People on this coast made their first contact with Europe when the Portuguese Henrique el Navegador sailed past in 1441. His men went ashore and captured twelve nomads to take with them.
Thus the manhunt began. The small fishing villages along the coast had nothing but stones and spears with which to defend themselves. In 1443, Eannes de Azurara relates:
Some were drowned in the sea, others hid in their cabins, yet others tried to bury their children in the sand in order to return later to fetch them. But Our Lord God, who rewards everything well done, decided as compensation for the hard work our men had done in His service that day to allow them to conquer their enemies and take 165 prisoners, men, women and children, not counting those killed or who killed themselves.
At the end of the 1400s, when Portugal and Spain divided up the world between them, the Spaniards were given the Saharan coast, as it lay close to the Spanish Canary Isles. But by the time four hundred Spaniards stepped ashore to take possession of the area, the Saharans had had time to organize resistance. Only a hundred Spaniards escaped with their lives. The hunt for slaves continued all through the 1500s, but for almost four hundred years the Saharans managed to prevent Europeans from gaining a foothold on the coast.
12
At the tip of the Cap Juby headland there is no archipelago, only one small island.
A Scot called Donald MacKenzie opened a store there in 1875. He called it the North West Africa Company and successfully traded cloth, tea and sugar for wool, leather and ostrich feathers.
The Sultan of Morocco disliked the competition. In 1895, he bought the store for £50,000 and closed it.
MacKenzie was also a thorn in the flesh of the Spanish traders on the Canary Isles, where he had a base. They wanted to take over his profitable caravan trade and exploit the rich coastal fishing grounds. In 1884, they sent men to the Sahara and built a fort on the next headland, the Dakla Peninsula, and called it Villa Cisneros.
Cap Juby from the air. (Musée d’Air France)
The Saharans attacked the fort constantly, the caravans never turned up, profits were non-existent and the Spanish state had to take over.
By 1914, the French had subjugated the interior of the Sahara. In the north, they had occupied Morocco. In Europe, the First World War was being fought. Only in the Spanish Sahara was nothing happening. The commanding officer in Villa Cisneros, Fransisco Bens, had been rotting away there for ten years. Now he put his soldiers onto a ship and sailed north to capture Cap Juby.
The Admiralty found out and ordered the ship to return to Villa Cisneros immediately.
But Bens didn’t give up. On foot, he marched his men north along the coast.
As they approached Cap Juby, they were overtaken by a Spanish cruiser, ordered to board and were once again conveyed ignominiously back to Villa Cisneros.
Not until 1916 was Bens finally able to occupy Cap Juby, this time at the request of the Saharans, who preferred Bens to the aggressive French, and also of the French, who preferred Bens to the aggressive Saharans.
Of course, by then trade had long gone elsewhere and MacKenzie’s island became the Spanish equivalent of Devil’s Island, a prison as loathed by the gaolers as it was feared by the prisoners.
Its little fort was surrounded by two kilometres of barbed wire, says Joseph Ressel, the French writer, there on a visit. At night, nowhere was safe outside the walls. It was difficult to tell the difference between soldiers and convicts: all were unshaven, unwashed and in the same ragged uniforms. The officers sat silently in the mess, playing dice, their faces expressionless.
But in the early 1920s, this godforsaken place gained a sudden importance when the French airline Compagnie Latécoère needed it as a stopover on the first Toulouse-Dakar air route.
And in the mid-1920s, when the Germans and the French were competing for the air routes to South America and German agents supplied the Saharans with arms and ammunition to shoot down French planes – then Cap Juby became a focal point.
In the spring of 1927, a new airport chief was appointed to Cap Juby with the task of rescuing shot-down French pilots and creating better relations with the Saharans. His name was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
13
I loved the airmen in Saint-Exupéry’s books. The pilots of those days were kind of canoeists of the air, with no more than their lower bodies inside the ‘flying machine’, as it was called. Flying was shooting the rapids with the propellor as a paddle.
The primitive, single-engined machines flew below the clouds to see their way. In fog or a sandstorm, they were lost. One in six flights between Cap Juby and Dakar ended in a crash or emergency landing in the desert.
And when the pilot in his thick leather overalls, ‘heavy and cumbersome as a diver’, clambered out of his cockpit – then, if the rescuers did not get to him in time, what awaited him was captivity or death at the hands of hostile nomads. Altogether, 121 pilots were lost.
There was no shortage of exciting adventures in the boys’ books of my childhood. But they had one failing – they had no idea what they were talking about.
If you asked Edward S. Ellis how Deerfoot behaved when he ‘crept invisibly through the thicket’, there would have been a silence. Ellis was not an Indian. He had no idea how it happened. I could see that already from the way he wrote.
Saint-Ex, on the other hand, was a real airman. He knew that the pilot can feel from the vibrations in his own body when fifteen tons of matter has achieved the ‘maturity’ required to take off. He knew what it felt like to separate the plane from the ground – ‘with a movement like picking a flower’ – and let it be borne by the air.
His knowledge was no thin veneer concealing massive ignorance. He was authentic. When he called the desert sun ‘a pale soap bubble in the mist’, I knew he had seen it. He had been there. It was in his language.
Saint-Ex was the first writer who gave me some sense of what ‘style’ is.
14
Today, Cap Juby is called Tarfaya. I book in at the Green March hotel. There is no other.
The town is white with blue front doors and flat roofs, a forest of reinforcement rods protruding from the walls – the houses are all prepared for a second floor which has not yet arrived.
The small shops are just holes in the walls, all with an identical assortment of candies, cigarettes, batteries, sewing thread and soft drinks.
I start asking after old people who might have memories of the 1920s. Yes, there should be a few. But while I am waiting for them, a courteous Moroccan policeman comes and asks me to accompany him to the police station.
They already know everything there. The squealing radio with its crackling voices has told them where I have come from, where I have spent the night, which police posts I have passed, all my father’s first names, all my mother’s first names and her maiden name, and also that claim not to know the names of my father’s father or my maternal grandmother.
So I want to talk to old Saharans in Tarfaya, do I? The chief gendarme is full of goodwill. Tomorrow I am to meet the mayor. He will help me.
I am allowed to see the charming and obliging side of the system of control. Other people get the disappearances and the torture.
15
The front door of the Green March hotel is kept shut with a thick piece of paper folded twice and jammed in between the door and the doorpost. Whenever anyone fails to do this, the door swings open and slams violently in the wind.
There is a café on the ground floor. For dinner, I am served two eggs apparently fried in waste engine oil. I eat the bread with gratitude.
The café has the town’s only television set. The news begins with the usual good wishes and other courtesies which Hassan, the King, has exchanged with other heads of state. Then comes what Hassan has done during the day, often with flashbacks to what Hassan had done previously on the same day or in the same genre. It ends with a prediction of what Hassan will do tomorrow, illustrated with film of what it looked like when
Hassan last did the same thing.
The few seconds left at the end are devoted to other world news.
Then the screen goes blank. Everyone waits patiently. The landlord gets up, climbs onto a chair and puts in a video.
After ten minutes, the tape breaks. Everyone goes on calmly watching. The landlord runs the tape back and starts it again, the volume higher this time – rather like trying to get through a sandy stretch of road by backing the car, revving the engine and trying it faster.
But it’s no use. The tape gives up at exactly the same place in the action.
No one moves a muscle. Everyone stays seated, full of confidence. The landlord goes to fetch another video. This time we go straight into the middle of a quite different story, the beginning missing. No one reacts. Everyone gratefully goes on watching.
All night the door slams violently in the wind blowing off the sea.
16
A man has gasped all his life, then draws his first really deep breath. After ‘a life of gasping’, as he calls it, he at last, slowly, with great enjoyment, drinks a large glass of cold air.
17
A tall yellow building behind the main street dominates the town. The walls are crowned with watchtowers, with open fields of fire in all directions. This is where Colonel Bens resided in 1925. Now it is the Moroccan mayor’s office.
The mayor sits below a preternaturally large photograph of Hassan and wears an Italian ‘camel-hair ulster’ made of nylon. With him are some old people in real, smelly camel-hair clothes, among them the son of the interpreter who accompanied Saint-Ex on his flights.
He tells me about an emergency landing in the desert. His father kept the ‘bandits’ at a distance with his rifle while Saint-Ex repaired the engine. They took off at dusk with bullets whistling round their ears.
‘That man saved my life,’ said Saint-Ex. Afterwards it was all made into a film so that the whole world could see it.
‘Were you there yourself?’
‘Not me. But Ahmed was.’
The mayor promises to summon Ahmed the next day.
18
I know which tiles are loose on the steep hotel stairs. Even in the darkness, I can find the footrest of the squatting-toilet. Life in Tarfaya is becoming familiar.
In the mornings, I breakfast on bread and water. Decades old, the bed I am sitting on still has the plastic covering it had been transported in. That probably increases its second-hand value. The bottom sheet is the kind that only goes as far as your knees. There is no top sheet.
Through the little window I can see across the constantly windswept headland to the island with its dark, abandoned prison. Some boys are playing football on the shore, in the wind coming off the sea.
The mayor’s office opens at eight-thirty, but there is no point going there until half-past ten. I sit in the sun outside the hotel and warm up as I wait. The greengrocer puts his wooden boxes out on the pavement. You buy bread from a blue hatch. A Saharan in a white jibba walks past. They are a rare sight here. Uniformed Moroccans are in the majority.
A small girl with a school bag buys some carrots. A man walks past with a large bunch of fragrant mint. His feet are cracked. Fish are being weighed on the corner – some a type of perch, vertically striped or long and silvery with horizontal stripes, glittering in the morning light.
At about half-past ten, I meet Ahmed, aged eighty-five.
‘Saint-Ex was different. He tried to learn our language. None of the Spaniards did that. He studied with a teacher of the Koran called Sidi l’Hussein Oueld n’Ouesa. The Spaniards just sat in their fort. They didn’t fly. But Saint-Ex was a travelling man, so he had to be able to speak languages. He was a man who knew how to negotiate and often did so over men held for ransom.’
‘Is it true that the tribes shot at the French planes?’
‘Of course.’ He smiles inwardly as though lost in happy memories.
‘Why?’
This causes a certain confusion. Naturally they shot, but why?
Gradually the intellectual explanation appears: we were defending ourselves against colonialism. Then comes the current opportune explanation: we were acting on the orders of the Sultan of Morocco. Anyhow, they lived off taking prisoners and demanding ransoms. Why then shouldn’t they shoot?
19
The Moor doesn’t defend his freedom, for in the desert you are always free. No visible treasures, for the desert is bare. No, the Moor defends a secret realm and that’s why I admire him.
The aristocrat Saint-Ex has a tendency to ennoble everything that arouses his admiration.
He ennobles the airline pilots as a new aristocracy of the air. He ennobles their opponents, ‘the Moor’, as knights of an exotic realm of pride.
He romanticizes the bearers of a new and unknown technology and a distant unknown people – and so defends old familiar feudal values, rejected by capitalist Europe.
Saint-Ex could not have known about the invisible treasures the desert does in fact contain, for phosphates, iron ore and oil had still not been found in the Sahara. But that it was their freedom the Saharans were defending – he ought to have known that.
He had done his military service in conquered Morocco. He had travelled in conquered Algeria. He knew that freedom is not something the desert automatically provides. ‘The Moors’ on the African Atlantic coast in 1927 were in fact the last unsubjugated Saharans – a result of the outstanding weakness of the Spanish colonial powers and the Moors’ own bitter resistance.
Perhaps it was natural that Saint-Ex could not support this struggle for freedom, as it was at him and his friends the Saharans were shooting with their German Mauser rifles.
But he never even realized what the struggle was about. It all became romanticism.
20
White garden furniture dazzles my eyes. I recognize it from previous dreams. Why does it keep coming back? The table and chairs are not spray-lacquered, but their wide boards are painted with layer after layer of thick oil paint. They are not ‘creamy white’, for there is no tinge of yellow, but the colour has the fat puffiness of whipped cream. The light is reflected from the gleaming white surfaces with a force that makes my eyes smart and everyone squint. Which everyone? Don’t know. Their faces are empty, obliterated, wiped out like my whole childhood.
There is no one to ask. They are all dead. But from the depths of the past, this table throws out a sunspot strong enough to wake me up.
21
The next morning while I sit warming up outside the hotel, the garbage cart comes past, drawn by a mule. The garbage pails are emptied into the open cart, just as used to happen in Älvsjö when I was a child. On the corner they are selling yellow dates on stems, gathered in bunches like the birch sprigs and coloured feathers of Lent at home.
Today’s old man points out the exact place where the Frenchman’s house stood: right next to the fortress wall on the side facing the airfield. They used to hear music from there at night, notes from an old gramophone he wound up by hand. For company he had four animals: cat, dog, a chimpanzee and a hyena.
In the evenings I carefully transfer this information from my tape recorder into my notebook. I think I can at last see Saint-Ex fairly clearly in front of me as he sits at his desk, surrounded by his animals.
The light flows from the lamp like oil. I see him dipping his pen into the inkwell, which I used to do when I was learning to write. The sea roars out there in the darkness, the cries of the guards on duty echoing between the walls. A light rain appears to be falling – the sound of the moist night air condensing on the metal roof. Sand crunches between the papers on the desk. Saint-Ex is writing.
When he leaves Cap Juby eighteen months later, he has with him the manuscript of his first novel, Southern Mail. And within him he is carrying what are the as-yet-unwritten desert stories in The Little Prince and Wind, Sand and Stars.
22
What fascinated me as a boy when I read those books was their belief that the airman
was a new kind of man.
A person taking off from the ground also elevated himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding, created by the particular experiences modern technology made possible.
The airman was not yet a captain in the routine trade between tax-free shops of the world’s cities. Like the astronaut now, the airman was the most modern man of his day, a representative of the future on a temporary stopover in what was soon to be the past.
Saint-Exupéry and his best friend, Henri Guillaumet, standing in front of their plane. (Musée d’Air France)
That gave him tremendous authority, which Saint-Ex used to ask yet again the great questions.
What is man? What are we for?
Man makes himself, he said.
We aren’t born man, we become that.
We become that through solidarity with each other.
We become that by taking responsibility.
I loved his gravity when he said such things, quite shamelessly, with the same endless trust in his reader as the airman had in the empty air. In that solemnity, he was so close to me, I could lean forward and touch him.
He taught me to demand of a writer not just excitement and adventure, but also knowledge, seriousness and presence. Presence most of all.
If the writer is not there himself in his writing, how can he demand that you should be?
To Smara
23
‘Like a pearl-diver, I must immediately return,’ wrote Michel Vieuchange in his diary.
Desert Divers Page 2