THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA : KUFARA LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE OUft. THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA : KUFARA ROSITA FORBES ftOSITA FORBES THE SECRET OF THE SAHARA : KUFARA BY ROSITA FORBES Author of "Unconducted Wanderers," etc. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIR HARRY JOHNSTON WITH 54 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR NEW ^Sr YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY GEORGE H. DOBAX COMPAKT PRINTED IJf THK UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO AHMED MOHAMMED BEY HASSANEIN IN MEMORY OP HOURS GRAVE AND GAY, BATTLES DESPERATE OR HUMOROUS, OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN THE LIBYAN DESERTS INTRODUCTION BY SIR HARRY JOHNSTON THE OASES OF KTJFARA VERY nearly midway between the great mountains of feet in Tibesti (which rise to over eleven thousand height) ; the plateaus of Fazan; the mountainous 'island' of the Cyrenaica; the oases of Western Egypt, and of Dongola; lies the still mysterious region of Kufara, visited and described by Mrs. Rosita Forbes, the author of this book. She has been seemingly the second explorer of Euro- birth to this feat for the Kufara pean accomplish ; although district was first placed on the map with no great in- correctness of location by Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs, after his journey thither in 1878-9, he was as Mrs. Forbes shows the only European of his party to reach these oases, and his stay there was very short. Apparently he only revealed, only realised by sight or information the salt lakes at Buseima and a rather problematical 'Erbelma' (qy. Erbayana, Erbelna?) to the south-west; and either he did not see, or he did not record the more important sheets of salt or brackish water in the comparatively large Kebabo oasis or collection of oases. These lakes of Kebabo stand at an average elevation of about fourteen hundred feet above sea level, an eleva- tion which was divined or calculated hurriedly by F. G. Rohlfs, but more accurately determined by Mrs. Forbes and her Egyptian fellow-traveller, Hassanein Bey. By these later figures the altitude above sea level of the Kebabo Oases may prove to be slightly lower than in the vii viii INTRODUCTION estimation of the older maps (1614 feet). Still it can- not be much less on the lake levels than fourteen hundred feet; therefore in considering the problems it is not pos- sible to attribute the Kebabo oases, the villages of Kufara to anything more than the site of a largish lake in pre- historic times which sent its waters flowing west into the great Wadi al Fardi, the course of which seems to have passed through Taiserbo to Jaghabub and thence past the oasis of Siwa into the Nile near Cairo. The Libyan Desert through which Mrs. Forbes travelled, starting from Cyrenaica and returning to Egypt, is classed by her and by most other persons with the Sahara; which properly speaking lies to the west of a long chain of peaks, ridges, and tablelands grouped in its central section under the name of 'Tibesti', the moun- tainous country of the Tu, Teda, or Tibu (Tebu or Tubu) peoples. But it would almost seem for reason of its past mammalian fauna as though we must distinguish between the Sahara and the Libyan Deserts, just as for similar reasons we do not extend the name of 'Sahara' to cover the sandy and stony wastes of Arabia. The true Libyan Desert almost a more awful region of desola- tion than the Sahara west of the Tibesti mountains would seem in ancient human times, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years ago, to have been the western area of the Nile basin. Its mighty rivers, their courses still traceable, fed by the almost Alpine range of Tibesti, by the vanished rain from the plateaus and ridges of Wanyanga and Darfur, flowed towards the Nile between its nascent delta and Kordofan. Its mammalian fauna and to a lesser degree its flora dif- fered in some important particulars from that of the Sahara (then possibly much covered by shallow lakes and still beasts trees inland seas) ; and more from the and of true West Africa or Central Africa. The White INTRODUCTION ix Rhinoceros or a nearly allied form of it has left fossil remains in Algeria and is still found within the equatorial Nile basin. It has penetrated south along the eastern side of Central Africa, but it does not appear to have passed into the Congo basin or to have reached the regions south of Algeria or west of Tibesti and Darfur. The 'Black' Rhinoceros with the pointed lip has pushed west- ward to the lands round Lake Chad and into the basin of the Shari, but seems never to have travelled as far west- ward as the Niger or ever to have been found in true West Africa. No zebra or wild ass, so far as we know, ever left Algeria or the Nile basin to enter the Chad or Congo regions. Many antelopes have in the near past and present ranged between Mediterranean Algeria on the north-west, the equatorial Nile basin, and southern most Africa, but have not appeared in the western half of Africa. The region therefore into which plunged the author of this book, with the concurrence and assistance of an educated Egyptian of Al Azhar University, has been of great interest to all students of Africa. Rohlfs's visit had almost become legendary and at best its reports were frag- mentary and inconclusive. The Kufara oasis was the half-way house between the mysterious and recalcitrant Negro kingdom of Wadai and the Mediterranean coast. Wadai was the last of the great Negro States of Central Africa to come under European supervision and control. But even after Wadai to the great benefit of North Central Africa was conquered by the French, and its slave trade abolished, the oasis of Kufara remained for a few more years a legendary district, perhaps mainly created by the excited imagination of a thwarted German explorer, who had already crossed Africa from the Medi- terranean to the Benue and the Niger, but who had scarcely penetrated to this secret land of water and palm x INTRODUCTION trees in the centre of the Libyan Desert than he had to leave it. We now realise from the work of Mr. Harding King in 1913 and from Mrs. Forbes's book, with its admirable photographs and both vivid and circumstantial descrip- tions, what this series of oases, salt lakes, and underground fountains means in the middle of the Libyan Desert. It is one of the vestiges of a formerly well-watered country ten, twenty or more thousand years ago. It was a more habitable region possibly at a distance in time not ex- ceeding five thousand years. To it came, long ago, when the intervening desert was much more traversable, clans of the Tu, Tebu or Tibu people, nowadays the dominating population of Fazan and Tibesti. A few Tebu one or two hundred still linger in Kufara on sufferance, the semi-slaves of the Zwiya Arabs. The author is able to give her readers an admirable photograph of one of these lingering Tebu of Kufara. Who and what are the variously named Tu, Teda, Tibu, or Tebu tribes? They are seemingly of consider- able antiquity, the Garamantes of Herodotos and the Romans, the Tedamansii of Claudius Ptolomseus, the Alexandrian geographer of the second century. They represent one of the numerous races between the White man and the Negro, but in their purer and more northern extension they are a people with a preponderance of white man stock. The skin is dark-tinted and the hair has a kink, a curl about it; but the physiognomy is that of the Mediterranean peoples, except for the occasionally tumid lips. They do not indeed differ very much in appear- ance, facially, from the Hamitic peoples of North-east Africa; but their language is utterly dissimilar. With this and that corruption, change, and deficiency, it has become the speech of Bornu (Kanuri), Kanem, Ennedi, northern Darfur, Tibesti, Tummo, and southern Fazan. INTRODUCTION xi Commerce even carries its dialects into Tripoli. But this Tibu-Kanuri group of tongues has no discernible connec- tion with any other African group and is utterly dissimilar in syntax and in word-roots from the sex-denoting Hami- tic, Libyan, Egyptian and Semitic languages of North and North-east Africa. Neither does it offer any point of resemblance with the Nubian group, with the Niger families, with Songhai or Fulfulde. It is rather hurriedly called a 'Negro' tongue, which explains nothing. There seem to have been many pre-Aryan, pre-Semitic, pre- Hamitic forms of speech generated by the White man in Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, which, like the original language-impulse of the Bantu and Semi- Bantu, were introduced into Tropical Africa and sub- sequently adopted by the Negro, who was at all times so easily influenced by the White invader. The Tibu speech seems to have been one of the several distinct groups of tongues (Fula may have been another) spoken in North Africa before that region was invaded from the east by the Hamites and from the North-west by the Libyans. It was pushed southwards into Fazan and thence ex- tended across the Libyan Desert to the oases of Kufara. But though ranking themselves as 'white men' or at any rate as a racial type much above the Negro, the Tibu were not quickly on the White man's side in religion. The ancient Garamantes became Christian only a short time before the invasion of Moslem Tripoli ; and were possibly not Islamized until the eleventh century.