The Sahara (20 page)

It was not just the newspapermen that celebrated and embellished his legend. The resistance leader was eulogized in verse by no lesser a poet than Robert Browning in “Through the Metidja to Abd-El-Kadr”, and William Makepeace Thackeray in his “Abdel-Kader at Toulon”. The timbre of these poems is clear from just a little of Thackeray’s panegyric, which opens:

No more, thou lithe and long-winged hawk, of desert-life for thee;

No more across the sultry sands shalt thou go swooping free:

Blunt iron talons, idle-beak, with spurning of thy chain,

Shatter against thy cage the wing thou ne’er may’st spread again.

A difficult legend to overturn, even in exile Abd al-Qadir received adulation from western sources. In 1860, while in exile in Damascus, he became known as the Protector of Christians after intervening to shield Damascene Christians during the massacres then taking place against them. As the Methodist Bishop John Philip Newman wrote in his book From Dan to Beersheba, “there was one humane Mohammedan who attempted to stay the massacre, and whose home afforded shelter to the defenceless. Abd-el-Kader, with 300 Algerian soldiers, who had followed their celeb rated chief into exile, stood as a wall of brass against the fanaticism and fury of the murderers.”

The Scramble For Africa

Back in North Africa, Spain had occupied at least one Moroccan coastal city since the fifteenth century but it was not until1830 that the French took an interest in the Saharan regions of that country. France and Spain finally agreed upon a mutually acceptable division of the country in the 1912 Treaty of Fez, typically without consulting the Moroccans. In 1881 Tunisia became a French protectorate and in 1882 Britain occupied Egypt and the Sudan. The Sudan was then abandoned in the face of resistance from the self-proclaimed Mahdi Muhammad ibn-Abdalla and his forces, before eventually being fully reoccupied in 1899, after a military campaign led by Lord Kitchener, when it was renamed the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Before Kitchener’s action in the Sudan, however, a meeting took place in Europe in 1886 that was to radically alter the fate of Africa, including the whole of the Sahara. The Conference of Berlin was organized so that European nations with commercial interests in Africa could decide exactly where their and other competing national interests lay. In this way the European governments hoped they might avoid war between each other as they further encroached upon the Dark Continent. By the end of the conference, in an act of hubris almost unparalleled in human history, the entire continent of Africa had been divided up between the European imperial powers. The agreement was entered into, according to the document’s final wording, “in a spirit of good and mutual accord , to regulate the conditions most favourable to the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa,” but without the presence of, or consultation with, a single African ruler. Africa for the Europeans was the order of the day.

After the signing of the General Act of the Berlin Conference, the speed with which the continent was physically divided up between erstwhile European rivals was truly remarkable. The so-called Scramble for Africa took place at great speed between 1880 and 1900. Against a background of national expansion and at the cost of very few European lives, it is perhaps unsurprising that cultural products of the period tended to be pro-empire, jingoistic and one-sided. Before the Scramble, a term coined in 1884 by a journalist with
The Times
, the European presence in the desert was fairly limited. In the northern half of the Sahara, the countries in which European powers began to take an interest were all technically Ottoman lands, rather than nation states. In some cases any semblance of Ottoman control was nominal at best and it is easier to think in terms of slices of the Ottoman Empire, known at this time as “the sick man of Europe”, being snatched away from Constantinople, rather than there taking place the wholesale conquest of independent countries. Even if the results were ultimately the same, the distinction is important and worth highlighting.

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 prisoner on his lapel when he met Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.