The Sahara (19 page)

After spending two weeks in Timbuktu, Caillie started on his return journey, travelling north across the Sahara in the company of a slave caravan, and over the Atlas Mountains to Tangier. Returning home to France by boat, Caillie was given a hero’s welcome, a state pension and the Legion d’Honneur. Yet Caillie’s account of Timbuktu was so out of kilter with the prevailing view of the armchair experts who had obviously never been there themselves that they accused him of lying about ever having reached the city. Fortunately for Caillie, the Societe Geographique of Paris accepted the veracity of his account, and awarded him the 10,000- franc prize money which they had offered to the first person to visit the city and come back to tell the tale. If people did not like the reality of Timbuktu’s humble position in the early nineteenth century, Caillie could hardly be blamed for that. The legend of Timbuktu and its limitless quantities of gold may have been tarnished by Caillie’s account, but the knowledge he brought back was more important than just another out-of-date European fantasy about the Dark Continent.

Heinrich Barth’s (1821-65) wanderings in the Sahara, which covered a five-year period from 1850, were undertaken, like those of his countryman Hornemann before him, on behalf of British interests. With a talent for languages and a keen eye for detail, Barth’s detailed five-volume account of his Saharan expeditions,
Travels and Explorations in North and Central Africa
, remains an essential reference to this day. like Caillie, Barth believed that a successful mission demanded proper planning, however long this took. Focusing in particular on his Arabic, by the time he ventured into the desert he was more than comfortable in his chosen disguise of a travelling holy man. Testament to the efficacy of this cover is the fact that, according to his own account, people he met often wanted to receive a blessing from him.

View over Timbuktu, an illustration from Barth’s Travels and Explorations in North and Central Africa

Although a more sympathetic scientist-traveller than many of his fellow Europeans, Barth did not shy away from recording his displeasure at certain local customs. He is rendered almost apoplectic when recording one particular annoyance during the course of a more than nine-month sojourn in Timbuktu. One can imagine him spluttering over his notebook as he wrote, “I was disgusted by the custom which prevails in the houses like that in which I was lodged, of using the terrace as a sort of closet; and I had great difficulty in preventing my guide, Ammer el Walati, who still stayed with me and made the terrace his usual residence, from indulging in this filthy practice.” He would have been much happier in the days of indoor plumbing.

From early on, European merchants saw the benefits of new Saharan markets, and were keen to secure exclusive trading rights to these with whatever local leaders they could. This was precisely the mission they paid Barth to conduct, and which he did after overcoming certain personal reservations. Barth reports the eagerness of the Sultan of Sokoto in agreeing to guarantee the security of any British traders who were to come into his domain. This promise was made, as Barth notes, even though the sultan’s control over his territory was limited, as was his ability to fulfil any such promise.

Another mid-nineteenth-century German inspired to explore the Sahara was Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs (1831-96). From Bremen, Rohlfs was the most indefatigable of this group of Saharan scholarly wanderers; family expectations saw him first studying medicine then joining the French Foreign Legion once he was a qualified doctor. It was Rohlfs’ time in the legion that made him want to discover more of the desert. He achieved an important step towards fulfilling this dream when he became a physician in Morocco, in the army of the Alaouite ruler Sultan Muhammad IV, also being made chief of sanitation for the sultan’s harem, a job not to be sniffed at.

As well as converting to Islam, Rohlfs made good use of this period to improve his knowledge of the Sahara and his language skills, becoming fluent in Arabic. Eventually setting off as an explorer in his own right, he was attacked in southern Morocco and left for dead. His medical training saved his life, as he was able to treat his injuries, which included the near severing of one of his legs. Undeterred, once recovered from the attack, Rohlfs resumed his career as a Saharan explorer, making a number of truly remarkable journeys.

Setting out in 1865, and following a route similar to that taken by the earlier Bornu Mission, Rohlfs successfully made the gruelling trek from Tripoli to Lake Chad, before continuing on to the Niger river. Following the course of the river, he eventually emerged into the Gulf of Guinea after a journey that lasted two years. Later expeditions took him to the far east of the Sahara and the Libyan Desert including Siwa and the even remoter oasis of Kufra, hitherto unseen by Europeans. In February 1874, while in the Libyan Desert in Egypt, Rohlfs recorded that he and his travelling companions experienced two days of very rare rainfall roughly sixty miles south-west of the oasis of Dakhla, and so named the spot Regenfeld, or Rain-field-as unlikely a name as one might imagine in one of the Sahara’s driest spots.

His reach and the extent of the observations he recorded as he travelled had no equal, a fact acknowledged by the Royal Geographical Society in 1868 when it presented him with one of its most prestigious awards, the Patron’s Medal. Rohlfs spent more than thirty years in Africa, engaged in many ground-breaking journeys, not just in the north of the continent (beyond the Sahara his travels took him from Abyssinia to Zanzibar). At the Brussels Conference of 1876, organized by Belgium’s King Leopold II to discuss Europe’s “civilizing” mission for Africa, Rohlfs represented German interests, having established himself as one of Bismarck’s most trusted confidants in matters of African imperialism.

Gustav Nachtigal (1834-85), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was another German medical man who became an army doctor and later explorer of the Sahara from 1862, when he first arrived in Algeria. Nachtigal moved to Algeria in the hope that the dry air would provide a cure for his tuberculosis. Like Rohlfs before him, he eventually became an employee of the state, in Nachtigal’s case a court physician to Muhammad III as-Sadiq, Bey of Tunis. While still employed by the Tunisian government, Nachtigal took part in a year-long military campaign against tribes from the Saharan south of the country which were hostile to the government.

Later, with help from Rohlfs, Nachtigal received a commission from Wilhelm I of Prussia to travel to the Sultanate of Bornu. Travelling first to the oasis of Murzuk in south-western Libya, Nachtigal made a nearly 500- mile diversion across barren desert to become the first European to reach the Tibesti Mountains in southern Libya and northern Chad. After exploring the desolate peaks, he made his way to Kukawa, capital of Bornu, where he was granted an audience with the sultan. From here, disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, Nachtigal continued south to Lake Chad.

With seemingly boundless energy, and his tuberculosis apparently no longer troubling him, Nachtigal next turned east and journeyed through the independent Saharan states of Wadai, Darfur and Kordofan, emerging from the desert on the Nile. Arriving in Khartoum, Nachtigal had chalked up another first for himself in the annals of Saharan travel by being the first European to traverse the route between Lake Chad and the White Nile, a demanding course that had defeated previous attempted crossings. Nachtigal kept a methodical and involved account of everything he encountered, from notes on local customs and dress to the weather, wildlife and geology. Nachtigal also produced detailed maps, which would prove of inestimable value to subsequent European ventures in the Sahara, not all of which were to travel as peacefully as his.

In all, this epic journey took Nachtigal five years and resulted in the publication of a three-volume account,
Sahara and Sudan
. Upon publication, he was made a number of offers, before accepting the post of consul general to Tunisia from the German government in 1884. He later became imperial commissioner to West Africa. In this latter role he was responsible for promoting German political and commercial interests in the region. He took to his new government job with enthusiasm; during his tenure he signed treaties with the indigenous leaders of both Togoland and Cameroon, which made the former a German colony and the latter a German protectorate.

One of the more sympathetic travellers of his time, Nachtigal could generally be relied upon to give an objective account of what he found. When he encountered generosity, kindness or intelligence among the local populations he was happy to document it, lacking the ingrained racial prejudice of many of his fellow Europeans. For a man who survived so many dangerous journeys across the length and breadth of the Sahara, it is a strange twist of fate that he died at sea while heading home to Germany. He was first buried at Grand-Bassem, Ivory Coast, before his remains were later ceremonially re-interred at Douala, Cameroon.

Algeria And Abd Al-Qadir

Going back a few years, to 1830, four years before Nachtigal was born, the French had invaded Algeria, renaming it “French Algeria”, and were soon forced into a bloody war of conquest. The year before the French invasion, Victor Hugo published a collection of verse called
Les Orientales
, sometimes translated as
Orientalia
. In part inspired by the Greek War of Independence against Ottoman rule, Hugo’s Orient was out of necessity an imagined East, he never having travelled to North Africa. In the prologue he wrote, “In Louis XIV’s time one was a Hellenist, now one is an Orientalist... For empires as for literatures, perhaps it will not be too long before the Orient is called upon to play a role in the Occident.” The reaction of the author of
Les Misérables
and other works that defended the rights and liberty of the common man to the invasion of Algeria is perhaps puzzling. later known as a great anti-imperialist, Hugo said of French involvement in Algeria: “Strange but true, what France lacks in Algiers is a little more barbarism. The Turks acted more quickly, more surely and made more progress: they were better at cutting off heads.” Although he later showed a great antipathy to the death penalty, even pleading in 1880 for the lives of captured Kabyle tribesmen who had fought against the French in Algeria, it is not clear if his political ambition forced him to make such seemingly hypocritical remarks, or whether they were simply the curse of a writer whose output overtook him.

Abd al-Qadir, Abd el-Kader or Abdel Kader as his name is also spelt, was the leader of native resistance to the French invasion of Algeria until his capture in 1847 and exile, first to France and later to Damascus. Born the son of a Sufi sheikh near Mascara, close to Oran, Abd al-Qadir’s campaign of guerrilla warfare against the French was marked both by the numerous victories he scored against superior numbers, and for the tactical truces struck between the two sides, which only ever lasted until the reality of new circumstances dictated the need for renewed military action. Somewhat unusually for a native rebel leader at this time, Abd al-Qadir enjoyed widespread popular support among those sections of the popular press in America and Britain that were critical of French aggression. His colourful nickname, the “Napoleon of the Arabs”, only served to reinforce the general anti-French sentiment.

Abd al-Qadir leads Algerian resistance to the French invasion

In a startlingly close retelling of the story of] Jugurtha’s resistance to the Roman invasion and conquest of North Africa, Abd al-Qadir was forced to flee to Morocco, having failed to gain the support of the Kabyle Berbers. Also like Jugurtha, upon reaching Morocco Abd al-Qadir was refused sanctuary, which ultimately forced him to surrender to the French. The parallel to the story of Jugurtha was not lost on the journalists of the day. Writing in
Bentley’s Miscellany
a year before Abd al-Qadir’s surrender, Everard Clive came out in support of the modern-day Jugurtha when he wrote, “Nearly 2,000 years have passed away since Rome, then in her full career of conquest... sent her Consuls to attack Jugurtha, King of Numidia, in the region where France now sends her Dukes and Marshals to strive against Abd-el-Kader.”