Chemin de fer trans-Saharan
The Chemin de Fer Transsaharien (German: Transsahara-Bahn , also Sahara-Eisenbahn or Saharaquerbahn ) was a planned railway line which was to open up North and West Africa for the French colonial empire based on the model of the North American transcontinental railways. It played a crucial role in the history of French colonial policy, although it was never built.
prehistory
France had conquered Algiers in 1830 under the pretext of fighting the centuries-old Islamic corsair mischief in the southern Mediterranean off the coast of the barbarian states . In fact, the Algerian war and pirate fleet no longer existed, but was sunk in the naval battle of Navarino in 1827 . Rather, the French King Charles X was looking for a foreign and military success in order to stabilize his battered position in French domestic politics. It was overthrown in the July Revolution , but France had now occupied overseas territory that was difficult to rule. In the following 18 years, the French colonial troops were involved in ever new battles, especially with the legendary Emir of Masqara, Abd ul-Qadir, better known as Abd el-Kader (1808–1883). The costly battles forbade the French government, which was striving for its international reputation, to give up Algiers. Instead, the colonial troops crossed the Atlas Mountains and advanced into the northern Sahara . At the same time, French units advanced from the colony of Senegal into the western Sahara, which was ruled by the Moors and the Fulbe . The long-term goal envisaged was the Niger Arch with the old trading metropolis Timbuktu .
The revolution of 1848 interrupted these attempts at expansion. France's Emperor Napoléon III. was little interested in Africa and let the British take precedence for a few years. In 1849 the British government sent the "Central African Mission", which also included the German Africa explorer Heinrich Barth (1821-1865). This expedition was able to establish friendly contacts with the leaders of the Tuareg of the Tassili n'Ajjer , the Ajjer Mountains, and also in Timbuktu, where the isolated advances of ambitious French colonial commanders were viewed with suspicion, concluded Barth, the only European survivor of the expedition, A trade and protection agreement on behalf of the British government, which London never ratified after interest in the Trans-Saharan route had waned since the mid-1850s.
French interest groups, who were primarily based in Algiers and hoped to be able to start a lucrative trade across the desert, came into this breach. On their behalf, the only nineteen-year-old Henri Duveyrier (1840-1892) visited the Tuareg leaders in the Ajjer Mountains in 1859, with whom Barth had become friends. The strong man of the Ajjer-Tuareg, Ikhenukhen, was looking for a new ally against an impending occupation of his country by the Turks, who advanced from Tripoli into the Sahara and had already occupied the trading city of Murzuk in Fezzan . Ikhenukhen signaled his willingness to sign a treaty with the French side, which was signed in the trading town of Ghadames in 1862 . However, there was no lively trade because Napoleon III. was too busy with his colonial adventures in Indochina and Mexico .
Henri Duveyrier, who had been welcomed by the Tuareg, drew an idealized picture of the desert nomads in his publications, without realizing that the Tuareg were not ready to give up their trade monopoly in favor of European competition. They were dependent on trade with the Sahel zone and would have been willing at best to bring European finished products to the south as middlemen.
The plans for the Chemin de Fer Trans-Saharan
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 buried all hopes of colonial expansion in North Africa for several years. Ambitious politicians in the bourgeois-liberal camp around Léon Gambetta had not given up their dreams, however, and when the monarchist right suffered a severe electoral defeat in 1877, liberal figures moved to the fore of state and government. Above all, they tried to present the public with a spectacular achievement that identified them as the better political option over the conservatives. The Minister for Transport and Public Works, Charles de Freycinet (1828–1923) was inspired by plans that the otherwise little important Africa researcher Paul Soleillet peddled at banks and ministries: with euphoric reports and sometimes absurd figures on the volume of trade in the Trans-Saharan trade, the researcher advertised for a railway line that runs from Algiers - or even better from Tunis - along the old trade route to Lake Chad into the Kingdom of Bornu and from there to the Niger Arch, i.e. H. to Timbuktu. Astronomical gains were promised, and the railroad through the most inhumane deserts was to prove to the world that France, despite the weakening by Germany, was able to achieve a gigantic technical masterpiece. The press picked up on these fantasies, and the government could no longer avoid this pull. The first expert commissions were set up and experts such as Henri Duveyrier were asked for their opinions.
In this situation, the so-called Berlin Congress took place in the German capital , at which the great powers - above all Great Britain and Austria-Hungary - once again appropriated parts of the Ottoman Empire . Otto von Bismarck offered the French delegation to grow to Tunis to use, and signaled the neighbors in that it was ready to support any French colonial enterprise diplomatically if France's hostile attitude towards the German Reich for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to give up . This was a positive signal for the French colonial lobby, because the possession of Tunis, which was nominally subordinate to the Ottoman Sultan , would have made the railway project easier, since the route here would not have been hindered by mountains. Freycinet, who was appointed Prime Minister in December 1879, tried to acquire the concessions for all the planned railway lines in Tunis for French consortia as soon as he took office, encountering fierce opposition from British investors from Malta and, above all, from Italian bidders which led to serious diplomatic entanglements for several months and forced Bismarck several times to make representations to the other governments in the interests of France.
Campaign climax and disaster
In 1880 the planning entered the decisive phase. The occupation of Tunis seemed only a matter of time. Contacts were made with the northern Tuareg, through whose territory the railway line was to run. The contact person with the Ajjer-Tuareg, Ikhenukhen, had long since been ousted from power and, in order to at least appear to maintain his influence, had placed himself under the protection of the Turks and resided more or less as their puppet in the caravan town of Ghat . At the same time a bloody war had broken out with the Tuareg of the Ahaggar Mountains. Warnings from travelers who have been to the Sahara, e.g. B. the German Erwin von Bary , were ignored. The dream of “French India” in Africa was more powerful. Those responsible in Paris and Algiers did not see that it would be completely impossible to travel through the Ahaggar country with letters of protection from the Ajjer Tuareg. Despite all objections, an armed expedition under the command of Captain Paul Flatters was sent from Laghouat in southern Algeria to the Ajjer Tuareg in the summer of 1880 . But they refused to let a military department travel through their country, as this clearly contradicted the Treaty of Ghadames (1862). Flatters had to return to the French colony without having achieved anything.
He was soon assigned to lead a second expedition. For this purpose he made contact with Ahitaghel, the amenokal ("king") of the Ahaggar-Tuareg. He called on the French side not to enter the land of the Ahaggar tribes because he could not guarantee the protection of Christians. This was entirely true because Ahitaghel's own position as elected ruler wavered. Other leaders accused him of being too conciliatory with the Ajjer Tuareg. When the French expedition approached the Ahaggar massif, despite repeated warnings, Ahitaghel was forced to attack the French for the sake of his own position of power and thereby present himself as the military leader of his people. Given the technical superiority of the French, he decided to lure them into a trap. With letters in which he adopted a completely new tone, he now invited Flatters and his team to come to Tadjmut's well. Flatters let himself be lured and made the mistake of splitting up his crew at the agreed meeting point, so that the Tuareg had an easy time when they attacked the military column in January 1881 and completely knocked down the division that Flatters led personally. Some of the French who had been waiting at the well managed to save themselves, but died of thirst in the desert. Later heroic legends painted the picture of desperate people eating each other while the Tuareg watched. The positive image that Heinrich Barth and Henri Duveyrier had drawn of the nomads had turned into its opposite.
Tunis instead of Timbuktu
The news of the destruction of the Flatters column hit the French public like a shock. The French consul in Tripoli even fabricated letters, allegedly from Ahitaghel, in which the Tuareg ruler proudly reported to the Turkish governor that he had destroyed the Christians in the name of Allah and asked for support from the Turkish army. The forgery was obvious, as the Tuareg of the Ahaggar Mountains had no reason to put themselves in the service of the Sultan, but in view of the anti-Islamic hysteria that had spread to several European countries, such documents were a perfect match for the general mood. At the same time the National Assembly was discussing the final blow to Tunis. There were enough critics like Georges Clemenceau , who accused the new Prime Minister Jules Ferry of getting too close to the arch enemy Germany and, moreover, of pursuing a policy from which only big business would benefit. Almost at the same time as the news of the failure of the Flatters expedition, it became known in Paris that there had been armed clashes with rebellious Kabyle warriors in the border area between the colony of Algeria and the reign of Tunis . In the whipped up atmosphere, very few French were able to distinguish between Tunis and Tuareg, and the National Assembly voted on April 23, 1881 at a ratio of 421 to 1 for the necessary loans to mobilize the navy and land-based units needed to invade Tunis . Otto v. Bismarck urged the French side not to accept the setback, but to strengthen their presence in North Africa.
With the occupation of Tunis on May 12th 1881, according to historical scholarship, the age of the “new imperialism ” began for France , at the same time the Trans-Saharan project was put in a drawer. Until the First World War, brochures were still circulating in which the dream of a train through the desert was reactivated again and again, but the French colonial politicians had realized that the investments for such a gigantic prestige project would never be amortized. Only smaller stretches from the coast to the northern Sahara were realized. The Tuareg country remained a taboo zone for more than a decade until, in the 1890s, ambitious military personnel, sometimes without direct instructions from the Colonial Ministry, advanced towards Timbuktu, which was occupied by the future Marshal Joseph Joffre in 1894 . The Ahaggar country fell into the hands of the French only in 1902.
In France, immediately after the January 1881 disaster, a scapegoat was sought. The political leadership around Freycinet and Ferry was unwilling to admit that they had been chasing a phantom. The culprit was now the African explorer Henri Duveyrier, who was charged with portraying the Tuareg, who had turned out to be brutal murderers, in a far too positive light. Duveyrier tried to rehabilitate himself by blaming the puritan Sanussiya movement and claiming against their better judgment that this fundamentalist brotherhood had incited the Muslim population of the Sahara to hate the Christians. Duveyrier could not withstand the constant pressure. He fell into a depression and in 1892 committed suicide.
literature
- Josef Chavanne : The Sahara, or from oasis to oasis. Images from nature and folk life in the great African desert. Hartleben, Vienna et al. 1879.
- Lagha Chegrouche: Géopolitique transsaharienne de l'énergie. In: Géopolitique. Revue de l'Institut International de Géopolitique. No. 108, Janvier 2010, ISSN 0752-1693 , p. 67.
- Lagha Chegrouche: Géopolitique transsaharienne de l'énergie, le jeu et l'enjeu? In: Revue de l'énergie. Vol. 61, No. 593, Janvier / Février 2010, ISSN 0303-240X , pp. 5-14.
- Henri Paul Eydoux: Exploring the Sahara. Schwarzwald-Verlag, Freudenstadt 1949.
- Lyte Mitchell Fozard: Charles-Louis de Freycinet. The Railways and the Expansion of the French Empire in North and West Africa. 1877-1893. Boston 1975 (Boston, Boston University Graduate School, dissertation, 1975).
- Jean Ganiage: L 'expansion coloniale de la France sous la Troisième République. 1871-1914. Payot, Paris 1968.
- Alexander S. Kanya-Forstner: The Conquest of the Western Sudan. A Study in French Military Imperialism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1969.
- Jeremy Keenan: The Tuareg. People of Ahaggar. Lane, London 1977, ISBN 0-7139-0636-7 .
- Douglas Porch: The Conquest of the Sahara. Cape, London 1985, ISBN 0-224-02134-6 .
- Paul Vuillot: L'exploration du Sahara. Étude historique et geographique. Challamel, Paris 1895.