Congrats! You've Conquered A Beach Without An Ocean!

I don't think he meant it this way, but Douglas Porch titling his book Conquest of the Sahara felt highly sarcastic by the time I finished reading it. The book details the attempts of the French to conquer that expanse of sand and the people within it, for whatever reason the procolonialists can muster at any given moment. Sometimes they base it on perceived economic value, or when discussion of a Transsaharian railroad emerged, as a way to connect their colonial holdings along the Mediterranean coast with what they had in central Africa. Other times it was framed as necessary to protect themselves against other imperial powers, to take it before Britain or Germany could, not that either of those powers had any interest. And frequently it was an issue of national honor, especially after some poorly conceived expedition is wiped out by bands of Tuaregs.

Porch more or less wraps up the book after the French are able to send military units into the Ahaggar - an area the Tuareg controlled - and not get exterminated. This apparently demonstrated the French were there to stay, and there was no place they wouldn't go if they saw a need to. Porch says this opened up the Ahaggar to more Arabic trade, since the French would presumably protect the region, which lead to a shift in Tuareg culture to more of an Islamic style. Unfortunately, Porch leaves this for a brief epilogue at the end, which undercut his assertion. The prior 290 pages were mostly about the French stumbling about, lead by guides who might be leading them into traps, and were almost certainly robbing them blind, with the French either dying, retreating to the coast, or reaching their destination half-dead. If they're very lucky, they get where they're going, but have left a trail of destruction and pillaging behind them, which doesn't do much to help future expeditions. The French wanted to set the different groups against each other, but the way their soldiers behaved, they primarily succeeded in setting everyone against the French.

In discussing it with my father, he compared the situation to the United States in Vietnam (or France in what was then Indochina, for that matter). Wherever France had soldiers in the Sahara, they might control that location. If there were no soldiers, they controlled nothing. I suppose by the end, there may have been a sense of menace for the locals, that the French aren't here now, but if they caused trouble, the French would arrive and at least attempt to hunt them down.

One thing this book would have benefitted from was a map. A nice two page map, right at the beginning, with relevant locations marked, maybe the routes Flatters or Pein took marked on it. Because as it was, I had a difficult time understanding where a particular group might be coming from, or going, or how great the distance was. I will say Porch's descriptions of the landscape are quite excellent, but that really just gives a picture of a particular location, not so much its relation to anything else. It does take some time to get to the early attempts (roughly 100 pages before the ill-fated Flatters expeditions), but I like that Porch includes the various political struggles going on in Paris, and how they influenced what went on. He also looks at the difficulties the central government had in controlling the officers in Africa, especially those coming to the Sahara from the south, and why those offciers were so difficult to control.