It is difficult to accept the view that the first Tuareg to enter Air arrived in the eighth century, even if it is only for the reason that the surviving “Itesan” houses could not for so long a time have remained in the state of preservation in which some of them are now found. I am personally not disposed to regard the first immigration as having taken place much before the latest date previously suggested as a limit, namely, the end of the eleventh century.
The invasion of the first tribes left the mountains with a mixed population of Tuareg and Goberawa; the disappearance of the latter as a separate race was only accomplished when the second or Kel Geres invasion took place. The Kel Geres so added to the Tuareg population in Air that henceforward the country must be regarded as essentially Tuareg, and this probably accounts for the tradition that the Kel Geres conquered the country, and as they came in both from the north and by the north, it doubtless gave rise to legends such as that of Maket n’Ikelan.
Failing more definite evidence than we now possess, I regard the Kel Geres movement as a part of a Hawara-Auriga emigration from the north to which Ibn Khaldun alludes. This does not exclude the possibility of some nuclei of Hawara having gone west of Air to join either the Aulimmiden or the Tademekkat or both groups. In fact, such a course of events would explain the distant affinity with, yet independence of, the Aulimmiden which is insisted upon by many authorities. We know that by the time Leo was writing he regarded both Ahaggar and Air as inhabited by Targa, while the Fezzan and the Chad road were inhabited by Lemta. The Ahaggaren I have previously tried to show were, in the main, Hawara. Now the advent in Air of a large mass from this division under the name of Kel Geres would warrant his grouping of both plateaux under one ethnic heading. The Hawara movement from the Western Fezzan and between Ghat and Ahaggar may be placed in the twelfth century, and therefore not so very far removed from the first immigration into Air from the south-east. It can also be accounted for by similar causes, namely, the growing pressure of the Arabs, perhaps as a sequel to the Hillalian invasion.
Following the two initial migrations, it may be assumed that small nuclei of Tuareg continued to reach Air. These would to-day be represented by such of the People of the King as are not to be connected with either the first five tribes or with the Kel Geres.
The Third Immigration
The third wave was that of the Kel Owi. On Barth and Hornemann’s authority they arrived in modern times, while according to Jean they arrived in the ninth century. Barth’s researches, which in all cases are more reliable than those of Jean, who appears usually to have accepted native dates without hesitation, led him to believe that the Kel Owi entered, in fact conquered Air, about A.D. 1740. They are not mentioned by Leo or any other writers before the time of Hornemann (A.D. 1800), who obtained such good information about them that his commentator, Major Rennell, also assumed their arrival to be recent.[398] By the end of the nineteenth century the Kel Owi had already achieved such fame that of all Tuareg known to him, Hornemann only mentions them. He adds in his account that Gober was at this time tributary to Air, a detail consistent with other records. Barth’s very late date[399] for the arrival of the Kel Owi nevertheless presents certain difficulties. It is clear on the one hand that it could not have been the Kel Owi who made the arrangement of Maket n’Ikelan, and that it must therefore have been the Kel Geres or their predecessors, but it is further difficult to see how a people could have entered Air in such numbers as to become the preponderant group within barely one hundred years and to have evicted the firmly rooted Kel Geres tribes so soon. That the Kel Owi should have appropriated the historical credit for the settlement of Maket n’Ikelan is easy to understand, for it was they who held the trade route to the north out of the country, but the early expulsion of the Kel Geres indicates a numerical superiority which, unfortunately, native tradition does not bear out.
It is noteworthy that no Kel Owi tribe is represented in the election of the king, which supports the view that they had not yet reached Air when the local system of government from Agades was devised.
“The vulgar account of the origin of the Kel Owi from the female slave of a Tinylcum who came to Asben where she gave birth to a boy who was the progenitor of the Kel Owi . . . is obviously nothing but a popular tale. . . .”[400]
The story collected by Jean, which purports to explain the two categories of tribes in Air to-day, the Kel Owi confederation and the People of the King, is not more authentic.[401] He tells how, after the arrival of the Sultan in Air, the Kel Geres kept away from his presence, while the Kel Owi ingratiated themselves and secured their own administration under the Añastafidet. The Sultan, however, wishing to create his own tribal group, divided the Kel Owi amongst themselves, and this is the origin of the People of the Añastafidet and the People of the King. In their efforts to ingratiate themselves, the Kel Owi of Bagezan which, as we have seen, was Itesan country at the time, sent as a present to the Sultan a woman named T’iugas with her six daughters of the Imanen tribe of the north; these women had been sent from the north to cement good relations between Air and Azger.[402] The six sisters nominated the eldest as their speaker and the Sultan gave her authority over the rest. She was followed by the next two sisters, and these three are the mothers of the three senior tribes of the Kel Owi, namely, the Kel Owi proper, the Kel Tafidet and the Kel Azañieres.[403] The other three women refused to accept the leadership of the eldest sister and placed themselves under the authority of the Sultan direct; and they were the mothers of the Kel Tadek, Imezegzil and Kel Zilalet.[404] The details of the story are obviously a Kel Owi invention. They are designed to establish nobility and equality of ancestry with the older and more respected tribes. The legend, however, probably also contains certain indications of truth, notably in the allusion to the Imanen women from the north, since there does exist an affinity between that tribe and the Itesan, though it must, of course, be understood that the Kel Bagezan of the story were an Itesan sub-tribe, and not the later Kel Bagezan of the Kel Owi group. With these conditions the story becomes intelligible as a legendary or traditional account. It is not meant to be taken as literally true, and is not even a very widely accepted version of the origin of the present social structure in Air, but it is amusing, for it shows how on this as on every other occasion the Kel Owi have attempted to claim antiquity of descent equal to that of the tribes they found on their arrival.
Two other traditions which I collected are best summarised by quoting the following extract from my diary, written while at T’imia, a Kel Owi village in the Bagezan mountains. One of the big men in the village was the “’alim” ’Umbellu, a fine figure of a man, old and bald but still powerful and vigorous, with the heavy noble features of a Roman emperor. He used to be the keeper of the old mosque, and is said to be one of the most learned men in the country. I had examined the ruined sanctuary, in which he had not set foot since it was desecrated by the French troops after the Kaossen revolt, and found some fragments of holy books, which I restored to ’Umbellu in the present mosque at T’imia, a shelter of reeds and matting. From him I received the same sort of confused account which others besides myself had heard. “. . . He says that the Kel Owi are not pure Tuareg, but that some Arabs or (sic) Tuareg of the north came down to Northern Air and mixed with the local population, which stock became the Kel Owi Confederation; but whether these people came as raiders or settlers he could not say. He was, however, quite clear that they had come from the Arab country.[405] Then in almost the same breath he told me that the Kel Owi are descended from a woman who came from the north and lived in Tamgak, where she mated with one of the local inhabitants and became the mother of all these tribes. He added that she was a Moslem at a time when the Kel Ferwan (a non-Kel Owi tribe, or People of the King, then living in Iferuan) were heathen, but whether Christians or pagan he could not say.”