People of the veil

by Baron Francis James Rennell Rodd Rennell of Rodd

The fourth of Leo’s areas inhabited by the Lemta is described as extending from the desert east of Air as far as the country of the Berdeoa. This area seems to be that in which the Chad road and the wells to the east of it are found. It would include a part of the desert of Agadem, the Great Steppe north of Lake Chad, and oases like Jado and the Kawar depression.

The fifth and last area is that of the people of Berdeoa; it adjoins the Fezzan and Barca in the north, and in the south the wilderness north of Wadai, including presumably Tibesti and the Libyan desert west of the Nile Valley. It is said to extend eastward to the deserts of Aujila, though north-eastward would have been a more accurate definition.

Between the people of Berdeoa and the Nile Valley are the Egyptian oases inhabited by the Arabs and some “vile” black people.

Leo’s description of the Sahara is far from being incorrect or confused; his information may be summarised as follows:[310]

Areas I and II.—South of Morocco and Western Algeria; north of the Niger and Senegal rivers; between the Atlantic littoral and the Ahaggar and Air massifs with their immediately adjacent deserts or steppes. Inhabitants: Sanhaja in the west and Zanziga in the east.

Area III.—Air and Ahaggar, with their adjacent areas; south of Tuat, Gourara and Mzab, and north of Damergu. Inhabitants: Targa.

Area IV.—Desert and steppe between Air and Tibesti from Wargla and Ghadames in the north to the country of Kano and Nigeria generally in the south, including the country of Ghat and the Western Fezzan. Inhabitants: Lemta.

Area V.—The Libyan desert of Egypt, the Cyrenaican steppes and desert, a part of the Eastern Fezzan and Tibesti, Erdi and Kufra. Inhabitants: the people of Berdeoa with Arabs in the north-east and some blacks in the south-east.

In the fourth area the Lemta were in the country where the Azger now live, but the southern and the eastern sides have since been lost to the Tuareg. Kawar, whence the Tuareg of Air fetch salt, is under the domination of the latter, but, like the other habitable areas on the Chad road and in the Great Steppe, is now inhabited largely by Kanuri and Tebu. There is nothing improbable in the statement that the Lemta covered the whole of the fourth area. We have quite other definite and probably independent records of the Tuareg having lived in the Chad area and in Bornu, whence they were driven by the Kanuri, who are known to have conquered Kawar in fairly recent historical times.[311]

The people of Berdeoa are the only inhabitants of any of the five areas who were not Muleththemin. I have little doubt that they are the inhabitants of Tibesti, where the town or village of Bardai is perhaps the most important of the permanently inhabited places. To-day they are Tebu, a name which seems to mean “The People of the Rock,”[312] with an incorrectly formed Arab version, Tibawi. The racial problem which they present can only be solved when they are better known. Keane[313] assumes that they are the descendants of the Garamantes, whose primeval home was perhaps in the Tibesti mountains. He notes the similarity of the names of their northern branch, the Teda, and a tribe called the Tedamansii, who seem, however, to have lived too far north to be connected with them.[314] The Southern Tebu or Daza section is certainly more negroid than the northern, and there are reasons for not accepting the view that the Garamantian civilisation was the product of a negroid people. Leo[315] records the discovery “of the region of Berdeoa,” which from the context is probably a misreading for a “region of the Berdeoa” in the Libyan desert of Egypt. The area is described as containing three castles and five or six villages. It is probably the Kufra archipelago of oases. The story of accidental discoveries of oases is also told of other places; Wau el Harir,[316] an oasis in the Eastern Fezzan, was reported to have been found by accident in 1860, and the Arab geographers relate similar stories of other points in the Libyan desert. The accounts of Kufra by Rohlfs and Hassanein Bey go to show that before it became a centre of the Senussi sect, with the consequent influx of Cyrenaican Arabs and Libyans, the population was Tebu. The identity of Berdeoa, which I think must be Bardai, was the subject of some controversy before circumstantial accounts of its existence were brought back by travellers in modern times. The name was for long assumed to be a misreading for Borku or Borgu, as D’Anville suggested. In Rennell’s map accompanying the account of Hornemann’s travels at the end of the eighteenth century the town (sic) of Bornu north of what is presumably meant to represent Lake Chad is a mislocation for Bornu province, while Bourgou in Lat. 26° N., Long. 22° E. is intended to represent Bardai in Tibesti, the Berdeoa of Leo. The “residue of the Libyan desert”[317] (i.e. other than that of the Tebu people of Berdeoa), namely, Augela (Aujila oasis) to the River of the Nile, we are told by Leo was inhabited by certaine Arabians and Africans called “Leuata,” a name which coincides with the Lebu or Rebu of Egyptian records. Idrisi places them in the same area as Leo, calling them Lebetae or Levata. The stock is referred to under the general name of Levata or Leuata by Ibn Khaldun in several connections. An ethnic rather than a tribal name seems to be involved, and this is natural if they are the descendants of the Lebu. Bates concludes that in the name of this people is the origin of the classical word “Libyan.”[318] The Leuata[319] assisted Hamid ibn Yesel, Lord of Tehert, in a war in Algeria against El Mansur, the third Fatimite Khalif. In A.D. 947-8, when El Mansur drove Hamid into Spain, the Levata were dispersed into the desert; some who escaped found refuge in the mountains between Sfax and Gabes, where they were still living in Ibn Khaldun’s day; others he places in the Great Syrtis and in the Siwa area. In Byzantine times they are shown in the Little Syrtis. El Masa’udi states that the Leuata survived in the Oases of Egypt. Their principal habitat is, in fact, not far from the country of the Lebu, who were in Cyrenaica according to Egyptian records. Both the Tehenu further east and the Lebu are known to have been subjected to pressure from the Meshwesh in the west, and some fusion between the two may well, therefore, have occurred. The ancestors of the Levata of Arab geographers and the modern Libyan inhabitants of Siwa and the northern oases of the Western Desert of Egypt are either the product of this fusion or the descendants of the Lebu alone. The Levata and Lebu seem to have this in common, that they are probably a non-Tuareg Libyan people immigrant from across the Mediterranean at the time of the invasions of Egypt by the Libyan and Sea People. In the course of history they were displaced and reduced; only in the north-east of the Libyan desert did they remain at all concentrated or homogeneous.