scilium (precise location unknown) in modern Tunisia, executed in 180 CE under the proconsul Saturninus. Their fate was sealed when, during their trial for not paying tribute to the emperor, their spokesman Speratus announced, “The Empire of this world I do not recognize; but rather I serve God whom no man has nor can see with human eyes,” echoing St. Paul’s first epistle to Timothy. A far-from-unfair ruler, Saturninus gave them thirty days’ grace to recant. But they did not and so were beheaded. Many more followed, but as the Christian thinker and native Berber Tertullian said of Rome’s policy, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

  Tertullian (c. 160-c. 220) was also responsible for coining a number of Latin terms central to Church doctrine, including trinitas, or the trinity, and the idea of Christian scriptures consisting of two testaments: vetus testamentum and novum testamentum. Tertullian would probably have been canonized had he not gone over to the heterodox Montanist cause later in life, which propound
ed, among other heresies, the idea of continuing, direct revelation through believers.

  Another important figure was St. Augustine (354-430), and not just for the Church in North Africa. A Numidian Berber, at first sight Augustine is an unlikely Christian hero. The son of a pagan father, he was a sometime pagan intellectual who as a young adult enjoyed life to the full, having a child with his concubine and famously praying, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” In spite of this, Augustine is revered as a Doctor of the Church and admired in the Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox traditions alike.

  Although he grew up with a Christian mother, St. Monica, Augustine’s conversion did not occur until he was 32, after reading Athanasius’ Life of St. Anthony. Having proved himself an able student in Carthage - in spite of loathing and failing to master Greek - Augustine started writing anti-heretical treatises after his conversion while living in a celibate male community in his home town of Thagaste, today’s Souk Ahras in Algeria. His writings received favourable attention from a Church official in Hippo, who summoned Augustine to the city. While there, he was ordained a priest, against his wishes but at the insistence of the local congregation, before eventually being consecrated Bishop of Hippo, just ten years after his conversion. He held this post until his death when the Vandals were besieging the city.

  A prolific writer, Augustine left behind more than a hundred works including sermons, books of Biblical commentary and numerous volumes of theology. His most popular work remains the Confessions. Written more than 1600 years ago, it is often hailed as the first modern autobiography and a work of startling honesty that includes a sense of the subconscious centuries before Freud and psychoanalysis existed.

  More important than references to the Sahara in early Christian literature, the proximity of the desert to those who formulated early Christian theology cannot be ignored. The impact the Church in North Africa had on the development of Christian theology is huge: it is noteworthy, for instance, that Christianity arrived in the Sahara before it reached either Greece or Rome, which would become important centres of Christianity, but not until after it had been planted among the Egyptians, Berbers, Libyans and Numidians, its tenets very much developed by the likes of St. Augustine and his fellow African theologians.

  Important in the life of the early Church were the periods of persecution, notably in the third century under the emperors Decius and Diocletian. Extensive and violent, persecution forced many Christians to flee into the desert on either side of the Nile. When, after the proclamation of tolerance, issued under Emperor Constantine I, or Constantine the Great, persecution ceased and the Church grew, many decided to remain in the desert, marking the start of Christian monasticism. Many were drawn to this ascetic life which was described as a life of martyrdom. And the most famous one to adopt this isolated way of life was St. Anthony.

  Although not the first monk, St. Anthony is acknowledged as the first to retreat fully into the desert. Before him many monks lived close to their home villages, spending periods in retreat rather than adopting this fulltime abdication from society. As St. Anthony’s biographer, St. Athanasius, wrote, “For there were not yet so many monasteries in Egypt, and no monk at all knew of the distant desert; but all who wished to give heed to themselves practised the discipline in solitude near their own village.”

  The “distant desert” had always been considered dangerous, not just because of the presence of wild animals and absence of reliable water supplies, but also as the refuge of outlaws and bandits. In the desert such people were literally outside of the law, yet it was into this desert that St. Anthony decided to move.

  Moving sixty miles west of Alexandria to Nitra, today Wadi Natrun, Anthony placed himself far from any existing population centres, hoping that this would provide him with the ideal opportunity for prayer and contemplation. He stayed at Nitra for thirteen years, emphasizing the importance of a life of isolation: “Just as fish die if they remain on dry land so monks, remaining away from their cells, or dwelling with men of the world, lose their determination to persevere in solitary prayer. Therefore, just as the fish should go back to the sea, so must we return to our cells, lest remaining outside we forget to watch ourselves interiorly.”

  Despite this and other sayings of the Desert Fathers being uttered more than 1700 years ago, their importance in the history of monasticism and, some would say, contemporary relevance, was recognized in the twentieth century by the monk and scholar Thomas Merton. Although his experience of the monastic life did not allow him to live in the Sahara, in The Wisdom of the Desert he pays tribute to the Desert Fathers and extols the virtue of the solitary life, believing that we are all essentially solitary beings who can thus benefit from time spent in solitary contemplation.

  Over the course of St. Anthony’s long life - tradition has it that he died aged 105 - the temptations and torments to which the devil subjected him have provided plenty of inspiration for writers and artists. According to St. Athanasius, the devil visited St. Anthony “one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. For he affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment,” adding that “the demons as if breaking the four walls of the dwelling seemed to enter through them, coming in the likeness of beasts and creeping things. And the place was on a sudden filled with the forms of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of them was moving according to his nature.”

  Many artistic representations of the saint’s torments were to follow, the earliest extant examples of the genre being tenth-century frescoes from Italy. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries artists such as Martin Schongauer, Matthias Grunewald and Hieronymus Bosch focused on the more fantastical elements of the story, producing some genuinely terrifying work. The Torment of St. Anthony is the title of the earliest known painting of one of the greatest artists of all time, the personification of Renaissance man, Michelangelo. His Torment, painted when he was twelve or thirteen, follows Schongauer’s own engraving of the subject, to which the young Michelangelo has added his own landscape as a background, and altered Anthony’s expression from sorrow to saintly detachment.

  Martin Schongauer’s engraving of St. Anthony’s torment

  The Vandals

  Nearly four hundred years after Rome took control of Mauretania, a Vandal army coming from Spain and led by King Geiseric did the same, beginning their own conquest of North Africa. The Vandals’ domination of North Africa, and far less successful encounter with the Saharan tribes, was not the longest stay of any foreign invader in the region, but whatever the Vandals lacked in longevity they made up for in drama. The most widely cited account of their journey from Europe to Africa is provided by the Roman historian Procopius who, in his Wars of Justinian, recounts that the Vandals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 429 at the invitation of the Roman general Boniface. Boniface soon regretted, and rescinded, the invitation; this did nothing to stop the arrival of the Vandals and their supporters. There followed a decade of fighting and conquest that left the Vandals in control of most of the Roman provinces.

  Not all cities went willingly; Hippo was a famous example and underwent a lengthy siege in the third month of which St. Augustine died, aged 76. As related in Sancti Augustini Vitta, the Life of Augustine, by Possidius, who was present during the siege, Augustine’s last days were spent praying for the city’s inhabitants whose fate, being of the Roman faith, was not likely to be good at the hands of the Arian Vandals. Possidius records that Augustine “repeatedly ordered that the library of the church and all the books should be carefully preserved for future generations.” The siege lasted for fourteen months and when they eventually took the city the Vandals indulged in a destructive rampage that saw death and enslavement of the city’s inhabitants and its buildings burnt, except for Augustin
e’s church and library. Such was his reputation that the Vandals ensured his church and books were protected and preserved. In this instance at least, the Vandals failed to live up to their reputation for wanton destruction.

  In a North African sojourn that lasted almost exactly one century, the Vandals successfully controlled their coastal subjects but not those living in the Sahara. Although Vandal settlements were largely confined to the coast and littoral, this did not keep them safe from the desert tribes. Whereas the Romans, as far as it was in their power, were unwilling to allow independence to the desert tribes, the Vandals did their best to adopt a policy of ignoring them, looking north instead to the Mediterranean. Even before the fall of Hippo, Geiseric had started building a fleet. As soon as it was ready, he launched himself with enthusiasm into a lucrative career of piracy, a calling he pursued until his death in 477.

  The pursuit of plunder at sea meant that in the Sahara a number of independent kingdoms soon developed, remote from the heartland of Vandal territory. Those tribes that had retained their nomadic lifestyle also took advantage of the limited law and order exerted on the fringes of the Vandals’ empire, launching raids in increasing number through the fourth century. Saharan-based Berbers achieved at least two major victories against Vandal settlements between 496 and 530, and by the end of Vandal rule, the inhabitants of these areas may actually have welcomed the restoration of some strong, central authority.