surrender, or else he’ll be forced to throw himself into the sea, or lose himself in the desert, no one is backing him anymore and he knows it…”
The officers and the army headquarters in Oran, in Rabat, even in Dakar, have been waiting for this moment for so long. The “fanatic” is backed into a corner, on one side is the sea, on the other, the desert. The sly old fox will be forced to capitulate. Hadn’t he been abandoned by everyone? To the north, Moulay Hafid signed the Act of Algeciras, putting an end to the holy war. He had accepted the French protectorate. Then there was the letter of October 1909, signed by Ma al-Ainine’s own son, Ahmed Hiba, he who is called Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, in which he offers the sheik’s submission to the law of Makhzen and asks for aid. “The Lion! He’s quite alone right now, the Lion and the sheik’s other sons, al-Shems, in Marrakech, and Larhdaf, the bandit, the plunderer of the Hamada. They’ve got no more resources, no more arms, and the population of the Souss Valley has abandoned them… They’ve only got a handful of warriors left, ragpickers, whose only arms are their old bronze-barreled rifles, their yataghans, and their spears! The Middle Ages!”
As he rides along with the officers, the civilian observer thinks of everyone who’s waiting for the fall of the old sheik. The Europeans in North Africa, the “Christians,” as the people from the desert call them — but isn’t their true religion money? The Spanish in Tangiers, in Ifni, the English in Tangiers, in Rabat, the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians, and all the bankers, all the businessmen awaiting the fall of the Arab empire, already making plans for the occupation, parceling out the arable lands, the forests of cork oaks, the mines, the palm groves; the brokers from the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, who keep track of the amount of customs duties collected in all the ports; Deputy Etienne’s racketeers who created the “Emeralds of the Sahara Company,” the “Gourara-Touat Nitrates Company,” for whom the bare earth must make way for imaginary railroads, for trans-Saharan, trans-Mauritanian rails, and it will be the army which will clear the way with rifle shots.
What more can the old man from Smara do against this wave of money and bullets? What can his ferocious gaze of a hunted animal do against the speculators who covet the lands, the cities, against those who are after the riches that will ensure the poverty of these people?
Beside the civilian observer, the officers ride along, faces impervious, never uttering an unnecessary word. Their eyes are trained on the horizon, out beyond the rocky hills, over where the misty valley of the Oued Tadla stretches.
Maybe they aren’t even thinking about what they’re doing? They’re riding along on the invisible trail which the Tuareg guide on his tawny horse is opening for them.
Behind them the Senegalese, the Sudanese infantry dressed in their dust-gray uniforms march heavily, leaning forward, lifting their legs up high, as if they were walking over furrows. Their steps make a steady scuffing sound on the hard earth. Behind them, the cloud of red and gray dust rises slowly, dirtying the sky.
It all began long ago. Now nothing can be done about it, as if this army were marching against phantoms. “But he will never agree to give himself up, especially not to the French. He would rather have every last one of his men killed, and be killed himself beside his sons, than be taken… And that would really be best for him, because believe me, the government will not accept his surrender, not after Coppolani’s assassination, remember. No, he’s a cruel wild fanatic who must disappear, he and all of his tribe, the Berik Allah, the ‘blessed by God’ as they call themselves… It’s the Middle Ages, isn’t it?”
The old fox had been betrayed, abandoned by his own people. One after the other, the tribes parted ways with him, because the chieftains realized that it was impossible to stop the advance of the Christians, in the north, in the south, they even came from the sea, they crossed the desert, they were at the gates of the desert in Tindouf, in Tabelbala, in Ouadane, they even occupied the holy city of Chinguetti, where Ma al-Ainine had given his first teachings.
Perhaps the last great battle had taken place at Bou Denib, when General Vigny had crushed Moulay Hiba’s six thousand men. That’s when Ma al-Ainine’s son fled into the mountains, disappeared to hide his shame undoubtedly, because he’d become a lakhme, a spineless being, as they say, defeated. The old sheik was left alone, prisoner to his Smara fortress, not understanding that it hadn’t been the arms but the money that had defeated him: the money of the bankers who had paid for Sultan Moulay Hafid’s soldiers and their handsome uniforms; the money that the soldiers of the Christians came to exact in the ports, taking their part of the customs duties; the money from the plundered lands, usurped palm groves, forests given over to those who knew best how to take them. How could he have understood that? Did he know what the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas was? Did he know what a loan for the construction of railroads was? Did he know what a company for mining nitrates from Gourara-Touat was? Did he even know that while he was praying and giving his blessing to the people of the desert, the governments of France and Great Britain were signing an agreement that gave to one of them a country named Morocco, and to the other a country named Egypt? While he was giving his word and his breath to the last free men, to the Izarguen, the Aroussiyine, the Tidrarin, the Ouled Bou Sebaa, the Taubalt, the Reguibat Sahel, the Ouled Delim, the Imraguen, while he was bestowing his powers upon his own tribe, the Berik Allah, did he know that a banking consortium, whose principal member was the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, was granting King Moulay Hafid a loan of sixty-two million five hundred thousand gold francs, with a five percent interest rate guaranteed by the proceeds of customs duties from the ports on the coast, and that the foreign soldiers had entered the country to ensure that at least sixty percent of the daily intake of customs was paid to the Banque? Did he know that upon the signing of the Act of Algeciras, which put an end to the holy war in the North, King Moulay Hafid was indebted to the tune of two hundred and six million gold francs, and that it was already evident that he could never reimburse his creditors? But the old sheik didn’t know all of that, because his warriors weren’t fighting for gold, but simply for a blessing, and the land they were defending didn’t belong to them, or to anyone, because it was simply the free open spaces over which their eyes swept, a gift from God.
“… A wild man, a fanatic, who tells his warriors before the battle that he will render them invincible and immortal, who sends them charging against rifles and machine guns armed only with their spears and their sabers…”
Now the troop of black infantrymen is occupying the whole valley of the Tadla River, at the ford, while the officials from Kasbah Tadla have come to acknowledge their submission to the French officers. Curls of smoke from the campfires rise into the evening air, and the civilian observer, as he does at every halt, watches the lovely night sky slowly unveiling. Again he thinks of Ma al-Ainine’s gaze, mysterious and profound, the gaze that fell upon Camille Douls disguised as a Turkish merchant, and scrutinized him to the very depths of his soul. Perhaps at the time he had guessed what the foreign man dressed in rags brought with him, the first image-stealer who wrote his travel log every evening on the pages of his Koran. But now it’s too late, and nothing can stop destiny from being fulfilled. On one side, the sea, on the other, the desert. The horizons are closing in on the people of Smara, the last nomads are surrounded. Hunger, thirst are hemming them in, they are beset with fear, illness, defeat.
“We could have put an end to your sheik and his ragpickers long ago if we’d wanted to. A 75-millimeter cannon in front of his cob palace, a few machine guns, and we would have been rid of him. Maybe they thought he wasn’t worth the trouble. They told themselves it was best to wait for him to fall on his own, like a worm-eaten fruit… But now, after Coppolani’s assassination, it’s no longer a matter of war: it’s a police operation against a band of brigands, that’s all.”
The old man had been betrayed by the same people he was trying to defend. It was the men from the Souss Valley, from Taroudant, Agadir, who had spread the news: “The great sheik Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al- Fadel, he who is called Ma al-Ainine, Water of the Eyes, is marching northward with his warriors of the desert, those from the Draa, the Saguiet al-Hamra valley, and even the blue men from Oualata, from Chinguetti. There are so many of them they cover an entire plain. They are marching northward toward the holy city of Fez, to overthrow the sultan and have Moulay Hiba appointed in his place, he who is called Sebaa, the Lion, the eldest son of Ma al- Ainine.”
But the general staff at headquarters hadn’t believed the rumors. It gave the officers a good laugh.
“The old man of Smara has gone mad. As if he could, with his troop of ragpickers, overthrow the sultan and drive out the French army!” That’s what I thought: the old fox is backed up against the sea and the desert, and he’s chosen to commit suicide; it’s his only way out now, to get himself killed along with his whole tribe.
Therefore, today, June 21, 1910, the troop of black infantrymen is en route with three French officers and the civilian observer at the head. They have veered south to meet up with the other troop that left from Zettat. The jaws of the pincers are closing in, to seize the old sheik and his ragpickers.
The light of the sun, mingled with the dust, burns the soldiers’ eyes. In the distance, on the hill overlooking the stone-strewn plain, an ochre village suddenly appears, barely distinguishable from the desert. “Kasbah
