The town has lost its Tuareg character. It is now a small settlement of a few hundred Kanuri and mixed inhabitants. The Tuareg element in the immediate neighbourhood is accounted for by some sedentary serfs or slaves living in other hamlets near by. The noble Tuareg of the Isherifan tribe who used to possess Gamram wander in the district between this place and the bush of Guliski. They have not counted for very much since they were decimated in a raid by Belkho, the great leader of the Air Tuareg during the latter years of last century. Belkho had complained that the Isherifan at Gamram were interfering with the caravans which crossed Damergu, and as his people were especially interested in the traffic, he demanded an assurance that the annoyance should cease, failing which he would have to take measures. The Isherifan returned an insolent reply and Belkho warned them again. He offered to accept a fine in camels for their misbehaviour, but when this was refused, collected a body of some two hundred to three hundred men and came swiftly down the road from Tergulawen with hostile intent. He reached the town at nightfall. Next morning he fell on the Isherifan, who had prepared for the attack, defeated them, and carried off so many camels that each of the victorious participants, as one explained to me, secured five female beasts for his share. Since then, my informant remarked, “the Isherifan are not.”
Damergu has been the scene of many bloody raids in recent times. At Farak, one day from Gamram, a great assemblage of men and camels from the Southland, bound for Ghat, was caught by the Imuzurak under Danda. Merchandise and camels were looted and the personnel was massacred.
During the four years which elapsed after the journey of the Foureau-Lamy Mission took place in 1900, a series of important events occurred in Damergu which ultimately led to the occupation of Air. In July 1900 the French military territory of Zinder-Chad had come into official existence, with a base of operations under Colonel Peroz at Say, and subsequently at Sorbo Hausa, on the Niger.[50] In February 1901 Colonel Peroz set out towards Lake Chad. Sergeant Bouthel, left in command at Zinder by Lieut. Joalland of the Voulet Mission, entered Damergu, defeated the Imuzuraq tribe of Tuareg at Tademari or Tanamari and killed their chief, Musa. His place was taken by his brother, Danda, who became ruler of the country, while a third brother, afterwards killed at Bir Alali (Fort Pradie) east of Lake Chad, in January 1902, with the assistance of the Senussi organised Kanem against the French. Of all the Air Tuareg, the Kel Owi confederation of tribes alone, on account of their commercial relations with the Hausa countries and with the north, adopted a pacific attitude. The rest of the Air and the local Tuareg in Damergu set about fortifying Tademari, Jajiduna and Gamram and raided as far afield as Zinder. Their defeat by Sergeant Bouthel had so little effect that they soon plundered a Kel Owi caravan at Fall near Mount Ginea. The French in consequence were forced to occupy Gidjigawa near Kallilua in southern Damergu, and finally, when the Farak massacre occurred, Jajiduna itself, where a fort was built and a nucleus of camel corps established. The latter, however, was restricted in its action to a small area north of the post; operations did not even extend to Farak, only thirty odd miles away. The effect of this French expansion was nevertheless to make many of the prouder Tuareg, who would not submit but foresaw the inevitable, move eastwards. Some of them migrated as far afield as Kanem and Wadai, others only to Elakkos. It was the continuation of a movement which had begun after the advent of the Foureau-Lamy Mission. But even east of Chad the ubiquitous white men arrived; the migrants fought the French with conspicuous success at Bir Alali on two occasions, though they were finally defeated. Of these Tuareg of the Exodus, some returned to Air, but the rest moved yet further east to the strange land of Darfur, where they still live in voluntary exile near El Fasher.
The repeated attacks on the north- and south-bound caravans in Damergu induced the French to escort the larger convoys of 1902 and 1903 as far as Turayet on the borders of the Air mountains. The departure of the irreconcilables towards the east, whence only a part was to return after the third encounter of Bir Alali, and the gradual penetration of the Southland, with the consequent pacification of the population, left the Imuzurak alone in Damergu in open defiance of the French. But in the meanwhile a second pillage had taken place at Farak, and, moreover, in Air itself the situation from every point of view was most unsatisfactory. The Sultan of the Air Tuareg was tossed about between the important Kel Owi confederation and their pacific policy on the one hand, and the irreconcilables of Damergu and Air on the other. In Gall in the south-east of Air had become a head-quarters of the raiders, and the Sultan began to find his position intolerable. He concluded by inviting the French to enter and take over. The occupation of Agades took place in the autumn of 1904 by a camel patrol under Lieut. Jean, when the modern history of Air and Damergu commenced.
Osman Mikitan, the Sultan of this critical period, lies buried in a square tomb of mud bricks in the Zungu hamlet of Gangara. He had changed places three times with Brahim as Sultan of the Air people, and died unregretted because he had sold his country to the foreigner.
The Tuareg of Damergu number among their tribes factions of many of the most famous Air clans. The Ikazkazan are represented by the section known generically as the Kel Ulli, the People of the Goats; these tribes include the Isherifan of Gamram and the Kel Tamat, in addition, of course, to many others in Air. The Imuzurak round Tanamari, with the Imaqoaran, Ibandeghan, Izagaran and Imarsutan are tribes which seem to represent the earliest Tuareg stock in the neighbourhood; some of them certainly belong to groups which, when the first migration into the plateau from the east occurred, never reached Air at all. The omnipresent Ifoghas reappear in Damergu near Tanut and roam northward; they are apparently cousins of the great division of the Ifoghas n’Adrar (Ifoghas of the Mountains), whose centre is around Kidal, north-east of Gao on the Niger. These Ifoghas of Damergu also I believe to have been left here in the course of the westward migration of the first wave of Tuareg, though some of them may have returned east after the initial movement. The Tamizgidda of Air apparently also had a section in Damergu in Barth’s day:[51] their name connects them with “the mosque,” and they are said by this explorer to have been regarded by the Arabs in his day[52] as “greatly Arabicised, having apparently been settled somewhere near a town.” A tribe of the same name occurs in the west; they also may be remnants, powerful as they were in Barth’s days, of a westward migration from the Chad area, or possibly of a returning wave which is known to have reached Air. The Tegama in Damergu, says Barth,[53] “form at present a very small tribe able to muster, at the utmost, three hundred spears; but most of them are mounted on horseback. Formerly, however, they were far more numerous, till Ibram, the father of the present chief, undertook, with the assistance of the Kel Geres, the unfortunate expedition against Sokoto. . . .” But this fighting certainly occurred at a more recent date than 1759, when, according to the Agades Chronicle, they were at war with the Kel Geres. Barth adds that they were said originally to have come from Janet, near Ghat, that they were already settled in the south long before the Kel Owi came to Air, and that they are found on the borders of Negroland in very ancient times. Ptolemy speaks of a Tegama people beyond Air towards Timbuctoo and the middle Sudan. Hornemann, from what he heard of them, “believed them to be Christians,” says Barth; though the only reference I can find in this authority is to the fact that they were probably idolatrous. I think Barth’s reference is to a generic group, now called the Kel Tegama, a collective name for the people living in the southern part of the area known as Tegama, which is on the west side of the northern borders of Damergu. Among the Kel Tegama to-day would be classed the Damergu Ifoghas and other tribes already mentioned. I fancy Barth has used a generic local and geographical name as a tribal name.
The belief that they were Christians is, however, particularly interesting. It is possible that these Tegama were not Tuareg at all, and that Barth’s informants may have been referring to the nomadic Fulani who pasture their cattle in the area where he met them, round In Asamed and Farak, though his description of the time spent in their company certainly points to their having in reality been Tuareg. Their “customs showed that they had fallen off much from ancient usages,” for not only did the women make advances to the eminent explorer, but even the men urged him to make free with their wives. He adds that the women had very regular features and fair skins and that the men were both taller and fairer than the Kel Owi, many of them dressing their hair in long tresses as a token of their being Inisilman or holy men (“despite their dissolute manners”), a peculiarity which connects them with the Ifoghas of Azger, who also are a tribe of “marabouts.”[54] His general description of the Tegama, taken in conjunction with their hunting and cattle-herding habits, corresponds so closely with the appearance of the Ifoghas of Damergu to-day that there is little doubt that Barth is referring to them, and that he should consequently more accurately have written, not “the Tegama” but the “Kel Tegama.” He distinctly states that they acknowledged the supremacy of the Sultan of Agades rather than that of the Kel Owi leaders, which will be seen to point to their early origin in the country. Normally resident in Northern Damergu, they move to Tegama and Azawagh after the rains to feed their cattle, goats and camels. The conquests of the later Tuareg immigrants reduced them to a low stage of poverty and degradation, though they have retained their nobility of caste, race and feature to a remarkable degree.
The history of Damergu shows clearly the predominant rôle which the Tuareg played among the lower-caste Kanuri sedentaries and the nomadic Fulani. The prepotency of a noble race among people of inferior class is one of the most interesting phenomena of history. The Kanuri in Damergu are, and probably have always been, numerically the stronger; they are armed with bows and arrows, the weapon par excellence for bush fighting. The Tuareg was less numerous at all times, but everywhere, except in the west, where he has been so long associated with the Sudan as to lose his nobility, disdained any weapon but the sword, knife or spear. Like the knight in medieval Europe, the Tuareg has always held that the armes blanches were the only weapons of a gentleman, yet with all these disadvantages his prestige was sufficient to ensure an ascendancy which would have continued but for the advent of the gun and gunpowder. In Damergu this prestige ensured the maintenance of the Tuareg Sultanates until the advent of the French. In the Southland all legends continue to magnify his prowess.
In Hausaland, at Dan Kaba in Katsina Emirate, a strolling player came one day to give a Punch and Judy show for the delectation of the village people, who were in part Hausa, in part sedentary Fulani, and in part nomadic cattle-owning Fulani. The old traditional play had been modernised, and although it was full of topical allusions to the Nigeria of 1922, enough of the past remained to show the reputation and moral ascendancy which the Tuareg enjoyed in the Southland. The showman’s apparatus was simple: divesting himself of his indigo robe, he arranged it on the ground over three sticks and crouched hidden beneath its folds. He had four dolls in all and worked them like those in our Punch and Judy shows in England. In the place of the squeaky voice of the Anglo-Saxon artist he used a bird whistle to conceal his words; the modulations of tone and inflexion in the dialogues and conversations between the puppets were remarkable. The Tuareg doll is the villain of the piece: his body is of blue rags, most unorthodoxly crowned with a white turban and armed with a huge sword and shield. Divested of the latter and crowned with a red turban, the same doll in the course of the play becomes the “dogari,” or native policeman of the Hausaland Emirs. The King of the Bush is a Fulani man, impersonated by a puppet made largely of orange cretonne with huge hair crest and bow and arrow. He suspects his wife, made of the same material but ornamented with cowries before and behind, of having relations with the Tuareg. She soothes and pets and sings to her suspicious husband, playing music on drums and calabash cymbals. Her mellifluous tones finally persuade him to go out a-hunting in the bush. Needless to say, in Act II she flirts outrageously with the attractive Man of the Open Lands, but is surprised by her husband in flagrante delicto, most realistically performed, whereupon, in the next act, a tremendous fight ensues. The King of the Bush, discarding his bow and arrow, fights with an axe, the Tuareg with his sword. The latter is victorious and kills the King of the Bush. The wife calls in the “dogari” to avenge her husband and to please her Southland audience. In Act V the Tuareg is haled off before the British Political Officer, presented in khaki cloth with a black basin-shaped hat like a Chinese coolie and the face of a complete idiot. In the ensuing dialogue the fettered Tuareg scores off the unfortunate white man continuously, but, as all plays must end happily, he is condemned to death. The execution of the plot is good, the technique admirable, although the performance was unduly protracted for our tastes. The one I witnessed lasted nearly four hours. The predominant rôle is that of the envied and handsome villain, the noble Tuareg. He is glorious in life and fearless in death.
It is unfortunately impossible for lack of space to discuss the Kanuri or Fulani of Damergu. The latter affect the political life of the country but little. They shift continually to fresh tracts of bush or better water for the sake of their great black cattle, which used to be sold in the far north as well as in Hausaland. They do not mix with the Tuareg, though they are recognised by them, as anyone must recognise them, to be of a noble race. Slender, fine-featured, but dark-skinned, with the profiles of Assyrian statues, the Damergu Fulani are of the Bororoji section of this interesting people which, in the course of its sojourn and gradual movement along the fringe of the Sudan from west to east, has provided the ruling class in most of the Hausa States. The recent history of Sokoto, of Katsina and of Kano is their history. Their conquest of power in Hausaland is but another instance of the ascendancy of nobility and a glaring contradiction of the Socialist theory of equal birth. When they came to power they were illiterate and pagan and had no political virtues; their success was due to breeding and caste.