The Sahara (36 page)

Howard Carter opens Tutankhamen’s tomb

The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb more than repaid Carnarvon’s investment and made Carter, with the help of the British journalist H. V Morton (later author of the popular
In Search of
series of travel books), the most famous archaeologist of all time. The fact that the tomb contained so many riches was what captivated the public. For gasp-inducing wonder, a pottery shard, however important, can never hope to compete with a golden death mask.

Of all the accounts left behind by foreigners who worked in the Sahara, one of the most pleasing is
A Cure for Serpents
by the Count Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1886-1968). When he first arrived Dr. Pirajno was responsible for a small group of Italian troops under the command of the Duke of Aosta. Nearly twenty years later, and after time in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, Pirajno was a count and the last Italian governor of Tripoli. As such, he handed control of the city over to British forces when they arrived in 1943.

A more sympathetic colonial administrator than many of his peers, Pirajno’s medical training also made him a careful observer of the people and places he visited, recognizing and appreciating the differences between the people he encountered. Writing about Ghadames, for example, Pirajno notes that it “is a strange country, and I learnt many things in the shade of its palm trees. The Ghadames speak Arabic with Arabs, Tamahak with the Tuaregs and Hausa with their servants, but among themselves they use a Berber dialect which no one speaks outside the walls of the city... Enclosed within their oasis and isolated in the vast desert, the Ghadames nevertheless maintain contacts all over the world; they combine the flabbiness of sedentary people with the broad vision of the nomads.”

When not tending the human sick, Pirajno turned his attention to sick animals which he was just as happy to treat. Here he describes a sick lion:

People who have never had a young lion with a fractured femur in the house will be unable to imagine how unsettling it can be. In the first place, someone had to take care of the beast... I sounded Jemberie and when, appealing to his religious sense, I mentioned that Neghesti was also one of God’s creatures, he agreed, but observed gravely that God had placed lions in the forest and not in men’s houses.

Another man who did not start his career as a government official was Hanns Vischer, who became a member of the British Colonial Administrative Service after starting out as a missionary. Originally Swiss, Vischer became a British citizen and gave up the missionary life to work among the Hausa of northern Nigeria. Although the majority of his career was spent working in the education sector in Nigeria, for which services he was knighted, he also produced an account of a 1906 journey,
Across the Sahara from Tripoli to Bornu
.

On a significant journey, crossing the desert along a former slave route, Vischer’s caravan of forty men and women and forty camels suffered a frequently waterless journey through British, French and Ottoman territory, gathering much original knowledge along the way. Vischer had hoped to do the reverse journey the next year but was denied permission by his superior in Nigeria. Major Sir Hanns Vischer retired from colonial service in 1939, spending the war working for the British Underground Propaganda Committee until his death in 1945.

Missionaries

The arrival in the Islamic Sahara of individuals preaching the Christian gospel was often seen as a threat not only to the quiet life of those living unremarkably in remote oases, but also to the authority, and possible stability, of the state. Where one foreign preacher was allowed to wander, others might follow, and men of the Good Book were sometimes the forerunners of men of the gun. Suspicion thus fell on Christian missionaries, who were viewed as theologically unsound and harbingers of conquest, perhaps reporting back on a town’s defences or the disposition of its inhabitants.

Few nineteenth-century missionaries were in the direct employ of their national governments but the majority of them unquestionably arrived with a strong belief that European imperial rule was in the best temporal and spiritual interests of the natives. Yet Islam was, and is, so dominant that any success on the part of European missionaries in finding converts among the denizens of the Sahara probably enjoyed no more than single figures.

The most famous foreign missionary to live in the Sahara was Charles Eugene de Foucauld (1858-1916). As a young man, the Strasbourg-born, aristocratic Foucauld was fond of those things most young men appreciate, including women and wine. General Laperinne, known in French history as the conqueror of the Sahara, and military cadet with Foucauld at the Ecole Speciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, used to say that when they trained together, “The only thing Foucauld liked about the mass was the wine.” Laperinne’s fame was such that during French rule Tamanrasset was called Fort Laperinne, becoming Tamanrasset only after Algerian independence. Although somewhat dissolute, Foucauld did well as an army officer, attracting some fame in France for his travels through southern Morocco, disguised as one Rabbi Joseph Aleman, gathering topographical and other intelligence for French military cartographers, for which exploits the Societe Geographique of Paris awarded him their Gold Medal.

Whatever else in his background or upbringing might have influenced his development, it was Foucauld’s travels in the Sahara that were the catalyst for his transformation in adulthood. Leaving the army, he toyed with the idea of converting to Islam before becoming a Trappist monk, to the surprise of everyone who knew him. Twelve years later, after living and studying in Palestine, whose deserts he found too heavily populated for his extreme ascetic tastes, he asked to be sent back to the Sahara. Foucauld moved to one of the Sahara’s most remote spots, Assekrem, which means “the end of the world” in Tamasheq, the Tuareg language. In the Ahaggar Mountains, thirty miles from the famed if hardly accessible Tamanrasset, the site provided Foucauld with the solitude for which he yearned.

Like St. Anthony 1600 years earlier, the desert’s loneliness was precisely what appealed to Foucauld. As one diary entry noted, “I find this desert life profoundly, deeply sweet. It is so pleasant and healthy to set oneself down in solitude, face to face with eternal things; one feels oneself penetrated by the truth.” Yet in spite of choosing the life of a hermit, Foucauld also frequently bemoaned his isolation and enjoyed the company of his compatriots on the rare occasions they visited.

De Foucauld, the hermit of Assekrem

Over time the Tuareg accepted Foucauld’s presence, allowing him to live among them for the next fifteen years. In terms of his mission to convert them, Foucauld must be considered a failure. As he wrote in a letter, those he converted consisted of “an old black woman at Beni Abbes. I also baptised a small baby who was in danger of dying, who had the joy of leaving this earth almost immediately for heaven. Lastly, I baptised a 13- year-old boy, but it was not I who converted him. He was brought to me by a French sergeant who had taught him his catechism and prepared him to receive the sacraments. You see, my dear brother, I am really a useless servant.

Of more practical use, Foucauld produced the first dictionary of Tamasheq. One of the more intriguing discoveries he made while compiling this was that the language has no word for virgin.

The coming of the First World War increased political tensions in the Sahara, so that not even in the remoteness of the Ahaggar was Foucauld able to retreat from the world. The Sanussi fraternity, which had long been agitating for independence, started acting in force against French interests, including raids against remote military outposts.

In December 1916, Foucauld was staying in a French compound at Tamanrasset when it was attacked by a band of Sanussi, searching for weapons and information about French forces in the area. During the course of the robbery Foucauld was accidentally shot in the head by a nervous youth who was guarding him. He died almost immediately. Today Assekrem is a place of pilgrimage; the numbers who visit the hermitage would no doubt have forced Foucauld to move elsewhere in search of a quieter spot in which to pursue his life of contemplation.

Another example of the European religious presence in North Africa since the nineteenth century is that of the French Roman Catholic religious order, the Peres Blanc, or White Fathers. Founded in 1868 by the first Archbishop of Algiers, later Cardinal, Charles Martial Lavigerie, the order’s stated mission was the conversion of Africa. With this aim in mind, it dispatched its first missionaries to the Sahara in 1876. As Lavigerie wrote at the time, “At this moment, three of our missionaries are with the Tuaregs en route for Timbuktu. They are resolved to establish themselves permanently in the capital of the Sudan or to give their lives in the cause of eternal truth.” All three were killed, along with their Chaamba guide, within days of entering the Sahara, possibly even before Lavigerie had written his rather optimistic note. Five years later, the next group of White Fathers to venture into the Sahara met with the same fate. Much more recently, a number of White Fathers were murdered during the course of the Algerian Civil War.

Paul Bowles was also familiar with the work of the White Fathers, paying the following tribute to them in
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands are Blue
(1963):

More extraordinary were the Peres Blancs, intelligent and well-educated. There was no element of resignation in their eagerness to spend the remainder of their lives in distant outposts, dressed as Moslems, speaking Arabic, living in the rigorous, comfortless manner of the desert inhabitants. They made no converts and they expected to make none. “We are only here to show the Moslem that the Christian can be worthy of respect,” they explained.

To this day the order maintains houses in a number of Saharan nations, including Algeria and Tunisia, although they now concentrate their energies on education rather than proselytizing.

The Sahara has attracted the religiously inspired since time immemorial. Its appeal for anyone seeking solitude is obvious. Life in the desert can be demanding, and perhaps there is an underlying association between the intrinsic discomfort of living in such a physically challenging environment and the challenge of a life of contemplation. In the desert though, life is simpler. With physical needs reduced to a minimum, it is expected that the purity and simplicity of desert life will help those who are searching for God, by whatever name they refer to him. As Merton once wrote, quoting St. Anthony, “The basic principle of desert life: that God is the authority and that apart from His manifest will there are few or no principles.”

Literary Travellers and Tourists

“Caravan tours across the Sahara may well be organized by the tourist agencies in a not distant future.”

Frank Cana, article in
Geographical Journal
(1915)

The Sahara has been a destination for foreign travellers for millennia. In centuries past many of these were soldiers; today they are more likely holidaymakers. Tourist souvenirs have replaced the spoils of war. Soldiers and settlers aside, there have always existed those who have journeyed to see what they might see, following different impulses; these usually forgotten journeymen and women passed through the desert, some intending to return home, others not. For centuries after the Arab invasion, the largest annual migration was by those performing the
hajj
to Mecca, and back.