The unconquerable sands of the Sahara

Through the second half of the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th, the French engaged in one of the oddest, most futile acts of manifest destiny ever attempted: They tried to conquer the Sahara Desert. Humans have always sought to assert their will over nature and over one another, but though the Sahara can certainly be crossed, it is nearly as unconquerable as the ocean. Generations of Frenchmen, writes Fergus Fleming, “entered a region that defied Western notions of permanence.” They came determined to civilize the region, “but the Sahara was the same after their deaths as before -- a vast expanse of sand and rock in which nothing would really change and upon which nothing could leave a lasting impression.”

The Sahara is vast. It covers an area larger than the continental United States and stretches from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and from the Atlas Mountains of North Africa south to what is now Nigeria. For centuries, caravans crossed the sands to and from the trade-rich entrepot of Timbuktu, and nomads known as the Tuareg carved out a perilous existence in the arid region. By the time the French arrived in Algeria in 1830, the old trade routes were in decline and the Sahara was little more than an empty sea of heat and dust.

Fleming, whose “Barrow’s Boys” was about various British exploratory expeditions of the first half of the 19th century, tries to personalize his new narrative by focusing on two individuals, Henri Laperrine and Charles de Foucauld. The former was a soldier and an officer; the latter was an aristocrat who became a monk and lived a harsh, ascetic life in some of the most forbidding places in an already forbidding region.

Over the course of more than three decades, Laperrine and Foucauld were involved in every major campaign launched by the French government to pacify the Sahara. Foucauld, who comes across in Fleming’s account as a bizarre figure driven to mollify his internal demons by the time-honored method of abnegation of the flesh, became something of a legend in France. Laperrine was the quintessence of the French officer: educated at St. Cyr (as was Foucauld), steeped in notions of France’s “civilizing mission” and honorable to a fault.

Energized by Emperor Napoleon III’s ambitions for an empire in Africa and then kept alive by the bourgeoisie of the Third Republic, the idea of linking France’s colonies in North Africa to its territory in Central Africa persisted, and the only way to do so was to make the Sahara safe for passage. Talk of a trans-Saharan railroad was enough to send even the least imaginative merchant of Lyon into paroxysms of imperialist delight. In an age of European expansion, the French feared, rightly, that if they didn’t seize control of the Sahara, the British or the Germans would, regardless of the fact that it offered nothing of significance other than acreage.

The attempt entailed decades of indecisive skirmishes with the Tuareg. Armed with far superior weaponry, the French were able to inflict severe casualties, but only when they could actually find the adversary. In time, the tribes offered less resistance, but the desert was never made truly secure. Even so, the French government poured a ceaseless stream of money, men and resources into the endeavor and ordered officers such as Laperrine to pacify one region after another.

This is history without the dramatic denouement that writers crave and readers demand. Unfortunately, Fleming’s attempt to weave a narrative around Laperrine and Foucauld is not a success. While Foucauld in particular is a writer’s dream -- a solitary figure who was never at peace, who tried to square mysticism with civilization and retreated to the solitude of the desert -- he remains too enigmatic to serve as a protagonist. Laperrine, a soldier’s soldier, is staid and decent, but Fleming (by his own admission) has precious few records of him and seems unable to use what there is to create a dynamic character. The result is a curious, inchoate and disappointing account of a curious, amorphous -- and suddenly relevant -- period of history.

Though Fleming captures the hopelessness of the French efforts to conquer the Saharan expanse, he does not peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Tuareg. Foucauld wanted to transform them into junior French citizens, and he set up missions and schools to do just that. Yet the tribes resisted. They had learned that the best way to defeat an enemy was to wait patiently. The desert would win in the end. The states that replaced the French hegemony -- Niger, Chad, Morocco and, most prominently, Algeria -- did manage to subdue not just the Tuareg but the Berbers of North Africa, yet even today the Sahara is a world apart. There are roads and enclaves, and there is some oil, but most of the region is as isolated and uninhabited as it was two centuries ago.

While the lives of Foucauld and Laperrine thus seem to have been wasted, “The Sword and the Cross” provides a vital lesson about the limits of power. The French at the turn of the 20th century were substantially more powerful -- economically and militarily -- than the Tuareg. Yet, like the Taliban and groups allied with Al Qaeda today, the Tuareg simply faded into the landscape and waited. Terrain still matters, and parts of the globe can still hold their own against the efforts of powerful nations to conquer them. The lesson is clear: In the steep, arid mountains of Afghanistan, as in the sands of the Sahara, conquest is elusive and force may never succeed. Of course, each new generation believes that it is different -- that the advance of its technology means that history doesn’t apply. So far, each new generation has also been wrong. *