PREFACE
This book was originally intended to be an account of the people and mountains of Air in the Central Sahara, where I made a journey during most of 1922 with Angus Buchanan and T. A. Glover. The former had visited the area on a previous occasion and had described the people and places he had seen in his book, Out of the World—North of Nigeria. It therefore seemed more profitable to inquire into some of the problems surrounding the inhabitants of the Sahara whom we encountered, and thus deal with Air and its Tuareg population rather less objectively than had my fellow-traveller. In the course of the succeeding years, as I became more and more immersed in considering various scientific aspects of the Sahara, I came to the conclusion that neither had the Tuareg people nor had this vast area of the earth’s surface been at all adequately examined. Most studies had been objective and, as is unhappily the case with this book, confined to one area. A comprehensive account of the history and ethnology of the Sahara still requires to be written.
As a consequence of these investigations, the present work assumed a form for which one journey of nine months in the countries concerned scarcely seems enough justification. That the book was not completed sooner has been due to the impossibility of spending any time continuously either in research or on writing during the three years which have elapsed since I returned. The fact that this book has been the occupation only of such spare time as I have had available accounts for its many conscious deficiencies, which are unfortunately not the more excusable in a volume of the type which it purports to be. If I can feel that it will have served to stimulate the curiosity of students or have assisted them to find their way about the literature on the subject, I shall consider that as a reward calculated to enhance the pleasure which I have derived from writing and reading about this—to me—fascinating topic.
It will be one of my lasting regrets that I was unable to complete with Angus Buchanan his journey across the Sahara from Nigeria to Algiers. The delays which we encountered in Air obliged me to return to resume my duties in that branch of H.M.’s Service in which I was then serving. This is not the place to mention the many things which I owe to Angus Buchanan; perhaps the greatest advantage I derived was the promise we gave one another to travel again together if an occasion should come to him and leisure from another profession to me, whereby we might be enabled to renew our companionship of the road. I am grateful to him for permission to use several of his photographs in the present volume as well as certain information which he collected when we were separately engaged on our different work.
To T. A. Glover, the Cinematographer, whose services Angus Buchanan secured to accompany him, I owe many pleasant memories of days spent together and his excellent advice in taking most of the photographs which are included in this book.
The French officers whom I encountered in the course of my wanderings were as charming and as friendly as perhaps, of all foreign nations, only Frenchmen know how to be. Were the relations between our respective countries always even remotely similar to those which subsisted between us, there would be no room for the suspicion and pettiness which so often mar diplomatic and political intercourse. The mutual confidence in which we lived is illustrated by two events.
On a certain occasion in Air when news was received of a raid being about to fall on the country, I was honoured by receiving a communication from the French officer commanding the Fort at Agades, indicating the locality in his general scheme of defence whither I might lead on a reconnaissance an armed band of local Tuareg from the village in which I was then living by myself. On another occasion, after travelling for some hundreds of miles with a French Camel Corps patrol, the men were paraded and in their presence I was nominated an honorary serjeant of the “Peloton Méhariste de Guré,” a type of compliment which those associated with the French Army will best realise. It is to the officer commanding this unit, Henri Gramain of the French Colonial Army, that I owe the most perfect companionship I have ever had the fortune to experience. I know that when we meet again we shall resume conversation where we left off at Teshkar in the bushland of Elakkos, one evening in the summer of 1922. He and my other friends, Tuareg, British, French, Arab and Fulani contributed to make that year the happiest I have ever spent.
No reader of the works of that great traveller, Dr. Heinrich Barth, will need to be told how much of the data collected in the succeeding pages has been culled from the monumental account of his Travels in Central Africa. This German, who most loyally served the British Crown in those far countries, is perhaps the greatest traveller there has ever been in Africa. His exploits were never advertised, so his fame has not been suffered to compete with the more sensational and journalistic enterprises accomplished since his day down to modern times. But no student will require to have his praises sung by any disciple.
I have to thank the Royal Geographical Society for permission to use the map which was prepared for a paper I had the honour to read in 1923 before a meeting of the Fellows. More especially do I wish to thank E. A. Reeves, their Keeper of Maps, both for the instruction in surveying which he gave me before my journey and for the assistance afforded after my return in checking and working up my results. My cartographic material in the form of road traverses, sketch maps based on astronomical positions, and theodolite computations are all in the Society’s library and available to students. A small collection of ethnographic material which I brought back is at Oxford in the Pitt Rivers Museum, to whose Curator, Henry Balfour, I am indebted both for advice and for plates Nos. 24-26, 37 and 42.
H. R. Palmer, now H.M. Lieutenant-Governor of Northern Nigeria, and Messrs. Macmillan & Co. have given me permission to use a table of the Kings of Agades incorporated as Appendix VI. The list originally appeared in extenso, with the names somewhat differently spelled, in an article which he published in the Journal of the African Society in July 1910. The great learning and sympathetic help which he was good enough to put at my disposal have made me, in common with many others in Nigeria, in whose friendship my journey so richly rewarded me, hope that he may be induced to render more accessible to the public the immense fund of historical and other material which he has accumulated during his long career as a distinguished Colonial servant.