Nearly Native, Barely Civilized African History

Editorial Board Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam Odile Goerg, Université Paris-Diderot Shamil Jeppie, University of Cape Town

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/afh Nearly Native, Barely Civilized

Henri Gaden’s Journey through Colonial French West Africa (1894-1939)

By Roy Dilley

Image of a hand-drawn map by Gaden (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/1 (12), author's photograph taken with permission of the archive).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dilley, Roy, 1954- author. Nearly native, barely civilized : Henri Gaden’s journey through colonial French West Africa (1894-1939) / by Roy Dilley. pages cm. -- (African history ; volume 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25096-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26528-8 (e-book) 1. Gaden, Henri, 1867-1939. 2. Colonial administrators--Africa, West--Biography. 3. Linguists--Biography. 4. Africa, West--Politics and government--1884-1960. 5. Mauritania--Biography. I. Title. II. Series: African history (Brill Academic Publishers) ; v. 3.

DT554.67.G34D55 2014 966.031092--dc23

2013040482

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ISSN 2211-1441 ISBN 978-90-04-25096-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-26528-8 (e-book)

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To my three sons Francis, Jerome and Luke

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ��ix Acknowledgements �� xiii Note on Orthography – Place and Personal Names �� xvii

Introduction ��1

A Funeral: Thursday, 14th December 1939 ��7

1 Gironde, Paris and Beyond �� 15

2 Agent of Commerce, African Novice: From Bordeaux to Bandiagara, 1894–1896 �� 35

Interlude: Furlough in France I �� 91

3 On the Trail of the Black Napoleon, 1897–1899 �� 93

Interlude: Furlough in France II ��149

4 The Mallam and the Qadis: A Posting to Zinder, 1900–1903 ��155

Interlude: Furlough in France III ��209

5 Cherchez la Femme: Tchekna, Chad, 1904–1907 ��213

Interlude: Furlough in France IV ��285

6 Confidential Relations: Boutilimit, Mauritania, 1908–1911 ��293

Interlude: Furlough in France V ��327

7 Paperwork and Bullets: The Years of Scholarship and War, 1912–18 ��329

viii contents

8 Governor, Savant, Adopted Son: St Louis, 1919–1927 ��349

9 The Monk of St Louis, 1927–1939 ��379

General Bibliography ��421 Bibliography of Henri Gaden’s Published Works ��431 Index ��433

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps*

1 Colonial French West Africa and Equatorial Africa around the turn of the 20th century �� 14 2 Missions to Bandiagara 1894–1896 and to Beyla and Nzo 1897–1899 �� 36 3 Missions to Zinder 1900–1903 and to Chad 1904–1907 ��156 4 The Colonial Territory of Mauritania c. 1930 (Fort Gouraud established in 1933) ��295 5 The Town of St Louis prior to World War II ��351

Plates

1 Gaden’s gravestone in Sor Cemetery, near St Louis, Senegal. Author’s own photograph �� 11 2 Sub-Lieutenant Gaden, 53rd Regiment in Tarbes, c.1890–92 (Fonds Gaden CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 5, item 117, no. 788, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive) �� 27 3 Moussa Diawara, Gaden’s ‘boy’ recruited first during the Bandiagara mission and then again during the Samory campaign. Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga �� 39 4 Devastation along Samory’s trail, Gaden’s photograph entitled ‘Dabardiyo, 26.09.98’, Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga ��124 5 Samory Toure after his capture on 29th September 1898, taken by Gaden, Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga ��129

* All maps are based on the Perry-Casteñeda Library Map Collection, Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

x list of illustrations

6 A band of officers at Beyla in October 1898. Figures are, from the left, Lt Jacquin, Capt Gaden, Capt Gouraud, Sergeant Bratières (?), and the medic Dr Boyé. Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga ��130 7 ‘Woman and Officer at Beyla, Oct. 1898.’ Could this be Salome Samory, daughter of the Almamy? Courtesy of the Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga ��135 8 The Sultan or Mbang Gaourang and the Kolak Doudmourrah (fig. 90 from G. Bruel, L’Afrique Equatoriale Française 1918, reproduced by kind permission of the General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, USA) ��225 9 ‘A bevy of beauties’, untitled photographs taken by Gaden of women most likely in (a & b) Zinder and in (c & d) Chad. Could 9c be ‘…something for Gerhardt. A likeable Arab girl…’? Could 9d possibly be an image of Gaden’s mousso, named Niorga, ‘la grande mademoiselle sous la Fronde’? All images courtesy of the Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga ��230 10 ‘Famous French Officers under the historical tree at Fort Lamy (Shari River)’ a photograph from A. Henry Savage Landor’s, Across Widest Africa, vol. 2, 1907, reproduced by kind permission of the General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, USA ��279 11 ‘Hôtel de la Mauritanie’, Avenue Dodds, St Louis (n.d.) (with kind permission of CAOM, digital image DAFANCAOM01_30FI) ��315 12 Henri Gaden as Governor of Mauritania (reproduced with kind permission of the Direction des Archives, Ministère des Affaires Etrangers, Paris) ��353 13 Taleb Khiar (standing in the centre) with Emir Sidi Ahmed and Mohammed Wuld Khalil (seated) and attendants standing behind, most likely at the time of Khiar’s submission

list of illustrations xi

to the French in 1919 (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 2, item 30, no. 701, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive) ��355 14 Henri Gaden (standing) and Amadou Aïdara, the boy in the aeroplane, c.1928–9 (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 2, item 35, no. 706, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive) ��393 15 Amadou Ali Diop, aka Doudou Gaden. Author’s own photograph taken in Dakar 2004 ��403 16 Henri Gaden in the dark suit and white pith helmet in the foreground about to receive the cravat of a Commandeur of the Legion of Honour, 27th January 1937 in the Place Faidherbe, St Louis (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 3, item 54, no. 725, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive) ��412

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The list of all those people who have lent me support over the course of this research project is too long to detail here. I am indebted to so many kind folk in Senegal, France, Britain and elsewhere, and I warmly acknowledge the generosity of all of them in helping me assemble a picture of Henri Gaden’s life and times. During a period of archival research in Senegal in 2004, I managed to interview a number of key individuals in Dakar and St Louis who had first- hand experience of the Gaden household during the 1920s and 1930s. An especial note of thanks goes to Amadou Ali Diop (a retired Customs Officer, b. 1929), aka ‘Doudou Gaden’, Henri Gaden’s foster child who was living in Dakar in 2004; Amadou Haidara (a retired school teacher, b. 1922), homo- phone of Gaden’s adopted child, a fact which evidently caused some confusion when the two boys were in the same class at school; Doudou Ndiaye (one-time Chef de Service à la Marie, b. c1929), who as a young boy lived opposite the Gaden’s; M. Ibrahim Diao (b. 1926), who in his early years spent much time at the Gaden household; M. Abdoulaye Lô (b. c1918), a contemporary of Gaden’s adopted son, Amadou Aïdara; Mokhtar Nongo (one-time Chef de Quartier) who was at Koranic school with Amadou Ali Diop. Also in St Louis, Diadji Gueye (a retired civil servant) who, despite having no direct knowledge of Gaden and his family, was infected by an enthusiasm for this project and freely gave his time accompanying me around St Louis, as did Mme Khady Nongo and Ibrahima Diallo, at the Galerie Amazonite. Maïtre Balacoune, the lawyer whose offices now occupy the house once belonging to Gaden in his retirement, showed kindness in allowing me to look around the property. I appreciate the assistance of the following people in Senegal in helping me find archival sources: M. Saliou Mbaye, M. Bousso, and M. Mamadou Ndiaye at the National Archives in Dakar; Professor Khadim Mbacké and Mme Oumou Kalsoum Ka at IFAN, Dakar, as well as Cheikh Diop, the librar- ian at IFAN library, who was indefatigable in looking out sources for me and who shared with me many a convivial taxi ride back to the Plateau; Abbé Etienne Sarr at Sor Church and the Curé at the Cathedral in St Louis; the staff at Le Service des Domaines et du Cadastre, St Louis.

xiv acknowledgements

Professor Mamadou Kandji and Dr Ousseynou Faye, both of the Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, gave me helpful pointers at various moments, and my old friend and field research assistant of over thirty years standing, Assane Lô, has been a much valued support throughout this project. His follow-up interviews of Amadou Ali Diop in 2007, and his herculean efforts in transcribing Gaden’s and Gouraud’s handwritten letters have been immeasurable. In France, I am indebted first to members of the Gaden family living in Bordeaux, in particular M. Christian Gaden, who welcomed me to his house for an interview and Mme Françoise Conquéret-Guibourd, who kindly allowed me access to her archive of family photographs and letters from Henri Gaden to his sister. Other members of the extended family were also generous with their time and shared information with me: M. François Gaden, Mme Catherine Puget (née Gaden) and M. Marc Fourault. To Alain Ricard warm thanks for pointing me in fruitful research directions on numerous occasions, and for sharing with me a passion for the life of Henri Gaden. Jean-Pierre Warnier too provided invaluable guidance at various stages over the last few years, for which I thank him. I would like to acknowledge the staff at the following archives for their assistance: the National Archives (Section Outre-Mer), Aix-en-Provence; the Institut de France, Paris; the Diplomatic Archives at the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, Paris; the Musée de l’Homme, Paris; the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, Château de Vincennes. I particularly appreciate the efforts of Mme Agnès Vatican, Conservateur des Archives, and the staff at Les Archives Municipales in Bordeaux in helping me find my way around their archive and making it so painless to obtain copies of, and permissions to reproduce, images from their collection of photographs taken by Henri Gaden. To French Historian, M. Marc Michel, my thanks for alerting me in 2004 to the fact that the Gouraud archive in Paris had just been made accessible to scholars, and to M. Pierre Fournié, Conservateur des Archives for facilitating my first visit to the Ministry archives then at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris in 2007. I could not have completed this work without the kind permission of M. Antoine Gouraud and M. Olivier Gouraud to consult the private Gouraud archive in Paris and to reproduce sections of Henri Gouraud’s letters to Gaden held in Aix-en-Provence. In Britain, this project was generously supported in its initial phases by a Visiting Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford in 2003, and its conception was polished through discussions with John Davis (sometime Warden of All Souls), David Parkin, Anthony Kirk-Greene, and John

acknowledgements xv

Hargreaves (Aberdeen); further afield David Robinson (Michigan), Michael Jackson (Harvard), Peter Geschiere (Amsterdam) and Kai Kresse (Berlin) have all added to the patina. I profited too from an AHRC Research Leave award in 2004–05 (No. RL/AN/703/APN17878), as well as a British Academy Small Grant (No. SG-37269) in 2004 to pursue aspects of this project. I have enjoyed the immense privilege of being able to write this book in two inspiring locations. First, for a six-month period from February 2009 at the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland, simply an idyllic place for study and reflection. My warmest thanks go to Dr Angela Hobart of the Centro for making my Visiting Research Fellowship possible and to Laura and Giovanni Simona, Reto Mortasini and my fellow scholars in Ascona for adding to the pleasure. Second, I finished the final draft of the manuscript in Konstanz, Germany, where I held a Visiting Professorial Research Fellowship at the University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. I have Professor Thomas Kirsch to thank wholeheartedly for my invitation to spend a year there, and to the staff of the Institute who worked tirelessly to support its Fellows. For the cartographic wizardry that went into the production of the book’s maps, I am grateful to Duncan Stewart of the University of St Andrews’ Print and Design Unit. Finally, and above all, to Julia Prest, my partner in life and in scholarship, who has encouraged and inspired me while writing this book.

NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY – PLACE AND PERSONAL NAMES

The orthography of place names in West Africa varies greatly for a number of reasons: with respect to the conventions adopted by a particular author, to the historical period in which the names were recorded and to the spelling conventions of the language in which they are transcribed. For example, the Sahelian town of Timbuktoo or Timbuctoo in English is also spelt Timbouctou or Tombuctou in French, although generally Timbuktu is now often preferred. Not only are there different French and English spellings of place names, but more recently orthographic systems have been developed that reflect more closely the specifics of West African vernaculars such as Pulaar or Fulfulde, Hausa and so on. In this book I have often followed the most common forms of spelling of place names in the colonial literature, although on close inspection they are not necessarily consistent with the demands of the new orthographic systems. I often note in brackets alternative spellings widespread throughout the literature in the hope that this may help comprehension where necessary. One particularly problematic area is personal names, many of which are now inscribed in a specific form through the procedures of the modern nation-states with respect to birth, marriage and death certificates, and so forth. Thus one common name can be rendered Amadu, Amadou, Ahmadou and so on. Some authors, however, apply modern orthographic systems to the spellings of personal names, while others use the conventions drawn from their own European mother tongues. But these variations can create confusion when the same person is referred to by apparently different names. For example, the patronym ‘Cam’ or ‘Caam’ in contemporary Pulaar orthography is rendered as Thiam, Tyam and even Chiam in French orthography or Cham in English. I have adopted where possible spellings that follow those in use during the French colonial period, although in the case of the names of many well-established historical figures or names of contemporary persons I have also noted in parentheses alternative spellings according to other orthographic systems where this might help the reader. I have not sacrificed clarity in the pursuit of orthographic exactitude.

INTRODUCTION

On arriving in Senegal, West Africa in 1980 to start a two-year period of anthropological fieldwork for a doctoral degree at Oxford University, I came across a copy of Henri Gaden’s 1931 publication entitled Proverbes et max- imes peuls et toucouleurs in a local bookshop. I snapped it up, and subsequently this book became one of my constant companions in the villages of the Senegal River valley and among Toucouleur (now known as Haalpulaar) communities further south. Not only did Gaden’s work help me understand the complexities and subtleties of the language and culture of the people I was studying, but I also felt that I had an affinity with the man through the particular interests he had in Haalpulaar culture and the insights he offered into their social life and ways of thinking. However, I puzzled at how he had managed to gain access to knowledge about areas of life that are normally out of bounds to Europeans and particularly to those that remain largely unknown to men, namely women’s affairs. His relationship to Coumba Cissé, his Senegalese mousso or ‘wife’ by a country marriage that lasted for around 30 years, was part of the answer to this conundrum: she provided Gaden with ethnographic information on a range of topics and was a font of local news and anecdotes. Only in 2004, having written up and published most of the ethnographic material previously collected for my doctorate, did I find the time from University duties of teaching and administration to pursue my fascination with the life, work and times of Henri Gaden. This book is the product of research conducted on and off over eight years in five different countries. Nearly Native, Barely Civilized is the first biography of Henri Gaden.1 It seeks to capture events as they unfolded from the perspective of those who witnessed them over a period of around 45 years from the time when Henri Gaden first set foot in Africa to his death in St Louis, Senegal in 1939. The main source material for the book is comprised of numerous series of letters from and to Henri Gaden. Its narrative structure remains faithful to the style in which Gaden’s and other individuals’ letters were written during a particular moment in history in which the course of the future was uncertain. A danger of writing biography is that the writer imposes

1 Anna Pondopoulo is the author of a short biographical contribution on Henri Gaden that appeared in a French academic journal in 2002 (see Pondopoulo 2002).

2 introduction retrospectively a sense of order and coherence on a life that was not present during its course. I have resisted this tendency. The various characters who play particular parts in specific scenes fade in and out of focus over time, and their roles may turn out to be cameos or leading parts in later acts. The partial yet progressive reporting of people’s actions and events allows the biographer to express the ambiguity and dubiety that surround those actions and events as they occurred, and this strategy helps retain the confusion and frustration felt by the actors situated in the moment. This is also intended to add an element of suspense to the narrative, since neither the letter writers nor I when reading the letters for the first time knew the outcome of specific situations. In this way, I attempt to capture historical realities as they unfolded and as they were experienced. This book does not, therefore, aim to reconstruct a conventional historical narrative of a life or of events as they unfolded; nor does it try to impose a rigid coherence and structure in the presentation of actions and incidents. In retaining the contradictions, tensions and uncertainties present in Gaden’s letters and in his life itself, I shed light on the nature of the colonial project more generally. For while colonialism sought to impose order and new types of organisation on what was perceived as the chaos and disorder of native affairs, its history as Gaden’s experience demonstrates is steeped in uncertainty. I have tried to capture this paradox in the writing of this book. The dates of the letters used as sources for this biography indicate the day on which they were written; but the date of receipt by the addressee could be many months later. The reader must bear in mind that there is, therefore, a time-lag between the writing of a letter and the reading of it, and that ‘conversations’ between correspondents might become somewhat disjointed as a result. It could take up to three months for a letter to travel from the interior of Africa to France. Events may appear to occur ‘out of sync’, but this feature reflects the slowness of communications between metropolitan France and Africa. Historical asides and footnotes have moreover been added to the text in order to fill in gaps in the information necessary for the reader to make sense of a particular context or situation. Finally, I have tried in particular to capture the sense of uncertainty and anxiety about the future course of events, and even of world history, in the minds of actors situated in particular places and in times very different from our own. Three kinds of chronology, which run simultaneously through this book, should be borne in mind by the reader. The first is the chronology of events as they occurred in historical time; the second is the chronological sequence

introduction 3

in which these events were written up in letters to family and friends; the third encompasses the time delay between the writing of the letter, the period taken to deliver the letter to the recipient and the subsequent responses to the correspondence. The first chronology is relatively straightforward to deal with: one thing follows another. The second chronology adds an initial twist to the sequence of events, for incidents may be reported as they occurred or retrospectively. The chronology of events can therefore appear strained, since the book’s narrative may be following the representation of events in specific letters rather than, say, the objective reporting of incidents as they occurred. Moreover, letters may also contain reflections on possible futures and projections beyond the present written within the context of the immediate circumstances of the author. The content of letters can therefore be three dimensional, referring to the past, the present and the future. The third chronology mixes up the simple linear progression of letter and reply, since a letter could take many months to arrive, and in the meantime other correspondence from the recipient may have been dispatched. There is not only then a time delay in communication, but there is also a constant slippage between messages that can disrupt what would otherwise be a steady flow of correspondence. Furthermore, events may be reported numerous times over the course of correspondence and authors may send out contradictory messages and opinions; sometimes they are simply mistaken.

Sources

This account of Henri Gaden’s life has been constructed primarily on the basis of Gaden’s letters to his father between 1886 and 1907, and also on the correspondence between Gaden and Henri Gouraud, a series that starts in the archive in 1898 with a letter from Gaden just after the capture of Samory Toure. This campaign brought the two men into a close friendship, and from then on they became regular correspondents over forty years until Gaden’s death in 1939. Gouraud’s letters to Gaden, from 1901 onwards, are lodged in the Fonds Gaden at the Centre d’Archives Outre-Mer in Aix-en- Provence (CAOM), and have been available to researchers for many years. To my knowledge they have not been the subject of any sustained historical analysis. Gaden’s letters to his father were the subject of a Masters dissertation at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 2003 (see Metayer 2003). Less well known, however, are the letters that Gaden sent from 1898 onwards to Gouraud, which are to be found in the Fonds Gouraud at the Archives du

4 introduction

Ministère des Relations Extérieurs (AMRE), Paris. These letters and Gouraud’s responses to them reveal particularly personal and intimate aspects of both men’s lives, and when read in parallel they provide a complex, detailed and fascinating story of colonial life. Gaden was also an associate of Auguste Terrier, a colonial administrator involved in North and Sub-Saharan African affairs, and their correspondence is lodged in the archives at the Institut de France (IdF), Paris. Maurice Delafosse’s letters to Gaden (as well as an occasional one from Gaden to Delafosse) are lodged in the Fonds archives personelles: M. Delafosse in the archives at the Musée de l’Homme (MH), Paris.2 There also exist occasional letters between Gaden and other French colonial officers, and between Gaden and his West African friends, contacts and research collaborators. Official French colonial papers form another important source of material for this book. In Senegal, the Archives Nationales de la République du Sénégal (Dakar, Sénégal) [ANS] holds two series of documents: the fonds ancien and the fonds moderne, which contain regular government reports on specific territories, official correspondence and memoranda, and much more. Gaden’s personal colonial dossier is also held in Dakar, while many duplicate documents have been lodged in Aix-en-Provence. Numerous other archives and collections were consulted during the course of the research for this book: the Fonds Gaden in the Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire (IFAN) at the Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar; the IFAN library in Dakar and the IFAN archive in St Louis; Service d’Archives, Palais de Justice, St Louis; Registers of the Cathédrale and of the Eglise de Sor, St Louis; Archives of the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (SHAT), Chateau de Vincennes, Vincennes. The Archives Muncipales de Bordeaux, Gaden’s natal city, holds a collection of Henri Gaden’s photographs which were the subject of an exhibition and a catalogue put together by Alain Ricard and Anne-Laure Jégo in Bordeaux in 2001. It is interesting to note that the Fonds Gaden were offered to the Archives Municipales in Bordeaux in 1975 not by a Gaden but by very distant relatives, M. and Mme Roger Guibourd; indeed a number of Gaden’s personal items are still held by the Guibourd family in Bordeaux. How and why this family came to possess and later dispose of parts of Gaden’s heritage is intriguing, and it is one of the questions that I address at the end of the book. I have adopted a particular style of referencing quotations and specific information taken from the letters: it is based on an individual’s initials and

2 These Delafosse letters have been used extensively in Anna Pondopoulo’s book (2009) on the relationship between the French and the ‘Peuls’.

introduction 5

the date of composition. For example, the first letter written by (Nicolas) Jules Henri Gaden to Henri Joseph Eugène Gouraud to survive in the archive is dated 16th September 1898 at the village of Nzo. This is referred to in the text as: (JHG-HJEG, 16.9.98). Subsequent letters from Gouraud to Gaden, such as his first written on 7th April 1901 from Guidambado near Zinder, is referred to as: (HJEG-JHG, 7.4.01). Similar abbreviations are used for other addressees: ‘F’ (as in JHG-F) for Gaden’s father; ‘Mine’ for Gaden’s sister Wilhelmine; ‘AT’ for Auguste Terrier; GGAOF for the Gouverneur Général, Afrique Occidentale Française; etc.

A FUNERAL: THURSDAY, 14TH DECEMBER 1939

A cold December morning, and the streets of St Louis, Senegal are draped in sea mist. It cloaks the town’s imposing French colonial buildings, swirling through the decorative wrought-iron work on the first-storey balconies. The damp air penetrates the thatch of the few remaining huts in the area and insinuates itself between the panels of flimsy wooden shacks, where native St Louisiens shiver in the early light. From the doors of one of the grand colonial stone houses, accompanied by his wife, comes M. Jean Chapouty, Director of the Cooperative Society, the last person to have seen Henri Gaden alive on 12th December. He pulls his overcoat close against the brisk morning air and makes his way towards the Place Faidherbe at the heart of St Louis where the statue of the General stands impe- riously. In another part of town, less metropolitan and less well-heeled, away from the icons of colonial power, the Moorish Shaykh Taleb Khiar buries himself beneath a long flowing gown or boubou which he pulls over his head. This is the last of the many layers he puts on to protect himself against the elements, and it makes his giant, bear-like frame seem even more enormous. With slightly wild and unkempt hair, a straggling beard covering his throat, the Shaykh looks every bit the colonial subject the authorities have sought to tame since their annexation of Mauritania many years earlier. He too heads purposefully in the direction of the Place Faidherbe, and then on to the Cathedral of St Louis, located to the side of the palace of the ‘Governance’. As these two figures near the Place, they are met by crowds of St Louisiens – French, Senegalese, Mauritanian. Some cross the Geut Ndar bridge that connects the island with the Tongue of Barbary and the settlements of Geut Ndar and Ndar Tout; others descend on the cathedral from the more salubrious southern and northern quarters of the island with their 18th and 19th century European-style architecture. Out of a modest two-storey house in the northern quarter, at the corner of rue Flamand and rue Brière de L’Isle, emerge a small group of Senegalese. Among them are Aminata Sall, Gaden’s cook, a ten-year- old boy, Amadou Ali Diop known affectionately as ‘Doudou Gaden’, and the tall elegant figure of a late middle-aged Toucouleur woman, bowed by the burden of bereavement. This is Coumba Cissé, Gaden’s wife by a country marriage, one not recognised by the French civil authorities. They met some 30 years earlier, and Coumba remained his loyal companion until his death. Bereft, alone and uncertain of what her future will hold with the head of her household now dead, she leads the small group towards the cathedral.

8 a funeral: thursday, 14th december 1939

The last mortal remains of Nicolas-Jules-Henri Gaden, born in Bordeaux in 1867, had lain over night in the chapel of the Hospital on rue Carnot in St Louis, set behind the cathedral. He had died just after midnight on 12th January in the arms of M. Chapouty at the age of 72 years – a considerable feat having spent almost 50 of them living in insalubrious outposts of French West Africa. Jean Chapouty (49) and M. Etienne Lagrange (52), a trader in the town, made arrangements for the last rites to be given to Henri Gaden. His body, now prepared and dressed, had been accompanied to the chapel by these two friends and a priest, Father Walther. A night vigil had been held until morning by a group of mourners, a guard of honour composed of his friends, family and colleagues who would not leave him to pass the night alone. The body was taken from the chapel at 9 o’clock on that chill morning of Thursday 14th December. The coffin, sealed with lead, disappeared under a mountain of flowers and the large number of wreaths offered by the Governments of Mauritania and of Senegal, the Governors, the military, the Cooperative Society, and by Gaden’s numerous friends and family.

The body is led into the cathedral, where huge crowds are gathered to pay their last respects to a man who was held in the highest regard by all sectors of the town’s community. From the cathedral’s stained glass window, the seated figure of Saint Louis, sceptre in hand, a halo enclosing his head crowned in glory, gives the sign of benediction to those who kneel before him. Behind the figure of the holy king stand a monk with a prayer book and a knight with sword at ease, a representation of the three powers of the French colonial presence in West Africa: sovereignty, military might and the Christian mission. The funeral service is simple, in accordance with Henri’s last wishes, but also grandiose. Eulogies are given by General Messegue, Commander of the troops in St Louis and, after him, by Shaykh Taleb Khiar, the great Muslim religious leader who pronounces words of immense feeling and sensibility in the name of the people of Mauritania. The Muslim holy man and one-time rebel leader now stands before the great and good of the colonial community of St Louis to deliver his eulogy inside the cathedral, the focal point of the Christian faith in the country. Gaden’s death brings a momentary blurring of the religious boundaries running through the heart of the colony.1 Then M. Beyries, Governor of Mauritania, evokes the life and the work of the great man:

1 No-one cared to record Taleb Khiar’s eulogy, and we are all the more impoverished today for this oversight.

a funeral: thursday, 14th december 1939 9

‘Governor Gaden, the Colonel Gaden, as he preferred to be known, remained faithful until the end of his colonial vocation. He passed away discreetly in the old town of St Louis that he cherished so much, in a room poorly furnished, like the cell of a monk, where he worked without respite on an important linguistic study. It is not only a glorious veteran of the colonial army, a great governor, who has disappeared. It is a savant, a learned scholar of studies into not just linguistics, but also ethnography, local history and folklore – research which appeared to prolong his active life that was directed always towards the native.’ He goes on: ‘From the valley of the Senegal River to that of the Oued Dra, over thousands of kilometres, in the adobe houses of the Toucouleur, the straw huts of the Peul, under the tent of the Moor, his name is and will be long pronounced with gratitude and with respect.’2 From Paris, his 72-year-old comrade-in-arms, long-standing friend and intimate correspondent, the great First World War General Henri Gouraud, laments Gaden’s passing: ‘Gaden! My old friend! My brother! After Saint Cyr, it was the Soudan and Samory.’ Commanding a company of auxiliary Senegalese riflemen, it was Gaden and his brave companions who plunged into the great hidden camp in virgin forest and captured Samory under the noses of his soldiers, without firing a single shot. Gouraud ends his death note, later published in the Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique Française with a patriotic, imperial hurrah. ‘France discovered that it possessed a magnificent colonial empire, to which she gave peace and liberty, and which now supplies manpower and resources. This empire, which is another France, is indebted firstly to a handful of energetic and adventurous men. In the midst of them, Gaden, who was successively a bold captain, a wise governor, and hard-working scholar, appeared as one of the most tenacious and the most human.’

The Burial Between the arched pontoons of the Faidherbe bridge, connecting the island of St Louis with the eyot of Sor at the mouth of the Senegal River, and on to the mainland itself, the funeral cortège makes its way to Gaden’s final resting place. A throng of local people follow in the wake of the coffin and the official party. The procession passes by the bustling Sor market where local traders sell all manner of goods and agricultural produce, and by the railway station

2 Quotation taken from a type-script of the eulogy given to me by Alain Ricard.

10 a funeral: thursday, 14th december 1939 that towers over the market-place to the rear. The rectangular tower of Sor Church can be seen in the distance, below which the crescented dome of a local mosque stands proudly, proclaiming the presence of Islam in the country. The cortège continues on its way past the rue de Paris until it reaches the route du Cimetière, at the end of which stand the cemeteries of Sor, one Christian and further on a Muslim one. Moving closer to the mainland, the temperature on Sor rises as the sun tries to burn off the early morning mists that still cling to the buildings of St Louis and the fishermen’s houses on Guet Ndar located further out in the mouth of the river, on the last spits of land at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The body is interred at 10 a.m. on 14th December 1939.

Gaden’s funerary ritual was conducted with full Christian ceremony, much to the great relief of his last remaining sister Wilhelmine or ‘Mine’ back in Bordeaux. She had been anxious to learn that he had received appropriate Catholic rites, and she was reassured of this by M. Chapouty in his letter to her after the burial. On the grave, situated just off the path from the main gateway in the cemetery, a large headstone was erected some time later. It depicts an image of Gaden above the dates ‘1867–1939’ and is inscribed with the words: ‘GADEN, Lieutenant Colonel de Reserve d’Infanterie Coloniale, Gouverneur Honoraire des Colonies, Lieutenant Gouverneur de la Mauritanie, 1920–1927’. (See plate 1.) The pointed obelisk form of the white headstone stands today framed against a backdrop of rich green foliage of the tall trees planted in the cemetery. A Frenchman buried far from his native lands in Europe; a life that had led him from the opulence of high bourgeois society in Bordeaux, where his forefathers had settled and set themselves up as wine traders, négociants, at the end of the 18th century around the time of the Revolution. What had brought him so far from his home, so far from the comforts of the life he could have led in metropolitan France? Almost exactly 13 years earlier, on 16th December 1926, a journalist who had visited St Louis reported in a column entitled ‘Silhouettes coloniales’, in the newspaper Le Midi Colonial et Maritime, the following observations made at the Hôtel de la Mauritanie, the seat of office and residence of the Governor of the territory: From all points in Mauritania, from the near Trarza to the distant Adrar, they come on camels to submit their grievances or proclaim their vows to the great chief of St Louis, whom they all venerate for his uprightness and equity… The prestige of M. le Gouverneur Gaden over the Maures and Toucouleurs is considerable.3

3 See clipping contained in CAOM 15 APC 1 (2).

a funeral: thursday, 14th december 1939 11

Plate 1. Gaden’s gravestone in Sor Cemetery, near St Louis, Senegal. Author’s own photograph.

But it was not always so. First, Gaden recounted in wide-eyed wonder more than 30 years earlier in a letter to his father in Bordeaux his journey by boat from France, via the Canaries, to the port of Dakar. We reached the Canaries. I did not see Tenerife, the weather being misty. After the islands there appeared the first flying fish and the occasional shark.

12 a funeral: thursday, 14th december 1939

Yesterday, indeed, we caused enormous schools of flying fish to rise up. We sighted land around 4 o’clock; the Mamelles, two hills to the north of Dakar, then the coast, dotted with very occasional trees, but of a very arid appearance, some attractive cliffs and rocks. (JHG-F, 30.10.94) Yet, Gaden struggled to come to terms with what he saw around him during his first encounters with Africa and its peoples. The exotic allure of his surroundings did not last long, and his initial impressions in the same letter of 30th October 1894 did not augur well. He described the following scene: Finally, we dropped anchor [in Dakar] at 6.30, on a dark night. The odour of the negro can be smelt from the port itself, and when a horde of canoes invaded us, a bunch of grubby blacks climbed aboard. The smell became awful. I have however almost become used to it already…. Horrible hot night, no air and a stifling temperature. The old Soudanese who were with us could not recall similar temperatures. You can see I have started off well. Today the heat is again stifling… He went on to observe: The blacks are decidedly a dirty race; above all those here, terribly lazy and indolent that one must berate them firmly in order to get something done. This colourful and dirty crowd is rather remarkable. All of them well clothed, however, [some] in unbelievable boubous, [others] in obnoxious rags. The women with their babies on their backs, straddled around their waists, their bare heads nodding around, are quite remarkable. On 14th December 1894 he wrote again to his father: The blacks are completely insensible to good deeds, which they take as a sign of weakness. A case of mores. The respected chief is one who administers blows and chops off heads, advisedly, of course. My groom is never as careful, never cleans the bridle or saddle as well as when I administer to him a kick somewhere or other. (JHG-F, 14.12.94) By the end of his life, Gaden had mellowed into a man of stature in the eyes of his adopted countrymen. He was hailed as a holy man by some in Mauritania, and he had forged intimate personal as well as professional relations with Moors and Senegalese alike. In response to his friend Gouraud, who had tried to persuade him to return to France after retirement, Gaden stated that he wished to be ‘close to Toucouleur friends’ in his last years. These friends were described in one of his last scholarly publications as being part of ‘the populations that we love’. He admitted to Gouraud: ‘I owe this work to these good people, the authors, men like any other men … I could only have done this work here [in St Louis] and not in France’ (JHG-HJEG, 17.4.32).

a funeral: thursday, 14th december 1939 13

Here is the figure of a young military officer, replete with 19th-century bourgeois prejudices regarding Africa and Africans. This image is recast by the end of his life, by which time he has become regarded as a respected figure of authority, of learning and stature in the eyes of his adopted community in St Louis. A one-time racist colonial novice with an unshrinking severity and judgemental eye underwent a remarkable personal transformation. What brought about such a radical shift in Gaden’s views, a mel- lowing of his attitudes towards local people? Indeed, what triggered the development of intimate relationships with Soudanese folk, their society and customs, and above all with local women? This story of Henri Gaden’s life traces the course of this sea-change in his outlook, which was initially forged in his youth in France, and how he came to assume an identity as an assimilated West African and became an African devotee.

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CHAPTER ONE

GIRONDE, PARIS AND BEYOND

Son of Bordeaux

Jules Nicolas Henri Gaden was born at 11 o’clock on the morning of 24th January 1867 in Bordeaux to an haute bourgeois family that revolved in the best social circles of the city. The Gadens were wealthy wine merchants of German origin who dominated the city’s trade after the Napoleonic wars. Henri’s parents, Henri senior and Hélène Rousse, were aged 26 and 22 respectively when their first child – a son – was born, and his birth certificate bears the names of Hermann Klipsch and Octave Le Roy as witnesses.1 Henri senior struck an imposing presence at just under six feet tall. He had deep-set eyes, a long, slightly bulbous nose, and wore a full beard. Later in life his high crown and prominent forehead were shown off to their full extent as his hair receded. He looked every inch the image of a 19th- century paterfamilias, dressed in a well-tailored grey three-piece suit. He had completed his French military service in the 143rd Infantry Regiment, being part of the class of 1861, and remained enlisted in the Infantry’s reserve corps until 1881, when at 41 years old he was granted ‘congé definitif’– definitive leave.2 Gaden’s mother, Hélène, was a petite, fine-featured woman, with black hair and tightly drawn thin lips, perhaps suggestive of a stern and humourless nature. From the one photograph that remains of her, she stares out directly at the camera, as though daring the on-looker the impertinence of breaking into a smile. Henri junior takes primarily after his mother in appearance. Gaden had four younger sisters. Wilhelmine, the eldest of the four, wore a carefree expression as a young girl, and she matured into a slender, athletic and attractive woman, of elegant appearance and poise, whose pleasant face was dominated by thick bushy eye-brows. Only one picture remains of any of his other three sisters, Hélène, Germaine and Marie, and this is of a young woman in a nun’s habit.3 The picture was taken

1 See Dossier Personnel, No 7Ye 486, SHAT. 2 See 15 APC/10, Livret, CAOM. 3 In the photographic collection retained by Mme Conqueret-Guibourd, Bordeaux.

16 chapter one in the city of Orléans, and is of Hélène, who joined the Sisters of Orléans. Her deep-set eyes and imposing brow suggest the features of her father, and she is not blessed with the same comeliness as her sister Wilhelmine. Gaden’s mother was highly religious, a Catholic by upbringing, and Henri’s three youngest sisters each took up holy orders in the Catholic Church: Hélène (Soeur Marie) joined the Ordre des Rédemptoristes, and Germaine (Soeur St Paul) and Marie (Soeur Marie-Dominique) both took vows among the Petites Soeurs Dominicaines Gardes-Malades des Pauvres. Henri was much more ambivalent about religion. As a young man, Henri wanted to escape the confines of his bourgeois life in France, and perhaps too the restraint and suffocating air of middle-class respectability. The family were conservative liberals who saw the role of the state as providing laissez-faire conditions in which free trade could flourish. Henri’s politics were marked neither by radical republicanism nor by left wing posturing, both of which he detested. In the 1860s, Henri’s family occupied an imposing four-storey, 18th- century town house at 56 quai des Chartrons, an address registered as the trading house of his father, who was a négociant working for La Maison Jules Rousse and Co. This business was owned by Henri’s maternal grandfather, Jules Rousse, and Henri’s father became associated with it in the late 1860s. Number 56 was also occupied by a watchmaker, Jean Truilhet and his wife, who lived in a small apartment in the building.4 By the late 1870s, Henri’s family comprised his mother and father, three of his sisters and a household retinue of an English maid, two chambermaids and a cook. Next door, at number 55, Henri’s grandfather, Hermann, lived with his family, and these premises were registered as the trading house of the wine merchants Gaden and Klipsch. By 1886, Henri’s family had moved into the larger property at number 55, and the Gaden and Klispch company had transferred its operations to 24, cours de la Martinique, an elegant four- storey building just around the corner behind the quai. Henri left the house to take up his education in Paris that year, by which time his younger brother, Philippe, was three years old. The household’s increasing opulence at this time can be seen in the size of the Gaden’s domestic staff: now a husband and wife who worked as valet and cook respectively, another English housemaid and two chambermaids.5

4 See Annuaire Général du Commerce et de L’Industrie, Bordeaux 1867 and 1869. 5 See Recensements démographiques, La Gironde, 1872, 1876, 1881 and 1886.

gironde, paris and beyond 17

Roots in Bordeaux

What we know of the history of the Gaden family owes much to the work of Michel Espagne, a French historian originally from the Bordeaux area himself, who specialises in the cultural relations between France and Germany, and has studied the German community in Bordeaux in the 18th and 19th centuries. He gives us particular insight into how two German immigrant families – the Gadens and Klipschs – established their lofty social position in the city by way of what he calls a ‘dazzling ascent’.6 Henri Gaden’s great-grandfather, Christian [Ludolf Daniel] Gaden, was born in 1776 (the son of Carl Georg, a pastor in Wismar on the Baltic coast) in Pampow, a town in Mecklemburg, then part of a Swedish possession on the Baltic Sea. Towards the end of the 18th century Christian and his wife, Wilhelmina Behncke, moved to Bordeaux, where Henri Gaden’s grandfather Hermann was born in 1809.7 In 1803, Christian formed an association with Christoph-Carl Klipsch, a friend and fellow German- speaking immigrant from Magdeburg, a city north-west of Leipzig. Together the two men founded the trading house ‘Gaden et Klipsch’, and they installed themselves on the quai des Chartrons, an area that was to become the city’s prestigious and affluent waterfront. They were among the first wine merchants to set up a business there, and they became part of an up and coming cosmopolitan trading community that settled in this outlying area of the city, just beyond old fortress of the Chateau Trompette. This community comprised, among others, fellow German Protestants along with their co-religionists from the Tarn region of France. Chartrons was a quarter of foreigners, including Irish, Portuguese, and an assortment of others. A symbol of success, the quarter along the quay in the north of the city that gave on to the Garonne river, was to become a thriving area of warehouses and company headquarters, the most bourgeois neighbourhood of Bordeaux. The German immigrant families of the Chartrons formed a tight-knit circle of business, social and marriage relations, a kind of self-supporting

6 See Espagne, 1997: 66. He argues that contrary to popular legend German wine merchants, not English ones, controlled the greater part of this trade during the period from the end of 18th to the 19th century. See also Espagne, Bordeaux-Baltique (1991) and his earlier doctoral thesis on German immigrant families in Bordeaux. 7 This account is based on Espagne’s work as well as interviews in 2004 with Christian Gaden (b. 1922) (Henri’s paternal cousin once-removed), genealogies supplied by him and by Mme Catherine Puget (née Gaden), and the privately published work with information on the Gaden family by Marc Fourault in Nos familles bordelaises (2001).

18 chapter one ethnic enclave in the city.8 Intermarriage was an important element in consolidating their economic presence and their cultural identity. Henri’s grandfather, Hermann, for instance, married one of Christoph-Carl Klipsch’s daughters, (Sophie) Aménaïde (b. 1813) in 1833. Other marriages link these families together in a skein of affinal connections that were spun from the time of their arrival in south-west France; and these family members were to become important and influential contacts for Henri Gaden during his adulthood. While the immigrant families intermarried to maintain their group identity, this community of German Protestants was not, however, a totally closed world, for they also sought connections with some of the long- established grand Bordeaux bourgeoisie. An example of this comes from Henri’s immediate family. His mother, Dorothée Marie Hélène Rousse (b. 1844), was the daughter of Jules Rousse (b. 1807) and Louise Wilhelmine Klipsch (b. 1821, herself the daughter of Christoph-Carl Klipsch). Jules’s father, Pierre-Nicolas, was a late-18th century ship’s captain and privateer from La Rochelle, who married a Bordeaux woman, Françoise Dupuy, in 1797. The marriage of Henri’s father (also called Henri (b. 1840)), to (Dorothée) Hélène Rousse was a significant moment in the religious affiliation of this branch of the family and in their subsequent integration into French society. The Rousse family were French Catholics; the Gadens were German Protestants, and the family grave containing numerous ancestors can be found today in the city’s Protestant cemetery, established in 1825. By contrast, Henri’s father was buried in the Rousse family sarcophagus situated in the Bordeaux Catholic cemetery, accompanying in the grave Pierre-Nicolas, the sea captain (1834), Jules Nicolas (1859), and Henri’s mother Dorothée Hélène (1917). Henri Gaden’s sister, Wilhelmine, was also buried there in 1943.9 Henri’s father must therefore at some point have converted to Catholicism – perhaps on his marriage to Dorothée Hélène; and all the children appear to have followed the mother’s religious faith and were brought up in the Church of Rome. Another connection through marriage to an important Bordelais family formed part of a set of relations that would also become significant in Henri Gaden’s later life. Henri’s aunt, Aménaïde Gaden, his father’s sister, married

8 Espagne (1997) estimates that there were around 20 German traders in the city in 1711, and this had risen to about 500 by 1802, of a total urban population of approximately 90,000. 9 See Cemetery records, Arreté de Concession, 6 Aout 1830, 3e Série No. 9 Côté E. Protestants could not be interred in the Catholic burial ground, which is why, according to its sexton, the Protestant cemetery was established in 1825; it was nonetheless possible for Catholics to be buried there.

gironde, paris and beyond 19

in 1857 (Jean) Paul Devès, the son of a merchant and ship’s outfitter Justin Devès and his wife Marie Boué. Justin (1789–1865) had founded the trading house ‘Devès et Chaumet’, one of the first companies to establish commercial relations with Senegal and the French Soudan. He was one of three Devès brothers who went out to West Africa in the 1820s to trade from St Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River. The family line of Justin’s brother Bruno gave rise to a group of Creole relations based in St Louis in the 19th and early 20th century through Bruno’s marriage to a Senegalese woman.10 His son, Gaspard, also married a Senegalese woman, Tamba Madeline Diop, and their subsequent offspring—three sons Hyacinthe, François and Justin II, all born in St Louis—became significant players in the social, political and economic life of the Senegalese town. Justin I returned to France in the 1850s, and left M. Chaumet in charge of his West African business interests. His son, Paul Devès, Henri’s uncle, had three children, one of whom, Gabriel, maintained the family’s commercial activities in West Africa. Henri Gaden was the son of an important Bordeaux mercantile family, whose networks were firmly rooted in the history of the commercial hub of the city, its port. These networks radiated out beyond the southwest corner of France to embrace an expanding international trade that was spurred by entrepreneurial activities of the French in the overseas territories they controlled in West Africa and elsewhere. From his viewpoint on the world from Bordeaux, Henri would have had his horizons broadened, his sense of adventure heightened by stories of feats in foreign lands, and by the excit- ing possibilities that might await him as he gazed from the window of his home on the quai des Chartrons onto the Garonne river that flowed out of the city through the Gironde estuary to the Atlantic Ocean.11 Pastor and privateer, Creole cousins and commercial traders, all of these characters added their ounce of spice to the social and cultural mix that Henri Gaden embodied.

10 Bruno appears to have had Masonic links, for he was the ‘Vénérable de la Loge La Parfaite Union’ in 1827. (David Robinson, personal communication.) 11 The mixture of Germanic roots and an adopted French identity in Gaden’s family was not without its difficulties in France in the post Franco-Prussian war period. This was also particularly so in the first two decades of the 20th century in the build up to the First World War when, for example, Gaden’s sister Wilhelmine, known affectionately to the family as ‘Mine’, felt herself moved publicly to change her name to ‘Françoise’ in order to distance herself by association from the name she shared with the wife of the German Emperor, Wilhelm II. The issue of Franco-German relations – and the divided loyalties they gave rise to within the family – was to play an important part throughout the course of Henri’s life. And it was to do so particularly in his choice of a military career in French Overseas territories.

20 chapter one

Lycée Louis-le-Grand

Leaving his natal city of Bordeaux for the first time in 1886, Henri Gaden took off to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, regarded as one of the most demanding public secondary schools in France. Known as ‘magno- ludoviciens’, students at the Lycée were subjected to rigorous academic training in preparation for entry into one of the Grandes Ecoles. Henri was well supported by family and friends in his attempts to fashion a new life for himself in the capital city. He lived in the 2nd arrondisement on the rue de la Paix, with someone named Paul, possibly his cousin Paul Gaden, three years his elder, the son of Henri’s uncle, Hermann, who was studying at the Ecole Polytechnique. The first letter that survives in the archive from Henri is to his father, dated 25th October 1886, written just after he had started at the Lycée. He was proud to announce that he had since the previous Sunday worn his tall school hat, a ‘kepi’, a symbol of his newly acquired position in the world.12 He was already well integrated into the network of family connections in Paris, and he listed his social engagements with his cousin Edouard Klipsch,13 and his uncle Gabriel Devès from Bordeaux, who was passing through the capital. Gaden signed off his letter saying: ‘make Mine [his sister] give you a big kiss on the part of your son who loves you’. Gaden quickly developed an interest in theatre and went sometimes with Edouard or with his friend Chambrelent to the Variétés or the Folies Dramatiques, among others. His appreciation of performances developed as he attended more productions, and he began to provide critical commentaries on what he had seen the previous evening. After dinner on one occasion he went with uncle Gabriel to see Jane Hading in Frou-frou, a play by Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac: ‘She was very good in the role, although she exaggerated a little from time to time; the play is very sad, however; at the end, one can only hear the blowing of noses and sobs from the audience; the closer the dénouement approaches, the louder the noise, to the point where it becomes absolutely risible’.14 He looked forward to seeing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in French in the New Year. Gaden soon picked up the school slang, which he sprinkled throughout his correspondence, and he reported a series of pranks the pupils played on

12 The hat is comparable with those worn by the French military: a tall round rigid cap with a peak. 13 Henri’s maternal grandmother was Louise Wilhelmine Klipsch. 14 Jane Hading, ‘la petite marseillaise’, was a French actress, 1859–1940.

gironde, paris and beyond 21

each other. He and his friends ragged the other students (‘bizuths’)15 by taking their books and charging them ten centimes to return them. Yesterday we came up with a more efficient means. On Saturday, in the day, each pupil’s clothes are put out on the beds for them to wear to go out… we pass through their dormitories, and pick up as many hats (kepis) as possible. We collected 12 of them, and demanded 10 centimes per hat; but the bizuths, led by one of their friends who’s a bit of a bad egg, complained to the [school] administration. (JHG-F, 14.11.86) Gaden turned against the snitches, and his sense of loyalty towards his fellow pranksters was expressed in a moral outrage: ‘what they did [complaining] was filthy, and not one of the ‘taupins’ [students preparing for the Grandes Ecoles] will hold back from tormenting them’. He was already becoming a little jaundiced by his lessons: ‘As regards the lectures, they contain nothing really new or really interesting’. Of physics, he complained: ‘Our professor gives us absolutely useless things to do, outside of the programme of study and lacking in any clarity at all. His classes are dull.’ The new term at school in 1888 began with a report card sent to his parents, and his marks were uneven: 17/20 for trigonometry 11/20 in German, the language of his forebears, but only 2/20 for physics and chemistry. He explained rather sheepishly to his father that he had ‘much to do in physics and chemistry, also I have to do a lot this year’ (JHG-F, 8.1.88). Gaden’s participation in bourgeois dining circles was developing, and his social connections were broadened. He was concerned to appear correct in his dealings with such folk, and consulted his father on the proper formula to sign off a letter were he to be invited by chance to dine with M. et Mme Lendet. An invitation to dine with the Lendets was forthcoming, and he visited them on New Year’s Eve, 1887. Conscious of his appearance, he announced that he had bought himself a pair of gloves to help strike the proper impression. He visited the Louvre with cousin Paul, but was not impressed: ‘we saw many ugly things, none of which attracted us’. His initiation into the ways of a gentlemen was further advanced over the holidays, for his parents had sent him a parcel for the festive period, and he and Paul each savoured their gifts, a couple of cigars, at their lodgings in rue de la Paix. Following his 21st birthday on 24th January 1888, Gaden received letters of congratulation from his three cousins, and one from his sister Hélène. A possible admirer, Marguerite, also wrote to him, a letter

15 ‘Bizuths’ were first-year students.

22 chapter one containing ‘much silliness of course’, and this correspondence continued sporadically over the next few years. Henri met up occasionally with his uncles Marc Fourault and Charles Gaden, his father’s brother. With Charles, he visited the site where the Eiffel tower was being built on the left bank of the Seine. It was still only 70 metres tall, but Henri regarded it unsympathetically: ‘[it] promises to make the most ugly effect possible’. What he would have made of it once it reached its full height of 300 metres in 1889 as part of the Exposition Universelle, we do not know. What Gaden saw obviously stirred his conservative sensibilities, for change on this scale, and the sense of progress it represented in a modern age, went counter to his traditionalist take on the world. Henri’s reactionary tendencies came out again in relation to the demonstrations of the Boulangistes on the streets of Paris. General Georges Boulanger had until 1886 been the Minister of War, but won electoral success in the Dordogne in the plebiscite of 1888, standing on a platform advocating militarism in Europe and revenge on Germany following the defeat of 1870. Restoring French territories close to home, rather than expanding an overseas empire, were some of the objectives of this popular political movement.16 Boulanger attracted support from what Henri thought to be a rag-bag of followers – monarchists, republican malcon- tents, and populists – and Henri witnessed mass uprisings on the streets which threatened to bring about civil disorder and even a coup d’état.17 ‘I have no longing to be part of them [the demonstrations], from which nothing much comes, and one risks being bludgeoned by the Boulangistes, who are for the most part butchers’ boys, street peddlers and other people of little respectability’, he wrote (JHG-F, 23.4.88). Towards the end of the academic year in the summer of 1888, Henri was facing his final examinations for entry into one of the Grandes Ecoles. ‘I can’t wait to have these examinations behind me, it [the situation] could not be more bothersome. Those for Saint Cyr above all annoy me; it is however worthwhile to sit them, in case of an emergency’. Saying he must return

16 Prime Minister Jules Ferry fell in the elections of October 1885, a result which opened a period of ministerial instability that had a profound effect on popular sentiment in France. Ferry had denigrated the Paris communards of 1871 and was a promoter of French interests overseas - two views close to Gaden’s heart. See Metayer 2003: 2.13. 17 By January 1889, a coup seemed very possible, and Georges Boulanger was seen to represent a threat to French democracy. With the possibility of arrest hanging over his head, he fled to Jersey and then to Brussels, where he committed suicide on the grave of his mistress. See, for example, Irvine 1989.

gironde, paris and beyond 23

to his physics, he signed off the letter ‘your son who loves you, J. H. Gaden’ (JHG-F, 29.5.88).

Henri finally passed his entrance examination for Saint Cyr in 1888, having spent two years at the Lycée Louis le Grand to complete his studies. A note in the Archives Privées at Aix-en-Provence reports that: ‘he showed himself to be an applied and serious student. He opted finally for a military career and entered the School at Saint Cyr [one of the top military academies in France] in 1888.’18 In earlier letters there was little indication that he wanted a military career, or what other avenues he might have been considering. We know that Saint Cyr was only his second option, but know nothing of what his first choice might have been. Perhaps it was the Polytechnique, another route into the army, the way chosen by his cousin Paul. There was little previous family history of military service, since Henri’s father, uncles and forefathers were all businessmen. To have a son join up, however, would have been a sure mark of integration of the Gaden family into their adopted country, and would have been a socially prestigious move for them. However, the family interests in overseas trade were perhaps not uncon- nected to Henri’s decision to follow a military career. Members of the family were engaged in lucrative trade with the colonies, especially through relations like the Devèses in Senegal, who might benefit from information and support supplied by a family member on active service in the colonies. One of the principal influences on French colonial policy at the time has been called ‘municipal imperialism’,19 in which merchants from the French ports of Bordeaux, Marseilles and elsewhere were pushing for greater access to trade opportunities in the newly acquired colonial territories. The Gadens were part of this push.

Saint Cyr Military School

Henri Gaden started the next academic year on 28th October 1888, as a student at Saint Cyr on a two-year course of study provided by the Special Military School in Seine-et-Oise just outside Paris. His letter of 17th November, written on official letter-headed paper bearing the school’s crest, opened with a description of a march of around ten kilometres he had just completed, similar to an exercise on the previous Saturday.

18 See CAOM, APC 15. 19 See J. Laffey (1974).

24 chapter one

His family’s social connections through his uncle Charles and cousin Edouard were mobilised to ease the passage of the young Henri into his new setting. Letters of recommendation were written for him to some of the officers at Saint Cyr, and Henri reminded his father of the importance of continuing to make direct recommendations to his senior officers. Henri set himself the task of passing on to his father the names of his ‘captains of “pompe” [general instruction]’ as soon as he had learnt them. His education at the start of his first year at Saint Cyr involved training in infantry service and equestrianism, and this had become more interesting for him once specialised routines had begun. Towards the end of the term, he began to find life tedious and his father’s letters helped to ‘rupture the monotony of my captivity’. He had fallen behind in some of his studies and was to be given some individual instruction by M. Fourrier, who was charged with assisting laggards. ‘You know that I am absolutely useless at geography … but it is precisely history and geography which are the key fac- tors in bringing down my average’. He counted on getting to grips with the subjects a little better by the end of the year so as to gain a sufficiently high rank to be able to enter an elite battalion. He also hoped to avoid the mumps that were doing the rounds of the school: ‘I really hope, however, not to have it [mumps], for, despite all the sweetness of Paradise, an extended stay of three weeks here does not tempt me at all’ (JHG-F, 4.3.1889). Henri gave voice to a range of views about the school that would become increasingly apparent in other contexts in his later life: his fear of ‘captivity’ and the monotony it brought, his need for escape and to venture far from his immediate surroundings in the search of new experiences, to move beyond the control of authorities whom he did not hold in high regard, and to follow his own considered course of action. His wit and sense of irony, his rhetorical flashes and cynical tone became the hallmarks of his attitude towards life. One irony, however, was that despite Henri’s difficulties with history and geography at Saint Cyr, these were two areas of interest (along with ethnography) in which he developed an expertise once he set foot in Africa. Henri Gaden left the Special Military School of Saint Cyr in October 1890 after two years’ of study and was placed 288th out of a class of 435 students – not a sparkling academic record, but a respectable one from a first-rank school.20 At least he had not ended up the ‘cochon’, the last in

20 See his Dossier Personnel, SHAT, No 7Ye 486 for this figure. The Saint Cyr website, however, gives the total number of students graduating that year as 456. See www.saint-cyr .org/cyr.

gironde, paris and beyond 25

the list of graduating students. Gaden’s ‘promotion’ or graduation year was christened in 1889,21 and was going to be called ‘Centenaire’ after the cente- nary of the 1789 Revolution. However, the officer charged with naming this group of students had lost his great-grandfather to the guillotine in that year, so ‘Promotion du Grand Triomphe’ was chosen instead. On passing out from Saint Cyr, Gaden received his commission at the rank of sub- Lieutenant of the 53rd Infantry Regiment, and was then transferred to the garrison at Tarbes, in the south-west corner of France.

Henri Gouraud, who was later to become Gaden’s close friend, comrade-in- arms in West Africa and long-term correspondent, was also a student at Saint Cyr. Gouraud was part of the same promotion as Gaden, and he described later in his memoirs how 60 officers from that year later reached the highest military rank of the army – general, brigadier etc.22 Gouraud’s name was registered among them, Gaden’s was not. The common experience shared by students at the same military school created bonds of fellowship not just between the two Henris, but more broadly among all those soldiers who were moulded by the rigours and discipline of their alma mater. This was a special fraternity and mutual regard that linked them together in a circle of collective concern. The names of many of these individuals appear again and again in Gouraud’s and Gaden’s later accounts of their military adventures in French West Africa. The life courses of these two Henris, Gaden and Gouraud, became increasingly intertwined as they both pursued careers in the military, with postings overseas to West Africa from 1894 onwards. While in later years they went their separate ways in life, they remained in touch with each other, and the narratives of their lives unfolded in a mutual relationship that would last over 45 years into their old age. While Gaden was critical of aspects of the education he received at Saint Cyr in his letters to his father, Gouraud gives us a very different view of the place. He had nothing negative to say of the institution in his retrospective account of his years there; indeed he lauded it with excessive praise. On entering Saint Cyr, he exclaimed in his autobiography: ‘Dear Saint Cyr! I had so passionately desired it! Glorious Saint Cyr!’23 The school motto had been

21 A ‘promotion’ is the group of students who enter the school in the same year, and who graduate together two years later. Gaden’s promotion was ‘the Class of 1890’ in contemporary North American parlance. 22 See Gouraud, 1939: 21–27. See also entries for Gaden and Gouraud in the Dictionnaire de biographie française, Tome 16, 1985. 23 Gouraud, 1939: 21.

26 chapter one changed 18 years earlier from the old Napoleonic phrasing ‘They study for the defence of the nation’ to ‘Honour and Homeland’ in 1870.24 ‘These two words, Honour and Homeland’, Gouraud wrote in 1890 while still infused with the spirit of the school, ‘encapsulate military duty. … A single sentiment equals them in beauty, in power, [that is] religious faith.’ He explained that the new students entered with the hope that one day they would fight, and spill their blood in order to return to France the territories of Alsace and Lorraine, annexed by the Germans after the 1870 victories. That goal would not to be realised until 1918. It was into this cauldron of patriotic fervour that Gaden and Gouraud had entered in 1888. Gaden too had felt a concern to reinstate French pride and honour after the defeats of 1870, but he must have also felt a sense of ambivalence about this since the clamour for revenge was directed at the land of his forefathers – Prussia, now Germany. That the rampant national- istic anti-German feeling within the school could have been a factor in Gaden’s choice of a future career in the colonies rather than in metropolitan France cannot be ignored. His decision to pursue military service overseas could well have been made in view of the possibility that he might have to face his ancestors’ fellow countrymen on the battlefields of Europe in the years that lay ahead.25 It is ironic that Gaden’s flight to Africa did not spare him from this fate of confrontation in battle, for he fought for France in 1914, although it occurred beyond the shores of Europe.

53rd Infantry Regiment, Tarbes

Henri Gaden left Saint Cyr as a commissioned officer at the rank of sub-Lieutenant in the 53rd Infantry Regiment. (See plate 2.) In 1892, he was stationed with the regiment in Tarbes, where he soon gained promotion to the position of Lieutenant. He paid a visit to Henri Laperrine, two years his senior from Saint Cyr (and future pioneer in the Sahara and army General), and dined with the regiment’s captain Dupouchel, along with the captain’s wife. These evenings became something of a habit, meeting every Monday, when after dinner they gathered around a table to play cards. He attended dances at Dr Brachet’s, whose wife he found ‘very nice and very friendly’: ‘They give little soirées where there is much amusement to be had’. All this night-life, he reassured his father, did not prevent him from getting up in

24 In French: ‘Ils s’instruisent pour la Défense de la Patrie’; ‘Honneur et Patrie’. 25 Alain Ricard, personal communication.

gironde, paris and beyond 27

the morning, for he was now getting used to having little sleep. But he found the etiquette involved in inviting women to soirées and dances too tire- some: ‘As I do not want to go begging for invitations, and I find the whole process rather uncongenial, I hold myself back from going there’ (JHG-F, 31.1.92). His desire, however, to be part of a privileged circle remained a theme of his social life at Tarbes, although some time later that year he wrote: ‘I would be happy to find more interesting society than at Tarbes, which provides only few opportunities outside of the military circle’ (JHG-F, 12.4.92). By early 1892, Gaden was occupied by a broad range of military activities and personal interests: he completed a four-month training course at the rifle range in a nearby camp, and had achieved a ranking of 22nd out of 61 students;26 his interest in photography was developing, an activity he

Plate 2. Sub-Lieutenant Gaden, 53rd Regiment in Tarbes, c. 1890–92 (Fonds Gaden CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 5, item 117, no. 788, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive).

26 See Dossier Personnel, SHAT.

28 chapter one shared in common with his sister Mine; he was reading widely, including ‘a long novel by Dumas’ and Talleyrand’s memoirs;27 and playing the piano now absorbed a good deal his time too. In April of that year, Gaden com- miserated with his father, who had suffered a business set-back, and explained that he was unable to offer any sort of financial support, for his salary (around 185 francs per month) only covered his living expenses;28 but he did suggest that his allowance could be reduced if necessary – he ‘could perfectly live on less’. In the same month, Gaden also reported to his father that he had taken a long hiking trip with a guide called Bordenave that took him into the mountains for two days in the Pyrenees above Lourdes. He scaled a number of peaks (including Sède, 2,976m, and Vignemale, 3,298m, on the Spanish border), camped by lakes and battled with deep snow up to his thighs. He arrived back at Tarbes, ‘not tired at all and enthused by my outing’, but with appalling sunburn on his face: ‘My eyes cried all day; one would have believed that I had just lost, in one single moment, my entire family. Today, my eyes are better, but my face is peeling and blotchy. I am hideous; I am the colour of Henri Mayet, worse still.’29 The detailed account he gave of his hiking trip was no doubt for Mine’s benefit, who was herself a very keen and accomplished climber, an activity she continued throughout her life.30 His only regret having completed his climb was that it had been terribly expensive and he would not be able to return home for some time – it had cost him ‘four gold Louis’. He ended this letter with on an optimistic note: ‘I will leave for the Soudan well trained. Your respectful son, J. H. Gaden.’ The last letter we have from Henri before leaving Tarbes to set off for West Africa in the autumn of 1894, was written on 16th May. In it he scolded his father for failing to keep him abreast of family affairs. His friend and fellow ‘cyrard’ from the same promotion at Saint Cyr, Flye-Sainte-Marie, had visited his father and brought back news that he was in good shape,

27 This was probably Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), Bishop of Autun (until condemned by the Pope), diplomat and politician under Napoleon Bonaparte, his Minister of Foreign Affairs before falling into disgrace. He was recalled under the restora- tion by Louis XVIII, and went on to become the French Ambassador in London. 28 Gouraud detailed his salary in the same year as a Lieutenant with the 21st Infantry Battalion: 185 francs per month, of which he paid 70 frs for board, 30 frs for lodgings, 12 frs for the hire of furniture, and around eight frs for laundry. This left him with around 60 frs for other expenses. 29 The caustic reference to the colour of his skin is not explained. It is perhaps a reference to the late 19th-century medic, Dr Henri Mayet, who wrote on anatomy and surgery, and also a work on how to cure congenital clubbed-foot. 30 See Marc Fourault (2001).

gironde, paris and beyond 29

and that his young brother Philippe had received his first communion. Slightly hurt that he had not been told of the date of this event, Henri complained to his father: ‘I knew nothing … I knew full well that it was due to happen, but when? If I had known that it was Sunday, it would have been easy for me to come and join you’ (JHG-F, 16.5.94). While family life created its moments of tension for Gaden, his daily round with the 53rd Infantry Regiment was not all that he might have hoped for. Climbing in the Pyrenees gave Henri some respite from the stifling conformity of the social world of Tarbes and the narrowness of military life in the garrison. It was an escape. He became increasingly frustrated at the inertia of military life and the lack of real responsibility, for he yearned to see action and adventure. To this impatience and malaise, he also felt the fever of a future war with Germany mounting, and it even infected the heavy somnolence of a small provincial town in the south-west of France. The long slog towards a life of bourgeois mediocrity did not interest him, and only the prospect of the colonies would seem to satisfy his desires.

Yearning for Action

The choice of a military career for Gaden was made at a time when the army carried the hopes and aspirations of the nation, following the military debacles of the 1870s. France had been vanquished during the Franco- Prussian wars, an emasculating defeat on the battlefields of Europe. ‘Historians have identified a “crisis of masculinity” in fin-de-siècle France, a world beset with social and cultural fears’, as Owen White puts it.31 The army became the incarnation of France – beaten but preparing itself for revenge. It acquired a great deal of prestige and the body of military values – discipline, obedience, respect for authority, morality, patriotism, a sense of sacrifice and of honour – was adopted widely in a new social project. The primary objective was the ‘moral recovery’ of the nation. Schools became the privileged instrument for the diffusion of these ideas, and the politician Leon Gambetta, on a visit to Bordeaux in 1871, had announced a new educational initiative — the promotion of patriotism. It is necessary to put in place everywhere within reach of the teacher, the sportsman and the military, as well as our children, our soldiers, our citizens, that they be capable of holding a sword, using a gun, making long marches,

31 See White, n.d. ‘Conquest and Cohabitation’: 5.

30 chapter one

passing the nights under the stars, to support valiantly all the ordeals for the homeland.32 As a school boy in Bordeaux, Henri would have been introduced to these ideas, and they no doubt formed within him a sense of duty, responsibility, and the need to redress earlier wrongs. The prestige of the army was also raised by this kind of campaign, and by the general elevation of the prestige of military schools for officers, whose places were being increasingly taken by representatives of the higher social classes, the aristocracy and the grande bourgeoisie in the latter half of the 19th century. The metropolitan army, a conservative force, retained its autonomy until the start of the 20th century and operated almost beyond the reach of government. The advancement and appointment of staff – even the most senior – were in its hands, and the Minister of War was often a docile instrument of the Army’s General Staff. The army constituted a ‘military society’ with its own rules, and they lived on the margins of civil society, recruited through special schools that were cut off from universities and other educational establishments. And the military still held the upper hand in the running of the colonies, at least up until the mid 1890s. This arbour of military privilege would have appealed to Gaden, for the colonies could be regarded as a refuge, a kind of paradise for those wishing to escape the radical changes that French society was undergoing (the new sense of progress, democratisation and the up-turning of traditional values). A military career overseas offered an opportunity for officers to express manly virtues through a more active and more intense life of adventure, which compared well to being holed up in barracks in France; this life could guarantee armed engagement and combat, and consequently the prospect of more rapid advancement through the army ranks. In 1893 Henri put in a request to join the ‘corps d’Afrique’, but was turned down. After a second request, this time more precise, he succeeded in gaining an overseas posting to the Soudan, and was put at the disposition of the Ministry of the Colonies on 25th August 1894. While the choice of a career in the colonies had its attractions for Gaden, the prestige of overseas service was still low. ‘When a young man leaves for the colonies, his friends ask themselves: “What crime must he have committed? From what corpse is he fleeing.”’ These words were uttered as late as 1929 by the Director of the Ecole Coloniale in Paris.33 Indeed, French possessions in West Africa were

32 Quoted in Metayer (2003: 3.3.2). 33 See Cohen 1971 for further general details on this subject and specifically p. 24 et passim on the problems of recruitment. Cohen goes on to state that the British had had a

gironde, paris and beyond 31

administered by the Ministry of the Marines, and were regarded as little more than convenient bases for French naval power. This control lasted until 1894, when the Ministry of Colonies was established in an attempt to address the problem of the excessive use of brutality and force by the Marines on local populations in the region.34 Henri Gaden, who had few skeletons in his cupboard, set off for Africa on the cusp of this transition from military to bureaucratic and civilian control, although he never quite came to terms with the new breed of technician and bureaucrat he was to encounter during his career overseas. The stifling atmosphere of bourgeois life gave him good reason to escape to Africa to satisfy the yearnings of his disquieted spirit.

The story related by Gaden’s close friend, Henri Gouraud, of his own childhood and upbringing exemplifies many of the themes in French social life of the period. None of his family had been in the armed services, for his paternal relatives had been medics with the exception of his uncle, an abbot. Henri Joseph Eugène Gouraud was born on 17th November 1867 in Paris, making him ten months Gaden’s junior, although he was always a step ahead of his friend with respect to army commissions and promotions. He was the first of six children born to Xavier Gouraud and his wife Mary Portal. Gouraud was sent by his parents at the age of three, along with his sister, to Rouen prior to the siege of Paris in 1870, to stay with his aunt, while his father, mother and an infant child remained in Paris.35 During his flight from Paris, Gouraud claimed to recall the overcrowded wagon that took his sister and him away, as well as vivid memories of a scene that had a particularly powerful effect upon him: he was sitting in the road when he looked up to see standing over him a large white horse mounted by an uhlan, a Prussian soldier from the lancer regiment. This serves as a preamble to the story he tells of how he found his vocation as a military officer, a tale of the humiliation of the Prussian annexation of French territory and of the need

similar problem in 1837, when the complaint was made that ‘the scum of England was being “poured into the colonies”’, which prompted twenty years later a policy of trying to adopt only top Oxbridge men for overseas postings’. 34 Cohen concludes on this period of French colonial history: ‘… it might be argued that these rough buccaneer types were probably just the sort of men who were necessary to break local resistance and assert French authority. When the primary stage of colonization – or conquest – had been accomplished, the time had come to begin the second stage: the establishment of a regular functioning administration. The buccaneer vanished and was replaced by the bureaucrat’ (Cohen, 1971:36). 35 See Gouraud, 1939: 13–20, on which this account is based.

32 chapter one for revenge and the reclamation of lost lands. As a child he was inspired by a family friend, who had fought at the battle of Champigny in 1870, to read military histories with avid interest, and he followed feverishly the stages of military conquest in the colonies. ‘My reading of military epics and tales of adventure formed within me an ardent military and warrior vocation, and I knew the love of danger.’ He admired Léon Gambetta because, after the disasters of Sedan and Metz, the politician had ‘safeguarded honour through the defence of the nation’. In 1886, Gouraud participated in the famous review led by General Boulanger, riding his conspicuous black horse at Longchamps in honour of the troops of Colonel Dominé, after the battles at Tonkin in Indochina. Gouraud even joined the chanting crowds, who were baying ‘Long live Boulanger! Long live the Army!’ After an education at the Collège Stanislas in Paris, Gouraud met up with Gaden at Saint Cyr in 1888 to start their military training together. On graduation, Gouraud intended to join the Marine Infantry, but was advised against it by his father, who had been told by a close friend of the bad reputation of this branch of the military. Gouraud was thus persuaded to take up a commission with the 21st Infantry Battalion (Chasseurs à Pied), based at Montbéliard. Later in life, after his colonial military service in Africa and Morocco, Gouraud went on to become the Commander of French Forces in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 (the Battle of Gallipolli, where he lost his right arm) and he ended the Great War as a General in charge of the Fourth Army on the Western Front, overseeing action during the second Battle of the Marne. From there he took up the post of French High Commissioner in Syria and the Lebanon, and before his retirement in 1937 was the Military Governor of Paris and served on the Supreme Allied War Council.36 While they kept in touch through letters and personal contacts, the two Henris were set on very different trajectories: Gouraud became an establishment figure in the highest echelons of the French government, while Gaden remained in West Africa to see out his days beyond the limelight of public acclaim and the prestige of social and political status.

This diversion has moved us many years ahead in the story of Gaden and Gouraud. In the early 1890s, prior to the two men being posted to West Africa, the idea of the civilizing mission of French colonialism was still only in its infancy, and it did not become official policy until 1895, coinciding with the creation of a Governorship General of the territory of Afrique

36 See Philippe Gouraud, Le Général Gouraud (1993); and Dictionnaire de biographie fran- çaise (1985).

gironde, paris and beyond 33

Occidentale Française (French West Africa), a newly formed federation of five previously separate colonies. From the start of the new republican era under the Third Republic in 1871, the formulation of a doctrine of French imperialism began to emerge, being the intellectual property of no one party or faction in particular. Republican France deemed itself to be so civilized ‘because they before all other nations had overcome suppression and superstition to form a democratic and rational government’; ‘… to be civilized was to be free from specific forms of tyranny: the tyranny of the elements over man, of disease over health, of instinct over reason, of ignorance over knowledge and of despotism over liberty.’37 It was a short step to transfer these ideals from the homeland to the expanding territories of the colonies, and both Gouraud and Gaden were eager to make the most of the opportunities overseas territories represented to two young men keen to see action, play a part in the expansion of French influence, and help spread the high ideals of the Third Republic aboard. There lying before them was the prospect of a terrain in which could be discovered values that were being lost in Europe, corroded by the acid of modernity and progress.

37 See Conklin, 1971: 5–6.

CHAPTER TWO

AGENT OF COMMERCE, AFRICAN NOVICE: FROM BORDEAUX TO BANDIAGARA, 1894–1896

The boat carrying Henri Gaden from France docked in the port of Dakar on the night of 29th October 1894. His first impressions of Africa unsettled him. The reception he received ‘when a horde of canoes’ with ‘a bunch of grubby blacks climbed aboard’ the vessel in the harbour was an encounter that assaulted his metropolitan sensibilities and shocked him out of his romantic reverie. ‘The odour of the negro’ and the stifling temperatures overwhelmed him. His initial observations betrayed his European bourgeois prejudices: ‘The blacks are decidedly a dirty race; above all those here, terribly lazy and indolent that one must berate them firmly in order to get something done.’ Gaden began to prepare himself nonetheless for a mission as yet unspecified, and he wrote in his first letter to his father on 30th October: I do not know if a serious expedition is being prepared, you are no doubt better informed than us. The captain of the spahis,1 who was aboard, left two hours after our arrival… on a steam packet of Maurel and Prom [one of the Bordeaux trading companies operating out of St Louis]. He had with him a detachment of spahis and 124 horses, of which 40 [were] for the officers of the infantry, without any riding tack! Despite the poor planning and the apparent chaos that surrounded him, Gaden looked forward to being in St Louis the following evening, and left Dakar by boat the morning of the next day. He hoped to be in Kayes, the capital of the French Soudan, in around ten days’ time, but he had little idea what he would do once he got there. Gaden learnt on 15th November 1894 that he was to be appointed as assistant to the Resident of Bandiagara by order of the civilian Governor of the Soudan, Louis Albert Grodet.2 The journey up the Senegal River from St Louis stirred no great interest in him and he coped well even with the

1 A West African term for colonial cavalry comprising Soudanese cavalrymen under the command of a European officer. 2 He told his father this news in a letter dated 23rd November, his first correspondence with him for three weeks since his arrival in West Africa. He also dispatched a letter on the same day to his uncle, the merchant, Gabriel Devès.

36 chapter two

a R.Bandam 00km 50 miles Kani RE Kan di CÔTE Say R.Tienba ’IVOIRE 0 OI Dabala? Filingué A 01 Parako u Kotono u Niamey

Zagnanad o D

Porto Novo ro DAHOMEY Man Doué Samory’s Camp Ko uba GAND DJERMA DU NIGER To Denifesso TERR IT Abome y

ly Sansané Haoussa R.Nig er

Gao s

Beyla R.Caval afeso

Nz o Ti R.Ces Zélékouma LIBERIA Do ri Aribinda D Cape Coas t A Djibo OAST GOL C (British) Ouagadougo u Douentza H Clis Bandiagara F R I C mbuktu Gourao Bandiagara Ti

A Bobo Black Volta Black Abidjan Bingerville Jenne Dioulasso Kong Mopti L.Debo F R E N C ogo SOUDAN FRANÇAIS rh Bandama? Sikaso CÔTE Ko ’IVOIRE D W E S T SINA Segou

Dabala? Sansanding R.Niger MA Odienne Koulikoro Man Bamako

R.Dio uba uané To Beyla Kati Nzo A Ke ro Kankan

Kita o R.Mil Siguiri

Nio ro R.Bakoy LIBERI Monr ovia Bafoulabe

) Dinguiray R.Ba ng Kissidougou Kayes 400 600 NIA UINE E A G LEONE SIERR A (British FRANÇAISE Bakel URIT s MA

R.Senega l L UINE E Freetown Map 2. Missions to Bandiagara 1894–1896 and to Beyla and Nzo 1897–1899. Beyla and Nzo 1894–1896 and to Bandiagara Map 2. Missions to G Conakry 200 miles Boutilimit PORTUGUESE Podor 300 kilomet re

R.Gambia SENEGA Wassulu Empire at its height 0 Nouakchott 0 St Louis Dakar

agent of commerce, african novice 37

heat at Podor, a trading post on the river. He had not ‘even the slightest indisposition’, while many of his comrades had already ‘paid their tribute’ (his euphemism for vomiting). He was travelling during the ‘petit hivernage’, a short period of rain in late November to early December before the onset of the dry season proper, which would last until around May. It was cloudy and had even rained that evening. The conditions on board the steamer the Borgnis-Desbordes3 were horribly cramped all the way to the town of Bakel, although the waters were still high as they ascended the River Senegal past Podor. ‘The country is abominably flat, and the vegetation is not pretty’ he complained. ‘Few trees and virtually all are stunted, their trunks are more or less contorted’. This barren landscape was dotted with occasional borassus palms whose fan- shaped foliage quivered nervously, and grand kapok trees [fromagers] whose bladed roots formed buttresses at the base of the trunk, the wood of which was used to make local dug-out canoes. These features of the Sahel landscape marked the isolated location of villages. On the lower reaches of the river before Bakel, the river banks were intensively cultivated, particularly with millet, on the jeeri, namely lands watered by seasonal rainfall; and on the waalo, the cuvettes or flood basins where agriculture took place after the river waters receded. Bakel, which appeared attractive from the river, lost much of its charm once viewed from the land. Gaden and his party stayed in the town waiting for shallow-draught river barges, which were needed to navigate the upper reaches of the Senegal and then the Bafoulabé River. He occupied his time nailing down wooden coffers used to protect the soldiers’ effects from water damage. Gaden arrived in the town of Kayes after four extremely tedious days’ journey by barge, and the town did not make a good impression on him: ‘an awful place’, ‘an ugly flat plain surrounded however with rather pretty wooded hills’. It was an important garrison town and home to the headquarters of the French administration in this part of the Soudan; its architecture was thoroughly European, consisting of numerous bungalows constructed in brick and roofed in tiles, buildings that were elevated off the ground on pillars and ringed by a veranda that formed a kind of roof supported by a wall at the lower level. Here Gaden recruited a ‘boy’, a Bambara from the local ethnic group, named Moussa Diawara, ‘a strapping fellow

3 The vessel was named after Colonel, later General, Borgnis-Desbordes, 1839–1900, the Commandant Supérieur of the Upper Senegal region (Haut-Sénégal), who annexed these territories in the early 1880s. Under his supervision, the laying of the railway from the Niger to Dakar was started. See Hommes et Destins, 95–105.

38 chapter two who appears to be good-willed. I hope it will last.’ (See plate 3.) He and his boy left Kayes by train, a line built by the French some years earlier to link with Bamako, and he suddenly found the countryside much more attractive. ‘We have crossed some superb sites. The country is very mountainous; mountains in the form of a table, but whose flanks resemble the steep slopes … of Spanish valleys’. ‘They are not very high, but are impressive.’ These views brought back memories of his expeditions in the Pyrenees, an area he loved so much. He continued on his way at night by horse from the Bafoulabé valley towards Kita, a French military post between the Senegal and the Niger, constructed by Colonel Borgnis-Desbordes some ten years earlier. He promised to write to his father every two or three days once he was settled at Bandiagara, and he dispatched his first dozen photographic plates to his sister Mine, to be forwarded to a developer in Bordeaux.4 He also asked his father to send him by special delivery a range of items: an essay on the Bambara language by G. Binger; maps of the Soudan and the Niger bend; publications on how to make lime, plaster and bricks; and finally a subscription to the periodical Revue de Deux Mondes.5 This represented the first of a long series of requests for provisions from France.

Henri Gaden was 27 years old in 1894 when he set foot on African soil for the first time, and headed for the French Soudan as an infantry officer of the rank of Lieutenant on detachment from his metropolitan regiment, ‘hors de cadre’ or seconded to the army of the Soudan under the Ministry of the Colonies. Henri stood at five feet nine inches tall, was of slim build and had fine features and a dignified air. He sported a dashing moustache, trimmed like cat’s whis- kers to the width of his cheeks, and he looked out on the world through the penetrating gaze of his grey eyes. His youthful features, though serious and thoughtful, had not yet been etched by grim military experience or by the chal- lenges that Africa would throw in his path, and his dark hair was neither bleached by the tropical sun nor whitened by anxiety, angst or age. ‘Soudan’ was the term the French used for that territory south of the Sahara running east from Senegal through to the Niger bend, and north of the dense sub-tropical forest zones of Guinea, the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast

4 Gaden used two sorts of camera that employed different photographic techniques: one had Lumière stereoscopic glass plates, and the other the newer Ilford instant film. He continued to take pictures throughout the course of his life in West Africa. See Anne-Laure Jégo’s Masters dissertation on Gaden’s photography: ‘Le parcours du capitaine Henri Gaden…’, 2001. 5 A Paris-based magazine that published articles on literary and cultural affairs.

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Plate 3. Moussa Diawara, Gaden’s ‘boy’ recruited first during the Bandiagara mission and then again during the Samory campaign. Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga.

(present-day Ghana). This part of Africa, like many others, was still relatively uncharted, except for the excursions of occasional travellers, adventurers and explorers, whose works the colonial pioneers sometimes relied upon for guidance. It was an area still clothed in mystery, considered ripe for the actions of courageous men to subdue what was thought of as mainly backward and even barbarous regions. It did not have a good press in the 1890s, and until the appointment of the first civilian Governor in 1893 it had been ‘run by and for the army’, or more specifically the Marines.6 Military excesses and the unfet- tered behaviour of a certain number of officers had raised its profile in French

6 See Klein, 1998: 77.

40 chapter two political and popular circles; West Africa had a reputation for insalubrity and it was well known as a playground for the expression of base desires of European soldiers. The town of Bandiagara had fallen to French forces just over one year before Gaden’s arrival. Colonel Archinard, who served under Borgnis- Desbordes, had been on the trail of Amadou Sekou (Amadu Sheku), the commander of an army of the Muslim faithful and the son of Al Hajj Umar Tall, who had resisted French annexation of the Soudan. Archinard had invaded Masina in early 1893, and had taken Bandiagara on 29th April that year. Agibou, a brother of Amadou, was entrusted with the colony that Archinard had created there, but only on condition that the ruler would be under the control of a French Resident backed by a military presence. It was going to be Gaden’s role to take up the post of assistant Resident, only some 18 months since Agibou had been appointed by the French as a puppet leader. Another important figure in Gaden’s consciousness was Colonel Bonnier. Lieutenant-Colonel Etienne Bonnier, of the Marine Artillery, took over as Commandant Supérieur of the French forces in the Soudan from Louis Archinard. He had successfully led a campaign against the ruler of the Wassulu Empire, Samory Toure, in 1893,7 and following that victory had turned north to the fabled but troubled town of Timbuktu. The fleet on the Niger, commanded by Lt Boiteux and accompanied by an officer called Aube, arrived at Timbuktu at the end of 1893.8 Boiteux left the fleet in Aube’s charge, and he then lodged in the town with a group of other men. One day, Aube went out in pursuit of a group of pillagers and was killed together with a number of laptots or African sailors serving under French command. Bonnier then set off with his infantrymen, and a number of artillery pieces in canoes went down the Niger towards Timbuktu to seek revenge. Another column of men, headed up by the Commandant Joffre,9 took a second column of troops by land towards the town, following the left bank of the river. Bonnier reached Timbuktu on 10th January 1894, and on the 12th he went west to chase off a

7 While Samory’s forces had taken a beating, the ruler still wielded much power in the region and represented a major threat to the French. He negotiated a treaty with Governor Grodet at Kayes after engaging Bonnier’s troops in 1893. Samory promised to leave the French alone, subject to the Europeans paying an annual tribute to him. Samory then transferred his power-base to the vast border areas of present-day Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast, and the French established a post a Siguiri to protect their southern flanks. Samory was to become a key figure in Gaden’s life during his next posting to West Africa. 8 See Gouraud (1939: 46) for an account of this tragedy. 9 Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre (1852–1931), known as ‘Papa Joffre’, saw service earlier during the siege of Paris, 1870–71. He went on to become a First World War General and had a key role, along with Henri Gouraud, in the Battle of the Marne.

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party of Tuaregs who were seen as a threat to the town. Having found their encampments and taken some of their cattle, Bonnier’s men bivouaced down for the night of the 14th. At 4 a.m. the next morning, nomadic Tuareg from the desert, their heads swathed in blue turbans and with veils across their faces, charged on their camels at full pace towards the camp. The Colonel fell fatally wounded along with around ten of his officers. His Senegalese riflemen were either killed or managed to escape, fleeing as far as they could run. One month later Joffre’s column arrived at the scene of the massacre to find the remains and scattered bones of the men, which he returned to Timbuktu to be buried near to the small fort he erected to protect himself and his troops. Of the two forts Joffre constructed at Timbuktu, one bore the name of Bonnier, Fort- Bonnier in the southern part of the town.10

Ignored and Maltreated

Gaden left the fort at Kayes en route for his new posting, and he departed ‘in very good health and full of ardour and enthusiasm’. He looked forward to being in Bamako by Christmas and Bandiagara by the New Year. On 7th December 1894, Gaden reached Kita, the fort established by Borgnis- Desbordes a decade earlier, from where he wrote to his father. He thanked him for the mail he had received, for ‘news gives me an awful amount of pleasure, even if it is a little old’. The English newspapers he had requested had yet not arrived, but he found to his delight at the mission house of White Fathers a copy of the Bambara grammar he had wanted.11 He explained the arrangements he had made with an industrialist working at the fort to have ten cases of champagne forwarded on to his destination. However, he noted a change in circumstance from life at Kayes: ‘we are more and more ignored and maltreated.’ ‘The [civilian] Governor is in the process of disorganising everything and undermining the country’. It was not all bad news, however: I have heard much talk of how good Bandiagara is from officers who arrive from Timbuktu; it is apparently a very healthy post, in mountainous country, dry; separated from the town by a stretch of water (marigot); many reforms in

10 Gouraud suggested that one of the reasons he wanted to join the officer corps in the Soudan was to put right this tragedy: ‘C’est … la catastrophe de la colonne Bonnier qui deter- mina mon départ pour le Soudan’ (1939: 47). 11 The White Fathers, a society of missionaries established in 1868 by Charles de Lavigerie, then Archbishop of Algers, operated first in North Africa and then in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1880s.

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the area. It is, they tell me, the only place where there is actually the hope of doing something. He remained content with life and he even shared the best hut in Kita with the captain of spahis, and lived very well on local produce, including milk and eggs, small tomatoes, haricot beans, rice, sweet potatoes, dough bread, yams and palm fruit. He was due to leave for Bangassi at 2.30 a.m. (JHG-F, 7.12.94). Two days later, Gaden reached Bangassi on 9th December, his sister Mine’s 26th birthday. To avoid the heat of the day, Gaden’s party travelled through the night in short stages of two to four hours, and would aim to arrive at their destination at around 8 a.m. the following morning. The night skies were full of stars, and the constellation of the Great Bear appeared on its back with its paws in the air, but the temperatures dropped steeply after dark, and their feet particularly suffered from the cold. Gaden wore his cape, a waterproof and two shirts, but this was barely sufficient, while the porters and boys who, he reported, were ‘less sensitive to the cold than them, turn green and are completely exhausted by the end of the night’; they were, however, half naked. The countryside improved, becoming more to Gaden’s liking, as they journeyed east in particular along the tracks above the Bakoy and Kali rivers that wound around the base of gigantic rocks, over fast-moving rapids and spectacular waterfalls near to Fangalla. There were very few inhabitants in these areas, and it was less dangerous to go alone from Kayes to Bamako than it was to walk at night in certain large cities like Paris, he pointed out. There was little fauna to observe, although he heard the cries of monkeys or sometimes a jackal or hyena, but no lions yet. A young leopard entered a hut in search of food one night: ‘much alarm among the blacks; frightened off, it sought shelter in the hut, where an officer who thought the animal was a hyena entered. An imbecile of a black having missed [it] with a shot from his gun, the animal escaped, but snatched at the officer’s foot as it passed. Light wounds, happily, the animal being young’ (JHG-F, 9.12.94). Gaden finally arrived on 13th December in Bamako on the banks of the great Niger River, whose waters were low at this time of year. It was only some 500 metres across, so he hoped to see the river in full flood on his return. He was now beginning to piece together fragments of the local political situation that were being discussed by other officers, and what French action might be planned for the near future. Gaden took a rather scathing view of Governor Albert Grodet’s planned visit to Bamako one week away; he was en route for Segou and planned to spend some time

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acquainting himself with the ‘theatre of operations(!)’, as Gaden caustically remarked in a letter to his father on 14th December.

Indifference is the General Rule

Gaden complained to his father in a letter of 14th December 1894 about the pacific policy pursued by Governor Grodet, as well as of the consequences of the ‘Bonnier affair’, ‘for which vengeance has never been taken’. This was one of the reasons, he ventured, why ‘our prestige here has suffered a terrible setback’. After describing the Bonnier affair to his father and the subsequent demise of French prestige, Gaden launched himself into a racist diatribe: The blacks are completely insensible to good deeds, which they take as a sign of weakness. A case of mores. The respected chief is one who administers blows and chops off heads, advisedly, of course. My groom is never as careful, never cleans the bridle or saddle as well as when I administer to him a kick somewhere or other. (JHG-F, 14.12.94) He went on to mention that ‘they camped near to [the village of] Dio, which pillaged Galliéni’s mission in 1881’.12 The landscape he now inhabited was inscribed with lieux de mémoires, places stirring the bitter memories of defeat or humiliation for the French mission, or sites celebrating moments of triumph and conquest against their adversaries. Gaden was impressed, nonetheless, with what he saw around him. There were fortified villages, called ‘tatas’, with their sturdy earthen houses which ‘must be really hard to take in an assault’. ‘Diaga has a superb tata’, and many settlements were richly resourced, full of cultivators, workers and industry. The countryside around Bamako, in particular, was fertile and very well cultivated; but despite all these riches, Gaden found himself being ‘ruined’ by the cost of commodities, for the exchange rate between cowrie shells, a local currency, and the French Franc stood at 2,480 cowries for five frs. These grumbles were silenced by reports he had heard from Bandiagara, a region described as a ‘pays de Cocagne’, a place of abundance, where life

12 Captain Galliéni and his reconnaissance party, sent out to survey the area for a railway line, had been attacked and robbed by Bambara forces. His original task had also been to create constructive relations with Amadou Tall, the son and successor to Al Hajj Umar, the great Muslim leader. Amadou refused to receive the mission and so the Captain and his men were held, effectively imprisoned in a small village for ten months, until relieved by Borgnis-Desbordes.

44 chapter two would be easy and agreeable, in which there was no lack of wine or conserves, of honey or milk, and cheese and butter from the post’s herd of cattle were plentiful. The water though was said to be bad, flowing but muddy, and there were few vegetables. He could not wait to get there. From the accounts of Bandiagara told to him by other officers, Gaden drew up a list of provisions he wanted his father to dispatch to him from Bordeaux: a cookery book and powdered quinine, some newspapers and books on elementary science, and a set of scales. ‘I have no need of a complete library, but you see that some specialist books would be useful.’ ‘Everything is lacking and indifference [on the part of his superiors] has become almost the general rule.’ There were happily some exceptions and Captain Destenave, his superior officer and Resident at Bandiagara, was one of them; he was someone ‘with whom I am delighted’. It all augured well for Gaden’s residency at his posting, which was only two stops down river to Mopti, and then 75 kms overland to the town of Bandiagara to the east.

No More Sundays

Gaden travelled along the Niger River heading for Mopti, via Segou, in water-logged dugout canoes that required a man to bale them out continually. The larger vessels were those made from two or three tree trunks tied together by local hemp cord, but which leaked at the joints. Two officers were taken in each canoe, along with their baggage, and a low straw shelter was erected on board to protect them from the sun. Sitting or crouching under it in some discomfort, the officers, with their feet perpetually submerged in water, had to put up with chickens flapping amongst their coffers. ‘All this does not prevent the Niger from being a superb river, magnificent, which despite its low waters, still reaches in some places 1,000 metres in width, whilst in others it branches out into numerous courses flowing between islands or banks of sand’ (JHG-F 1.1.95). Gaden had left Bamako on 20th December to embark on this river journey. During stop-overs he took the opportunity to indulge in hunting trips and would leave at daybreak with the captain of the spahis in search of wild fowl. They encountered a lion on one trip and quickly bid a prudent retreat. These adventures broke the monotony of travel, but the mental and physical dislocations caused by relentless journeying through alien landscapes instilled in Gaden and his companions a sense of befuddlement about the passage of time and the dates of European festivals and fêtes. Writing on 1st

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January, or so he believed, Gaden sent his family best wishes for the New Year, a date ‘which no longer represents anything for us’. ‘As regards the days of the week, it is no longer a concern. The blacks do not have Sundays, since 3/4 of them never do anything; we do not have them any more.’ The town of Segou on the Niger interested Gaden a great deal. There was an exemplary military post, which afforded the most perfect views of the surroundings, and also the house of the griot or praise-singer for Amadou Tall was still there. Amadou’s palace, however, had been destroyed when French forces moved against the rebel leader, who had been holed up in the town before his flight to Nioro to the north in 1886. Gaden now began to note more local customs, and engaged in discussions with his ‘boy’ about Bambara ideas.

The blacks are respectful of traditions. Example: I had cooked recently a fish in broth with some wine. A large lump of it remained. My boy gave it to the laptots. As the Bambara in general, and he in particular, are not Muslims, I wanted to know why he [the boy] had not eaten it himself. He responded to me: “You [Toi], there is wine inside”. I pushed a little further, so: “Me, there is no need of wine. My father and mine mymother [‘mon Mamère’] have never taken any of it there”. Gaden added a commentary: ‘I could well believe that his father and his mother have never had any of it. They were the Diawaras of Segou, sent by Archinard to Kaarta Biné, and who no doubt had never even seen a bottle.’ He then mused on what he observed around him about Bambara society:

Anyway, the society is divided into well-segregated castes; warriors, cultivators, blacksmiths, weavers, leatherworkers, praise-singers, and there is no need of rules in order to guarantee their privileges. A black believes himself to be dishonoured if he takes up a trade other than that of his father. … And here are people whom we have the presumption to civilize! (JHG-F, 1.1.95) This was a remarkably sensitive insight for someone who still espoused racist views, for he was able to shed a critically reflexive light on the nature of the French mission in West Africa. This contradictory eddy of thought flowing within Gaden could be taken as the first sign of the loosening of the certainties in a world-view built upon his solid French bourgeois background. This appreciation for things Soudanese came up again in his meeting with ‘the illustrious Mademba’, reported on 2nd January 1895. Mademba Sy was a Wolof from Senegal, who had been an employee of the Post and Telegraph Service and had helped lay the telegraph wire between Kayes and Bamako. He had been given part of the old Segou state, after Amadou

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Tall’s flight at the hands of Colonel Archinard. The colonel had established Mademba as the ruler or Fama of Sansanding along with 100 of Amadou’s slaves from Nioro. The Fama had built up his army, household and his harem following the French campaigns against the remnants of Amadou’s followers.13 At Sansanding, Gaden found Mademba to be highly intelligent, and spent an evening dining very well with him, a meal washed down by ‘champagne and a rather good Bordeaux’. The residence was … not a luxury dwelling. Enormous palace, surrounded by a high wall flanked by large towers. But inside! No more cleanliness or order than among the last of his captives. Mademba is mightily interesting on the country, which he knows profoundly, on its history, its uses, its languages. Eight mightily interesting days were passed with this man. Gaden also met a captain, now commanding a unit from Segou, who had been in Timbuktu drawing up a map of the town when Bonnier’s column had been attacked. The officer related a story to Gaden: Bonnier had been forewarned that his group would be attacked the day before the surprise raid, and the warning had come from Tuareg women who had been taken to the camp. Bonnier had evidently taken no account of this. What happened was due entirely to his negligence and perhaps that of the sentry officer, if there was one. Anyway, it strikes me that these famous troops of the Marine, or rather their officers, have an insouciance that borders on derogation. We [the infantry] actually have other principles, those of war. In any case, it appears that the Bonnier affair is in no manner attributable to the Governor.14 (JHG-F, 1.1.95) In Gaden’s view, it was the lack of proper military procedures among the rabble they considered to be the Marines that was the cause of the massacre. It was probably comforting for officers to accept this idea, since it was at least in their control to do something about it; disaster had a rational cause, and was not the result of happenstance or a superior adversary. As an upshot of this debacle a set of restrictions was imposed on the garrison at Timbuktu: they were not allowed to go further than six kms from the town, and communications with other neighbouring posts had to be made under armed escort. Gaden’s comment on the situation was: ‘It would be

13 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, in his autobiography entitled Amkoullel, l’enfant Peul, gives some details of Mademba Sy’s biography and his installation by Archinard at the head of the state of Sansanding (see 1991: 346 et passim). See also Klein (1998: 92 et passim). 14 Civilian Governor Albert Grodet was eventually relieved on his post later in 1895, following Lt-Col Monteil’s defeat at the hands of Samory.

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easy to purge the country of this verminous lot in a ring up to 200 kms wide…. But it is necessary to be able to say in France that the country is pacified! The blacks take this inertia as an indication of fear and our prestige disappears.’ As Gaden approached Mopti, he anticipated that he would arrive in Bandiagara on the 7th January or later. The Residence involved the administration of the affairs in the area on behalf of ‘a Negro king’; ‘politics is all that needs to be done, that is nothing’. ‘I will do my best to take myself off [from the post], walking as far as I can under the pretext of topography.’ He added a comforting note to his family that he was admirably well, was sleeping soundly, and his appetite perfect; he had put on weight, his beard was growing. However, slightly less savoury was his report that he alter- nated between living in dust or dampness, and he had not changed his clothes when going to bed since 21st November!

A Country Where No European Has Been

Gaden arrived in Bandiagara earlier than planned on the 6th January, having left Mopti on the 4th at 5.30 p.m. by barge with his laptots, his boy and two of Agibou’s soldiers or sofas, ‘one of whom is to help me find porters and a horse; the other, returning to the town, demanded nothing more than to accompany me’ (JHG-F, 7.1.95). Gaden travelled through territories only freshly conquered, but received no information on the countryside apart from what he could pick up from fellow officers at Mopti. He planned to travel by boat and then disembark from the barge once they were out of the marshes to the east, taking his party overland towards Bandiagara. But night fell quickly and they had to make their way under the stars. His entire company claimed not to know the route, and he requisitioned a local fish- erman who ought to have known the area. Little headway was being made, and eventually Gaden ordered everyone into the water to drag the barge through the swamps. By 8.30 p.m. it was impossible to go any further, and he commanded all his men to cross the wetlands carrying his trucks on their heads. Gaden stayed alone waiting patiently for his horse to arrive. By 10.30 p.m., he glimpsed an enormous animal approaching in the moonlight, breathing loudly as it wandered around. Not a horse, but a hippopotamus, he supposed. Towards midnight, seeing no-one was about to arrive, he rolled himself up in his covers and dozed on the barge. At 3 a.m. Gaden was woken by his boy who, accompanied by four men, had brought a horse with them. They had been lost in the marshes, but fortunately his boy had

48 chapter two figured things out and came to Gaden’s rescue. Agibou’s sofa, freezing in the night air, had not wanted to get involved. Gaden later found him on dry land, sleeping next to a hearty fire. Woken by ‘two master kicks well-aimed in an appropriate place’, the sofa was sent to join the porters under a hail of stones to make him move a little quicker. Gaden wrote a letter to Mopti advising that the sofa be locked up for a few days. In a charming village, truly fatigued, Gaden found the local chief who lent him his hut for the night. Eggs were brought to him, for which he gave an equivalent sum in cowrie shells, and the gesture was well received by the chief, who expressed his pleasure to his boy with the words: ‘This toubab [whiteman] is good’. The second of Agibou’s sofas in the party, ‘pushing fanaticism to its limits’, attached a bayonet to the barrel of his gun and stood guard at Gaden’s door. This annoyed Gaden considerably and the guard was dismissed after a short time. They set out the following day along a pathway through the bush, where Gaden came across a partridge and guinea-fowl, prey for his hunting rifle, and they provided him with a sound meal later that day. They passed through the village of Piko, which was deserted, and he learnt that all the inhabitants, fearing they might have to contribute to his mission, had dissolved into the bush only to reappear once he had left the area. The following night they found shelter in the ruined village of Kori Kori, but Gaden’s sleep was disturbed by rustling noises; only later did he learn that people were advised not to stay overnight there, since the village was full of snakes, trigonocephales, some of which were the most venomous in the Soudan. The next day Gaden was welcomed in perfect health into Bandiagara, where he found his superior officer and the Resident, Captain Destenave:

[He] is a charming man, very well-acquainted with the country, which is mightily interesting and absolutely unknown, even in Kayes. The other officers are perfectly fine, I could not have fallen on more sympathetic people who get along well with each other. I am going to be responsible for geography and ethnography. I will roam around the Niger bend with a view to bringing on the area, collecting information on the country, its resources and its population. I am going to be going through country where no European has been seen…. much of the country is known to no-one, even to Agibou, who has actually left with his spahis on reconnaissance of the local populations. I am sure that all this is going to interest me enormously. I feel an inner curiosity for all this richly textured and new country. (JHG-F, 7.1.95)

Gaden’s excitement bubbled over at the opportunities he saw stretching out in front of him during his two-year posting as adjunct to the Bandiagara

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Resident. He had so much to tell his father, but had to draw his letter to a close, for the mail was about to leave.

The Battle for Bandiagara The town of Bandiagara was founded reputedly around 1770 by a hunter called Nangabanu Tembély of the Dogon people (known to the colonialists as ‘Habe’), famed for their dwellings on the cliffs close to the town.15 The area around the town, however, had been the focus of migration of Toucouleurs or Futanke from Fouta Toro in the valley of the Senegal River from the 1850s onwards, under the leadership of Al Hajj Umar Tall, who was born in a village in the Middle Senegal Valley.16 Responding to pressures from the French annexation of Fouta Toro and the Upper Senegal, Umar Tall recruited followers to his branch of Islam with a view to setting up a Muslim state in territories where the French had little influence.17 One of the first major acts of arms in the country was in 1857 at the small fort of Medine (Khasso), which was held by seven Europeans and around 50 local riflemen against Umar’s troops who had blockaded the French post. Louis Faidherbe, commanding a column of French forces arrived to save the day, broke the siege and delivered the post from attack.18 Umar was obliged to retreat and headed east. In 1862 Umar embarked upon the conquest of the state of Masina, which threw Tall’s Futanke followers against fellow Muslims settled in the Niger area around Mopti and Bandiagara. The Shaykh Umar died in battle at the hands of local Masina troops, or disappeared mystically as some versions would have it, some 19 kilometres to the south-west of Bandiagara, holed up in a cave in the cliffs. Tall’s movement fractured after this, with Amadou Sheku, his son, the Commander of the Faithful, leading the remnants of Umar’s troops to Segou, from where he tried to establish a central authority over the conquered territories. Tijani Amadou (Amadou al Tijan) Tall, the nephew of the great Shaykh, gained control of

15 The Dogon people have an iconic status within anthropology, having been the focus of extensive study by a team of French ethnologists from the 1930s through to the 1950s, led by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. See, for example, Griaule (1948) and Dieterlen (1941). 16 This movement was known in the valley as the fergo Umar, or the migration of Umar’s followers, the flight from Fuuta or Fouta east to the Niger bend in present-day Mali. 17 See Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, and specifically pp. 205–210 for an account of the Battle of Medine, and Chapter 8 on the conquest and revolt of Masina. See too Dumont (1974) and Willis (1989) for further details about Umar’s life and mission. 18 Under Louis Faidherbe, the Governor of the Colony of Senegal from 1854 to 1861 and military commander, Senegal was transformed into a thriving French colony; he laid the basis of the future French empire in the region.

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Masina from where he retained considerable autonomy from his cousin. Tijani’s original capital had been at Dè, around 55 kms to the north-east of Bandiagara, but he later decided to install himself in the town for strategic reasons. Tijani built a house there, where he stayed during his reign from 1864, the year of his uncle’s demise, until 1887, when he died. In 1886, Amadou Sheku moved from Segou to Nioro, a town to the north- west, from where he could threaten the French flank on the Upper Senegal, although he was weakened by an arms embargo. Nioro fell to Archinard and his men in 1891, and Amadou fled again, this time to Masina where Tijani Amadou had died some years earlier. Amadou assumed the command of the town, but Archinard was on his trail.19 The French forced their way east, through Jenne to Mopti, and on to Bandiagara – the Futanke’s last stronghold – which fell in late April 1893 after the battle of Kori Kori, the snake-invested village in which Gaden had passed the night on route to his new posting. Amadou, was again forced into exile and he went still further east, into Hausaland in northern Nigeria, not far from the capital of the Sokoto Caliphate, where he died in December 1897.20 What was left of Amadou’s following wandered throughout West Africa over the course of the next few years, the intention being to perform the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, the only place guaranteed to be free from European influence. They were to cross paths with Gaden again during future West African postings. Agibou Tall, a younger son of Shaykh Umar and half-brother to Amadou Sheku by different mothers, was installed by the French in 1893 as a colonel-in- chief, but was referred to as ‘Fama’ – the Bambara word for ruler – and was based in Bandiagara. Agibou had collaborated with the French on previous occasions, although he was once entrusted by his elder brother with the command of Segou and had control of the fief of Dinguiray. In the eyes of many of the Futanke, Agibou was a traitor; but the French represented for them the greater enemy to their interests. Agibou and the colonialists in Bandiagara

19 Louis Archinard (1850–1920) was not to last long in his position of Commandant Supérieur, which he had held since 1888. Hungry for promotion, and seeing military action as the way to achieve it, he ignored instructions from Paris and the powerful figure of Eugène Etienne, and fought almost as much with politicians in France as he did with his Soudanese adversaries, Amadou and Samory. In five years, he had quadrupled the size of the French empire in West Africa, but was dismissed in disgrace for disobeying orders. Not everyone saw him in this light, for many in the colonial army, including Gaden, still held him in high regard and wanted him to return to West Africa. He later served in Indochina. 20 Robinson (1987) calculates this date from an Islamic date recorded in a manuscript written by one of Amadou’s followers. See also Klein, 1998: 88–89 on the defeat of Amadou Sheku. This was one of a series of migrations called by Amadou Sheku and his followers the hijra, a movement away from pollution in imitation of the Prophet’s flight to Medina.

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alike feared the return of the Umarians, and a close eye was kept on their whereabouts. Agibou built a palace at Bandiagara in Soudanese style under French supervision, and it was the first piece of colonial architecture in the area to be constructed in a manner that respected local methods of building, which was completed by the renowned masons from Jenne.

Agibou’s Grand Palaver

Gaden would have been aware of some of the details of the history of Bandiagara and of the Umarians, told to him by officers and picked up through his reading. He went on to develop his own lines of research that would shed further light upon the events surrounding the migration of the Umarians and what was to follow. One of his first tasks at Bandiagara, however, was to draw up a revised map of the Masina area, which he was in the process of reworking. Bandiagara is situated on a plateau surrounded by hills of no more than 100 metres in height, and they form a type of stairway leading to other higher plateaus or to stepped pleats of land, one spilling onto the other in the distance. From his hut where he passed his days, Gaden looked out over this very horizon. First, the entrance to the camp, where the guards were stationed in their straw huts. The riflemen’s wives passed by incessantly, clothed or not, occupied with the drudgery of carrying water by balancing an arrangement of calabashes filled to overflowing and perched on their heads. An ostrich, an animal kept by the officers at the post as a pet, would walk along, its wings hanging limply, its beak open gasping for air. The wall of the camp marked abruptly the end of this part of the scene. Beyond it appeared Bandiagara itself, which stretched down along a gentle incline towards the long arm of water that separated the post from the local settlements. The rectangular houses of reddish-grey earth, squeezed in one against the other, were interspersed with straw huts, which had the appearance of small round haystacks, almost black now having seen their first rainy season the year before. Dominating all was Agibou’s palace, sitting on the skyline, whose facade was topped by serrated pointed columns. Sometimes a white boubou or gown appeared and walked across the roof, or vultures soared overhead after some piece of rubbish, or an enormous column of dust would be whipped up by the wind. Gaden’s first meeting with Agibou occurred on 8th January 1895 when he was accompanied by Captain Destenave, who had only recently returned

52 chapter two from a tour with his troops. He reported the grand palaver to his father in a letter written on 31st January. They went to his camp at Alakanda, very close to the post: They came to meet us; the fama [Agibou] being preceded by his griots, one beating a tam-tam drum, the other blowing a bizarre horn, a third clanging bells. All this made a strange music, little varied, it is always the same air in two bars that is repeated. The fama, on his very handsome horse, richly dressed in the finest livery, and surrounded by a horde of little slaves holding the bridle, the fama’s legs, his crop, the horse’s tail. Scattered behind, a horde of chiefs and followers in scarlet boubous, their faces covered up to the middle of the nose for they are cold, all exuberantly prancing about on their little horses that they ride with Arabic bits, short stirrups, and spurs always urging the animal on. Finally, spread out everywhere, men on foot, grooms and sofas with large muskets. We approach a watercourse, which comes out from a narrow ridge of mountains, and watch as this gay and noisy crowd arrive on the bank opposite. They all dismount along the side of the water on an area of flat stony ground, and we come to meet them. After numerous greetings and handshakes, their hands as black on the palm as on the back, like those of well-bred blacks who never work, they all remount and the procession, with us now in the middle, sets out on a march for the camp. At the camp, grand palavers, with Agibou first, and then with the other chiefs. There are all sorts of them: Futankes, old devotees of Al Hajj [Umar Tall], Peuls, ancient masters of the country, and Habés [Dogon], who represent the autochthonous cultivators. Even some Bambaras who followed Al Hajj since Nioro, and a Tuareg with an ugly white countenance. … An attractive company of around 200 men, and what men, armed with lances, bows and arrows, sometimes [with] abominable English rifles. They are all just about clothed; however, some have only a string with a rudimentary pocket ornamented by a tassel of cotton amusingly placed. These are the civilized Bobo for the true Bobo are habitu- ally naked. (JHG-F, 31.1.95) Gaden photographed Agibou and his chiefs and then left, escorted by their hosts to the water’s edge. After this amusing day, they returned to their ‘slightly monotonous life at the post, me still at my maps’.

Mission to Gourao

From Mopti, Gaden informed his father on 19th January that he had been sent on a mission to Gourao to take command of the post in the absence of the Commandant of the flotilla that operated from Lake Debo on the Niger, just up-river from Timbuktu. The commandant had had to sail towards the mysterious city, for there had been more pillaging by Tuaregs in the area, and the garrison had a formal order not to venture far from their forts.

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While there were a lot of provisions, material, and munitions at the Gourao post, Gaden was concerned that with so few people left, and many bands of Tuareg close to the left bank of the river, an attempt might be made on the post while he was there. He was, however, accompanied by 23 riflemen from the Company of Bandiagara. He had been appointed to the mission by the Governor, which Gaden took as evidence of the latter’s good disposition towards him. He wrote: ‘It seems however bizarre to see the troops of the Marine have their chiefs removed only to be given an officer of the General Army Staff to protect a resource that belongs to the Ministry of the Marine, and not that of the Colonies.’ He was plagued by uncertainties as he left for Gourao, especially regarding the situation in which two military structures operated and overviewed by a civilian Governor, in whom Gaden had little faith. He wrote: ‘…in this country of incoherence, one is never sure of the morrow’. He was also concerned that a censor read all private correspondence and commented: ‘I prefer not to know the name of this sad individual’ (JHG-F, 19.1.95). Returning to his post at Bandiagara on 27th January, Gaden managed to get out his writing paper again. He recounted his trip from Mopti to Gourao, first by barge, then a march of a day and a night along inundated river banks, finally reaching his destination by 5 a.m. on the 22nd. To Gaden’s surprise, the flotilla arrived back that evening, leaving him with nothing to do apart from making the acquaintance of the pleasant Commandant Hourst. The Commandant reported that the Tuaregs around Timbuktu were absolutely calm; but a group of Moors, ‘a band of pirates of all prove- nances’, was attracted to the area, free to roam about with impunity given the formal orders restricting the movement of the garrison. ‘One cannot leave the post without an escort of 12 men…. as regards the blacks, peaceful cultivators, and Tuareg who have submitted to us, they are left to be pillaged and assassinated without lending them the least assistance…. It will finish with the assassination of an officer or by a general uprising of Tuaregs and blacks’, Gaden informed his father (JHG-F, 31.1.95). The mountain of Gourao and other beautiful rocky outcrops had impressed Gaden. He had observed the streams that flowed down gentle slopes to Lake Debo, where thick bush and numerous palm trees in full leaf made a wonderful scene to his photographer’s eye. It was here that the Commandant Hourst strode purposefully every morning at 6 a.m. onto the beach to bathe. In this tranquil spot next to the lake, Gaden had mused on his posting. He was glad to be in Bandiagara and not in Timbuktu where things had been hotting up. He could do so many things here, ‘without spilling a drop of blood, all totally peaceful, without the need of an escort of

54 chapter two boys or grooms, to stroll about without a care’. ‘[T]he policy of Captain Destenave has brought all these people [in the area] to us; they want to be with us as we would wish, they will be content with everything that we would want’ (JHG-F, 31.1.95). Gaden broke off from his reflections, interrupted by the sound of Agibou’s tamtams, drums summoning him from his hut. He picked up the letter the following day, 7th February, having dined at the post with Governor Grodet the night before: ‘well received, polite and talkative’ was his initial verdict on meeting him. But he added: ‘With the eye of a half- deranged person, he is impulsive. A droll individual. Not at all what is needed for the countries around here, despite the high opinion he has of himself. [He] found a very difficult situation here and much hostility, but he has managed to make the situation even worse in attracting everyone’s rancour’ (JHG-F, 7.2.95). The position of Samory and his troops remained a concern, but Gaden understood they had now retreated to the other side of the Black Volta, at some safe distance to the south. Samory would no doubt be back in the area by the hivernage, the wet season, between June and September. Gaden was disconcerted too by an incident following a request from an officer for one of Henri’s maps. The officer was looking for the position of a French post on the Niger; he did not know of it, nor did the Governor. ‘There you have it, a post with at least two officers, and no-one in the Government of the Colony is aware of its position! Isn’t it all rather typical?’ His faith in Captain Destenave remained solid, however: ‘… a charming and sociable man, learned, distinguished, very interested in the situation here, absolutely up-to-date with the affairs of the country, which is the most interesting’ (JHG-F, 31.1.95).

Trade and Troubled Parents

Now settled somewhat in Bandiagara, Gaden turned his mind to the trading potential the country might offer to those involved in commerce back home, and especially to the Devèses with interests in the Soudan. It is this Niger bend area that is the future. I hope to be able to report from my stay here exact data on the commercial situation of the country, and what it can do for us. The coast is sadly very far away… but coming up from the south would have, I think, much going for it. Bandiagara is a rather important transit point. The Dyulas pass through here with red pagnes [traditional cloths] highly regarded here. The English import through Salaya red thread, which the local weavers make up, with other yarns they dye themselves in blue,

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black and yellow, very pretty pagnes, woven very finely, and very much sought after here. They sell them for around 15 frs. They bring as well kola nuts … which they trade against salt. Inversely, the people of the north are involved in a similar traffic with the south. Timbuktu is an important market. … It is therefore necessary to be masters of this country’s commerce to take these centres, in other words to be masters of the river. It is certain that if one can achieve this result in the Niger bend, which is the market where all the products of Africa come to be exchanged, the region more populated than the rest of our Soudan and where the populations are more industrious and perfect- ible, if one wants, as I say, to master this country commercially, it is necessary to hold all the transit places where caravans pass. To have only a few is to have none, the markets and the trade routes will only be displaced elsewhere. One must take all or take nothing. Peaceful conquest is actually possible, to be followed by an adequate police force. It is of course for the future alone that one must work in the present. Before he signed off he added that ‘if the Devèses need information or want a study of the country, tell them to write to me with precise instructions. I will do my best to report something’ (JHG-F, 31.1.95). Gaden continued this correspondence after receiving mail from home – from his father, sister Mine and uncle Paul, probably Paul Reyher.21 He had been rapped over the knuckles by his father for apparently not writing more regularly. Gaden defended himself against this charge by pointing out that part of the problem related to how long his correspondence took to arrive in France, which might be as much as two months. Another part was the ‘cabinet noir’, or censor’s office which read officers’ letters, particularly those whose relations might be held in suspicion by the Governor. Captain Hourst was one of them, and a number of his letters had been suppressed. ‘I do no know who this swine is who is charged with this lowly police work; in any case, if he reads this letter, he finds here an assurance of my profound contempt.’ Gaden ventured to suggest that he himself might be marked out for special treatment because of his connections with the Devès family. Gaden chided both of his parents yet again on 19th February for the lack of understanding of the situation in the colonies: One should not leave for war and bury one’s head in trying to find a reason for an absence of letters; we are not in France and it is necessary for you, if you are in France, to modify all your French moral habits as regards what concerns me [in Africa]. Never count on a letter when the post arrives. If there is

21 His older cousin, also related to the Klipsch family, through a marriage to Henri’s mother’s sister.

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one, all the better! If not, you must wait calmly for the next one before accus- ing me of culpable negligence and deep ingratitude. … You see that I am the first to be punished by the incomprehensible non-arrival of my letter. What can I say about my provisions? I was able to bring here only two tins of aspara- gus, 7 or 8 of petits pois, with four bottles of champagne. I am preciously guarding that for bad days. (JHG-F, 19.2.95)

The Governor had just left Bandiagara along with his travelling mass of 120 porters. They had been a drain on the resources of the post and Gaden was glad to see the back of them, for they dined well with succulent menus. He let loose his feelings: ‘All the wages of these bastards that he has as boys are paid from the local budget.’ In addition, ‘he is willing give 5 frs for around 10 chickens and so many dozen eggs that are brought to him. We pay, us, 1 fr per chicken and 10 centimes per egg; as a result, of course, an explosive circular [is sent out] from this swine against the ancien régime. And he would decry as inappropriate, when he sees it, the distribution to Europeans of milk from the herd belonging to the post.’ Gaden later retracted some of his accusations against Grodet’s mission once he was informed that the Captain was going to demand a 2,000 fr subvention for the costs of the visit. But his forthright criticism of the Governor in this letter was plain for all to see, especially the censor. Governor Grodet had summoned Gaden to tell him that he was not pleased with his mission to Gourao. He had been perfectly kind towards him, and had tried to get him to chat about Commandant Hourst. Gaden thought the Governor had wanted him to say that the Commandant had sent him, Gaden, back from Gourao. Hourst was obviously under suspicion. Forewarned of this meeting with the Governor by Captain Destenave, Gaden held himself solely responsible for the decision to return to Bandiagara. The Governor demanded that Gaden write a report on the matter. Henri suspected an intrigue: ‘The Governor would like to have a new pretext to fall on Commandant Hourst, who is his bête noire. He has not succeeded; which I am delighted about’. ‘There are some creatures who serve him as spies, I do not know if he thought of this role for me.’ Gaden’s rosy view of Bandiagara was now slightly tarnished, for he realised that the politics of colonial life in a small post could be tense, a place of back-biting and duplicity, and that those higher in the chain of command could not necessarily be trusted. Gaden described at length for his father the three local populations, or ‘races’ as he called them: the Habe [Dogon], the Fulbe and the Futanke. Whilst sometimes appearing like ethnographic notes, his descriptions readily reverted to colonial stereotype and caricature. Habes were

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cultivators, ‘without religion’ and great drinkers of ‘dolo’, a local brew. Some of them were ‘genuinely Herculean but their faces in general are coarse’. ‘The women are frightful, in general stocky and coarsely made.’ The second group were the Fulbe, the deposed rulers, the purest of whom were ‘hardly coppered’ and ‘the children are almost white’. ‘This is a highly attractive race’; some ‘men and women have profiles of extreme distinction’. He concluded: ‘The Fulbes are thieves and liars; fanatical Muslims who detest us’, but they would cordially present a pleasant countenance to the French. The third were the Futanke, baptized by the French under the name ‘Toucouleur’,22 and they represented the ‘conquering race that dethroned the Fulbe’. ‘They came here with Al Hajj Umar, and Agibou is his son. … They are the most handsome blacks who owe to their Fulbe origins a fine and intelligent physionomy.’ He opined: ‘You see that there is here a rather attractive salad of races’ (JHG-F, 19.2.95).

Frustration at the Fort

Gaden’s daily round began when he rose at 5.30 a.m. to conduct the distribution of meat at the post; then he worked on his maps until around 9.30 a.m. The officers met up again towards 10 a.m. to dine, when they chatted a good deal and then returned to their separate huts to take a siesta, which involved lying on a bed reading whatever was to hand. By 2 p.m. they were back at work, which they would leave two hours later in order to ‘stick their noses outside’. At 5 p.m. they went out on horseback or took a stroll around the post, before night fell abruptly towards 6 p.m. At night the hyenas whooped all around the town and would make an awful racket by the walls of the post. Occasionally they would unearth a human skeleton, buried at no great depth, spreading here and there human remains, which they cleaned to perfection. This life for Gaden at a military post, tranquil as it was, came to unnerve him. It was too calm. He had come to the Soudan hoping to go out on missions, or at least to lead an active and even adventurous life. The flat calm on which his life turned now brought him to despair. He had felt himself full of energy to transform a country in which there was much to do. But obstacles always arose. ‘If my existence has to continue as now, then I will bitterly regret this posting.’ A glimmer of hope was kindled, for he talked with Captain Destenave, who informed him of the possibility of a number

22 They are known also as Haalpulaaren, the ‘speakers of Pulaar’.

58 chapter two of sorties planned for before the hivernage set in. He hoped for one either with the Captain or on his own, but speculated that his comrade who had been at the post longer would have first dibs – ‘The rights of seniority’. ‘In any case, my turn will also come’, he stated optimistically (JHG-F, 19.2.95). Meanwhile, Gaden was keen to learn as much as possible about West Africa, and he used the accounts written by explorers of their travels through the region. He was acquainted with the works of Heinrich Barth23 and Louis Binger,24 but enquired whether his father could dispatch a copy of the published travels of Lt-Col Monteil.25 He also requested English publications on the Gold Coast (Ghana) and the Royal Niger Company, a British mercantile enterprise operating on the lower reaches of the Niger River.

An Eldorado

Gaden was now convinced that his correspondence was being read because of his connections with the Devès family, and this explained the delay in his mail. His uncle Gabriel had written to him, but he was fearful of giving details in his correspondence, especially since the matter concerned trade and his advice on how to penetrate the territory. It was better to proceed with caution. But despite his caution, Gaden nonetheless gave sufficient detail for any censor to gain a clear idea of the plan. This country has been turned upside-down by continuous wars over the last 50 years, and has been calm only since our arrival. Its riches are going to increase rapidly. But despite the possibility to shift European merchandise to all the countries neighbouring the Niger, I do not believe that the true way to penetrate it is by way of Kayes. (JHG-F, 5.3.95) Gaden then suggested another route into West Africa: ‘I think that the future lies in the penetration at Kong from the south’ in what will be ‘a very

23 Heinrich Barth (1821–1865), a German explorer and scholar of Africa travelled through West Africa in the 1850s, in particular to Timbuktu which he entered in 1853. His Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1849–1855, published in five volumes, appeared between 1857 and 1858. Gaden read them avidly. 24 Louis Gustave Binger (1856–1936) was a French officer who journeyed from Senegal up the Niger, and across West Africa. He published his two-volume Du Niger au golfe de Guinée par le pays de Kong et le Mossi, in 1892. In that same year, he headed a mission to delimit the frontier with Ashanti territory, held by the British, and went on to become Governor of Côte d’Ivoire for five years until 1898. 25 Parfait-Louis Monteil (1855–1925) was a French officer who published in 1882, Voyage d’exploration au Sénégal, and also led an expedition from Dakar to Tripoli in Libya between 1890 and 1892, an account of which appeared in 1894 under the title De Saint-Louis à Tripoli par le lac Tchad. It is most likely that Gaden was referring to this rather than his earlier work.

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attractive and very rich colony’. The proposed railway line should come from the Ivory Coast, not from the west, and he thought that such a scheme would attract capital investment, which in turn would yield rapid returns, for companies like Verdier of Marseilles. Uncle Gabriel was obviously excited by the prospect of a railway, but careful research had to be done, Gaden warned, and companies would need to cooperate with each other, like Maurel and Prom and the Devèses from Bordeaux, the Verdiers and others. ‘Members of these trading houses must come themselves’, and not rely on information provided by military officers or by ‘lowly often uncon- scientious agents. … In one or two years you will have from Timbuktu to the Ivory Coast millions of consumers’, who could be mobilised as producers by the ‘intelligent’ Dyula traders. There is here, I am persuaded, a superb future. … The cattle are fat, magnificent, the donkeys are very attractive, well loaded up and not injured. The merchant chiefs, around 10 of them, are dressed, besides their pantaloons, in a sort of shirt of a brown material with black stripes, on to which are sown grigris [amulets] around the waist. (JHG-F, 5.3.95) Gaden detailed all the trading peoples on the region, and he went on: ‘It is not in French silver or even the gold of the country with which European merchants make payments. It is exchanges they have to make [not purchases]… [and] the material of exchange has to be found.’ Salt and kola nuts, he noted, were the currency of trade, especially salt bars, not sea-salt in sacks, which the Moors detested. The Moors descended from the north with their salt to exchange for kola and other commodities, and on to this trade was grafted a commerce in slaves, which he estimated was worth around 36,000 frs. This figure did not count the value of the human traffic, of men, women and children. None of this elicited, however, any moral comment from him. He again urged the interested parties to come and observe the region for themselves, and he went on to extemporise a diatribe against those younger members of the trading houses: The so-called sons of the family would be better in the bush than on the flag- stones of the town. They would think less, when returning home, of the cut of their clothes or the colour of their ties. But I am afraid that the young generations are almost exclusively composed of spineless and emasculated beings, incapable of living without the luxury and the comforts to which they are accustomed since their tender infancy. (JHG-F, 5.3.95) Finally, he offered to undertake scouting missions in the territories of commercial interest, a prospect he would relish rather than being cooped up at the post.

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Discontented and Melancholic

By March 1895, Gaden was pleased with the progress made at the post at Bandiagara, now well appointed and its construction finished. Relations with Agibou appeared to be good: It is in Masina where the power of Agibou can be seen as the best proof of the utility of our support. Finally, it is at Bandiagara that the movement [of goods] is seen and will be seen increasingly, due to its position and the recent anti- slavery measures put in place by the Governor. (JHG-F, 22.3.95) But he was also down in the dumps and very unhappy about his sedentary situation. A mission was going to leave within the month, involving Captain Destenave and two officers, probably two adjutants, and Gaden complained:

The Governor having sent me here, and saying that Bandiagara is the only place where one would have the chance to march, I suppose that he [the Governor] profits from this situation. For not only am I to stay here, but an officer probably more influential than me is sent to Jenne. … The reason given to me is that it is necessary to leave here an officer who knows the region. (JHG-F, 22.3.95) Gaden claimed he did not know the first thing about Agibou’s affairs, since Destenave had taken care to keep to himself all interesting and delicate questions. However, ‘… the captain spoke to me about future missions and proposals for a promotion or a medal, as if I was a baby that can be amused with a rattle.’ His faith in Destenave was shaken, yet while he was still admired as an officer (‘he would make a perfect colonel’), he was reproached for his habit of systematically cordoning things off from other officers and keeping things to himself. Gaden was ‘highly discontented and disappointed’ with this ‘highly ridiculous situation’; but at least the absence of the captain would offer him the chance to familiarise himself with the country and its chiefs. Two days later he wrote that he would take a more philosophical view of his predicament, clinging to the hope that Destenave would hold good to his promises of a mission in the area. Regular packages of his photographic materials and plates were sent back to Bordeaux, where his sister Mine took care of developing them and of sending copies back to him. Gaden requested again that his father dispatch books he had asked for earlier; he also added an order for various other items: some astronomic instruments necessary for determining the location of principal places, one or two daggers (an attractive one for Agibou, who was very appreciative of such things) along with large

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magnifying glasses and ‘jewellery of poor taste’ to give as presents. A French translation of the Qur’an was requested too, but this was for his own personal use; he tried to reassure his mother, a devout Catholic, that he was not thinking of converting to Islam. Instead it would be very useful in chatting about religion ‘with the fanatics’ (JHG-F, 5.4.95). By early April 1895, the work on the post was finished, and Gaden had the chance to sit back and admire his surroundings. The trees had little foliage in April, and a dull green or grey colour emerged here and there across the landscape. Agibou’s palace stood tall against the other buildings in the town, and its serrated pointed rooftop reminded Gaden of his god-daughter’s, Marie’s, eccentric handwriting that resembled ‘cunei- form hieroglyphics’. Yet the scene summoned a melancholy prospect for Gaden: grey and sad; the sky itself is hardly blue, almost grey as well. Everything is abominably dry, and the water from the marigot resembles a green slab. Holes are dug in the sand to gain water, but it stinks horribly. … At night it is also somewhat sad. The Habes of Bandiagara dance every evening, [and] until midnight their monotonous songs to the accompaniment of calabashes and the clapping of hands can be heard. … Towards three o’clock in the morning, the marabout cries out his prayers in a loud trailing voice, always the same prayer. (JHG-F, 5.4.95) Ramadan had now drawn to a close, a moment that was marked by the firing of a gun on the appearance of the new moon, and the following day the fête for the end of the fast began. Everyone, under whatever pretext, would pass by the post to say good-day, and then oblige the officer to give a coin or two. This was an expensive custom. Gaden had come by now to appreciate the Habe greatly: ‘These are precious folk here; excellent cultivators, they feed just about everyone and they work with very good grace at all the drudgery’, and he thought the presence of the White Fathers would benefit them, for the missionaries could teach them trades. He mused that the Fathers would be well received by Agibou too. Gaden signed off his letter forewarning his father that he might receive a visit from Commandant Hourst, who was due to return to France via Bordeaux. ‘He is a charming lad, very informed, energetic and gentle, an excellent comrade.’ This invitation to look in on his father was extended to many officers Gaden met over the coming years, for he realised that France was not well informed about the situation in the Soudan, and his colleagues could give the family a more vivid sense of his life there. He closed: ‘If you find drops on my writing paper, they are not tears but only my sweat!’

62 chapter two

Gourao Revisited

From the time he had been questioned by Governor Grodet about his mission to Gourao, Gaden had been puzzling about the trip; but towards the end of April things became clearer to him. He learned that Gourao had never been threatened by an attack by Tuaregs, and if it had been, he would have been in no position to protect the surrounding populations. All he could have done would have been to look on ‘as an amateur’ as they were massacred. ‘It was a shameful situation; I would have liked so much not to have found myself there’ (JHG-F, 22.4.95). Suspecting that he had been duped into going there on the pretext of an impending assault, Gaden felt he had been used to spy on the operations of the post under Hourst’s command, and the Governor had expected a report from him that could be taken as evidence against the commandant, with whom Gaden had since then struck up a close friendship. Gaden’s anger was directed at Governor Grodet, who had since become quite ill after visiting Timbuktu, struck down by fever and vomiting. While he wished him well in his recovery, he was relieved to learn that the Governor would be returning to France, where he had been under attack for his handling of affairs in the Soudan. ‘I wish for him not to return here; he has been disastrous for the colony, disastrous for our influence and for our annexation of the region.’ He was in large part responsible, in Gaden’s view, for Lieutenant-Colonel Monteil’s defeat at the hands of Samory in the Ivory Coast about one month earlier.26 He now held this civilian governor, who had command over the affairs of the military in the Soudan, in the lowest possible regard. Gaden’s mood began to swing alarmingly: from dejection, depression and frustration at his lack of opportunity to take responsibility and initiative for missions and tours beyond the oppressive atmosphere of the post, to a state of enthused anticipation at the prospect that he might be offered something more interesting to occupy himself. Captain Destenave was about to leave with two fellow junior officers – Lieutenants Margaine and

26 Gaden had picked up snippets of news about this defeat in late March, when he was concerned about how the fall of the strategic town of Kong would impact on his plans for commercial development in West Africa. Now the full details of the debacle were circulating amongst officers. Monteil engaged Samory’s troops, ‘a veritable army, superior in number’ on 15th February 1895, but was forced to retreat after a bloody encounter during which he himself received a serious wound. He was recalled to France, replaced by Commandant Caudrelier as head of the column of 300 men. See, for example, L. Delafosse, Maurice Delafosse, 1976: 114.

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Voulet of the Marine Infantry27 – for Mossi country to the southeast, and he had intimated to Gaden that a tour to Dori in the east was in the offing in a couple of months’ time. Having to hold the fort while Destenave was away would now not be such a restricting chore, for he also understood that once the captain completed his tour of duty and then returned to France soon after, Gaden himself would take up the function of the Resident in a temporary capacity. He demanded absolute silence on this and other matters discussed in his letters, as he had done on many other occasions. Gaden poured his energies into plans and preparations for his up-coming tour in the east, probably through Guilgodi, Aribinda, Liptako and on to Dori, into territory explored by the German traveller Barth in 1853, whose work Gaden admired immensely for its geographical accuracy, acute observations and scholarly approach. ‘These countries are very new and little open to our products up to the present.’ He still did not know the exact itinerary he would follow, but the tour gave him the chance to produce ‘a serious study of these countries’. He threw himself feverishly into full-scale production of items to distribute as gifts on his travels, for he had received bundles of drapes, cloth and fine stuffs with which he intended to make up garments for local dignitaries. Around ten trunks of provisions were also about to arrive, along with a sum of 1,000 frs. With some of these coins he planned to have Agibou’s blacksmiths make up rings set with a five franc piece; they ‘will make magnificent presents from here for Dori’. With the cloth, he employed a team of local tailors, installed in his household, to run up boubous from the light, striped satins and the rich velours that ‘they cut with a knife in a rather primitive fashion. … I am obliged every moment to go and cast an eye over my workshop, where five boubous are in production, two green, two grey and one vermillion red. Since they no longer have red thread, I am obliged to make them [the weavers] eat kola nuts and they dye the white thread by putting it their mouths!’ (JHG-F, 22.4.95). The imminent departure of his mission took his mind off the Gourao debacle, and marked for him the start of a period of intense work.

Traore and Trade

By 5th May, Captain Destenave had left on his mission and this produced a notable change in Gaden’s existence: he was now in charge of the affairs of

27 This was the same Lieutenant Voulet who was to lead the disastrous mission that committed atrocities in the Soudan some years later.

64 chapter two the Residence at the tender age of 28 years, and was very occupied with local matters that spread over a territory one fifth the size of France.28 The itinerary for his trip had been decided, and it would take him into Fulbe country, via Douentza, Djibi, Aribinda to Dori, a journey for which he was preparing by writing a study in consultation with three local informants, one of whom was Mahmamdu Al Hajj Traore, a highly intelligent marabout in Bandiagara, who had been twice to Mecca and was very knowledgeable about the history of the country and its different ‘races’. ‘This is a man of very broad outlook and a very open mind, with whom I have had numerous conversations’ (JHG-F, 5.5.95). In his role as Resident, Gaden also had to develop relations with Agibou, who was temporarily away on tour, and whose place had been taken by his son, Tijani, who had little authority. That meant that complaints and grievances within the community were directed to the French post rather than taken to the temporary chief. This was an unusual state of affairs for Gaden to deal with, but at least it put him in intimate contact with local folk, which he seemed to relish. The presents for his mission made by his ‘corporation of Bandiagara tailors’ were now just about completed. With the hivernage approaching, the temperatures rose together with the humidity, and this made for an uncomfortable season with so much work to do. It was a period of fatigue and illness, and the limited medical facilities in the area were stretched even at the best of times to cope with medical problems. Gaden regretted the lack of ‘intellectual nourishment’ at the post, and he was still awaiting towards the end of May the third volume of Barth’s travels, a publication he recommended to his Devès relatives for its ‘precious information’ for trading houses on the country from Sokoto in Nigeria to Timbuktu on the fringes of the desert, a kind of West African Eldorado for Gaden. ‘It would be difficult to find a more conscientiously constructed work’, he remarked. Gaden also received a letter from his uncle Gabriel, who appeared to be pressing him too quickly on their plans for trade: ‘It is absolutely useless that he sets me up in advance. My advice is still not yet supported by a sufficiently long experience’, he reported to his father (JHG-F, 21.5.95). Their scheme required an exact account of the actual state of

28 The one single letter that exists in the Paris archive from Gaden to Gouraud is dated 18th May, Bandiagara, but the year is unreadable. Given the contents it must have been written around this time, for Gaden referred to Destenave being away on mission, and that he himself still had hopes of going on his promised tour to Dori. The intimacy of later correspondence is missing; Gaden addressed him as ‘my dear Gouraud’, and signed off ‘your devoted comrade’. The letter shows, if little else, that the two Henris were exchanging correspondence at this time.

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commerce and of the commercial history of these regions to be drawn up before they committed themselves in any meaningful way. Gaden found it difficult to leave alone the subject of Governor Grodet, the unfortunate administrator who had received the blame for a series of set-backs in the colony, referring to him sarcastically as ‘His Majesty Grodet the First’. The Governor had either been ‘very culpable or very clumsy’ in handling the demands of his office; ‘…what a blunder to appoint a civilian Governor in a colony where the Governor would be the only civilian; and an individual who knows absolutely nothing about the country! It is unimaginable!’ Gaden’s mind turned to who might succeed as Governor, for Grodet’s career seemed to be doomed,29 and he thought that a military chief would be ‘welcomed by cries of joy from everyone.’ Archinard was favoured but not Dodds. Dodds’ mission in Dahomey had been ‘declared unanimously the most piteous colonial campaign of the century’, according to Gaden.30 Gaden’s relationship with the marabout Al Hajj Traore blossomed, and the Frenchman developed a deep respect for him. ‘I am on very good terms with him.’ Traore was a man of 62 years, intelligent and wise, who usually lived in Jenne or Timbuktu, and travelled extensively throughout the region conducting his commercial activities. His knowledge of the history of the countries east of the Niger bend impressed Gaden, as did his understanding of the patterns of trade and what might be possible in the future. Al Hajj had accompanied Barth on his travels from Say on the Niger to Koukaoua in the 1850s, and his grasp of the complexities of commerce in Timbuktu over the preceding 40 years or so was detailed and masterful. Some of this information was recorded by Gaden for the benefit of his father, who would then gain a better picture of how best to engage in trade, or at least pass it on to the Devès family. Sadly for Gaden, the marabout was about to leave Bandiagara for St Louis, but Gaden arranged for him to meet one of the Devès traders in the town, and a letter of recommendation was given to Traore to present there. Gaden emphasised yet again his view that the most

29 Albert Grodet, who prior to his appointment to the Soudan had been the Governor of Martinqiue until 1891, was recalled to France in July 1895. In March 1895, Le Hérissé, a right- wing Deputy, had launched an attack on Grodet, with the evident connivance of Colonel Archinard, in Gaden’s view. 30 Alfred-Amedée Dodds (later a General) was born in St Louis of British, French and Senegalese ancestry, and he led a campaign against the forces of the King of Dahomey in 1892–3. His victory at Abomey in 1892 opened up a linkage between the French possessions in upper Senegal and the upper Niger region with their territories in the south. A graduate of Saint Cyr, and an officer in the Marine Artillery, perhaps Gaden’s fierce objection to him related to his radical politics.

66 chapter two profitable way into the Niger bend and the commercial potential it offered would be for traders to come from the south via Kong. The future success of this plan, and the proposed railway from the coast, hinged on what would become of Samory and his mobile Wassulu empire, which commanded an infantry of 30–35,000 men and a 3,000-strong cavalry, all organised into platoons and companies on a European model. Settled near Kong, Samory could easily undermine his scheme, and any military action against him there could lead to the destruction of the town. So Gaden was keen to pursue a pacific strategy in order to safeguard the route in which he fervently believed; he might even be able to interest Samory himself in the enterprise. An alternative was to put a price on Samory’s head, a few hundred gourds’ full of money would no doubt do it, thought Gaden, for what scruples did others have with respect to their leader? Gaden accused the English at Salaga of supporting Samory, and suggested that they traded in slaves with him.

Agibou, the Victim of Inertia

On 7th June 1895, Gaden, still fuming about the ex-Governor Grodet, informed his father that he had just received a report written by Colonel Archinard, the officer recalled to France in 1893 for disobeying orders. Gaden nonetheless still held Archinard in high esteem: This report is admirably well done and shows that the Colonel knew the country perfectly. It is truly shameful to observe him being the target of attacks by an ignorant press that prevent this man from returning here. The colony has lost a great deal. Grodet showed himself to be completely incapable, and he did enormous damage to the colony. (JHG-F, 7.6.95) Gaden shared some of his predicaments with his father. Regarding his tat- tered wardrobe from France, he admitted he was now obliged to wear local outfits: ‘I dress Bandiagara style, you see that here’ (JHG-F, 21.5.95). Drinking by officers was very much part of life at French posts. Gaden seemed to have taken his share, although his indulgences were not always explicit in his letters. Earlier three cases of champagne and two of absinthe had been delivered to him for his own use. Now, in charge of the distribution of alcohol at the post, he described to his father how each man was allotted a measure of wine and one of tafia, a type of eau de vie. The rations were 25 centilitres of wine per day, not a quantity to make any Frenchman forget his worries; but happily Gaden added they always had dolo, the local brew made by the Habe, to rely on in hard times. A bond between the French and

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the Habe was created through alcohol; but it was not the case for relations between them and the local Muslim population. The Muslim festival known locally as Tabaski (at which a ram is sacrificed) had been held three days earlier on 4th June,31 and this created much extra work for Gaden, who took part as acting Resident in the celebrations and received hoards of people to whom gifts were customarily given. He had been given almost no information on local events or instructions about what should happen and how he should conduct himself as Resident. There was much to do to get himself up-to-date with the local calendar. He also had to familiarise himself with the village folk and would chat for a rather long time with those who came to seek his advice, opinion or judgement on pressing matters. The Agibou was not liked roundabouts and, in Gaden’s opinion, he truly did nothing for the local population. This man is only here because of us, and if we leave this country, 48 hours later even Bandiagara would be totally “effervescent”, all the country in revolution, and the Fama would have been run through by the blades of his Futankes. He knows it, but he knows also that, while we leave him here, he will be strongly supported and maintained by us, even if he abuses his position. The most ridiculous intrigues are played out around the Fama; he is surrounded by detestable counsellors who aggravate discords instead of soothing them. (JHG-F, 7.6.95) Gaden also provided an intriguing vignette of Agibou and the politics of Bandiagara: After the morning prayer made on the morning of Tabaski on the plateau to the east of the village, it is customary that the Fama speaks to his chiefs and notables, who are grouped behind him for the ‘salam’. This year, he thought it interesting to say to the Futanke, in particular: “The French killed all the Futanke that they found at Segou, all of those they found at Nioro, they cut their throats. The French have not done the same at Bandiagara, they have received well those of you who came to them, those who had left Amadou (his brother). If they did this, it is because of me; it is because I asked them to, because I intercede for you every day. You know those who wait for you! (JHG- F, 7.6.95) ‘What an absurd lecture!’, Gaden huffed, ‘and all of this rendered the fête rather less gay’. He continued: ‘Agibou has a tendency to be independent, externally charming, polite, considerate, flexible, like all Toucouleurs. Full of protestation of devotion, always ready to say that he is nothing, that the French are everything…’ He complained that Agibou moped about, very

31 Known in the Arabic-speaking world as id al-adha.

68 chapter two often ‘the victim of inertia’, a ‘big thing with the blacks’; but that it was important politically to protect him, because from the point of view of external relations, he was a perfect instrument of peaceful conquest and French penetration. Once the French were able to set themselves up everywhere in the region, Gaden believed, that would be the time in Bandiagara for a ‘white chief to replace the black chief’.

Tolerating Slavery

Gaden was morally ambivalent and pragmatic about slavery, for he understood the place it occupied in the local economy, and to ban it outright would be to disrupt commercial life seriously and lead to the transfer of trade elsewhere.

One thing to respect absolutely in all of this country is slavery. … It is much more gentle than one might generally believe it to be, and it prevents the misery of existing here as in France. With respect to the trade, the best way to repress it is to pacify the country. Everyone here needs peace and tranquillity, and they desire them. It is certain that, actually, we attract the populations to us much more by remaining tranquil [not intervening] and in assuring freedom of communications everywhere. (JHG-F, 21.5.95) This ‘good policy’, which would not depopulate the colonies by driving traders away, was best furthered, Gaden ventured, by ‘military officers, who should govern the country; we [the military] are more honest than the civilians and cost less…. What a collection of scoundrels these colonial administrators are!’ In June, Gaden returned to the theme of trade, this time in the form of the ‘natural production’ of captives in some areas, the quality of donkeys from others, gold and silver from pillaging of mines elsewhere. The key players in the commerce of the region were the Dyula, and he detailed their trade commodities and the exchange rates they used: one captive was worth 20–60,000 cowrie shells, or 50–60 francs; a charge of gun powder, one captive; a very good horse, 20 captives; a bar of salt, two or three captives; and a donkey, 15,000 cowries. He elaborated on the subject of the slave trade: In banning the sale of trade captives in our markets, the caravans simply go elsewhere. … The result of these repressive measures [on the trade in captives] will be to diminish our commerce and push the chiefs such as Samory … to an even greater devastation [of the local populations]. Our colony, pacified, will never be a centre for the production of captives. In tolerating the

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trade, we tolerate simply therefore the purchases by our blacks who contribute to the populating of our colony. To defend the trade is indulge in hollow words without obtaining any practical result. … Send us therefore people who [will] command the country for the good of the country and not for [the good of] the schemers who only seek the applause of the ignorant crowd that is France. (JHG-F, 7.6.95) This was a policy of tolerance of, not a defence of, trading in captives that might strike the modern ear as shocking. But Gaden, always the pragmatist, developed a practical relativism which in his view would better the lot of those sectors of the population he regarded highly – the Dyula traders for example – while having an eye for how best to further the interests of the colony as a whole, and perhaps even his own and his family’s lot too. His descriptions of the state of trade were also aimed at what he considered to be the ignorance of the metropolitan French, who congratulated themselves on having triumphed against slavery in the cause of civilization. ‘Illusions!’ cried Gaden. ‘... the bourgeoisie, who know absolutely nothing about this, and who, when captives are discussed, dream of chains, of ropes around their necks, of slave-drivers who, whip in hand, make them work, have been taken in by a collection of emotive words. This is simply gro- tesque’ (JHG-F, 20.6.95). Gaden’s life as the acting Resident in Destenave’s absence was dominated by paperwork. However, he used his time to good effect and accumu- lated information that he had been deprived of prior to the Captain’s departure. After his return, Gaden believed, Destenave would find it difficult to maintain the mystery he had so far created, for he would have to handle Gaden with care, knowing that he now had developed an understanding of the region through the numerous ears and eyes he now had at his disposition, namely local informants who were feeding him information.

M. Dubois’ Railway

The volume written by Parfait Monteil arrived in late June, and it gave Gaden much pleasure perusing it.32 He learnt from the work that the French had drawn up treaties in the country to the east of Bandiagara. This was news to him. It was important for those stationed in the region to know

32 He remarked on 7th July 1895 that he could not understand the cabal which had been raised against Monteil, and he wished he would make more noise in his defence: ‘All this is very shifty’, he stated.

70 chapter two these things, and it was unimaginable that they were never told! He and his fellow officers had to find out by way of literature published abroad and dispatched privately to individuals on tours of duty what was happening in the territory. He pressed his case again for a new Governor who would not be ‘an enemy of colonial expansion’, and suggested that everyone was clamouring for Archinard to be appointed. He had also received a letter from his uncle Gabriel, which he read with keen interest, for he seemed to have been put off Gaden’s schemes for a railway to the south through Kong and the Ivory Coast. The reason for this change of heart on his uncle’s part would appear to have been an article written by a journalist, M. Dubois, who was advocating a line to the west linking up the Niger bend with Senegal. The journalist had made a flying visit through the region and had passed through the area where Gaden was stationed. M. Dubois was ‘an extreme phoney’, Gaden thought, whose studies on the railway line were spoken about at all the posts and were met with laughter (JHG-F, 20.6.95). He tried his best to convince Gabriel, through the letter to his father, of how mistaken the Dubois plan was, firstly by belittling his mission as super- ficial, and secondly by rehearsing the arguments over many pages of the virtues of the southern route. Gaden’s trader marabout friend, Al Hajj Traore was ‘someone who would be more instructive than M. Dubois’. Gaden saw some merit in Dubois’ proposal, for it would be of an enormous benefit and provide important services for the activities of military occupation, but it ought to be the French state that met the costs of this particular line. He urged his uncle to withdraw his confidence in Dubois (‘not serious, this young man’) and to push for the original proposal. As a taster of the things on offer from the region, Gaden prepared a bundle of goods that his uncle had asked to be sent to him, along with some items for himself and friends. Because of the rains, he had to delay its dispatch, but he noted some of the contents for his father: a very beautiful piece of cloth that served as a screen against mosquitoes, bought for 50 francs; some kassas, woollen covers and cloths used as cloaks; cotton pagnes; skins prepared by the Bobos (who produced them using a special process they kept secret) and some leatherwork. Especially put together for his uncle was a trunk of samples of cotton, bands of material and so on. Finally, he expressed his pleasure in his posting, for the biggest fault in colonial service was that officers were shifted around in a way that prevented them from gaining a sound knowledge of any locality. His position was exceptional at Bandiagara, compared to what most of his comrades faced, for he was allowed as the acting Resident to study the country over a sustained period, and could draw on information from local informants with

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whom he had struck up fruitful relations. He closed his very long letter (written over five days) with a final plea to his uncle Gabriel: ‘May it [the letter] open uncle Gabriel’s eyes to M. Dubois’ account, and render him more cautious in his future decisions’ (JHG-F, 20.6.95). Some time later Gaden received mail containing in particular a brochure put together by the Devèses about the proposed extension of their trading activities in the Soudan:

The brochure is very good: yes, the Soudan is rich; above all the valley of the Niger bend, which I observe every day. I see populations in large numbers and fields that stretch beyond view; but the people must be educated and learn how to add to their production those things that would be useful to us. (JHG-F, 31.8.95)

There was a job to be done in the Soudan with local populations; but there was also one to be done in France. The French press published ‘misleading articles’ about the Soudan, and Gaden attempted to address those impressions, which could sway uncle Gabriel away from their agreed commercial plans for the region. The self-styled ‘explorers’ who came to the Soudan and reported to the press were ‘the lowest type of scoundrel, who explored nothing more than the papers which they had procured from military officers, God knows how!’ To add to his worries, Gaden had also heard that the son of a Soudanese slave called ‘Issac’, brought up by a French charity, was at the Senate in Paris. What damage might this do to the reputation of the colony in the metropole? He felt personally exposed too for his virulent criticism of Grodet, some of which had been passed on to the Devèses. ‘… publish nothing!’ was his defence. Some three months later, much to his surprise given his earlier attack on the man and his ‘exploration’ of the region, Gaden received a copy of the article by M. Dubois that appeared in a supplement of Le Figaro. The author had evidently sent a copy of his piece to the Devèses to be passed on to Gaden. ‘I am happy with what he writes. It is well observed and well described’. Gaden highlighted those points in the article which confirmed his own view about the richness of the Niger valley and its commercial potential, and which of course supported the mercantile expansion he had envisaged throughout the region. He returned to a favourite subject, another plank in his policy for local development and education: ‘Send in the White Fathers’ was his rallying-cry (JHG-F, 22.11.95). By January 1896, Gaden’s vision for the development of the Soudan now included a new element – agricultural production. Colonies might be organised around either agriculture or commerce, or a combination of

72 chapter two both, and a system of exploitation of the potential of the region through forestry and intensive cultivation would give a commercial goal to the colonial government. This would not be a direct exploitation of the soil by European farmers, but an indirect one, since the climate did not permit the establishment of large colonies manned by French labour. ‘For us, who do not journey under the lights of Immortal Principles and who do not want to possess captive labour, we can only employ the manpower of salaried labour.’ Indigenous labour coupled with European management of the exportation of commodities would be the future, an idea perhaps based on the production of groundnuts in Senegal, introduced into the colony earlier in the century (JHG-F, 24.1.96).

The Most Unpopular of Sovereigns

Gaden’s preparations for his mission to Dori in the east were in hand, and it looked as though it was becoming even more necessary given the reports that were received from the area: ‘Pillaging and theft have risen to such a height that they have become an institution. It is time for this to stop and for the trade caravans to move freely everywhere.’ Doubts about whether the mission would go ahead lurked not far from the surface, and Gaden was concerned about being misled a second time (JHG-F, 7.7.95). Meanwhile, news was coming through of the changes to the administration of French West Africa (to be organised as a federation of five previously separate colonies – Senegal, Guinea, Dahomey, Ivory Coast and Western Soudan – under the authority of one overall Governor General). Although the situation was not totally clear to him, Gaden did not fail to understand from the dispatches that Jean Baptiste Chaudié (b.1853), a professional colonial administrator, a civilian distrusted in military circles, had been appointed to the new position of Governor General of French West Africa in June 1895. Gaden made known his dissenting views on this topic (JHG-F, 21.7.95). However, the news of the downfall of Grodet was welcomed by Gaden with much joy, a fitting end and dignified recompense for ‘his [Grodet’s] loyal services’, he opined. He still could not bring himself to believe what had happened, and they awaited the arrival of Colonel Trentinian, the Commandant Supérieur of the French troops, and new Lieutenant- Governor of the Soudan.33 The reorganisation of the administration would

33 Louis Edgar de Trentinian, Count de Trentinian, (1851–1942) was born in Martinique, and educated at Saint Cyr. He went on to become a First World War General, and was one of

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lead to a diminution of responsibility and initiative for the Governor of the Soudan, he thought, and the persistence with a civilian regime in the shape of Chaudié was not what Gaden was hoping for. He saw this as a result of the campaign by the press and by parliament against the perceived excesses of the French military. Gaden tackled one of the main arguments in the press – the fear of rising costs of colonial administration: ‘Nothing is more expensive than a civilian regime. The Soudan with Grodet and no active army contingent has cost more than two contingents and Archinard!’ These civilian ‘messieurs’ make fantastic salaries, he pointed out, are indemnified at every turn, and the local budgets afforded a commodious living for them, in the way that Grodet had done, juggling the regional finances and lavish- ing money on luxuries. It was this anti-colonial tactic that was using up precious resources, Gaden claimed, not military expansion that would bring financial benefits. ‘Why then the anomaly of a civilian Governor commanding only military personnel’, the only exception being a few civilian administrators, postal and treasury staff dotted around here and there. He foresaw, as before, a fight between the Colonel Commandant at Kayes, and the Governor General of French West Africa in St Louis, unless the Colonel could be less of ‘an old fossil’ and the Governor show more tact: The civilians for export [administrators sent from France to serve in French West Africa] are generally only those who are crazy or burdensome that they cannot be decently accommodated in France. This is why the colonies will only ever be mad-houses, like Senegal and probably all the others. (JHG-F, 21.7.95) Gaden’s frustrations with Captain Destenave were by July becoming more acute, for he felt that he had been left in the dark over so many issues concerning the administration of the Residency. Gaden was taking steps to address his lack of understanding by planning a study of local political organisation and a report on slavery and its trade. His relations with Agibou were now strained, and his opinion of the ruler had slipped further: ‘He is the most false and the most absurd being one could find’ … ‘lost in the most ridiculous intrigues, greedy and a liar, he is the most unpopular of sovereigns.’ A particular incident involving Agibou had annoyed him greatly, and the turn of events over the last few days had made the situation especially uncomfortable. Agibou had promised the Captain and then the Governor to pass on the command of the town to a Habe chief, who had

the founders of the Académie des Sciences Coloniales. See Hommes et Destins, tome 2: 722–28.

74 chapter two been the principal mainstay of Tijani, Agibou’s son. Agibou detested the chief and never kept to his promise; indeed behind his back he had stirred up the territory against him. The chief had left Bandiagara, returning back to his village, when Gaden’s agents informed him that many hundreds of Habe had revolted and waited to attack him. Gaden stopped the chief before he arrived home, and immediately summoned Agibou who, trying to pull the wool over his eyes, agreed to all of Gaden’s demands. Gaden then learned that Agibou had sent word to the Habe to attack immediately, but in a frank exchange with Agibou’s spokesman Gaden had managed to hold off further deterioration of relations. On reflection he wrote: ‘I do not want to rupture openly our relations with the Fama because that would spoil everything’, and he did not want the captain to return to find a major breakdown in understanding. Destenave meanwhile was out of reach, did not respond to Gaden’s letters, and no word had been received from him since 2nd July, three weeks earlier. Gaden felt in an exposed position as only the acting Resident, and worried that the situation might hurtle out of control: I act for the best, following my own lights. Initiative is a beautiful thing, and I assure you that I am developing mine; but for a simple interim [Resident], I confess that the actual situation is highly disagreeable to me. If this brave man [the Habe chief] is killed, that is going to be the start of a pile of intrigues in the country, and my situation will become more difficult. (JHG-F, 21.7.95) The burden on Gaden’s shoulders only increased his sense of vulnerability as an isolated junior officer with huge responsibility; and it undermined the confidence he had in his own abilities. If these events had not already turned some of his hair grey, then further complications in the political situation at Bandiagara would surely do so.

Even-Handed Force, a Gift of God

By 6th August, the tensions surrounding the broken promise to the Habe chief and Agibou’s part in this intrigue had developed into an ugly predicament. A column of more than 1,000 armed Habe men assembled some 29 kms from Bandiagara. Gaden was forced to intervene and move them on; at the same time he had to oversee the arrival of the chief in his village, where he was to be set upon by angry crowds of cultivators according to Agibou’s plan. Without a shot being fired, Gaden managed to collect sufficient and precise information to be able to accuse Agibou of being the

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author of this strategy and of trying to deceive him, the Resident, by under- hand tactics. Agibou denied the accusations energetically and demanded to go to the chief’s village of Kani to discover the truth. Gaden could not refuse him, but rather than accompany Agibou there, he decided to go alone in advance with only his interpreter and a guard. He arrived well before Agibou, and started searching for villagers to provide statements. ‘My presence was sufficient to help calm everyone down’. The following morning, Agibou confessed to his part in the affair, which was as well since Gaden was not convinced that the local population would have spoken out against him for fear of reprisals.34 All the chiefs and notables of the territory were then summoned, and Gaden conducted a general round-up of 44 suspected individuals. He arrested in the most public way possible two important chiefs from Bandiagara, those he considered the ring-leaders. As a result, Gaden pointed out: ‘Agibou is horribly afraid, and he is completely deflated. It is enough for me [now] to give him some simple advice and he follows it immediately. This is marvellous: good effects have already been felt in the village where he is universally detested.’ He concluded: ‘Here, force is appreciated, but [only] even-handed force, that they consider to be the gift of God.’ This incident gave Gaden further pause for consideration on the merits and methods of achieving social order. He pursued the theme by concluding in a belligerent tone that ‘it is impossible to penetrate [new territories] other than by force. … If peaceful missions succeed now it is only thanks to our military prestige. Also every act of weakness carries with it blows to our prestige and is exploited against us. … It is not necessary to rule by terror, but by gentle force’ (JHG-F, 6.8.95). Gaden profited greatly from Destenave’s absence. While it may have stretched him to the limits of his diplomatic prowess, Gaden revelled in the freedom from authority he had so often sought. He heard too that Destenave was to be called to serve directly under the new Governor Trentinian once he returned from his mission, and Gaden had every reason to think he would accept the new position. The upshot of this, Gaden mused, would no doubt be his appointment as interim Resident. The downside was that this might delay his tour of the east until a new captain was appointed. Anyway, the rainy season was at its height with suffocating temperatures and humidity, rain and tornadoes, pools of standing water and swollen rivers; these were not the kind of conditions in which to embark upon a mission, so a delay would not be disastrous. Gaden had been put forward for promotion

34 It is not clear from the letters exactly how Agibou had conspired to turn the Habe against their own chief, and Gaden does not give details.

76 chapter two to captain, but thought his chances were minimal given his age and experience: ‘I’ve done nothing to justify a mention in dispatches; I am not troubled and I make no illusions about it.’ More than ever though he promised himself not to return Africa without his three stripes. Gaden had conducted interviews with Habe villagers to collect their versions of events, and assemble the facts about what had happened regarding the plot against the chief. The first meeting after the captain’s return in August between Agibou and Destenave was remarkable, Gaden reported, with the Fama initially denying his role in the Habe conspiracy. Then seeing that this would lead nowhere, he put on his hat and then placed it on the ground as an act of submission, finally collapsing on the floor, prostrating himself at Gaden’s feet, embracing his legs with both arms, and rubbing his shaven head against his boots. ‘Lieutenant’, Agibou lamented, ‘I have no hope anymore other than in you, tell the Commandant to pardon me! etc…’ After this ‘ridiculous scene’, Gaden invited him to get up off the floor and sit back down again. Following this, judgement was passed by a group of marabouts on the local chief who had contributed most to inciting the unfortunate chain of confrontations, and he was condemned to death and executed the next day. The use of a council of local marabouts to dispense justice relating to native affairs was part of a constitutional arrangement that separated a native legal system from one dealing with French personnel within the colony. And in August, the grand assembly of all the chiefs and notables of Bandiagara was convened, and Agibou appeared before it to receive a dressing down from the captain in front of everyone. Gaden commented: All this is going to produce excellent results. … As regards Agibou, it is absolutely unimaginable to see a Fama promising the Governor and the Captain to re-establish a chief under his command and, the moment when he should have delivered his promises, looking for ways to trick me, receiving at his house at midnight all sorts of individuals, and fermenting an uprising in the territory of the chief, giving the order to cut him off on route, with a column of over 1000 men, to have him killed. This is monstrous! (JHG-F, 17.8.95) On 17th August, after much waiting and uncertainty, Gaden finally announced to his father his imminent departure with Captain Destenave for Dori, to the east in the direction of Niamey. The trip was to go ahead despite the difficulties posed by the water courses being high and the lack of millet in the country, the local staple. His first ‘bath’ would be on leaving Bandiagara, when he had to traverse the swollen marigot that separated the post from the town, and this would not be the last. He was pleased, nonetheless, to break out of the post to head for open country and experience

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some action at last. It had been confirmed too that he would take up the role of Resident again on his return to Bandiagara, when the captain would be stationed at Kayes with the colonel.

Mission to Dori

Gaden left Bandiagara on the 20th August on his mission to Dori, taking a southern route via Kani, some two days’ travel away, where Captain Destenave joined up with him. By the 25th, they reached the notorious village of Bangui, perched high on a rock wall some 30 metres above them. They were not well received by the villagers, who squarely barred their passage and refused them millet and other provisions. Discussions took place between the French and the chiefs. Then suddenly some villagers armed with guns and spears arrived, causing the French party to run for their own weapons. The troops cleared the area and then, according to Gaden, ‘went to search the village for what they required’ for all the Habe had fled to the mountains. Gaden told his parents in a letter of 31st August 1895 from the village of Kombo Kani that ‘this thrashing of the Habe is completely confidential’. He skates over the details of what the thrashing actually meant and how many lives, if any, were lost on the enemy side. If any French soldiers had died, however, the news would have been made known. Brutal responses by French troops against local populations were not uncommon, and this could well have been one that went undocumented. By 9th September, Gaden’s party were now in Guesséré 156 kms from Bandiagara, a distance covered in just over two weeks. They had arrived in a Fulbe province yet to be explored, and this provided Gaden with an opportunity to fill in a blank space on his maps. He reported on the levels of population, their types of activities and agriculture, their dwellings and village organisation. Commenting on the inhabitants of Goundo, some 8,000 souls, he wrote: ‘these people here are like peasants in France, who are infatuated with the land and thriftiness’. He planned on his return to Bandiagara to publish maps and an important work on the area. Just after they arrived in the village of Djibo on 18th September an unfortunate incident occurred involving a young Soudanese groom in their party. Gaden described what happened in a letter of 19th September. The lad, only 15 years old, had been disembowelled by a spear wielded by a local domestic captive. The boy was buried one hour later. The captive’s master, a grand chief, had given the order to his men to kill any of the French party who became isolated from the others. The chief and his captive fled

78 chapter two immediately, and the rest of the villagers, believing that the French would seek reprisals, took up arms and led their women and children away into the bush. Only the Fulbe chiefs and their men remained, and Gaden’s party passed the night on high alert with sentries posted around their camp and patrols in the immediate area. By morning, the stand-off subsided and the French imposed a large fine on the village, reserving the right to hit back at the chief at a later date. ‘We are going to enter, evidently, the most interesting part of the voyage’, was Gaden’s view as the party neared the village of Dori. The village was essential if the region were to be developed, and if the trade routes connecting Dori to Timbuktu were secured, then the receipts of the local administration’s coffers would be boosted as a result of the levies on passing caravans. However, if levies were enforced too rigorously in order to gain instant financial benefits, the markets would become deserted and trade would dry up. This had been Grodet’s policy, now continued by Captain Meyer in Timbuktu, Gaden claimed, and the strategy had been shown not to work. On 28th September, they left for Dori and travelled over 80 kms through terrain which was mostly uninhabited. The worst of the wet season had now passed, but they still had to cross dangerous swollen marigots, giving them a chance for another ‘bath’. The weather was still heavy, misty and disagreeable, a time of fever for local people. The French nonetheless remained well thanks to their supplies of quinine. They reached Dori following the itinerary charted by Heinrich Barth in his account of his travels, which Gaden found to be ‘well and conscientiously put together’. By contrast, the itinerary provided in the reports by Parfait Monteil, who had crossed the area some years earlier, was ‘rather fantastical’, especially regarding the river networks. Gaden made use of the equipment sent out earlier by his father to make astronomical observations and to calculate the latitude and longitude of their positions. Dori was a large village with houses constructed in earth and straw, situated on an enormous flat, empty plain full of marshes and cut through by water channels. The party had been obliged to make a long detour of six kms to find a way through the wetlands to the settlement. It had been an important market centre, but the Hausa caravans coming from Say on the Niger were now much fewer in number. ‘With a post at Dori, we will hold this route, our presence here would double the importance of the market which is almost as great as Timbuktu or Jenne, and we will hold all the commercial routes to the north’, Gaden enthused. ‘It would be sufficient to have one Lieutenant here with a company of men, around one hundred

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riflemen’, adding that he would come here voluntarily himself as the Resident (JHG-F, 26.9.95). By mid-October, Gaden was weary of the mission, and was particularly disillusioned by Captain Destenave. The French column had been well received by the sedentary populations in most of the places they had visited in Aribinda, and especially where nomads and others subjugated and oppressed the settled agricultural populations. ‘They were counting on us to better their situation’, Gaden suggested, and the captain had understood this, but was frightened of being drawn into such tense local relations and having to intervene. Days had been lost in which the captain had indulged in discussions with various parties in order to understand how things worked, but Gaden was sure that they had said nothing of importance. ‘They in fact said nothing, and we have done nothing’, was his conclusion. His solution was simple: It is vital to give confidence in a firm manner to the Fulbes… [and others]; they could have sent chiefs to Aribinda, we could have organised them, giving them an overall chief, and it would have been they who were charged with getting rid of…[those] who fleece the people and terrorise the country. But our great chief [Destenave] deemed otherwise and, by fear of being obliged to act, we stayed at Aribinda on our return for only 1/2 a day…. It is thus that we spread our influence. (JHG-F, 2.11.95) Gaden arrived back in Bandiagara on 26th October in perfect health, having suffered not one minute of fever during the whole trip that had taken him through mosquito-infested marshes and standing water at the height of the hivernage. He had travelled almost 500 kms over the last two months and felt exhilarated. He had though picked up a superb tapeworm, which gave him a terrible, indeed frightening, appetite and caused him to lose weight. He was going to have it expelled in three or four days, but it was a tiring operation demanding a day’s repose afterwards. The celebrations to mark the mission’s return to Bandiagara were tarnished for Gaden by the lack of decisive action by his captain during the mission. ‘Only half the job done, and very probably reprisals would be taken out against the people of Aribinda. … This does not prevent the captain bringing out an enormous tam-tam spectacular [to celebrate] the success of the mission!’ ‘This is egoism and egotism pushed to the absolute limits. … Since our departure, we had to listen daily to a symphony of “I” and “Me”, which ended up being intolerable.’ Gaden did not regret going on the mission, however, and had enjoyed the adventure and the task of collecting an ‘ample harvest of topographical information’ on his return trip, which he conducted alone (JHG-F, 2.11.95).

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Muzzled in Bandiagara

Work had mounted up in the two months’ absence from the post. Various reports were to be submitted to the new ‘Colonel Governor’, a highly active and very exigent man. Gaden found Agibou still up to the same old tricks, although the Fama had left town before Gaden’s arrival at the post. Agibou was visiting a village situated one day’s journey from Bandiagara that had not yet submitted to French rule. ‘The situation is far from good’, and Gaden regarded this state of affairs as a result of Agibou’s negligence and avarice: ‘He has done nothing since he came here, lives surrounded by griot women, and no longer has a personal following – no sofas, no cavalry, or at least very few.’ Agibou found such an entourage too costly to maintain and loved best to hoard the five franc coins he was provided with as a procurement from the post. Tax income was also healthy, but the post did not benefit from this as Agibou claimed it for himself, according to a clause in his settlement with the French. Tensions were high and officers could not now travel further than three days from the town without a patrol of 20 or so riflemen, and there were frequent exchanges of fire with local groups. Gaden felt the captain too must share some of the blame for this situation for not handling matters in a more clear and forthright way. This situation is all the more false and disagreeable: I am not able to tell everything that I see, and that is painful. The more I continue, the more I am able to take account of the situation and the more I deplore being in part “muzzled”. The situation is difficult, for I detest all this bluffing, and sadly I see a lot of it and I am obliged to be almost complicit in it by a semi-silence. (JHG-F, 2.11.95) Gaden’s main problem with Destenave was that, despite being an intelligent and active man, he totally lacked the ability to make a decision. He was also ‘very susceptible to the flattery of the local inhabitants, in particular the Toucouleurs, who encircle him; perfect courtiers who only see him as a dispenser of gourds, kolas, boubous, and not one of them would dare to tell the truth.’ These reflections on Destenave’s character and his style of command brought Gaden to formulate his own vision of how the French should proceed: On how many occasions has success not been due to a single act of audacity, thus using marvellously the rather infantine tendency of the blacks, no matter what their race, to find themselves always disconcerted by a rapid and energetic decision, by a firm conviction…. In the Soudan, the blacks only have the cult of force; for Muslims, force is the gift of God. Fatalists as they are,

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when our superiority is for them quite incontestable, they accept it, and bow down before it. Fetishists only understand the strongest of laws, like all people in their infancy. (JHG-F, 2.11.95) He concluded this polemic, which included some of the most brutal colonial formulations imaginable of the African other, with the declaration: ‘Conquest here could only be military [not pacific].’ Captain Destenave left Bandiagara for Kayes on 3rd December, and Gaden now had full responsibility for running the post, at least until a new captain was appointed. He was the Resident, the agent in charge of intelligence, as well as the commander of the garrison of men stationed there. These duties and demands, he wrote on 5th December, weighed him down: One is always ready to throw in the face of a young officer his inexperience, his youth, his lack of calm or ability to weigh things up, every time that he does something stupid, which is natural, but also every time he takes decisions which are not exactly those the Commandant Supérieur would have taken. It is more important here for the Resident to be more senior than the commander of the garrison, in other words, he should be master in his own house. I hope therefore in every way to be relieved of functions that I would accept with pleasure if I had a higher rank. (JHG-F, 5.12.95) Pride perhaps prevented him from identifying himself explicitly with ‘the young officer’, or from detailing the circumstances of the stupidities committed and faulty decisions made, but the final sentence suggests that this was not just a reflection on the predicament of junior officers in general, but it touched on personal sensitivities jolted by events during his short time in command. He was also down-hearted at his prospects of promotion, even though he believed his name had gone forward to the army hierarchy at Kayes for further consideration. He was still too young, he admitted, and feared that those officers serving in Madagascar would be given priority that year in view of the action they had seen there. Nonetheless, he har- boured feelings of disquiet, for he had been a junior officer now for five years, and he was not even among those ranked as ‘first class’, namely in the top half of the list of lieutenants. ‘I have never covered myself in glory, I don’t have any wounds, I have no reason to leap-frog my comrades to an advance after five years.’ He feared he would be back to square one as before. His thoughts turned to home, for he anticipated the end of his tour of duty, hoping not to pass another hivernage in Bandiagara, and to be home in Bordeaux for the end of July. The medic at the post and Captain Destenave were due to return to France soon, and Gaden had offered invitations to them both to visit his parents when they disembarked in Bordeaux. He warned his father in December to be discreet in his dealings with

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Destenave: ‘watch that my sisters do not have too long a wagging tongue, and make no more indiscretions with my epistles.’ His polemics against the captain, he feared, might slip out during the course of his meeting with the family. By the 24th February 1896, Gaden received a letter from his father written on 5th January, and the son exploded with rage. His father had evidently passed on extracts of his letter of 2nd November, in which he had launched into his criticism of Destenave, to Colonel Archinard in France, a superior in army rank to both men. ‘I believed I was able to write in all confidence a letter, private and intimate, and never authorised you to make use of it as you have done. I cannot accept the role that you make me play. … I do not know which extracts you have sent to the Colonel. In any case, I am obliged now to write to Commandant Destenave to tell him that the information on the mission has been communicated to Archinard, and to let him know it was done without my consent and behind my back.’ He continued half a page later: ‘I ask you in the future not to believe that you are authorised to use my private letters, unless I mention it deliberately’ (JHG-F, 24.2.96). Gaden repeated in his letter of the 7th March his accusations against his father about breaching confidences from his private correspondence, and warned him again not to pass any information on, even to his cousin Edouard, who had been part of his circle during his Paris days. ‘I write what passes through my head and will be more closely under surveillance’ if identified as the source of seemingly malicious leaks against senior officers. He cautioned again with respect to the invitation to his colleagues to pass by his father’s house that his sisters should know to hold their tongues in Destenave’s presence, but with the doctor and Margaine, two close comrades, ‘you can say anything you like’ (JHG-F, 7.3.96).

A Good Deal of Local Effervescence

The New Year had still not brought a new captain to the post, although Gaden learnt that a Captain de Beychevelle of the Marine Infantry was on his way. He savoured the prospect that 1896 would bring his return to France, even if he knew not when. He was faced with the continuing problem of operating a system in which there was ‘much to do but nothing to do it with’, and suggested that it was not possible to cope with the demands of commanding such a large area with only two officers and 60 riflemen. He also heard that a Chef de Bataillon would accompany the new captain in order to conduct an inspection of the post’s administration. He was

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nervous that there would be errors in the accounts, particularly in the administration of two separate budgets – the principal colonial one, and the local one. Gaden’s succession to the post of Resident had not been easy, and the more he delved into the affairs of the post, the more he came to realise that he could not defend or take responsibility for the arrangements put in place under Destenave. He was caught in a compromising position: ‘all of this annoys me greatly because my silence could be seen as complic- ity. God knows indeed that I have always been opposed to these processes of bluffing which appear to me absolutely to be beneath our dignity’ (JHG-F, 5.1.96). Gaden now learnt that the new captain, whose arrival was expected in late January, had not even been appointed yet. Gaden would have to continue in his role as Resident. In the recent round of promotions, Destenave had been elevated to the rank of Chef de Bataillon, and Gaden’s two comrades, Voulet and Margaine both achieved their hopes of advancement. Gaden missed out, as expected, and he consoled himself with the thought that he had been occupied for many months by a very interesting posting that had given him independence from immediate authority – ‘Bandiagara being considered, after Timbuktu, the most delicate posting in the Soudan.’ Henri Laperrine,35 Captain of the Spahis, on a tour to buy horses for his patrol, visited Gaden for a few days, giving him the chance to enjoy fresh company, especially of a friend from his days at Saint Cyr in France. Laperrine’s visit stirred his feelings of frustration, for the captain headed off some days later in the direction Gaden had hoped to follow, if only he could escape his duties (JHG-F, 3.2.96). The visit of Captain Laperrine caused something of a ripple of resent- ment at the post. After he left Bandiagara, following information given to him by Gaden, Laperrine took his men to the village of Téréli and stirred up a good deal of ‘effervescence’ there. Up until then, the village had been calm, paying its taxes, regularly supplying services and man-power to the post, and indeed was the home of a number of Agibou’s sofas. It was not, in

35 Henri Laperrine (1860–1920) was a graduate of Saint Cyr and military man of the old guard. In 1897 he recruited and organised ‘Compagnies Méharistes Sahariennes’, a corps of cavalry on camel which spent much of their time in small patrols going through the desert, often living like nomads themselves. In 1902, this corps was officially recognised. A pioneer and something of a loose cannon allowed to roam around the Sahel and Sahara, Laperrine was a controversial figure. He died in 1920 in the Sahara following problems with fuel in the plane in which he was travelling; he had to put down at Tarezroufl in the desert and there he died of thirst and exhaustion in the desert sands he had so often mastered. See Fleming (2004) The Sword and the Cross on the relationship in North Africa between Laperrine and Charles de Foucauld.

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Gaden’s view, a hot-bed of dissent. Gaden did not state exactly what happened there, but he learnt that after the villagers had received the captain cordially, he had to draw back because some of them took up arms against him. The captain then went on his way without further trouble. However, Laperrine then summoned a company of 120 men under the command of Lt Voulet to investigate the area, which they found in a heightened state of tension, and duly ‘smashed up’ the village. The cost on the French side was six killed, including a white sergeant, and 26 wounded counting a white adjutant. The numbers of villagers killed and injured were not reported. ‘This worries me a lot’, stated Gaden, ‘and I do not know what can have been the cause of this effervescence that I could not frankly have foreseen.’ And he hoped that he was not going to be held responsible for any of the dirty business that happened there (JHG-F, 7.3.96). Captain de Beychevelle had finally arrived at the start of March and was by now installed at the post. Gaden’s new role was as the ‘new captain’s dictionary’, for the reports from Bandiagara sent since his arrival always contained the phrase: ‘according to the information provided by Lieutenant Gaden …’. This was an absurd situation, Gaden thought. The captain’s communications never mentioned that a single shot had been fired, while there had been more than 6,000 cartridges expended recently, no doubt in large part during the Laperrine-inspired effervescence at Téréli. Gaden felt exhausted by the burden he was carrying, frustrated by the sedentary life he was leading, and in need of repatriation. He was miserable and was suffering a little from ‘soudanite’, a mental and physical condition to which officers in West Africa attributed all sorts of symptoms.36 His condition grew worse by the end of March, and was not helped by the news that the colonel had appointed him for a mission to delimit the territories under Agibou’s control, to the north, west and south. If he had to do this, he complained, he would not be able to return home for at least a year. By 26th March, a new concern was added to Gaden’s list: Captain de Beychevelle had been punished and replaced following the raid on the village of Téréli, instigated initially by the actions of Laperrine. Colonel Trentinian, not having yet read the reports of the incident, simply recalled the captain on news that filtered through; once he had found time to read the reports, Gaden fretted, the colonel would see that information from Gaden provided Laperrine with the pretext of investigating the village in the first place. And what of his friend Voulet?, Gaden asked. He was in

36 See Girard (2002), La Soudanite, and Taithe (2009) for more on this condition.

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command of the troops that had smashed up the village. He was under an enormous pressure of circumstance and acted without orders, Gaden pointed out.37 In the eyes of the civil authority, ‘it is us two [Gaden and Voulet] who will be the victims, and will be sent back to France as incompetents! I hope to be mistaken and await events philosophically and with a tranquil conscience.’ ‘This is what happens to us, Voulet and me, despite all the beautiful promises of that charlatan, Captain Destenave’, he added (JHG-F, 26.3.96). The pressure of circumstance was getting to Gaden too, for his letters over this period became more fractured, a symptom of his ‘soudanite’ perhaps? His anxieties around similar themes appeared again and again, pop- ping up in different places in his letters, as though he was being consumed by them, unable to rid his mind of their gnawing effect on his thoughts. He repeated: ‘I will wait in the queue when I come back [to France] in order to be blamed or to be shown completely incompetent … I hope I am mistaken. … I am tired and I long for rest’. He signed off with a request to his father for more clothes, given the present state of the rags that remained on him, especially for more military effects, his cloak and flannels, in anticipation of returning home. They were to be sent to St Louis, for he did not want to disembark in France looking like a beggar.

Delayed Departure

Gaden’s heath continued to hold up well, despite being a little anaemic and susceptible to colds and fevers, a condition he attributed to the state of the ‘rags’ he had to wear. He hoped to leave Bandiagara in one-and-a-half months, to be home by the end of July. There was nothing more to do in the Soudan, for the country was theoretically pacified and everything that might trigger the use of firearms had been banned, a consequence of the recent Laperrine/Voulet affair. In the ‘cercle’, the region administered by the post at Bandiagara, one could no longer even tour the country with a group of riflemen in order to collect taxes. The Governor of the Soudan, Colonel Trentinian was, in Gaden’s view, completely in the hands of the civil Governor General Chaudié in St Louis, who was behind this latest ban. Captain de Beycheville had been held totally responsible for the village incident at Téréli, sentenced to 30 days imprisonment, and was to be

37 This would not be the last time that Captain Voulet became embroiled in an unpleasant incident.

86 chapter two replaced. A new captain, Minvielle, was due to arrive soon from Segou, and he seemed to Gaden to be ‘infinitely more intelligent and much easier in his relations with others’. Gaden and Voulet had not been, up to now at least, put under any pressure by the authorities, and he thought it unlikely now that they would ever be held responsible for what happened in Téréli. By 18th April, his order to return home arrived, and he anticipated leaving Bandiagara in early May, picking up an ocean-going steamer from Kayes to take him directly to France, without the need to transfer to a ‘dirty mail packet’ in St Louis. At the post, his new captain, a man with sound experience in the Bureau of Arab Affairs, had shown himself to be ‘intelligent, broad-minded, calm and very good’, what a contrast with the ‘version’ that had just left. De Beycheville had demanded justice and was appealing against his sentence. Gaden fretted that he might be implicated in the captain’s appeal, but added that he would fight tooth and nail to defend himself. He was thankful that de Beycheville had been appointed to the position of captain in Bandiagara by the time of the village incident, for he feared to think of what the consequences would have been for himself (JHG-F, 18.4.96). By May, the ripples of the political events in Bandiagara continued to be felt: Destenave had been interviewed by the Governor General in St Louis, and Gaden was indignant at the results of the enquiry: ‘when will this man ever stop engaging in the “bluffs” and falsehoods he creates for himself!’ Colonel Trentinian was ‘feet and fists bound, in the hands of [Governor General] Chaudié, and lowers himself to the depths for fear of losing his position’. Furthermore, Captain Laperrine had been disowned for his earlier actions, and the Commandant of the Cercle of Timbuktu had been recalled and relieved of his duties. The fault lay not in the individual responsibilities of officers for their conduct but, in Gaden’s view, with ‘our regime and the bad faith of our Governors’. He was going to return from the Soudan, he stated, ‘absolutely sickened by what has happened here’ and regretting not having had ‘the benefit of a campaign of war’. He was satisfied that he no longer held any illusions about the French role in the colonies, and had firmly decided not to renew the experience in West Africa, until such time as the situation had radically altered (JHG-F, 3.5.96). Gaden had planned to leave Bandiagara on May 3rd, but his departure was delayed by a few days to wait for the son of Chief Mouhl of Douenza,38

38 Douenza, in Gaden’s orthography, later transcribed as ‘Douentza’ in French literature, was a place mentioned by Gaden in his proposed itinerary for the route to Dori in August and September of 1895. His correspondence during that trip does not refer to stopping at or

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who was to accompany him on his journey to Kayes, where the boy would attend the town’s ‘School for Hostages’.39 By 19th May, Gaden was still in Bandiagara, having delayed yet again his departure to wait for the chief’s son to appear. In the meantime, an incident occurred which required his continued presence at the post until it blew over. A marabout had declared a jihad against the French, and moved to within 40 kms of the post to a heavily populated area. ‘In these conditions, my departure would have appeared like flight and so I had to stay’, declared Gaden. Concerned that the call for a holy war might find sympathisers in the locality, 35 auxiliary Soudanese troops were sent out to deal with the marabout; Agibou was also patrolling the area but could not be trusted alone with such responsibility. He had recently engaged the group of ‘fanatical Fulbes’, who were armed only with lances, and the Agibou’s auxiliaries, despite being armed with rifles, panicked and scattered on foot in every direction. ‘A disorderly flight by our men over around four kms, including Agibou’s cavalry, followed by the Fulbe on foot!’ About ten Fulbe were killed during this chaotic retreat. Finally, Agibou and his men covered themselves in glory by rounding up the band of deserters and chasing off the remaining Fulbe. Agibou’s griot later presented Gaden with a sack containing the heads of four of the Fulbe, presumed to include the marabout and his son, and the heads spent the night in Gaden’s hut bobbing around in a bath of water. The following morning the heads were mounted on stakes for all to see; they were photographed too, and the resulting pictures taken by Gaden eventually turned out well. The marabout, it turned out, had in fact not been killed, but had succeeded in recruiting 6–700 Habes, who were due to attack the post that evening or the following day. Gaden armed all the personnel at the post and put them on a state of alert to await events. Nothing happened that night. The following day, he learned that the Habe had deserted the marabout,

passing through the town, but at some point that year he acquired and had translated in Bandiagara an Arabic manuscript from the ‘Amirou of Douentza’. This manuscript was later sent to Charles Monteil, brother of Lieutenant-Colonel Parfait-Louis, in 1908 when Gaden found it in his papers. It was then published posthumously, along with Gaden’s letter to Charles, in the Bulletin de l’IFAN, tome XXX, série B, no. 2, in 1968, under the editorship of Charles’ son, Vincent Monteil, who added a set of notes to the text. It was entitled ‘Ta’rîkh peul de Douentza (1895)’. This text had also been sent to Octave Houdas, a scholar of Oriental Languages in Paris, along with the Chronicles of the Pachas of Timbuktu (1751), published by Houdas in Arabic in 1899 and translated by him in 1901. 39 This was the name given to educational establishments in the colonies to train the sons of chiefs and notables under French rule, as a preparation for them taking up posts in the colonial administration.

88 chapter two and he was left with only six horses and around 40 Fulbe; but he could not resist a dig at Agibou: ‘with a column of about 1,000 individuals, he [Agibou] did not dare to move; all of them were terrorised’; ‘we see this extraordinary fact of a band of 40 fanatics completely terrorising the “Kingdom of Agibou”’. By the 22nd there were no further signs of the marabout in the locality, his Habe supporters had dissolved back into their villages, and things were calm, although the threat had revealed to Gaden how vulnerable the post would have been had the attack gone ahead. News from home was that Captain Meyer, one of Gaden’s colleagues from Timbuktu, had made a bad impression on his sister Mine when visiting the family house in Bordeaux. This did not surprise Gaden: ‘an ugly- looking fellow … in whom I would accord no confidence at all’. While officers returning from Soudan obviously played an important role in keeping the family up to date with news, another reason for these young men to visit the family was to see if any would make a suitable partner for Mine, who was now 30 years’ old and getting slightly long in the tooth for marriage. Gaden’s mother was worried about the state of her son’s health, and had been reciting prayers on his behalf: ‘Mother’s prayers are certainly a great help to me, but I am persuaded that prayers and “grigris” only produce their effects when they are accompanied by more humane things’, and he went on to refer to how a good bottle of wine, drunk at home as a toast to his health, might have been infinitely better used had it been emptied into his stomach. ‘Thank you however for your kind thoughts and excuse my egotistical reflections’. One wonders if his mother was not offended, not simply by his reference to drink, but by the juxtaposition of her prayers with West African grigris or amulets (JHG-F, 19.5.96). By 5th June 1896, Gaden was en route for Kayes, going down the Bani River by barge and lighter, having left Bandiagara on 28th May. He had stopped over in Jenne for two days, and it had given him much pleasure to walk around the ancient town with its distinctive baked-mud architecture, the products of its skilled masons renowned throughout West Africa. Even more pleasing for him was that he had found a marabout, a very educated man, a good friend of his contacts in Bandiagara, and he had taken Gaden on a tour of the town, explaining to him in detail its commerce and its people. ‘There is no longer any place in my mind for “legends” relating to the town’, and his father could pass this message on to the Devèses, who had perhaps doubted some of the stories he recounted in his letters. ‘I will be well placed on my return to explain to them the mechanisms of the market and the ways of commerce of the Niger bend’ (JHG-F, 5.6.96).

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He returned back down the Bani River to Mopti, where he took another barge up the Niger to Segou on 10th June, and then travelled on to Kayes for the end of July. He saw himself being in France by the end of August, and trusted that his father had remembered to send to St Louis his best army uniform, in which to present himself to the Governor General before he left, and a civilian suit for the voyage home.

INTERLUDE: FURLOUGH IN FRANCE I

Despite all the scrapes and controversies Gaden was involved in during his two-year tour of duty in Bandiagara, he nonetheless received a satisfactory testimonial from the Minister of the Colonies, André Lebon on 19th November 1896: M. le Commandant Destenave passed on to me his praise of the precious help you lent him at Liptako, at Gigoldi and at Aribinda, and pointed up especially the historical and geographical information that you collected on the regions neighbouring Masina.1 This appears to have been a very generous mention of Gaden by Captain Destenave given what had occurred between the two of them. On his return to France in August 1896, Gaden was on furlough in Bordeaux and then joined up with his regiment in Tarbes, where he was decorated with the colonial medal on 24th October 1896 for his participation in the expedition to the Soudan, 1894–1896. Finally, after doubting that he would return to the Soudan unless he felt the situation had become less encumbered by political wrangling, and after several months passed in France, he requested to be put at the disposition of the Minister of the Colonies to serve again in West Africa. ‘The knowledge that I have already acquired of the Niger bend area makes me hope that I would be able to render new services there,’ he wrote on 18th December 1896.2 Henri Gouraud was in the Soudan over the same period as Gaden’s Bandiagara tour of duty. Gouraud had arrived in the Soudan around April 1894, some six months before Gaden’s posting, and he had been stationed at Kayes and Kita. By November 1894, Gouraud was the adjutant commandant at Bougouni, to the south of Bamako, but by April 1895 he was posted to Timbuktu, where he saw action in missions against the Tuareg. After a period with the Bureau of Indigenous Affairs at Kayes, Gouraud then found himself back in Bougouni as the commandant of the cerle, and he returned to France at the end of November 1896, a few months after Gaden’s arrival in Bordeaux. The two men knew each other from Saint Cyr, and there is every likelihood that they came across each other in the Soudan, or at least heard of

1 See Dossier de Candidature, 1 C 9, ANS. 2 See Dossier Personnel, No 7Ye 486, SHAT.

92 interlude: furlough in france i each other’s movements. There is only one letter to be found in the Paris archive from Gaden to Gouraud, see footnote 28 in Chapter Two above, which is evidence that they were at least in communication. However, the lack of other correspondence and of any reference to Gouraud in Gaden’s letters to his father suggests that the two men do not seem to have been significant figures in each other’s lives at that time. The circumstances of their second campaign together forged a deep connection between the two men. This connection and its resulting correspondence is important in that it highlights what has been left out of Gaden’s letters to his father. He is virtually silent about any domestic arrangements, particularly relationships he might have had with local women. It is perfectly understandable for a son not to share this intimate information with his father, especially during the epoch in which they lived, and also given the sensitivity of the subject of relationships between French men and native women. Gaden, it seems, did after all take a local wife while he was in Bandiagara, yet she is all but invisible. The only mention he ever made of her is in a letter of 16th September 1904 to Gouraud when, in reference to a wife he had just taken in Tchekna, Chad, he wrote: ‘She reminds me a little of my “woman-on-a-string” (ma femme à la ficelle) from Bandiagara’. We cannot be sure why she attracted this sobriquet.

CHAPTER THREE

ON THE TRAIL OF THE BLACK NAPOLEON, 1897–1899

In September 1897 Henri Gaden embarked on the steamer La Cordillère bound for Dakar. He was accompanied by Henri Gouraud, and by the Governor General Chaudié, who was returning to the Governance in St Louis. Disembarking at the port of Dakar, the party of seventeen officers of various rank headed for St Louis by train, crossing the flat Cayor region now green with vegetation following the rains. The air was still thick, humid and oppressive at this time of year, and the temperatures at night remained high, giving Gaden cause to complain that his first night was as bad as that three years ago when he had first landed in Africa. Arriving in St Louis, he found warm hospitality at the Devès household, and he breakfasted in the morning with Lieutenant Obissier, who filled him in on the current situation in the Soudan. He explained a new initiative to Gaden to recruit 1,000 auxiliary rifleman for new campaigns, and how he, Gaden, would be responsible, in the first instance at least, for training and commanding a company of these new auxiliaries. This was not what he had envisaged. Nor did he take kindly to having to pay 80 francs customs duty to bring his effects into the country – ‘a distasteful imposition’, an exploitation of the people who came to work in the colony, he complained (JHG-F, 4.10.97). His mission had yet again been tarnished from the start, but he hoped this time to see some serious action, as his friend Gouraud had done on his previous tour of duty.

At the behest of Eugène Etienne,1 the Government had decided in 1892 to bring an end to Almamy Samory Toure’s activities in the southern Soudan.

1 Eugène Etienne, who started life as a shop assistant and later acquired a fortune in Algeria, a master of both political and business negotiations, was Under Secretary of State for Algeria (1887, 1889–92). In 1889, with the support of Gabriel Hanotaux, Head of the Protectorates Office, he pushed for a programme to establish ‘the African France’ (La France Africaine), a vision of a territory under French influence from Algeria to the Congo, from the Atlantic coast to Lake Chad. At the same time Le Comité de l’Afrique Française was established to overview and direct French policy on the continent. Founded by the Prince of Arenberg, and including well-known public figures, officers and specialists on colonial issues, the Comité also took as its goal the union of French North African territories with those in West Africa and the Congo in central Africa. (Gaden paid his subscription to the Comité to receive its publications.)

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Lieutenant-Colonel Humbert, of the Marine Artillery, had been charged with the conduct of operations, and his campaign had been to deliver the final blow to Samory’s sphere of influence.2 Humbert’s mission had turned out to have been one of the most difficult of all the campaigns in the Soudan. This was because Samory’s sofas or soldiers had been particularly tenacious, and pursued a guerrilla strategy against the French troops by hiding in the vegetation along river banks to ambush columns, then disappearing into the thick bush only to emerge again later for another raid. Humbert’s column had eventually taken two of Samory’s villages, one of which was his capital at Kerouané in the headwaters of a tributary of the Niger. Humbert had also reached his mountain hideaway, where Samory had established a keep to store his provisions and an arsenal of weaponry; among the supplies found there was a bust of M. Grévy in Sèvres porcelain.3 Samory was certainly an enigma to the French. Humbert’s campaign ultimately failed in its attempt to crush him, and it was followed by the debacle at Kong in 1895 under Lieutenant-Colonel Monteil’s command.4 The new campaign being organised in 1897 was another attempt to snuff out what the French saw as the threat Samory posed to the security of their future colonies in a southern West African belt running from the upper Volta region across into Guinea. Officers were aware that Paris was keeping a close eye on expenditure in the colonies, and that the French press and public opinion could easily turn against them. Those on the ground, however, saw increasingly the need to act. By the late 1890s, Samory had changed tactics in the face of superior French firepower, and pursued a scorched-earth policy,

Etienne was also a founder member in 1892 of Le Groupe Coloniale, an influential lobby pushing for colonial expansion. Many Bordeaux traders supported this group in their campaigns to promote greater access to the territories of the French colonies. (See Zeldin, 1973 & 1977, Volumes One and Two, for further details.) Gaden regarded Etienne very highly, and seems to have used his influence, and that of Auguste Terrier, to promote his own position. 2 Samory Toure was born around 1830 in Manymbaladougou, the son of a Dyula itinerant trader, a career that Samory followed in his early years. In the 1850s he took up arms after his mother had been taken captive, and by the 1860s he declared himself a war leader, marking the start of his political career. He arrived on the Niger in 1876 and from there began a series of campaigns against local rulers, and eventually clashed with the French in 1882. He took the title ‘Almamy’ (or al imam) in 1884, styling himself as a religious as well as a military leader. At its height, Samory’s Wassulu Empire stretched from present-day Guinea and Mali to Sierra Leone and northern Ivory Coast. See for further details Yves Person, Samori. Une révolution dyula (1968, 1970, 1975) (not for the faint hearted at almost 3,000 pages); or the more manageable volume by the same author: Samori: La renaissance de l’empire Mandingue (1976); see also Ibrahima Khalil Fofana, L’Almami Samori Touré (1998). 3 See Gouraud, 1939: 45; this was no doubt a bust of Jules Grévy (1807–1891), a lawyer and politician, and President of the Republic from 1879–87. 4 See Kanya-Forstner, 1969: 183–194 on the war against Samory.

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leaving villages destroyed and populations decimated. According to Gouraud: ‘His system of government being terror, his resource to balance his budget is the taking of slaves. Also, when he occupies a village, he sells the women and children, and the men are decapitated’.5 Moreover, colonial sensitivities were still raw following the massacre of Captain Braulot and his men in 1897, prior to Gaden’s arrival. Braulot had been charged with a diplomatic mission to negotiate with Samory as early as 1896, but he had not succeeded in meeting the Almamy or his envoys. In 1897, Samory had requested talks, and Braulot had set off to meet up with his spokesmen. On finding the town of Buna, his destination, occupied by Samory’s military officers who had refused to receive him, he had retraced his steps, only to meet up with one of Samory’s sons en route. The son had suggested that they return to Buna together to sort out the misunderstanding, but along the way Samory’s sofas had turned on the French and massacred them. When Gaden learnt of his appointment to command a company of auxiliaries, Gouraud also found out that he was to serve as an adjutant under Chef de Bataillon Caudrelier, the commander of the troops set for a mission in the upper Volta. It had been Caudrelier who had taken over from Monteil as commander of the French forces that fell back in retreat from Kong after their 1895 bloody encounter with Samory’s army. The French were also concerned to establish a strong presence in the area of Kong for fear of British intrusion from the lower Volta towards the north. Gaden and Gouraud now accompanied each other en route through Kayes to Kita, from where they went their separate ways. Gouraud was to take command of an auxiliary company that headed for Kong in February 1898, where skirmishes had taken place involving Samory’s men. The French were moving systematically against any opposition to their presence in the region, and they were closing in on Samory, whose whereabouts were uncertain when the two Henris arrived in the Soudan for their second tours of duty. So Gaden’s and Gouraud’s brief voyage together to Kayes and Kita was all they saw of each other for almost one year. They were not to meet up again until September 1898 near Beyla, when they were in hot pursuit of the fresh tracks left by Samory and his army.

A Dirty Hole

Gaden and Gouraud, and the rest of the party, arrived in Kayes on 13th October 1897, by which time both men knew what their missions were

5 As reported by Gouraud, 1939: 44.

96 chapter three going to be. Gaden was satisfied with his lot, for not only would he command his auxiliary company, but he was also to be the adjutant Commandant of the Cercle at Kita. He envisaged marching on Samory as part of a column, and was excited at the prospect of being at the head of his own company. Colonel Trentinian, the Governor of the Soudan under whom Gaden had served in Bandiagara, had been replaced temporarily by Colonel Audéoud.6 Gaden was disappointed not to find Trentinian in office and hoped this would not jeopardise the prospect of military action. However, Gaden feared that Louis Binger, now the Governor of Ivory Coast, wanted to negotiate with Samory, a policy of ‘deplorable blindness’, for they should strike immediately against the rebel leader or leave him alone, he thought (JHG-F, 15.10.97). The party of men reached Kita at the end of October. Gaden observed that the railway line from Kayes was little advanced compared to when he had last seen it, for the work had been suspended due to lack of central finance. The voyage was uncomfortable, and the conditions and transport were poor; Gaden never found travelling in convoy very agreeable. At Kita, Gaden met up with the auxiliaries under his command, but rather than finding (as he had been led to believe) 120 well-instructed soldiers at Kayes, there were only 84 men who had been requisitioned from villages in the cercle by methods similar to those used for acquiring porters. Gaden decided to let go those he thought had little prospect or interest in soldiery, and made up his numbers by enlisting volunteers rather than coerced conscripts. The post was poorly provisioned, so Gaden had to have equipment made up from the skins of cattle and sheep, whose carcasses had been distributed as meat rations; and copper rings for securing their effects were fabricated by local blacksmiths from the casings of spent cartridges. He was supported in his efforts to mould his auxiliaries into an efficient fighting machine by one European sergeant and ten other sergeants and corporals who had served with the Soudanese riflemen, all of whom he thought were devoted to the task. He envisaged 30 to 40 days’ training and exercises in order to form them into a solid unit. His fear was that his company might be used simply to protect the military posts while the regular soldiers went off on marches in search of action. Gaden found Kita to be ‘a dirty hole’, a make-shift barracks thrown up in 1881. The post was now infested with ants, rats and bats, and the accommodation allowed no secrets to be kept from other officers occupying adjacent

6 Gaden’s Uncle Gabriel had made a recommendation to Colonel Audéoud on his nephew’s behalf for a place on this mission.

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rooms separated by flimsy walls. The only attractive feature was a mountain close by, which he planned to scale as soon as time allowed. He was joined in Kita by his old ‘boy’, Moussa Diawara, the Bambara who had served him so loyally on his last tour. He found him when passing through Badembé, where Moussa had established a house and worked the land, six lougans or fields. Now 32 years old, married, a father and head of a household, he was ‘relatively richer than me’, Gaden observed. During the period when Moussa would be away on mission with Gaden, the oldest and most trusted of his captives would look after the household, now enlarged by a second wife. Moussa, who had become a local figure in the community, agreed to provide domestic service for his old employer at only 30 francs per month; ‘He is very devoted to me’, Gaden wrote. Moussa could certainly count on making a profit on the side from his services, and he would have an assured future in the municipal administration of his village after his service had been completed.7

A Magnificent First Command

Reports of yellow fever in the Soudan had been published in the French press, and Gaden calmly stated for his parents’ sake that only ‘a small epi- demic’ had broken out in the area. ‘It was not much, there were only a dozen deaths’, and there had been one case in Kita, after which the men were consigned to their quarters for a few days. He reassured his parents: ‘We are refractory individuals and remain absolutely calm … it is absolutely pointless to worry yourselves about me’. The Minister of the Colonies, André Lebon, paid a flying visit to the Kayes, and Gaden heard that he had announced that there would be no campaigns that year, and that the order had gone out to halt all operations. Gaden attributed this lack of resolve on the part of the Government to the up-coming elections in May the following year: ‘There you have it, the benefits of universal suffrage for a parliamentary regime’. His lack of faith in parliamentary democracy in France, and in initiatives to extend the right to vote, showed no signs of being upturned. His frustration on hearing this news was palpable: ‘This inaction is all the more culpable since the English are marching, it seems.

7 See Hampâté Bâ’s The Fortunes of Wangrin (1999), for a fictional account of the life of a Soudanese in French colonial service and the types of activity they would indulge in to enrich themselves on the side, and the future opportunities it allowed them in local social life. The story is based on Bâ’s own experiences as a colonial employee and interpreter, and indeed real life characters, such as Henri Gouraud, are mentioned in the book.

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It is therefore very probable that we will have Samory on our backs before four months are out.’ He suspected the ‘English’ were supplying Samory with arms and materials, trying to support him in an attempt to extend their own influence in the region at the expense of the French. Colonel Audéoud appeared to understand the situation perfectly, and the order was given, despite the Minister’s words, to push on with the training of his platoon. Gaden picked up news that a company of around 200 men, supplemented by troops from Bamako, would soon be formed and sent on a campaign south to the area between Kerouané, Beyla and Kong. ‘I would be delighted to have the command of this company … to be sent to a destination that gives me a little more movement and adventure’; but it was always possible that the troops would be destined for command by the officers of the Marine Infantry, leaving Gaden suspended in a state of inaction (JHG-F, 19.11.97). By 4th December, Gaden learnt that he had, in effect, been promoted to the rank of Captain, although he did not know when it would be formally conferred on him: ‘… this has come much earlier than I thought. For me this could not have worked out better.’ A captain from the Marine Infantry had been due to arrive and take up command of the company of auxiliaries but was later posted elsewhere, leaving Gaden in charge of his men: ‘… a superb company of 200 rifles. This is a magnificent first command. I could not have wished for better.’ Gaden took this as a sign of the great confidence his Colonel had in him. He was going to go to the extreme south, where exactly he was not quite sure, but it would allow him to pursue a roaming existence. ‘Do not worry if my correspondence becomes somewhat irregular, and above all if it takes a long time to arrive’, Gaden told his parents. He was happy too with the training of his recruits:

As regards my blacks, I have not changed my opinion much about them. I am surprised and very satisfied by the progress they have made during the month since their training. They carry off exercises with the greatest good will and give better results than whites would have done over the same time. I have imposed very few punishments up to now. (JHG-F, 4.12.97)

However, porters were in short supply for his mission, and so the amount of rations they could take with them was limited. Gaden asked his father to send out grated vegetable and fruit conserves, as well as first-aid provisions. He would also have to act as the doctor for his company of men, and would need preparations to treat wounds and injuries sustained in action. His photography continued to take up his spare time, and photographic plates and film were regularly sent back to France. Gaden was still in contact with

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‘Père Houdas’, the Professor of Oriental Languages in Paris, and continued to look for manuscripts in Arabic for him.8 By 11th December, Gaden was ready to depart, but he still waited on gun cartridges and other equipment from Kayes. The poor state of the ammunition at Kita did not inspire confidence in Gaden; many of the cartridges had lost their lead or had deteriorated badly. Another cloud casting a shadow on this sunny prospect was that Gaden would have to operate under the orders of the Chef de Bataillon, Commandant Bertin, who commanded the southern region; Bertin had a poor reputation even in military circles. Nonetheless, Gaden was in high spirits with much hope for what the future would hold: ‘I sense that 1898 comes in great strides’ (JHG-F, 11.12.97).

Pillaging and Captives

Gaden arrived in Siguiri on 21st December, having left Kita on the 12th. He had travelled 128 kilometres in good time, and had not had any casualties en route, although one of his European sergeants went down with a liver and lung infection and had to be evacuated to hospital, from where Gaden doubted he would ever emerge. Gaden was still in the dark as regarded his exact mission, for information that was collected by the commandant was never passed on to anyone else: ‘… we live here without knowing anything of what is happening around us. This is very Soudanese.’ [Thoughts of Captain Destenave from Bandiagara must have been in his mind.] His journey to Siguiri did not yield much of interest, expect for observations on gold extraction by panning the sand found around certain water courses. Even the lure of military action could not divert Gaden away from consid- erations of the commercial potential to be exploited in the territories through which he passed. Siguiri was situated in the headwaters of the Niger, a river Gaden had come to know years earlier further downstream. He was pleased to see it again. The French post lay 1,200 metres from the river, built on a vast spur detached from the hills that bordered the valley to the west. From this van- tage point, the valley of the Niger was laid out on a broad canvas, a very beautiful landscape to take in. Gaden imagined the area covered by rice

8 Gaden had provided Houdas with Arabic manuscripts during his last tour of duty. In March 1898, Gaden received a letter from Houdas, the future father-in-law of Maurice Delafosse, a contemporary of Gaden’s serving in the Ivory Coast. ‘I am very sure I will not be coming across any [manuscripts] in the South Region’, Gaden commented, but he was glad to maintain contact with the Professor.

100 chapter three fields, with villages set in pretty clusters of trees and herds of animals roaming the open spaces. He was jolted out of his reverie by the fact that the area was very under populated, the result of Samory’s campaigns and the French presence. To the south was lush forest where oranges, bananas and pineapples grew in abundance, but Gaden preferred the country to the east, inhabited by ‘more civilized and much more intelligent races’. Here he found the local population of Malinke to have the appearance of ‘great brutes’, and a group of 120 of them came every day to follow exercises with his company. ‘They receive no wages, not even any rations. They are, all those who are here, volunteers’. They counted on a campaign being organised that they could profit from, hoping to be attached to the column as riflemen, auxiliaries or camp followers. They would fight well, might even be killed or wounded, and ‘all because they entertain the hope of gaining a few captives. … The desire for pillaging, to feel in some measure the pleasure of having a gun, to be a soldier, to run an adventure and to join in thrashing others’, this was what drove them Gaden claimed. He went on to add that through a single military campaign, a profit equal to what they could gain in a year of agriculture or commerce was theirs to be had. He reflected:

And you find [French] soldiers here exploiting this sentiment [encouraging recruitment of locals to gain war booty]. It is rather surprising to see Frenchmen of the 19th century, who cry one to the other that we have come here above all to bring about the triumph of the cause of civilization, of progress, etc … You see here the beautiful tirade, in Jacobin style – [yet] we support ourselves by captivity in order to advance and maintain our position here. The end justifies the means, they say, but one has to confess that we are not content within ourselves about this. As regards my position, I left with much pleasure all my preconceptions at St Louis, [and] I find that we are perfectly right to proceed in this way. (JHG-F, 25.12.97)

The irony that the civilizing mission of French colonialism was founded in part on uncivilized practices was apparent to Gaden; but more than this, he was proud to flaunt his new-found principles and challenge his parents’ preconceptions. Gaden left Siguiri earlier than he had anticipated, for he had received an order on 31st December to take his company further south towards the post at Beyla. He was delighted to leave, for Commandant Bertin, who had earlier promised him help in organising his company, only put obstacles in his way, removed any initiative he might take, and served to work against Gaden. The sergeant he had lost to illness en route to Siguiri had been replaced by Lieutenant Feist, an officer in the Marine Infantry, who was

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also on his second tour of duty. Gaden was very content with this appointment, for it would mean less burden on his shoulders, and the total of two officers and three sub-officers was just about sufficient for a company of 200 men. The five European officers were accompanied, along with the company of men, by 51 porters and other employees, around 25 women and children and captives who belonged to the riflemen. In addition he had ‘an orchestra of eight musicians, tam-tams and flutes, which serves from time to time to help us forget the long stages on the march’. He was also pleased that Feist would provide him with the company of a fellow officer with whom he could chat, something that was ‘precious in the bush’. Gaden reported he was in perfect health and that everyone was well-trained. ‘I do not know what the future holds for the Third Auxiliary Company, but it is for the moment in the best of conditions’ (JHG-F, 4.1.98). Relations with Commandant Bertin were deteriorating. Gaden complained that ‘he did not do me the honour of telling me what I was to do there [in Beyla], nor did he give me the least information on what is happening there or how to prepare for it. I cannot avoid finding this procedure at the very least bizarre.’ He added that Bertin was ‘little liked among the Marine Infantry’, and all those he came across at Siguiri had not contributed anything that might change this view of him. Gaden surmised that at Beyla, a post designed to protect the territory on the right bank of the Niger tributary from incursions by Samory’s men, would provide a strategic point to safeguard an area not yet ravaged by the sofas.

From there over to Kong [in the east] everything is completely devastated. Even Kong has been taken by force and pillaged by Samory; there are, it is said, great quantities of gold [in Samory’s possession], and the inhabitants have been made captives or have dispersed. This is sad. (JHG-F, 4.1.98)

Gaden learnt that two other French companies of regular soldiers were also on the march, and along with his contingent there would be a total of 500 rifles. This would be insufficient to pose a serious threat to Samory. However, it would appear that French troops were manoeuvring themselves into position for a campaign, Gaden thought, and this would allow them the option of choosing their moment to strike. He feared though the prospect of spending the hivernage in a post that still needed to be built securely, where illness and the lack of communication would cut them off from other military centres for months on end. This was not a very agreeable situation. The countryside did not offer any attractions to him, certainly compared to the Soudan, and the weather was grey, overcast and even misty for a lot of the time so the sun never warmed the ground; the lack of

102 chapter three rain proper meant the bush vegetation was dry and the leaves had fallen from the trees, giving the impression of ‘some awful European country, all grey.’ These conditions were not conducive to photography, and a number of his plates had not turned out for the want of good sunlight. Otherwise ‘not the slightest indisposition and I feel neither anaemic or fatigued’, he reported to his father.

An Inexcusable Mistake

Gaden travelled towards Beyla and arrived on 16th January at Kérouané, the old forest hideout of Samory. There he received from Beyla an urgent dispatch from Commandant Bertin, dated 2nd January and sent from Siguiri. The letter had been sent by special delivery 400 kilometres to Beyla on the very day Gaden had left Siguiri for the same destination. ‘What was all this mystery about? Is it to stop me demanding complementary instructions or explanations; it is possible. In any case, it is most strange’. He added: ‘Since I arrived in the Soudan this time, I have never had officially or via my superiors any communication on the state of affairs, on the political situation in the region to which I am headed, [or] about contact with Samory. I find this astounding.’ He planned to be Beyla itself by the 20th, and then to march east to Touba two days later, some 130 kilometres further on, where he was due to meet Captain Ristori, in command of a company of regular riflemen stationed at the French post. From there he believed he would be sent to Dabala at the confluence of the Férédougouba and Tienba (Tyemba) rivers, in a territory that had been completely devastated by Samory and his men; Gaden envisaged ‘a rather disagreeable existence’, despite the fact that they would be given time to make the post more habitable. Commandant Bertin had refused permission for porters to carry some of their effects and their medicines, and Gaden complained that his campaign chest alone weighed ten kilogrammes, while the medicines were shared out among other people’s personal baggage. They had no tools to use to construct the post at Dabala, and the commandant had suggested they make them en route. They managed to commission the production of axes and machetes, and took eight pick-axes, eight shovels and a saw from Kérouané, along with some nails. All this to construct a post to accommodate 200 men! Around him everything was unravelling, ‘the order of the day’ according to him, ‘all very Soudanese’. Despite the hardships and difficulties he faced, Gaden continued to be delighted with his men, ‘a most solid detachment … well trained with much discipline and endurance. … These blacks are really extraordinary as military men’ (JHG-F, 16.1.98).

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Gaden received a telegraph message, which he found at Kankan, a town some 200 kilometres north of Beyla, announcing his official promotion to the rank of Captain. He was absolutely bemused by this: the official date of his appointment the message claimed was 31st December, but he had learnt of it on 20th November. He had therefore being sporting on his uniform for the last few weeks, quite illegally by army codes, the three stripes of a captain – a case of premature elevation at his own hand. Gaden feared the worst, and turned over in his mind all the possible consequences of the inexcusable mistake made by the army headquarters in Kayes: he would be stripped of his rank, lose the command of his company, and be the subject of a formal military procedure. He was jealously regarded by his fellow officers for having such a plum assignment, one which he himself could not really believe was true, and now his rivals would all think the error from which he had benefited was of his own doing. The only thought that consoled him was that other officers promoted in the same round had also done the same as him.9 A few months later a letter arrived in Dabala for Gaden from the army headquarters attributing the error regarding the date of his promotion to a ‘lapse in telegraphic communication’. The authorities had evidently found the whole affair amusing, and they were content to let Gaden benefit from the error without further consequences. His family and friends, delighted at the news, claimed that he was ‘the youngest captain in the army’, but Gaden remained concerned about the administrative blunder that he felt had left egg on his face (JHG-F, 5.3.98).10 Gaden described to his father what he had witnessed on his travels from Kankan to Kérouané, a journey of around 150 kilometres: From Kankan, the country is totally devastated. It makes hard viewing. Ruins and traces of old villages and cultivated fields are everywhere … In counting the villages en route, one comes across perhaps only 1000 inhabitants. To the right and to the left it is worse; it is misery, and the people have a brutish appearance. Here iron bars are used as currency, and for 50 centimes one buys 3 large bars of iron about 50 cms long. Convenient currency, but I prefer cowrie shells. On the other hand, there are fruits: in the valley of the Milo river, exquisite oranges, at the [military] posts fields of pineapples which are

9 Gaden’s promotion to the rank of captain is dated in his official staff dossier as 29th December 1897. See Dossier Personnel, No. 7Ye 486, SHAT. See also, Bulletin Individuel de Notes, in 1 C 9, ANS, Dakar. 10 Gaden had received too congratulations from the two colonels and his comrades in his regiment, the 53rds, stationed back in France.

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particularly good here, and then bananas. This is a compensation. (JHG-F, 16.1.98) Gaden found the countryside to his liking, especially towards Kérouané, where a ridge of mountains running on a north-east axis surrounded the town. He was reminded of the Pyrenees above Lourdes, those peaks he knew so well from his days in Tarbes. These were smaller and yet their classical form was very pleasing to the eye. The scene recalled for him too the plain around Bandiagara, but there it had been covered in cultivable fields and packed with productive villages, all the way up to the sides of the mountains into regions where the people had yet to submit to French rule. By contrast, the region around Kérouané saddened him for there were so few inhabitants, and what he saw was a ‘complete mess’. Gaden had been following press reports on an affair involving a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who had been tried and found guilty of treason under the charge of spying for Germany in 1894.11 The whole business sickened him, and like many in the military he was avowedly anti-Dreyfus in his attitudes. From 1897 an increasingly vociferous campaign had been launched in the press to have the judgement reviewed, and this was supported by some very prominent figures in French society. The case was bringing the army into disrepute, and the stench of anti-Semitism hovered around the proceedings. Gaden voiced his feelings: I cannot accept that seven officers in a court martial had unanimously condemned another officer as a traitor without being not only morally but also materially sure of what they were doing. The case was judged in camera (huis clos), probably because there was evidence that could not be divulged. The partisans of Dreyfus appear to me to have ignored this evidence, and that the only result of this campaign will be shame and ridicule for them, and no doubt a recrudescence – merited – of anti-Semitism. As regards the press, it is particularly ignoble on this occasion. What other scandal will they serve up to us next? We have debased ourselves in the eyes of Europe. The liberty of the press and universal suffrage included appear to me to mislead completely the moral sense of the nation, and this will lead us to a regime of the Sabre, if the occasion presents itself. We are not worthy of anything else. (JHG-F, 16.1.98) Gaden’s anti-Semitic attitude became increasingly apparent as the Dreyfus affair dragged on, and this infected his relationship with his new Lieutenant Feist who, it turned out, was Jewish.

11 See, for example, for further details of the Dreyfus affair, Caham’s The Dreyfus Affair (1996), or Birnbaum’s Le Moment antisémite (1998).

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In the Middle of the Bush

Gaden arrived in Touba on the morning of the 27th January 1898, having now completed a journey of 750 kilometres since leaving Kita with only ten days rest in Siguiri, and one day in each of his three stop-overs in Kankan, Kérouané and Beyla. His health was still holding up, along with his sergeant’s, the only two of the company not to go down with illness en route; his ‘blacks’ had been admirable. Fears of what conditions might be like at Dabala, another 75 kilometres to the east, concerned him though. He had been told by Captain Ristori, the commandant of the post at Touba, that work had begun on the construction at Dabala, a village situated three kilometres from the left bank of the river where the only inhabitants were two men, three women and five children. There was no other village in a radius of 20 kilometres from the post, and the two most important centres for supplies were 40 or so kilometres away, at Koro and Guenteguela. ‘We will be therefore in the middle of the bush, and not even at a transit point, for the route which used to pass by some time ago has long since been abandoned by the natives.’ The one consolation for Gaden was that the countryside around was teeming with game, large herds of elephant, along with many hippopotamuses and caimans in the river. Ristori had related a story to him of his first night at the place, when he bivouaced down with his riflemen: they had killed two boas around seven metres long that had slithered their way with their mouths wide open across the campsite and over the sleeping soldiers. ‘It would be impossible, with the best will in the world, to chose a worse place for a post!’ Gaden was philosophical about dealing with these inconveniences himself, but he did not have such confidence in his auxiliaries: ‘I do not know at all what state of mind they will be in down there’. He reassured himself with the thought that Samory was last reported to have been in the east, a good distance away near Kong, and that since the country had been completely ruined by Samory’s campaign, Gaden was certain that the enemy would be unable to support themselves in this devastated landscape. Samory would not bother them here, he concluded (JHG-F, 27.1.98). Since leaving Kérouané the surroundings had changed. They had passed by real mountains standing some 560 metres above the level of the plain; a chain of rocky outcrops not presenting a picturesque view, but the source of an exquisite spring whose water was clear and fresh, like nothing Gaden had ever seen in the Soudan. The post at Beyla was awful, but it was set in hilly countryside with superb vegetation and water courses; they were in true virgin forest by now, with trees whose trunks were 15 metres in girth

106 chapter three and from which hung enormous lianas. The temperatures were cooler particularly in the elevated areas, but the humidity was increasing as they journeyed further south, and the hivernage that would last for a whole nine months stretched out before them. The post at Touba was situated in a dominant position within a village rich in resources. Gaden doubted that he would find the same conditions at Dabala. Gaden looped around to the north to pass through Koro, which the company reached on 2nd February, on the way to Dabala. Situated 45 kilometres north-north-west of their new post, Koro offered the provisions they needed: they bought a small herd of cattle – three cows for milk and 13 bulls for meat provisions – as well as some goats. The Seventh Company from Touba returned to their post on Gaden’s arrival at Dabala, where he found the building work little advanced. The first enclosure only consisted of pickets sticking out of the ground, and walls were just being erected. Besides his 200 auxiliaries, who were employed cutting wood and dried grass, Gaden requisitioned 300 workers from the area, and they were engaged in mixing earth to build walls and terraces. The sanitary facilities were deplorable, for the nearest water course was 250 meters away, 30 metres beyond the outer enclosure, where a depression in the ground would become a vast marsh in the hivernage. Judging by the signs on the soft ground, the area was also a haven for hippopotamuses and elephants. Gaden learnt that his company would get relief from this grind- ing work at Dabala and would be allowed to take breaks at Touba from time to time. Their state of unpreparedness led Gaden’s thoughts to return to the presence of Samory, wherever he might be. ‘One feels more threatened above everything else by Samory’. Over the next few weeks Dabala would not be defendable and Touba still did not have a secure keep. Their provisions would last for only one month and they had not one cartridge in reserve, whereas Touba had 4,000 and even Beyla, further from any potential site of conflict, had 3,600 rounds. Gaden had received instruction that they should have sufficient supplies to hold out for two months in the case of an attack. ‘All this is the work of the Commandant of the Region, and this proves one thousand times that he merits the rock-bottom reputation that he has in the Marine Infantry.’ Gaden held himself back from further attacks on Bertin; ‘but frankly this is worse than [Capt] Destenave, one thousand times’ (JHG-F, 6.2.98). The news of Samory was worrisome, for he had moved west from the Volta and had attacked a post not 150 kilometres north-east of Dabala.

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Although he had been repulsed, two riflemen had been injured. The nearest sofas in the area were reported to be five days’ march from Gaden’s post, and at least three of those days would take them through ravaged countryside where few provisions were to be had. He concluded, though, that neither Dabala nor the southern region was yet severely threatened. Patrols regularly went from the post, up to three days’ march away to the east, but not one sofa had been spotted in three months. ‘We will certainly be very tranquil this year’, he reported to his parents (JHG-F, 20.2.98). The post from France sent on 31st December, almost two months earlier, had just reached Gaden in Dabala, ‘his desert’, his lonely outpost in the colonies. He was glad to hear that news of his promotion had pleased his parents so much. The first rains of the hivernage would arrive in April, and Gaden hoped that he and his men would not have to pass the whole rainy season at this insalubrious posting, preferring to be in Touba. Moreover, they only had two small pirogues or dug-out canoes with which to cross the water that surrounded them, not much use in an emergency for 200 men. The post itself was dry and well ventilated, set on higher ground dominating a ferruginous plateau. They built their settlement on a one-metre-high terrace above the level of the ground, but Gaden feared this might be washed away during the torrential downpours that would hit them later in the year. The post was still far from being completed, with the stockade, surrounding walls, living quarters (huts), storerooms and powder room needing their final touches. His own hut, with a double roof to insulate it from the pounding heat of the sun, was ‘a true monument’ – ‘to every lord, every honour’ one of his fellow officers announced. Flour had just arrived, along with yeast for making bread, and Gaden was delighted with his early baking experiments using a clay oven they had knocked together for themselves. He had become disgusted with the old, poor, dried biscuits they had been living on, which they were condemned to nibble and wash down with water. The production of palm wine was in full flow, made by a man who brought it to them twice a day. The wine was bottled, along with a few grains of rice to aid fermentation, and then corked and tied. The resulting drink was bubbly, like champagne, and not bad at all to Gaden’s taste. Wild guinea fowl were shot and eaten, and domesticated chickens provided eggs, along with the milk from their herd of cattle. His robust health continued in good form, and he had suffered ‘not one minute of fever’ [malaria], although he suspected he had picked up another tapeworm (JHG-F, 20.2.98).

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Amusing Hunts

One of the pleasures of colonial bush life for many officers was hunting, and Gaden was always quick to seize the opportunity of bagging a few animals to take his mind off the pressing matters of military operations or off the drudgery of pushing on with the construction of the post. Hunting was driven by a practical need to supply extra sources of protein, but also by the sense of acquiring a mastery of the landscape through a domination of its fauna. The imposition of colonial rule embraced all creatures, human and animal; similarly, attempts at maintaining a menagerie of animals taken as pets during hunting could be viewed as an attempt at containment and domestication of the savage under the control of the civilized. This was to become a theme of colonial life for Gaden in future postings. Gaden had started off his hunting spree by shooting a monkey, black with a long white tail, a female who was accompanied by an infant that was also injured in the hunt. Gaden reflected: ‘it was so humanly despairing at the death of its mother that I had to finish it off too’. It had been his only prize up to the present, but he was eyeing the plentiful antelope in the bush: ‘I do not stop with this one assassination’ (JHG-F, 20.2.98). Gaden was enchanted with his newly acquired Winchester carbine. The only problem was that the bullets did not have sufficient power to kill big game, especially hippopotamuses, and from long-range antelopes had to be hit with a well-placed shot to bring them down. He had only succeeded in shooting one by late February, and another had disappeared into the bush bleeding badly, whose trail Gaden gave up on after more than a kilometre tracking the animal. Gaden’s hunting lifestyle was also a means to maintain his fitness, since he would hike for three to four hours per day searching out and pursuing his prey. He knew every corner of the bush in a radius of five kilometres from the post, and would follow the paths made by elephants that cleared the thickets and undergrowth of the forest. It was on the fringes of the forest, along such paths or in clearings that he waited for game to emerge. The tales of his hunting trips recounted a roll-call of destruction that he unleashed upon his surroundings: by the end of March, his 13th antelope, plus wild cattle, pigs and all sorts of species of bird. He was nicknamed by the local villagers as ‘the-captain-who-kills-antelope’. Some of the men in Gaden’s company were concerned about his hunting excesses, and petitioned him not to shoot elephants. He had also shot at a chimpanzee, which he missed, and his men pointed out to him that they considered the species to have been human in earlier times, that they called ‘Ouodou’. He assured them that he would respect their ‘genuine solicitude’

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about the animals. Later he came across a large male elephant, a superb lone figure with massive tusks, an animal that he had smelt, just ‘like a true hunting dog’, well before it came into view. It stood some 20 metres from him, examining him closely; but Gaden prudently did not fire, probably recalling the words of his men to respect these noble beasts (JHG-F, 31.3.98). Gaden related to his father a number of ‘amusing hunts’, one of which included the pursuit of hippopotamuses in the waters just below the post at Dabala. One night he saw a hippo in the river, which he shot and wounded. The beast got out of the water and wandered off into the bush. Night fell and Gaden’s men, in a very excitable state, searched high and low for it, but, by the light of flaming torches that danced across the waters of the river as they walked back and forth, no hippo could be seen. The animal had disappeared and Gaden returned to his quarters for the evening. The following morning he returned to the scene and, following the river further downstream, he came across a group of four hippos peacefully relaxing in a deep reach of water. They were completely submerged, and from time to time they would pop their heads out of the water to breath – nostrils, ears, and eyes would break the surface and then disappear again. Gaden glee- fully seized his chance for another attempt, and lodged a bullet from his carbine in the ear of one of them. The effect of this small bullet was astonishing, he reported, for the beast turned frantically in circles, half on its side, sending an enormous backwash of water in all directions. He thought the hippo would die quickly, so he rushed to call up 30 men to help land it. But the agony lasted for more than three hours, as the animal surfaced every 30 seconds or so, breathing noisily in its death throes. Gaden crossed the river by a ford and came upon the animal from the other bank, and lodged another bullet in its neck. The hippo sank without trace. His men told him that when a hippo was dead it would come to the surface of the water, but Gaden was not convinced. It was time for him to return to the post, have some dinner and look out some rope. He went back down to the river later on to find the head of another hippo pop up in the same spot where he had shot the first one, so he let off another round at his new target and this smashed fatally into its forehead. At the same time the body of a third hippo emerged. This was an old male, and Gaden surmised that his female companions had held the body under water for all this time: ‘Is this not just so tender, this gesture of love between such horrible animals’. His men were overjoyed at this prospect, crying with great joy ‘there is much meat today’. They attached a rope to its feet and to one enormous tooth, and with much effort dragged the body half out of the water. Then the butchery began, ‘a scene of bloody savagery’. There was

110 chapter three hardly any current in the river, so the water around the carcass quickly turned blood red, and then once the stomach and entrails were removed, green and red, for the animal had eaten well the previous day. Gaden found the smell overpowering and disappeared back to the camp before the operation was completed. It took 30 men to carry the meat back to the post: ‘Needless to say, I didn’t eat any of it, but I kept the teeth, which are much more beautiful than [others] I have ever seen’ (JHG-F, 5.3.98).

Lost in the Bush

The tranquil existence at Dabala continued, but it had not been so elsewhere. At Tombougou, some 100 kilometres to the north-east, Samory’s troops under the command of one of his loyal chiefs, Bilali, had threatened the French post there. Samory’s men were starving and Bilali was charged with re-supplying the troops. This was likely to lead to pillaging the villages and ravaging the countryside around Tombougou. An officer with a platoon of 75 rifles from the post at Odienne had been attacked recently in the area, but the French force had inflicted heavy losses on the sofas, while the officer himself returned with six wounded or dead. Gaden received an order to send Lieutenant Feist, whom he was growing to dislike, along with 120 rifles to be put at the disposition of the commandant at Odienne. The sad obligation of rank imposed by Gaden’s three stripes meant that he had to stay in position with the remaining 80 men in his company. The construction at the post was completed and he had time to kill in ‘the monotony of his existence’. The rains had begun and the river waters rose; and while this posed difficulties for Gaden’s men to cross the swelling courses, it also meant that their security was much more sure, for Samory’s men would not be able to penetrate the territory with ease. Gaden was frustrated with the overall military strategy. Since the massacre of Braulot and his company the year previous, the French had not responded in any way to Samory’s presence in the east; instead, they had allowed Samory’s chief Bilali to regroup after their recent success against him. It seems that we have obeyed absolutely Ministerial orders; [but] it is more and more sickening that a campaign is not underway, due to the pretext of a general election! And more, we are not ready; under the excuse of economis- ing there are no officers. Thus in the Region of the South, which comprises 12 posts, there are exactly 13 officers and two medics. No money in the coffers. I have not been able to pay my riflemen since 31st December – lack of money – and I must have in my own purse between 18–20 francs! Obviously, I cannot pay my servants. (JHG-F, 19.3.98)

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Gaden added that he now acted as the post’s medic at Dabala, and he was still in charge of distributing meat three times a week; happily this was supplemented by abundant game and wild animals they hunted. Gaden even had time to reflect on his first two postings in the Soudan: … my stay here is infinitely less interesting than the previous one. Bandiagara appears to me as a very distant paradise, and I feel acute sympathy for Agibou and his scoundrel subjects. The people here are only brutes, whom I almost never see… here and there some louse comes to complain from a village that a few months ago some women or some kolas were taken from him. I listen, content to see a new face, and send the complainer back to where he came from, not having even the means to rub two sticks together. I have already had five or six of this type of visit … This proves the density of the population and the importance of the influence I exercise here … If I were in a more populated country, next to an important centre, I would be able to interest myself in historical and ethnographic questions, or simply commercial ones, have some interesting relations with natives, as I had during my first stay; but I am lost in the bush and anyway the populations of the south are, in general terms, highly backward and of little interest. He continued: The chief of Dabala (10 inhabitants) comes to see me from time to time. He is a poor man who does not even have a pair of trousers. He wears a band of cloth the width of one hand that is passed between his legs. The mosquitoes devour him and he passes his time, when he is with me, wriggling around and administering slaps to himself on his legs and elsewhere to chase away the mosquitoes attracted by the prospect of an easy meal. I would like to make a present of my trousers to him, but I do not have a metre of guinée [cloth] in my possession. I am therefore almost as poor as him. (JHG-F, 19.3.98) He went on to lambast the poverty of the colony, as much at Kayes as anywhere, and he joked that he would end up being paid what was owed to him from this tour of duty in local produce, such as guinée cloth, kolas, iron bars, balls of rubber or bundles of shea butter. News was filtering through to Gaden about French action in the east, around Sikasso, where he knew his friend Gouraud was serving under Colonel Pineau. Babemba, the town’s chief, had refused to receive the new French Resident appointed to the town, had stripped him and his escort of their arms and munitions, and taken his horse. After that, the officer was allowed to return to Kayes to recount his story, and Gaden thought him lucky not to have been assassinated there and then. A huge column of six companies, four artillery pieces and 100 spahis was being formed at Bamako to deal with Babemba, who Gaden hoped ‘would be finished before the hivernage’. Taking Sikasso would not be easy with its solid fortifications and its population of tens of thousands of inhabitants, who would fight

112 chapter three doggedly to the last.12 What the impact of this action would be on Samory, he could not imagine. With his Lieutenant off with over half the company in Odienne, and action brewing in the east, Gaden’s isolation and solitude at Dabala were even more keenly felt.

Vindictive as a Corsican

On 1st April, Gaden received orders from the Commandant de Cercle to make up a column of 200 rifles to patrol the territory to the east of Dabala for the duration of the hivernage, in order to protect the country from pillaging by Samory’s sofas. The French forces at Sikasso had run into difficulties in their attempt on the town, and Gaden surmised that he was being deployed to the area so as to leave the combatants free to concentrate on their mission. News from Lieutenant Feist was that his detachment of auxiliaries was performing well, and ‘only dream of measuring themselves against the sofas’. Gaden left the following morning and joined them en route to Toté, a French post two days’ travel to the east from Dabala. He would at last be freed from the confinement of his ‘absurdly situated’ bush posting (JHG-F, 2.4.98). From Toté, he made his way north-east to Bafélétou. Since his departure at the beginning of April almost two weeks earlier he had not seen one sofa. Life on the march during the hivernage was difficult, for they were accosted by tornadoes, driving rain and atrocious conditions under foot. Fighting to put their tents up in these storms was as much of a battle as they might anticipate when engaging with Samory’s sofas. Despite these demands, camp life had an orderliness to it, imposed particularly by Gaden’s boy, the faithful Moussa, who would promptly badger Gaden to take his meals on time and summon him to table (JHG-F, 13.4.98).

12 Gouraud’s company had earlier been part of Caudrelier’s column which arrived in Kong to find the town in ruins after Samory had burnt it to the ground. All that was left of the great market (the focus of many of Gaden’s earlier plans for commercial penetration), which Binger had so richly described in 1887, was just a pile of ash and a mound of debris. Gouraud had then turned north to the highly fortified town of Sikasso, which Samory had held under siege for 15 months in 1887 in his unsuccessful attempt to overthrow its Senufo ruler, Tiéba. The French alliance with Sikasso came to an end in 1898. Fama Bademba, the brother of Tiéba, had taken command of the town and had resisted French attempts to break through its mighty defences. The city walls could not, however, withstand the pounding from French artillery, and where Samory had failed, the colonial forces succeeded through sheer firepower to breach the defences. Sikasso fell to the French two months later in mid May 1898, an assault in which Gouraud took part.

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The lack of ammunition and provisions for his company continued to dog Gaden, and he returned from his sortie to Bafélétou a few weeks later with over 300 mouths to feed and just 15 days’ supplies. The village itself could provide little in the way of foodstuffs for the men, and the post at Kani, his usual revictualing station 45 kilometres to the east was under attack. He had learnt that morning that 200 sofas had raided the village and its inhabitants had fled into the bush. ‘I wait to learn at any moment that Kani burns’ (JHG-F, 29.4.98). Reports also arrived that sofas were even closer to hand, in a village ten kilometres away, and Gaden took his men to investigate. It turned out that only two of Samory’s cavalrymen had been spotted by the villagers, most of whom had since fled leaving the place deserted. This proved problematic for there were no provisions to be had there and no manpower to support the post. Another difficulty was that Lieutenant Feist was ill and had been left at the post at Toté along with 50 men, and so Gaden remained the only officer responsible for 200 men and their dependents: ‘I will be more than ever alone’. Captain Ristori at Touba had indicated that Gaden would probably spend the whole hivernage in inhospitable conditions with few supplies and a lack of officers. Furthermore, Gaden was under orders not to shoot unless under attack, and he had to refuse engagement with the enemy unless sure of success: ‘Truly beautiful instructions … the absurd orders of Captain Ristori’ (JHG-F, 13.4.98). At the beginning of April, Gaden had put in a request that he and his company be transferred from the command of Captain Ristori at Touba and placed at the disposition of Captain Conrard, the Resident at Odienne. Permission for the transfer was granted at the end of that month. Less good news was that Lieutenant Feist was very poorly in Dabala (JHG-F, 29.4.98). By mid May, Gaden had stationed his company at Boratoro, 15 kilometres to the east of Bafélétou, but he had not received any of his mail as expected. He attributed this to the actions of Captain Ristori: ‘The excellent Captain Ristori … vindictive as a Corsican, has gone after me with all his rancour since I passed under the orders of the Resident of Odienne’. All mail for Gaden that arrived in Touba had indeed been sent back by the captain to Kankan. Since their frank exchange of views, followed by the transfer of his company, Gaden felt he was a target for Ristori’s vengeance. ‘Since then, I am more than good for nothing and he does not miss an occasion to be disagreeable to me, all the time remaining quite proper’ (JHG-F, 17.5.98). Gaden related to his father how on arriving at Touba at the start of his mission, Ristori had said to him: ‘You are going to Dabala, this is your death sentence’, and then had gone on to regale him with the horrors that awaited

114 chapter three him there during the hivernage. Gaden believed that Feist’s poor condition was in part due to the discontent stirred up by Ristori, and Gaden had written a long report to Ristori about the insalubrity of the Dabala post, but received no response. Gaden did not want to take responsibility for any deaths that might occur in Dabala, or for the condition of his company after passing the rainy season there. In May he was keen to point out to his father that he had been right all along about Dabala: Gaden’s company had been sent on tour to the east, and it was Ristori and his men who had replaced him at Dabala. There, a sergeant from Ristori’s company had died (an event Ristori blamed on Gaden) and the regional medical officer then condemned the post as no longer fit to be occupied. ‘I am happily very fatal- istic in practical things’, Gaden reflected, ‘and I have a thick bed of philosophy that keeps me above many things.’ For Gaden, what was most sad in this affair was: ‘in a country where we should be supporting each other that [one should] meet a being of the Ristori species’ (JHG-F, 17.5.98). Gaden no longer had time to pursue hunting to supplement supplies, since he had too much to do, especially letter writing, the new colonial obsession. He feared more and more he was becoming a pen-pusher. Faced with difficulties gaining information on Samory’s men, Gaden sent out spies – riflemen disguised as sofas – in search of intelligence. Rumours circulated that the town of Sikasso had been taken by the French, which would mean that more troops could be made available for a pincer movement on Samory’s positions. Gaden turned over in his mind possible military strategies to be used against Samory and what responses they might elicit.

Other Affairs

If worries about Samory were not enough, the dangers of the African bush were always close at hand. One night Gaden was woken by a gun-shot and cries of ‘to arms’. Thinking that it was an attack by the sofas, he immediately sent out patrols to the outlying stations and summoned his riflemen in preparation for an assault. It turned out to be a leopard attacking a corporal at one of the outposts. The solider had been seized by the neck and dragged into the bush, and while he had let off his gun to frighten it away, the animal had been undeterred and left him dead with four fang holes in his neck. Gaden had never heard tell of such an incident before in the Soudan. The Dreyfus affair in France also occupied his mind, this time in the form of Ludovic Trarieux, on whom he sarcastically conferred the title

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‘His Majesty’, ‘this sad sire’, the celebrated defender of Dreyfus who had created doubts over the officer’s culpability. Gaden had believed Trarieux to be an honest man before the affair, but now that illusion had evaporated: ‘his attitude has been most louche, despite his efforts to appear as a scrupulously honest man’. ‘These consciences full of scruples are not right consciences … All this denotes sadly a veritable hatred of the army among the so-called “intellectuals”. It is sad and sickening’ (JHG-F, 29.4.98). No left- leaning intellectual was he. Gaden would return to this topic again and again over the next few months. Compared to his first posting to West Africa, trade barely featured as a topic of Gaden’s correspondence on this tour. However, he began to become more expansive in his writing on world affairs and global trade over this period, and in particular on the state of European society in general: There has been since the start of the century a very handsome industrial and commercial effort, due to scientific discoveries. This is all very much wrapped up in what is called Progress. We have firstly taken to materialism and dis- dained religion. Then general enrichment has increased well-being and demands, [and] has brought with it the reign of money and egoism. There has been much talk about the rights of the people, but nothing has been said to them of the duties that these rights create … [instead] they would like to gain more and more by working less and less. At the same time, one rushes about initiating the entire world to this “Progress”. … This is a peril common to all of Europe, which should bring together collectively their powers and research the means to hold back this crisis. (JHG-F, 17.5.98) Gaden, the conservative reactionary, once again found it difficult to come to terms with the changes taking place in Europe. For quite some time, since Captain Ristori in vengeful mode no longer forwarded mail, Gaden had been deprived of Le Havas, which kept officers up to date with political events at home and overseas.13 However, he did pick up news from the post at Odienne, and the plans of the British were in the forefront of his mind, particularly with respect to conventions signed to delimit the respective territories of the two colonial powers in West Africa. The British presence in the lower Volta area and in Nigeria was extending north, in contravention of agreements signed between the two countries, Gaden thought, and the transfer of control of the territory of the Niger Company to colonial forces would bring their sphere of influence up to Sokoto in north-west Nigeria, the centre of the Hausa empire. ‘The English

13 Havas, the first French news agency, was created by Charles-Louis Havas in 1835 to supply news about France overseas. See for further details Zeldin 1977: 538–9.

116 chapter three have many people there; in the hinterland from Lagos, they have near to 3000 men under the orders of the bandit [Lord] Lugard, a type of ferocious adventurer who is capable of anything.’ The delimitation of colonial possessions around Sokoto would become an issue of future concern for Gaden (JHG-F, 30.5.98). Gaden’s disquisitions on the state of world affairs and the politics of colonial expansion in other parts of West Africa no doubt diverted him from his immediate preoccupations with Samory’s presence in the area. His main army appeared to be still in the area around Kong, although other bands of sofas under the command of his generals were closer to hand. They employed hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, would take flight when they saw the red hats or chéchias that the riflemen wore, and were much more mobile than French troops. Gaden feared that they would take flight like a flock of sparrows if the French marched against them, only for them to regroup once the troops had returned to their posts. He received orders in late May to move from Boratoro to the east, some three days’ march, where there were reported to be large numbers of women, wives of Samory’s sofas, under the guard of a small band of men. ‘It would be a very pretty haul to make, which would allow me to marry off my riflemen who certainly would not be unhappy with the prospect.’ A number of his riflemen were already married, and their wives had been sent to the post at Odienne, where they were being looked after by Captain Conrard, the commandant of the region. They would stay there as long as Gaden’s position remained stable over the hivernage, but if his company were to be posted elsewhere the women would be directed back to their families. Gaden, however, was silent on his own prospects of taking a wife as booty. Meanwhile, the captain at Touba, Ristori, ‘my animal’, was still creating problems for him, the last episode of which was the arrival of a detachment of troops unannounced from Toté and without a European sub-officer in charge. ‘It is really vexing to have to deal with brutes of this species’, he exclaimed (JHG-F, 30.5.98). Nothing more was said about whether or not Gaden successfully landed his catch of women for his riflemen.

A Wandering Jew

By 9th June 1898, Gaden learnt that he was now to march from Bafélétou with all his company’s baggage and provisions to Ganaoui some 90 kilometres away, a distance to be covered in two days. ‘That is to say, we are going to have to break our backs’ to get there, and he had put out the call to the

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local villages for porters; he was waiting with impatience for their arrival so as to be on the march by 3 a.m. under the light of the moon; ‘Useless to think of sleeping’, he added. He was going to join up with his regional commandant, the infamous Lieutenant Colonel Bertin, ‘the most disagreeable man I have ever met’, who was leading his company and an artillery section. They were then to head off towards Tiémou, a village to the north-east of Bafélétou and about 100 kilometres west of Kong. There they would meet Commandant Pineau’s column coming from Sikasso following their successful campaign against the town. Gaden foresaw many marches ahead of them, since the sofas they were going to pursue seemed to vanish before them like magic. Commandant Pineau had already engaged some of them and they had fled; it was thought that around 1,500 had descended into the south. ‘It is probable that we will cover many kilometres against an elusive enemy and that we will hardy have any opportunity to grasp them in our hands. The sofas are exhausted and have had enough; a pitiful enemy to fight.’ It was going to be a charming voyage to make at the height of the rainy season – one involving devilish humidity even if the danger of gun- fire was minimal. Yet, Gaden looked forward with relish to the mission ahead, since for too long he had moped around doing nothing (JHG-F, 9.6.98). Gaden left Bafélétou on 10th June, and met up with Bertin, his company of men and a convoy of 600 porters at Ganaoui. ‘Without bothering himself with the sofas, as if they did not exist, and despite all the information I gave him, learning of Samory’s retreat with all his troops towards the south-west, the Lieutenant-Colonel led us due east’. From there, they had marched without rest to a post north of Bandama, where they arrived on 17th June; after taking a day’s repose, Gaden continued on with 200 porters to Kong, where he arrived on 22nd June and found only a pile of ruins in the middle of which were an estimated 2,000 skulls, in part hidden by grass that had grown up between them. It was a great and attractive town, and the impression it now makes is really painful. The sofas have poisoned all the wells with bodies, except one that is reserved for Europeans. My men have almost all been hit by terrible diar- rhoea. From Bandama to Kong, around 95 kilometres, there is nothing but ruins and the country, to judge by the old cultivations that one crosses all the time, must have been exceptionally rich and well populated. The sofas have destroyed everything in 18 months. (JHG-F, 15.7.98) On returning to Bandama, Gaden learnt that all of Samory’s troops were now far to the west, in an area between Beyla and Kissidougou, and must have passed through the territory close to where Gaden and his company

118 chapter three had been stationed earlier. ‘This exodus by Samory, due to the inertia of Lt-Col Bertin, has naturally greatly annoyed Colonel Audéoud’, the Governor of the Soudan. ‘It is now a matter of going to search for him deep in the forests of the south.’ On 4th July, Gaden received orders to reunite his company and make his way at the double with an artillery piece to Kani, a position just south of Bafélétou from where he had started his march east in June. He arrived at Kani on the 12th, delayed by the artillery they had to drag behind them by mule, and hoped to take some rest there; but he was immediately on the move again back to Touba with a view to being there on the 18th. He was to cover the distance of 130 kilometres that separated the two posts in four days, and then join up with a column of men under the command of Captain de Lartigue. They would then go straight towards the south to attack Samory’s army somewhere around Nzo on the border with Liberia. Not only did the weather make conditions difficult, but Gaden also complained of having very few provisions: only two packets of tobacco, a few candles and no fat. ‘I have transformed into a wandering Jew, and I am on my third horse since April; the first two are dead and I do not know if the third will withstand this existence.’ Lieutenant-Colonel Bertin had been requested to return to Kayes and was crest-fallen. Gaden was unable to hide his pleasure in his superior officer’s predicament, and added: ‘He will be given a very bad reception there for all the mistakes that he has made’ (JHG-F, 15.7.98).

Nest of Bullets

The journey from Kani to Touba had been much worse than Gaden had expected. He arrived a day late, having taken half a day to cross the Férédougou River, whose violent current swollen by the heavy rains ran five metres deep. The company used pirogues to ferry seven men at a time over the water, and the animals had to make do as best they could following the canoes from one bank to the other. Ropes were attached to them to haul them out, but the effort had left many of them exhausted and two mules died of fatigue some kilometres from Touba. On arriving in Touba on 19th July, Gaden was sent immediately to the village of Doué 60 kilometres to the south to join Commandant de Lartigue, who had gone there to attack a band of sofas with 300 men. The commandant, however, had walked straight into Samory’s entire army at the village, where he had been taken by surprise on the night of the 19th. That night and over the course of the

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following day, the battle had been bloody and Samory’s men had fought with great obduracy, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the French, including a detachment of Gaden’s company.14 According to Gaden, the day saw 11 dead and 18 wounded among the small French force, which had used up all its ammunition. The French retreated on the 21st, and Gaden himself only arrived after the battle and returned with the column. He was crest-fallen to have turned up too late, despite his best efforts. Samory now moved in haste to the south-west, while the French column returned north, followed by a band of sofas. At their first halt, a village where Gaden had passed the previous night on his way south, the company tried to get some rest. The settlement was surrounded by vegetation three metres high and dominated by a plateau a short distance away. At 7 a.m. the next morning, the plateau was swarming with sofas led by Samory’s son and General Saranké Mory, some 500–600 men in all, raining down on them round after round of rapid fire. Gaden’s company formed the rear- guard, trying to hold the village for two hours under violent attack, while the rest of the convoy and the wounded made their way back to Touba. The village became a veritable ‘nest of bullets’, and one man from the company was lost, killed by a bullet from a 86 rifle, of which Samory’s troops had taken around ten from Sikasso many years earlier. Gaden was absolutely delighted with his men, who had come under fire for the first time and performed well in such atrocious conditions. They had to beat a retreat from the village in order not to waste their remaining ammunition, a delicate operation, and the manoeuvres to evacuate the area were carried out as though it were a textbook exercise. They rested for a number of days at Touba, but the calm was occasionally interrupted by light assaults on the post from small bands of sofas who had pursued them from Doué. They departed for Beyla to the west, leaving Ristori and his company to protect Touba. Samory was now holed up around Nzo in dense forest, where the local inhabitants known to the French as Touras might be persuaded to assist them. Gaden had much admiration for the fighting qualities of the well-trained and war-seasoned sofas, of whom there were around 600–700 well-armed with British and Belgian rifles. ‘This is not an enemy to disdain … these people are very

14 Gouraud reported in his memoirs (1939: 190) that Sergeant Bratières, heading the detachment from Gaden’s company, intervened at a critical time in the conflict. Gouraud stated, contradicting Gaden’s account, that there were 13 dead and 28 wounded; and he glossed over the hasty retreat of de Lartigue’s men and the details of Gaden’s rear-guard action. His was perhaps a view tinted by a rosy post-facto (and patriotic) hue on events.

120 chapter three hardened, they chose their positions very well and use the terrain marvellously. They are very good marksmen, often shooting in volleys, ringing the changes with bugle calls.’ Gaden was keen to continue on Samory’s trail: ‘I hope very much that in a few days we will get back on their heels again.’ Attached to the Almamy’s elite troops was a population of around 15,000– 20,000 captive sofas and women-folk, all of whom were severely under- nourished. Gaden’s path to the south had been marked out by the signs of devastation that Samory’s men had left in their wake, a route signposted by a trail of cadavers strewn here and there. At Beyla, Gaden met up with other officers who were part of de Lartigue’s company: Lt Woelffel, ‘an excellent officer who commands a platoon of the 1st Company’, Lt Jacquin from the artillery, and a medic, Dr Boyé. They enjoyed each other’s company and shared in lively conversation. Gaden, however, did not miss one of his colleagues: I am very happy to no longer have with me my lieutenant, the young Feist. I learned a while ago that he was a Jew and he served as a spy for Lieutenant Colonel Bertin and Commandant Pineau. He lied to me on different occasions and did all that he could to do me a disservice towards Colonel Bertin. I regret not having known this earlier. He is a fiend of a man who will be for- tunate not to find himself in my path. (JHG-F, 6.8.98) Gaden’s anti-Semitism was forthright, and was expressed at a time when the Dreyfus affair was intensifying, the effects of which could be felt even in the depths of the Guinée bush. Throughout August Gaden’s health continued to hold up well in spite of the rain, humidity, forced marches and ‘general floundering’ since his arrival at Beyla. His time was now spent drawing maps and interviewing fugitives from Samory’s camp to extract military intelligence. Around 2,000 captives and some sofas had already run away to seek refuge at Touba and Beyla, and they were settled in local villages in an attempt to repopulate the area. Many had been lost to starvation and exhaustion. The local populations around Nzo, whom the French referred to as ‘cannibals’, had become their allies and, according to Gaden, were well fed on the rich pickings left by incapacitated camp followers of Samory. ‘These brave chaps capture almost all of the sofas and their captives who split off from the main party to go marauding. They cut off their heads then chop up the bodies, [and] the meat is preserved in palm oil. This makes a confection [des confits] very much appreciated by these gentlemen’ (JHG-F, 27.8.98). Those groups on the opposite bank of the Cavally or Diougou river were, according to Gaden, more amateur in their culinary practices and they were in the process of compiling ‘an honourable sepulchre to a good number of sofas and their

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captives’. These people were, however, important local contacts to be cultivated, for they possessed information on Samory’s movements and were skilled as guides through the terrain. The chief of the Gueres, not a cannibal himself in Gaden’s view, had sent his son to Beyla to stock up on provisions for his village, a gift no doubt for services already rendered. The French fear was that Samory would slip over the border into Liberia, and from there he would be able to re-supply himself with arms and ammunition from merchants operating out of Monrovia, the country’s capital and coastal port. If this were the case, Gaden hoped that they would pursue him over the frontier and deal with him there.

The September Campaign 189815

The first major engagement of the campaign against Samory occurred in the dense forest to the south of Nzo at the village of Tiafesso in the second week of September, when Lieutenant Woelffel attacked a band of sofas who were preparing to cross the Diougou or Cavally River. Numerous important military leaders from Samory’s camp were captured and around 2,000 or 5,000 sofas gave themselves up (according to Gouraud and to Gaden respectively). In tow was a vast crowd of around 25,000 women, children and captives, who were later sent north to be resettled elsewhere. A report of this conflict was received by the commandant on the 14th.16 The routes through the forest were guarded by Guere recruits whose job it was to stop the returning sofas rejoining Samory’s following. Gouraud arrived in Beyla on 4th September, by which time Gaden was on the march for Nzo. Gaden left Beyla on the 3rd and joined up with Woelffel on the 11th to witness the mass exodus of Samory’s demoralised and famished followers. Torrential rains had hampered their passage, the rivers and water courses were overflowing and there was no food to be had anywhere. En route south, Gaden came across pathways littered with hundreds of bodies of those left dead by Samory’s sofas, and where they had stopped over on their marches there were ‘unapproachable slaughterhouses’ of rotting corpses. At Woelffel’s camp, there was much grim evidence of the attacks Samory’s men had suffered: bodies of sofas were everywhere, and they had been ‘very properly

15 The first letter written by Gaden to Gouraud to survive from this period is dated 16th September 1898 at Nzo. The correspondence between the two men continues for another 40 years. 16 See Gouraud (1939: 191 and specifically 184–230) for his account of the capture of Samory, some of which informs my description of events.

122 chapter three cleaned of their legs and arms, cut at the joints as though by a very able surgeon’. Gaden was in desperate need of provisions, for he had been sent on the march by the commandant with meagre rations, ‘an incomprehensible parsimony’, and Woelffel’s men had gone two days without any food. They, like Samory’s followers, were famished and had to return to Nzo to re-supply the company rather than continue the search. Gaden reminded Gouraud to prompt the commandant to send down more rice, ‘much more rice’, from Beyla. Gaden estimated that 120,000 people followed Samory, who was in hostile territory and could only pass through it by the use of force. Samory lacked interpreters to communicate with the local groups, and his progress was slowed by the entourage that trailed behind him. Samory’s following was starving and they were falling like flies through exhaustion and hunger. The spectacle of the remnants of Samory’s disillusioned followers was ‘new and unforgettable’, this movement of a population ‘was something altogether fantastic’ (JHG-F 23.9.98). Bands of local men attacked the following, and they would seize women whom they hacked to death immediately. Gaden attempted to scare the men off by rounds of gun-fire, but they returned again and again as friendly as ever towards the French forces. ‘This was rather disgusting’, ‘this contemptible war’, were his comments. Gaden impressed upon Gouraud the importance of maintaining relations with local groups through key personnel: Without Yargara Ouli, we will not have relations with Torou, the chief here. Without Torou, no relations with the Gueres, [and] no relations with the Dioulas from the left bank. Without these people … no information and we will not be able to figure things out alone in a country that is awfully difficult. … The anthropophages are now serious with us, but it is important to profit from their good dispositions in order to finish with Samory. (JHG- HJEG, 16.9.98) Gouraud turned up in Nzo on 21st September to find ‘his old friend Captain Gaden and the Lieutenant Woelffel with 300 riflemen’, but the trail of Samory had been lost. Gaden appeared to Gouraud ‘much thinner but more solid than ever’. Gaden was pleased to meet up with Gouraud, and the two of them revelled in the opportunity of seeing action together: ‘Gouraud and I are full of ardour, will have greater freedom in our movements and will be able to do a good job, as repugnant as it is’ (JHG-F 23.9.98). Gouraud received orders on the 23rd to form a reconnaissance party comprising two detachments: the first commanded by Gouraud comprised 96 men from the 15th Company; the second commanded by Gaden comprised 112 men from the Third Auxiliary Company, including Lieutenant Jacquin

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and two sergeants Bratières and Lafon. They left Nzo on the 24th and followed a path east through the deep forest searching for Samory and what remained of his men. Dr Boyé was attached to the reconnaissance mission, and had instructed the men to take precautions regarding drinking water. Given the number of maggot-ridden corpses lying around, it had to be boiled, treated with permanganate and filtered.

The reconnaissance party of nine European officers, 210 rifles and 50 porters sets off on 24th September from Nzo under heavy skies and constant rainfall at 6 o’clock in the morning heading east along forest tracks recently trod by Samory’s sofas. Leaving their horses behind, they strike out on foot through the tangled undergrowth like true ‘fantassins’ or infantry men. To cross the Diougou River they use an enormous tree trunk felled from bank to bank strad- dling the rapidly flowing waters, and by 9 o’clock they reach the village of Guiro. Their welcome is a silent one, from corpses lying where they fell inside their huts, whose hearths are black and fires extinct; the countryside around is devoid of the signs of human life. They push on to Kourogouodougou, where the same scene assaults their eyes. They shelter for a short time under conical roofs that they take down from the tops of huts and place on the ground; the officers then slither inside through an opening cut in the thatch. What are they to do next? The Dioula guides who accompany them do not know their way after the next village, Guikoma. Gouraud decides to send some of his men disguised as sofas under the lead of Dia Fodé, an old sofa chief who submitted to the French back in 1893, to go on ahead in the hope of finding a deserter or a laggard who might offer up information about the terrain and Samory’s position. Gaden and Gouraud sit in their cramped make-shift shelters waiting for a report back from the scouts; eight hours pass under the never-ending down- pour. Dia Fodé returns with three local inhabitants, but while they can give no information on Samory’s whereabouts they are able to lead them to Dénifesso 20 kilometres further on. On the 26th they prepare themselves for their march, leaving at 5 a.m. and trudging all day along water-logged paths until Dénifesso, a village now razed to the ground by the sofas, where only a few mud walls stand forlornly; no shelter can be found. Here they come across 100 or so fugitives from Samory’s camp huddled one against the other drenched to the skin and shivering with cold. The scouts return bringing with them a one- eyed sofa armed with a rapid-fire rifle, and he surrenders to the French party. Further to the south-east there is an encampment of Samory’s wives and Samory himself is holed up next to it, he tells them. It is impossible, he goes on, to follow the track since there are too many corpses and the smell is overpowering. Concerned about the health of the men in continuing along a

124 chapter three cadaver-ridden path, Doctor Boyé argues against pushing further in the same direction; they must find an alternative route. But Gouraud makes a decision: ‘There where Samory and his bands have passed, the riflemen led by a French captain will also pass’, he proclaims with all the self-importance he can muster. They would be guided to Samory by the grizzly signposts he has left along his route through the forest. The wet conditions encourage the rapid decomposition of the human remains everywhere, and the least breath of wind transports the rotting odours into the nostrils of the passing soldiers. They have no appetite and no desire to sleep, the thrill of the chase coursing through their veins. (See plate 4, ‘Dabardiyo, 26.09.98’.) At 5.30 a.m. on the morning of the 27th they are already marching, and a few hours later they confront the problem of crossing yet another river, the

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Mlé, an affluent of the Bafing, normally 25–30 metres from one bank to the other. Swollen by the rains, the river now extends far beyond its banks and the men have to wade waist-deep through the water to reach the trees that once stood on its banks. From there a rope is attached to trees on the opposite bank, and one by one the men and their provisions are transported through the strong currents, with only the taut cord stretched across its width preventing them from being swept down stream. There they find a cannon abandoned by Samory, one he had acquired from ‘British’ merchants some years before. After two hours, they continue on to Gouangooule, a place where Mokhtar, one of Samory’s sons, had been stationed for a long while with his large rear-guard company; Gaden takes in the view from this elevated position looking out over wooded mountains in the distance, but is overwhelmed by the stench that surrounds him.17 The route south to Guoro is more difficult, with steep rocky slopes overgrown with thick vegetation through which no air can circulate. Towards 2 o’clock they see the village of Zélékouma sitting in a clearing, and Jacquin and a small patrol are sent down to reconnoitre. He beats a retreat saying ‘Unapproachable, the village can be smelt from 400 metres.’ But here they come across a macabre scene: a family of ten sofa deserters sit under crude shelters put together with branches and leaves, eating shreds of meat roasting on a fire. Further away the decapitated head of a young girl lies on the ground, her eyes staring in a ghostly gaze at the officers. The diners are only momentarily troubled by the presence of the party, such is their desperate hunger that brings them to this predicament. After passing a miserable night in continual rain, they gain more detailed information on Samory that morning, corroborated by numerous testaments. They are not far from the enemy camp, but how far and exactly where they will encounter it is impossible to say. Their arduous route through the forest ends abruptly, and they find themselves viewing the horizon from open country covered in tall, sharp grasses. They are no longer meeting deserters and refugees; instead there are laggards unable to keep up with the main body of Samory’s group. They are sickly, wounded and exhausted individuals, who sit or lie unable to move any further. ‘Mfa, kouko’, the women with children call out to the soldiers; ‘Father, I am hungry’, but the soldiers have nothing to give them and trudge past the pitiful gatherings. At 10 o’clock they find traces of a recently evacuated cattle enclosure with the fresh tracks of hooves in the ground, and by 11 a.m. they stand before a steep wooded slope with overgrown slippery paths leading down to an encampment once occupied by Samory’s wives.

17 See Gaden’s account of ‘La Capture de Samory’, published in Le Tour du Monde – A Travers du Monde, no.8, 25 février 1899: 57–60.

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All that is left are a few old women who tell the officers that Sarankégny, Samory’s favourite, left three days earlier with the others to the north-east, and indicate to them the route to follow. They cross another river and halt for a short while to rest and eat what foodstuffs they have left – dried meat and biscuits. They pack up their effects and cross an immense camp set in a cirque of mountains, at the centre of which stands the Almamy’s old hut, his saddle and the second of his abandoned cannon. An old woman with hands full of blood hides in a hut, next to which lies a body, its stomach gaping wide and its entrails recently removed. A sofa approaches and recounts to Gouraud that Samory is only a few kilometres away, and that he has sent an agent to Touba, where he thinks the French commandant is, to offer a vague proposition of submission. The sofa tells how he deserted with two companions, both of whom were later caught and decapitated. The survivor offers his services to Gouraud, for he can lead them to the camp. They quickly resume their march and climb an interminable slope under the heat of the sun, which now beats down with unrelenting force since they are no longer protected by trees. Boyé, the doctor, marches with his shirt tails hanging out, ‘in the style of the blacks’, Gaden remarks. The day draws to a close, and they stop at a clearing sheltered by the mountains and by two water courses surrounded by trees and dense vegetation. Their camp is rudimentary, thrown up in haste, and they suffer from cold as the night draws on. They send out a scouting party at 3 o’clock in the morning to reconnoitre a village a few hundred metres away where an enfeebled rear-guard company under the command of Macé Amara, one of Samory’s sons, is camped. Silently they station themselves around the village so that none of the sofas can be sent out to warn Samory of the presence of the French. The deserter tells Gouraud of Samory’s position, which is heavily protected to the north, the direction from which he anticipates the French forces will attack; but their approach from the west is only lightly guarded, for Macé Amara has only 20 sofas in the nearby village. Samory’s hut is situated on a small rise, they learn, and is surrounded by many of his followers. Gouraud gives orders for the final assault the following morning: Gaden is to send a squad of men to slip down behind Amara’s camp and defend the route back into the camp; the first section of Gaden’s company under Lieutenant Jacquin and Sergeant Bratières is to make its way through the women’s encampment, across the area occupied by Samory’s sofas without firing a shot, and hold a position on the path to Touba, the only escape route for the enemy; the second section under Gaden is to follow the first and take themselves to the Almamy’s hut and occupy it; the third section of Gaden’s company and the first of Gouraud’s will together form a reserve under Gouraud’s command; the convoy and the second section of Gouraud’s men are

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to hold the entrance to the women’s encampment. Gouraud announces to the men assembled before him: ‘We are only a few hundred strong, and the enemy comprises many thousands of men. In order to take Samory, we must not engage in combat. As inclined as we might be, it will give the Almamy the time to flee. Surprise is absolutely essential.’ To take Samory alive is the aim, and the rest of the sofas will surrender, at least that is the hope. The morning dawns, a bright and beautiful daybreak, and the sky is clear, the kind of day that heralds the end of the hivernage. Gaden urges his men to make one final push, exhausted as they are after their onerous march. They soon break out from the cover of the trees, and opening up before them is a valley bathed in sunlight, from the floor of which three kilometres away the plumes of smoke from Samory’s camp drift lazily upwards through the morning air. The path, protected on either side by tall grass that hides the approach of the first wave of men, winds its sinuous way towards the camp. Over one water course, and then a second, they break into a trot through the women’s encampment and on to the main camp now only 300 metres away. The sofas they run past lie bemused on the ground, hardly believing what they see in front of them. Up into the camp itself, their surprise is complete, no signal has gone out of their approach, and the riflemen at the head of the section see the figure of Samory, recognisable by his tall stature and the white turban wrapped around the red chechia he wears on his head. He scrambles to his feet, the leaves of the Qur’an he is reading fly in all directions, and he searches for his horse. Sergeant Bratières and three rifles – Corporal Faganda Tounkara, and the auxiliaries Banda Tounkara and Filifing Keita – throw themselves towards him, and Jacquin with the rest of his section continue on their way to the camp’s exit in the direction of Touba. The Almamy runs away quickly with the agility of a young man, but he has not even had time to pick up his gun. The riflemen shout out ‘Ilo, ilo Samory’, ‘stop, stop’, but he chooses not to listen and continues on as fast as he can. Finally Bratières cries out with the same message and Samory, surprised at hearing a European voice, comes to halt, out of breath, his chest heaving heavily. Beside himself with emotion, Samory demands to be killed then and there, and enquires whether Bratières is the commandant; Jacquin then arrives, having sent his section on to guard the other side of the camp. The sofas stirring themselves from their slumbers now take up their weapons, but seeing that their leader is captured they throw them to the ground following the Almamy’s signal not to fight. Meantime, Gaden has occupied the Almamy’s hut, and it is here that Samory is brought. The camp strikes Gaden as having the most bizarre air of normality; man- ioc hangs out to dry in the sun, and the sounds of women pounding couscous are carried on the breeze; the order and routine of camp life goes on as if

128 chapter three nothing has happened. This is not at all the chaos and disorder he expected to find. He reassures those around him that if they stay calm no harm will come to them, and he stations his men around the hut ready for any eventuality. A sofa who has been gathered up in the melée by chance harangues Gaden as he goes through Samory’s effects left in his hut. Gouraud joins him in the camp, having occupied the women’s encampment with his section of men. It is over, the long campaign has succeeded, and their success is beyond their wildest hopes – not a single shot fired, not one man lost or injured. Horribly out of breath and exhausted, they collapse on the ground, their victory sealed.

As their adrenalin subsided during a moment of tranquillity, Gouraud and Gaden sat down and reflected on the French missions that had fallen at Samory’s hands. They recalled Captain Braulot whose forces who had been massacred in 1897, and were pleased to identify those responsible – Amara Dialli, Samory’s favourite griot, and Saranké-Mory. All that remained to be done now was to round up the bands of men commanded by Saranké-Mory and Mohktar stationed some ten kilometres away. Samory sent envoys to his sons with the assurance that they would be unharmed if they gave themselves up and surrendered their arms. Samory then requested permission to pray, and gathered around him his marabouts, generals and griots; they knelt to perform their salams. (See plate 5.) The haul of riches following the capture of the camp was remarkable: around 400 rapid-fire rifles, 90 cases of cartridges of European manufac- ture, 130 head of cattle, 60 horses and 200,000 francs’ worth of gold and silver. Samory’s family comprised 100 sons, 200 daughters and his camp followers were estimated to number around 50–60,000. Gouraud and Gaden returned with their prisoners under escort to Beyla by 17th October. (See plate 6, the band of officers involved in Samory’s capture.) The Commandant of the Region was overjoyed at the return of the company, for he had heard no news of them and had been increasingly anxious to learn of their fate. On the journey back to Beyla, Gaden had time to make Samory’s acquaintance. He wrote to his father: ‘He is an excellent man with whom we are on very good terms’.18 His mother had been particularly worried having heard no news for such a long time but, as Gaden explained

18 Gouraud later reported that he had quizzed Samory on how he seemed to anticipate in advance the movement of French troops. He replied: ‘It is very easy, I who am a great chief is never seen singing, never seen taking meals, nor does anyone ever sit at my table with me. For I learnt that the whites had the habit of sitting together to eat and there … they recount important things as well as insignificant things. When I knew that, I could not believe it at

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to her, she was not to worry because in any case families are ‘always informed by telegraph’ (JHG-F, 10.10.98). Joyous scenes greeted the announcement of the news of the mission’s success at Kayes, the army headquarters in the Soudan. Celebrations and 20-gun salutes took place at all French posts in the region. Captain Ristori, commandant at the post at Touba, described the jubilation when the news of Samory’s capture broke: ‘At Touba this provoked great enthusiasm and during the afternoon the entire population (women, men, children, young

first, but finally … I sent my young men to be engaged to serve the whites.’ After learning this Gouraud was never to have officers to sit at his table during a campaign again (1939: 218–9).

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Plate 6. A band of officers at Beyla in October 1898. Figures are, from the left, Lt Jacquin, Capt Gaden, Capt Gouraud, Sergeant Bratières (?), and the medic Dr Boyé. Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga. and old) came to dance at the post with the riflemen’.19 Gaden, who had taken many photographs during the campaign, heard that an account of the capture was to be published and illustrated with his images. He had, however, no desire to remain with the escort all the way to Kayes, but decided he would accompany Samory for the next few days up to Kerouané and Kankan. He held hopes that his company of men would now be transferred to the regular army, since they had performed so admirably.

19 His letter is signed Captain Ristori and addressed to the Commandant of the South Region at Nzo, 4th Oct 1899 [sic] – this must be 1898, for he reported how news of the capture of Samory had just reached him at ‘Santa on 1st October’ [sic]. CAOM 15 APC/1 (14). This letter was sent to Gaden by a fellow officer.

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He thought that he too might be in for a favourable mention, along with his fellow officers, in dispatches from Kayes. Gaden signed off his letter to his father with news of rumours circulating that it was not English merchants who had supplied Samory with arms and provisions, but in fact French trading houses in St Louis and Kayes. The evidence collected after his capture suggested that these companies would be under intense scrutiny (JHG-F 21.10.98). The sweet taste of success did not rest long in the mouths of French politicians and military men, or indeed of the public at large. While a heady brew was created by the success in the Soudan, the events at Fashoda in north-east Africa took the fizz out of the celebrations. Captain Marchand’s long two-year haul across the Congo to the Nile, where he entered Fashoda in the name of the Republic in July 1898, was a short-lived triumph.20 By September, Kitchener’s fleet had sailed up the Nile and confronted the small French contingent holed up in their recently constructed mud fort next to the Nile. By 26th September, two days before the capture of Samory, a telegram had reached the Quai d’Orsay to report that the French had backed down, and the British had taken charge of the town, following on from their victory in Khartoum.21 At the same time, the Dreyfus affair was drawing to its climax following Zola’s sensational open letter ‘J’Accuse’ in L’Aurore, and the momentum of the Dreyfusards was moving inexorably forward. The grand pronouncements of victory against Samory, such as that published in the Journal Officiel de l’Afrique Occidentale Française on 13th October 1898, were already overshadowed by news from elsewhere in Africa and France itself. On 18th October 1898 the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur was awarded to each of the officers involved in the Samory campaign: Gouraud, Gaden, Boyé and Jacquin, and Sergeant Bratières. At least they had now received the recognition they were due.

20 For an account of the encounter between the British and French at Fashoda, see Thomas Pakenham (1992: 532–538, & 547–556). 21 Gaden later revised his ideas about Captain Marchand’s mission to Fashoda: ‘Without the English expedition that held back the Madhist forces from the north, Marchand would have surely been massacred in Fashoda soon after he established himself there’ (JHG-F, 2.1.99). The whole debacle rankled Gaden, for it put France in a bad light: ‘We have harvested the benefits of our regime which has no tradition, no coherence, no grandeur in its external policies’. France’s political strategy in Egypt and the Sudan, ‘the politics of incoherence’, were but a pin-pick that irritated Britain (JHG-HJEG, 8.1.99).

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Spoils of War

Gaden still could not believe that Dreyfus might be innocent, and was particularly happy not to be in France then, nor to return home until the whole affair was over (JHG-F, 21.10.98). Indeed it disgusted him so much that he would try to profit from anything that would prolong his stay in Africa. The upheavals occurring in France had revealed, quite innocently he thought, ‘the games played by Jews and Protestants with tortured consciences’, and that all the clamour would not have been made if the ‘traitor’ had been ‘a simple Christian’ (JGH-F, 2.11.98). He was disappointed to learn that his company would not be ‘licensed’ as regular soldiers, but he would take a detachment with him to Kissidougou where he was to take up command of the military post. He had heard too of the Mission Afrique Centrale- Tchad that had been announced by the Secretary of the State for the Colonies, André Lebon, in July that year, part of a grand scheme to link the various French colonies in Africa through an ambitious project that would see three columns of French troops meeting at Lake Chad. One column would descend south across the Sahara from Algeria, a second would come up through the Congo, and a third would travel east across the Soudan. Captain Paul Voulet, Gaden’s friend from Bandigara days, had been given command of the Soudanese mission with Captain Julien Chanoine, whom Gaden also knew.22 Reports of the campaign against Samory were starting to appear in the press, and Gaden took exception to what he regarded as inaccurate accounts of the events surrounding the capture. Colonel Pineau’s column had been attributed a central role, to which Gaden retorted: The famous Pineau column did not hear the hiss of one bullet; but the Commandant is a very able bluffer. … an excellent officer but he is devoured by ambition. … The only victims of the Pineau column were the poor porters – I saw them, the skeletons – as many died of fatigue as were killed by young officers wielding revolvers. It is in fact sad to state that there are some young men who appear to gain pleasure from killing with their own hands and without sufficient motive. (JHG-F, 2.11.98) An official report of the action at Samory’s camp was also challenged by Gaden and the other officers involved in the capture: ‘We are rather

22 Earlier Gaden had written to ask his friend whether he could be part of the company, but Voulet received his letter too late: Chanoine had already been appointed. Thinking that the company was light on European officers, he rued this missed opportunity (JHG-F, 2.11.98); but with hindsight, he would come to thank his luck that he was not appointed to the mission.

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annoyed actually because in [the report] relating the final incidents none of us is mentioned and the Commandant [de Lartigue] is represented as having led our small column of men himself, whilst he was reposing tran- quilly at Nzo’ (JHG-F, 16.11.98). Gaden remained at Beyla, accompanied only by Gouraud; yet despite the pleasure he gained from his friend’s company, the time dragged by slowly. His restlessness was overtaking him once again. Gaden moved to Kérouané by the end of November, and from there he wrote to Gouraud, addressing him now as ‘mon cher ami’, an indication of the close comradeship forged over the course of their campaign together: I was delighted to make this expedition with you, and had no cause, I assure you, to make a favourable impression. And then above all has it not been for us an occasion to come know each other better, and as you say to weave more solid links. I have therefore no regrets, I assure you, and am on the contrary delighted, discreetly, at the way things have turned out. (JHG-HJEG, 29.11.98) A letter from Gaden’s commanding officer, de Lartigue, sheds some more light on the topic of their discretion. Dated at the end of September, the letter concerns the problem of provisions for the troops and the numbers of refugees and captives now in French hands. De Lartigue wrote to Gaden: ‘for the moment no more distribution of captives’, and he was told to wait until they returned to Beyla where the final reparations would be made. Anyway, in de Lartigue’s view, the riflemen were already gorged with riches taken earlier in the operation, and on the basis of his past experience he advised Gaden that the consequences of a further glut of war booty could be disastrous for his men. He added that ‘a certain number of supplementary captives’ would be distributed later by commanders of units ‘to their grooms, boys, cooks etc. … Read into this neither a critique nor an observa- tion, my dear Gaden, but a simple precautionary measure’, he noted.23 Female captives, the plunder of war, were often divided up as a perk to soldiers after battle, and this seems to have occurred prior to and immediately after the capture of Samory. The practice was well-known in other parts of West Africa, although the issue of war booty was hotly debated within official circles.24 Not only did his auxiliaries and junior officers benefit from

23 See Fonds Terrier, Correspondence VIII (5898). 24 See Martin Klein (1998: 83–108) on the problem of the distribution of captive women after military conquest. He provides two examples that occurred around 1887. First, after the capture of Rip in Senegal, the French commander Colonel Coronnat reported: ‘… after my

134 chapter three the allocation of war spoils, but Gaden himself seems to have done quite well out of all this too. A letter to Gaden from a fellow officer, whose name is illegible, written on 30th November 1898 at Kayes contained the following: ‘All the good warriors wanted a piece of that Salome Samory that you have so gently gathered up.’25 Gaden had obviously ended up with a very attractive young lady, one of Samory’s daughters, but whether Gaden’s Salome danced for him, we do not know. Nor is it known how Gaden ‘gathered her up’, whether for example he acquired her through customary exchanges of marriage gifts. This would be very unlikely, given that his new ‘father-in-law’ was under arrest, stripped of his possessions, and en route for Kayes to stand trial. That she was part of the booty of war, a captive taken as a concubine by a commanding officer, was very likely given what de Lartigue had written. Many years later Gaden received in St Louis a letter from one of Samory’s sons, Sidiki Samory Toure, written on 10th July 1911 from Conakry in Guinée. Sidiki wrote: ‘My sister Beau says hello to you, who was your wife during your residence at Beyla, and is now at Kérouané’.26 He also added that another of his sisters, Rakiatou, went to Touba and married a commandant de cercle.27 (See plate 7, ‘Woman with Officer at Beyla, 1898’. Could this be an image of Salome Samory?) Gaden wrote to his parents on 30th November, the day after penning his enigmatic missive to Gouraud. No mention at all was made to these goings- on involving women; instead, Gaden was pleased to hear that they had been gladdened by the news of his Croix, and grateful for the congratulations he had received from friends and family (JHG-F, 30.11.98). Rudolf Slatin’s 1896 book entitled Fire and the Sword in the Sudan had just arrived and Gaden found it particularly interesting on the question of Fashoda: ‘It would appear to me impossible for us to have kept Fashoda and I understand very well the fury of the English. …we always do things too late and by half.’ He was en route to his posting at Kissidougou, where he was heading

departure, a certain number of women were put in the presence of a certain number of tirailleurs, drivers and spahis, and after coming to terms, there resulted a certain number of unions in conformity with the customs of the country’ (94). Second, an administrative report from 1894 underlined the issue: ‘…what reward can we give in exchange for services rendered [to African soldiers and auxiliaries] … if not booty, that is to say, slaves’ (108). Klein reports that it was not just Soudanese troops who benefited from this distribution: ‘After a battle, the officers often got the first choice of slave women’ (83). 25 See CAOM 15 APC/1 (14). 26 ‘Salome’ was no doubt a nickname given to Beau by the officers. 27 See CAOM 15 APC/1 (14).

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Plate 7. ‘Woman and Officer at Beyla, Oct. 1898.’ Could this be Salome Samory, daughter of the Almamy? Courtesy of the Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga.

with more than 100 rifles from his company and 500–600 women and children that these men were taking with them. Gaden was charged with establishing a new post, from where he could try to stop the encroachments into the region by the British. He would be alone with only two sub-officers and a mission house of White Fathers ten kilometres from the post: ‘this is a little distant but it will be nonetheless a precious resource’. Press reports continued to appear in France about Samory’s capture, which were ‘complete fantasy’ in Gaden’s view. He was extremely glad to have escaped the publicity, or rather the rumours that were circulating about Gouraud and the ‘petit Gaston’ Lieutenant Jacquin. He was curious to know whether cor- rections would be made to the reports, that it was, for instance, not Jacquin who had actually captured Samory but rather the Sergeant Bratières.

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The Exile of Samory Toure Gaden resisted the opportunity to escort Samory and his company back to Kayes, where the Black Napoleon was held until the French authorities decided what to do with him. Just before the end of 1898, a decision was made. In front of the palace of the Governance in Kayes on 22nd December 1898 French troops with bayonets fixed presented themselves before General de Trentinian. All the officers, the heads of public services, their personnel and the colony’s population gathered to witness the sentencing of Samory, who was brought before them followed by his children and counsellors. De Trentinian intoned: Samory! You [Tu] have been the cruellest of men to have walked the Soudan; you have not ceased, over more than twenty years, to massacre the poor blacks; you have behaved like a ferocious beast. You and those who are the instruments of all your crimes, you should die a death, the most ignominious, the most terrible! …28 Instead, honouring the promise of life given by the men who captured him, Samory, his son Saranke-Mory and his principal advisor Morifindian, were sentenced to exile in Gabon in Equatorial Africa. Other sons were sentenced to obligatory residence in Timbuktu and Nioro. Samory would die in exile on 2nd June 1900 following a bout of pneumonia. In his letter of 10th July 1911 that passed on news of Gaden’s wife, his ‘Salome’ or Beau, Sidiki Samory Toure also updated Gaden on other family members. Having learnt news of Gaden’s whereabouts from his brother, Philippe, Sidiki reported that he too was working for the trading company Devès and Chaumet in West Africa. He went on to describe how after the capture of his father, three sons (Sidiki [the letter writer], Amara and Siakat) were nominated to go to school at Kayes. He himself regretted very much not having been able to gain more education, especially that offered to him by M. de Lartigue, the commandant. Had Sidiki’s father told the lad of the offer to accompany the commandant to France, he would have jumped at the chance. [His competence in written French suggests that further education may well have benefited him.] This case, nonetheless, stands as a remarkable testament to how entangled the lives of colonial officers and local people had become. Sidiki asked too of news of the other European officers involved in the campaign – Gouraud, Bratières and Jacquin among others – and hoped that his regards would be passed on to them. Sidiki’s elder brother, Saranké Mory, was still in Gabon, and the others who had been under compulsory residence at

28 See ‘Le Départ de Samory pour l’Exil’, A Travers du Monde, 3e Mars 1899 (no author specified). In this short article Samory is referred to as the ‘Black Napoleon’.

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Timbuktu and Nioro were now free. Two of them had performed French military service in a cavalry regiment and had gained their stripes. After completing his schooling, Sidiki became a tutor in a school in Guinée, but left after three years since the salary was not satisfactory (900 frs per year). He then worked in an office job for a railway company, prior to his present employer, Devès and Chaumet.29

White Fathers

Gaden arrived at his new post in Kissidougou on 9th December 1898, and wrote to Gouraud the following day. He was pleased to find Mr Moreau there in good health, who was relieved in turn to pass on the responsibility of the cercle to Gaden. Moreau made a good impression on Gaden. They passed a few days together reminiscing about mutual friends, and conducted a number of sorties beyond the post without authorisation from the commandant. Gaden had heard rumours that Moreau was a freemason, as Gouraud believed, but he was in fact a practising Catholic and had become distressed by events at the post. Moreau explained to Gaden that his relations with the local White Fathers from Bouillé in France were strained, and this was not helped by the personality of Father Hébrard, the Père Superieur. This tension was not to be interpreted as religiously fuelled animosity between the colonialist and missionaries, as Gouraud’s suggestion might have implied. Instead, Moreau went on to explain how four families – women and children of French soldiers – had been put in the care of the Fathers. This had caused a good deal of friction since the Fathers made numerous reclamations on the families’ behalf against employees of the post, who were ‘accused of all sorts of things by these moussos [or wives of the soldiers].’30 The bad will towards the post had spread to the local community, and relations between the mission and the colonials were sour. Gaden was however upbeat: ‘Be this as it may, I will do … my utmost to live with them on good terms and to offer to them all the services I am able; but it is essential that they do not hinder my authority as the Commandant of the cercle’ (JHG-HJEG, 10.12.98).

29 Samory’s great-grandson, Ahmed Sékou Toure (1922–1984) became the first President of the Republic of Guinée from 1958, and gained a reputation as an anti-colonial leader whose relations with France were at times extremely tense. 30 Mousso is a word of Bambara origin meaning ‘woman’ used by the French to denote the wives of soldiers, usually married according to local customs.

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In addition, Gaden claimed the Fathers searched out ‘non-Kissien’ [non- local] children and that their aim was to teach them the Kissien language. The issue of teaching local languages to the children of French officers by local women was a thorny one; for many of the officers hoped that they would be taught French in order for them to gain positions later in life as clerks, interpreters, local teachers etc in the colonial service in Africa.31 In his letter to Gouraud on 10th December 1898, Gaden became animated about what language children of mixed unions were being taught at the mission. Why was he apparently so concerned about language? The crucial question was not simply the teaching of local languages, it was rather, it seems, about who these children were. The next three sentences of his letter to Gouraud give us some clues: I am going to send to them or hand over to them myself all four of your [Gouraud’s] kids. I will tear myself away with regret from Mogho Diouise, who has put on five kilograms since my departure from Beyla and is more and more amiable. I have a great longing to keep him, but I will nevertheless faithfully hand him over to the Fathers. Gaden did have a son, who could well have been born around this time, but his date of birth is unknown. Whether Mogho Diouise was one of Gaden’s children we have no indication, but Gaden was obviously deeply attached to him.32 An intriguing fact regarding what probably happened to Gouraud’s children some years later appears in Owen White’s book Children of the French Empire, where the case of a boy at the orphanage in Segou is reported who insisted on signing off his letters to his ‘second mother’, Madame Pion- Roux, as ‘Paul Gouraud’, ‘using the surname of his father, a captain in the colonial infantry. Since his father had not recognised him, however, Madame Pion-Roux referred to him as Paul Koulibaly – the surname of his true mother, who had abandoned him.’33 The details of this child were also reported in the anthropological survey of 1910, which was published in 1912 under the title ‘Enquête sur les croisements ethniques’, in Revue Anthropologique, and was based on information submitted by the doctor at the medical post at Segou. The child’s family background is noted: Paul G …, of mixed race of the first degree, the product of a union between Saran Koulibaly, black, and M. G.…, white, that conformed to local customs; Saran Koulibaly, born in Kita, was of Bambara extraction; M. G… was a captain of

31 See Owen White’s book Children of the French Empire (1999). 32 Mogho is a chiefly title among the Mossi, and Diouise is a boy’s name. 33 My thanks to Owen White for pointing out this reference to me, and for a good deal of other invaluable help in trying to trace Gaden and Gouraud’s offspring (see White, 1999: 83).

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the colonial infantry. Neither party had been ‘married’ prior to this union, which had produced three children, the oldest a boy [Paul] and two younger sisters now dead. Paul’s age was estimated as 12 years, which would date his birth to around 1898, prior to Gaden’s reference to him in his letter to Gouraud.34 It would appear that only three of Gouraud’s children survived to be recorded in the records of the orphanage; perhaps the fourth one died while in the care of the Fathers at Kissidougou. The concern of both Gaden and Gouraud to brush over the traces left in official records and elsewhere of their offspring seems in retrospect to be quite astonishing, and without doubt effective too. That children were born to African moussos, and that they were not recognised by their French fathers, was common practice in the colonies at the time. The pickle that one of Gaden’s contemporaries and colleagues, Maurice Delafosse, found himself in on the eve of his marriage in 1907 to a French woman, Alice Houdas, the daughter of Octave Houdas, the Professor of Oriental Languages in Paris with whom Gaden corresponded, is well known and discussed in his biography. Delafosse had not recognised his two children by a woman called Amoui from the Ivory Coast, but had a pang of conscience days before his marriage ceremony to Alice. The children had been sent to a French school for hostages in West Africa against their mother’s wishes, and she had complained bitterly to the authorities about this treatment. Admitting a checkered past to his future wife on the eve of his marriage, Delafosse had his children hastily recognised through the appropriate civil process. The effect of this revelation on his wife-to-be can only be imagined; that she did not call off the engagement is remarkable. The two métis sons, Jean and Henri, later became important political and administrative figures in Côte d’Ivoire after its independence.35

A Most Ridiculous Figure

By early December 1898, Gaden was bored of his posting to Kissidougou, and he entertained thoughts of demitting office as the cercle’s commandant, since his superiors seemed to him to be so unappreciative of what he was doing. He was anxious for the freedom that sorties from the post offered

34 See ‘Enquête sur les croisements ethniques’, Revue Anthropologique, Vol. 22, Sept-Oct 1912: 337–406, especially 392. 35 See Delafosse’s daughter’s biography of her father entitled Maurice Delafosse (by Louise Delafosse, 1976) in which this story is told.

140 chapter three him, and he planned to leave for 12 days to push into Liberia. He continued to take ‘very attractive photographs’, and he was going to have ‘an almost unique collection of very lively souvenirs that would make for pleasant moments to be taken during my future life in France.’ He had not at this stage at least abandoned ideas about returning to home for good, settling down and leading some sort of life in the metropole. He talked of returning to France as soon as possible, hopefully in August of the New Year. December 9th was his sister Mine’s birthday, which he always remembered over those of his other siblings. Close to him in age by one year, Mine conducted a correspondence with her older brother, and their relationship was strengthened by their mutual interests not only in photography and but also in mountaineering, a past-time in which she excelled. He was always much more solicitous about how she was fairing compared to his other siblings – three sisters and a younger brother – to whom he rarely referred in his letters. There was always an element of disdain, however, in his occasional references to Philippe, nicknamed ‘the twit’ by Gaden (JHG-F, 19.12.98). He returned to the post on 30th December after his tour of the cercle. He had visited all the villages where past rebellions had taken place to dispel any misunderstandings that might take root ‘among these savages’. He announced his arrival among them in the cercle with 120 riflemen. ‘A warm welcome everywhere’, he reported, and the territory was calm. He decided against a foray into Liberia, for he had received ‘severe orders en route not to engage with anyone; I would have had a terrible story [to recount] if I had crossed the frontier’. However, another trip to meet up with an English engineer at the source of the Niger was planned soon in order to determine the frontier with Sierra Leone, a British-held territory. He looked forward to that with much pleasure (JHG-F, 2.1.99). His comrades and former pupils from the same graduation year at Saint Cyr sent Gaden their congratulations on the capture of Samory, and he learnt that a celebratory dinner was going to be organised for him and Gouraud on their return to France. All the accounts of the mission only spoke of Gouraud and Jacquin, and Gouraud was annoyed by the publicity surrounding his name. Jacquin, however, appeared to be making the most of his new-found celebrity, and was widely being fêted as the man who captured Samory. This disgusted Gaden: ‘Jacquin … is very childish’; and he was concerned again that Sergeant Bratières be given the credit for his role. ‘I am for my part delighted to have escaped all this noise which signifies nothing and changes not one thing’. He referred to writing ‘a detailed and scrupulously exact account’ of the affair to set the record straight, and it

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appeared in February 1899 in Le Tour du Monde.36 Gaden’s appreciation of Samory grew by the day: ‘He has nothing of the appearance of a tyrant. He is actually a very handsome black with a superior intelligence and is very active. It is unfortunate that his intelligence and this activity were so badly employed.’ It had also become apparent that despite the continued accusations made against British traders for supplying Samory with arms and ammunition, French merchants had indeed kept him supplied all along, especially those from the Ivory Coast, from Conakry in Guinée and even from Kayes. ‘After this, there is no need to accuse others’, was Gaden’s conclusion (JHG-F, 2.1.99). In early January 1899, Gaden embarked upon a mission to meet up with a British officer from the Royal Engineers to determine the exact position of the frontier with Sierra Leone. He headed towards the source of the Niger equipped, he claimed, only with a compass, and was under orders to note the precise latitude and longitude of the river’s source once he rendezvoused with his British counterpart. This farcical predicament gave him the chance to let loose his wit, once again. He would come over as a ‘paltry figure next to the English lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, who will surely be better equipped’ (JHG-HJEG, 8.1.99). He had been relieved of his command of the post at Kissidougou, which pleased him no end, and this mission to the frontier gave him the chance to indulge in his yearning for travel and adventure. ‘Decidedly, I am dedicated to a truly itinerant existence’ (JHG-F, 13.1.99). After missing his first rendezvous, he finally met up with ‘his Englishman’ along with another officer on 17th January at the source of the Niger, where he feared he cut the most ridiculous figure.37 Gaden received continual dispatches from his commandant to suggest that he ‘carried with him the destiny of France’. He was relieved to find the two Englishmen who, despite being close to what Gaden called the ‘classical’ stereotype of their countrymen, were friendly and easy going. All difficult political questions were avoided, and as officers together they struck up a relationship in which they took no responsibility for the policies pursued by their

36 See Gaden’s account entitled ‘La Capture de Samory’, 1899. Earlier Jacquin had published a letter in the newspaper La Gironde on 8th December 1898 giving his version of events; this followed an account the day before by Sergeant Bratières in the same newspaper. See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC (1) 3. 37 See the letter from the British Lieutenant MacResy, dated ‘15.1.1898’ [sic] – which should surely be 1899 – for he talked of having missed Gaden at Tembi Kunda on the 13th January. Compare with the letters to Gaden’s father and to Gouraud from the same period. CAOM 15 APC/1 (14).

142 chapter three respective governments. Gaden’s sense of shame at his lack of prepared- ness was soon overturned once they dined together: I surprised my Englishman [sic] by the luxury with which I was able to provide a suitable dinner. He had neither a folding chair nor table, only a simple tin of sardines, some salted butter, biscuits and water from the river to drink. I had vegetables, bread, wine, coffee etc, the kind of thing that makes for my blissful comfort. (JHG-F, 22.1.99) Gaden had not lost that French sense of style, even when eating a picnic deep in the Guinea bush. During his mission, Gaden was accompanied by Beau, his mousso, whom he now found wearing on his patience. To Gouraud he expressed his frustrations: ‘I await the first opportunity to send my young mousso back to her dear family. She is completely unbearable.’ He stressed the need to be hard on her, but he felt at times that he lacked the courage to carry out his threats. His tenderness towards her came out as he observed her one night as she slept curled up on a mat in his tent (JHG-HJEG, 8.1.99). He also informed Gouraud that Mogho Diouise had been with the White Fathers for some time, and he had left the boy with much sadness. Father Hébrard, who now had charge of the boy, struck Gaden as being ‘very decidedly inferior to those I have usually seen among the White Fathers. This is unfortunate, [and] for the moment they do not appear to me to do a great deal for Kissidougou.’ Instead of reporting this item of news to his father, he preferred to write in a letter to him that he would soon take over command of the frontier guards stationed in Siguiri, comprising 324 men, three officers and two sub-officers all under his charge. ‘This is an attractive command’ (JHG-F, 22.1.99). By 30th January, Gaden was back in Kissidougou and found the post smoothly run in his absence by his replacement, who had been knee-deep in paperwork. The publicity that the capture of Samory received in the French press continued to concern Gaden, and in particular the part Jacquin had claimed for himself in the campaign. ‘Our petit Gaston’, as he called him, was ‘an excellent lad, very active, very devoted and capable, but not very intelligent’. He was no doubt now in France, where he would be fêted, ‘passing under the arcs de triomphe that his municipality will not fail to erect for him’ (JHG-F, 30.1.99). ‘This is perfect if it amuses him. It is the type of pleasure which would be perfectly disagreeable to me’ (JHG-HJEG, 30.1.99). To Gouraud he admitted that he was extremely happy to have escaped the publicity and the gaze of the journalists, but was concerned about the reception his friend would receive when he returned to France.

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He added that it would give him great pleasure if Gouraud were to visit his parents at 55 quai de Chartrons in Bordeaux before heading to Paris (JHG- HJEG, 30.1.99). The politics of his homeland continued to trouble him deeply: ‘France is therefore this ignominious band [of politicians] that represents the sovereign people. I should say the sovereign scum.’ Captain Voulet’s movements were also occupying his thoughts, for his mission’s departure from Timbuktu en route to Say had just been announced. To Gouraud he confided that he had received word from Voulet that gave Gaden concern about his friend’s state of mind: ‘He [Voulet] tells me [Gaden] “it is not in the least true that I felt a gentle satisfaction in knowing that Gouraud and you hold me in esteem and have warm feelings toward me, the sort that I would only find among my oldest friends”’ (JHG-HJEG, 30.1.99). Voulet had taken offence at the suggestion that Gaden and Gouraud were counted amongst his closest friends, and this outburst shocked Gaden, who sensed perhaps that he was becoming unhinged. This was prescient. Gaden signed off his letter to his parents with the now familiar dig at his younger brother Philippe: ‘I leave you sending my hairy kisses to Maman, my sisters and that cretin Philippe, for he is still one of those who can be embraced like a girl’ (JHG-F, 30.1.99). In Gaden’s absence from Kissidougou, Moreau, who had taken over command of the post again, had been stirring things up with the White Fathers. As a result, Gaden received a ‘personal and confidential’ letter from his superiors asking him to conduct an enquiry into the ‘sharp practices’ of the Mission. Gaden dined with the Fathers, but he thought that since he had been invited to do so it would have been dishonest to conduct an enquiry. ‘After all, I am not a Gendarme, and I do not suppose that the Commandant has the right to inflict on his subordinates missions as repugnant as this one.’38 That his and Gouraud’s children were at the mission-house made the question of an enquiry even more delicate (JHG-HJEG, 15.2.99). By mid February Gaden was en route from Kissidougou to take up command of the frontier guards at Siguiri. He left his company at Kissidougou, for none of his men had volunteered to join him at his new posting. He travelled ‘alone’, that is to say with his Sergeant Berthet, their boys and their families, which made up a considerable entourage. He was

38 The request to investigate the White Fathers had come from Commandant de Lartigue, who had written to Gaden on 29th January 1899 asking for a survey to be carried out in the most discreet manner. Among other issues Gaden was to examine at the mission were the way in they treated infants in their care, and the missionaries’ conduct in relation to the local population. See Fonds Terrier, Correspondence VIII (5898).

144 chapter three received everywhere he went with a very enthusiastic welcome from local people: ‘the news has spread that I came from the column that captured Samory. I have had tam-tams everywhere and I received en route a gift of a bull and 12 sheep!’ (JHG-F, 25.2.99). To Gouraud he opened up his heart at little more: his initial delight on hearing the news of his new posting had now given way to a sense of foreboding on learning more details, and his enthusiasm had all but drained away. His new company were paid only eight sous per day, were supplied with no meat and only 300 grams of rice. They would be a group of ‘poor devils’ half starved and discontent. ‘I will not have a company but an infamous band of thieves or even of sleepy- heads overtaken by the force of inertia’ (JHG-HJEG, 15.2.99). He recounted his recent tour, which was one of the most exhausting he had undertaken. His personnel were ‘dead tired’, and even the loyal Moussa could not understand what Gaden must have done to the Governor to have been condemned to run around so much. Gaden replied that this life-style was preferable to the unending paper-pushing involved in administering a cercle from a French post. ‘Naturally, he [Moussa] did not understand.’ Gaden shared with Gouraud his views on the moral decline of the homeland: ‘France has been prey for many long years to the Freemasons, who have only one agenda: ‘the hatred of the Catholic religion’. They discussed too plans for the future together, in particular the prospects of a posting to Zinder or Chad: ‘I would leave [after some months in France] with great joy above all for Tchad, which I have always wanted to see’. He ended his letter with a revealing note about Beau, his mousso: ‘With that I’m going to bed. It is one o’clock in the morning. My tender mousso wriggles on the mat. She is distressed to be with a toubab [whiteman] as nomadic as her father. I am best, more than anything, when alone in the bush. … I am very difficult to please’ (JHG-HJEG, 15.2.99).

Brutes and Savagery

Gaden arrived in Siguiri on 22nd February 1899, where he found a company of 300 men awaiting instruction and training. They were to be deployed at various posts along the frontier, forming a protective shield against local unrest and British encroachment from the south. Gaden had under his command four officers and ten sub-officers who would be responsible for detachments sent to the outposts, and he also took over the functions of the Commandant of the cercle. Rumours were circulating about a war with Britain, for the French were unsure what their opponents were doing in the

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Ivory Coast; and Gaden put his mind to the way the troops might be mobilised in such an eventuality. What was needed was a ‘vigorous offensive to push back the English to their side’, he thought. But unfortunately, in his view, the Governor General, ‘the illustrious Chaudié’, seemed to have taken a decision to go on the defensive: ‘this would be absurd and shameful’. The British should relent in their expansionist tendencies, for ‘they are becoming a danger to the whole of Europe’ (JHG-F, 4.3.99). Gaden’s life, now calm after months of marching through the bush, gave way again to the monotony and tedium of living at a French post. To alleviate the boredom, he turned again to the old question of commerce, especially the possibility that rubber might be a commodity to exploit. Local production had started in various regions, and ‘there would certainly be a market for rubber in Bordeaux that could rival that in Anvers. … This will be the rehabilitation of the Soudan and of the colonies’, he opined. Cotton was also in his sights, but it would have to be made up as cloth in the Soudan, for fear of it spoil- ing in transit. The tedium of his existence was only broken by the news that a European sergeant had been killed by a leopard near to Kérouané – ‘a rather banal end’, thought Gaden (JHG-F, 4.3.99). News trickled back from the Voulet mission to Chad, and it was not good. Gaden remarked to Gouraud in February that he thought the mission needed further support, but by the beginning of March he heard of the announcement of an arrest warrant issued against Voulet. He wrote a note to ‘poor Voulet’, but the details of what had occurred were still sketchy. He shared with Gouraud, on a more pleasant note, the news of Sergeant Bratières’ and Lieutenant Woelffel’s citation by the Ministry for their part in Samory’s capture, redressing the neglect Gaden felt his sergeant had suffered as a result of Jacquin’s manoeuvrings and self-promotion in France. The commandant had immediately written to the Minister asking for the same to be offered to Gaden and Gouraud, along with the other sub-officers on the campaign. Gaden felt that it was not right for Gouraud’s role in all of this to be diminished, and those of their superiors elevated, especially the part played by Commandant de Lartigue, ‘the Count of Touba’, as Gaden referred to him. He had never ventured further than Nzo during the whole campaign (JHG-HJEG, 5.3.99). Gaden’s thoughts by mid March were turning to his departure from the Soudan and the end of his second tour of duty, and he asked his parents to send to St Louis new formal wear for his return home; Gaden himself hoped to be there by August. Gouraud was due to return to France soon and was expected to be home by the beginning of April. General de Trentinian was leaving Kayes in a few days’ time, and his temporary replacement would be

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‘an unsociable Colonel’ who had brought his French wife to the military headquarters, a rare bird in this part of the Soudan for the period.39 Gaden’s company of auxiliaries from the Samory campaign had finally been licensed, an announcement that brought him much satisfaction (JHG-F, 17.3.99). Trouble was brewing in the south, however, and Gaden was asked to use his experience and knowledge to keep an eye on Mangin, a captain of the Marines, ‘this brute’, who had the reputation of being a crackpot.40 He reported too that the Devèses, despite their capital and influential position, had missed an opportunity to establish a greater commercial presence in the region. A number of smaller traders had got together a flotilla of vessels to carry goods along the rivers, while the Devès trading house relied on the barges belonging to the French administration, and these were not always available for service. The railway from Guinée had now been completed, and this track – along with the line through the Ivory Coast – would be the future conduits for trade. The Devèses had not heeded Gaden’s earlier advice and were to lose out in the long run. In April, Gaden took up command of the post at Beyla (‘a disagreeable end to his tour’) as part of his duties in charge of the frontier guards; he was also concerned about the tapeworm which had been his travelling companion since his trip to the Sierra Leone border. Supplying his posts with sufficient provisions was a constant headache for him, but he still managed to take photographs of all manner of subjects: interior domestic scenes, portraits of men, women, the young and the old, ‘who are all happy to be taken’. In one of the first passages describing his domestic life for his parents, Gaden made some observations in April 1899: ‘For a distraction I have a family of cats, a mother and her kittens who make merry. They climb on the table and dine with us; they often sleep in the day on my bed, and the other day one of them had colic and deposited a stinking souvenir in the middle of my sheets. … We have as well two porcupines that are very sociable [and] when their leashes are pulled they arch up on their feet’ (JHG-F, 17.4.99).41

39 De Trentinian also had his wife accompany him to Kayes, but French women were few on the ground in the Soudan. 40 This was Georges Mangin, the brother of Charles, the soon-to-be-famous General of the First World War. Charles gained the unfortunate nickname of ‘the Butcher’ after his campaign at the second battle of the Marne, and he had also been part of Marchand’s 1898 expedition to Fashoda which ended in humiliation for the French. The hot-head Georges, mad-man Mangin, however, did not live to see the Great War. 41 Perhaps the use by Gaden of the first person plural is significant here – an inadvertent slip?

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By mid May, a reconnaissance mission involving Woelffel and Boyé was en route south to an area where more trouble had been brewing. Gaden received a letter from Woelffel referring to ‘Mangin’s stupidity’ in provoking an attack by local people on the reconnaissance party;42 and at the end of the month he received two letters from Dr Boyé and from Captain Donnat. Donnat informed him that Mangin was wounded, two bullets in his left leg, and ten other men also sustained injuries in an engagement at Man, south of Touba in the Ivory Coast. Dr Boyé then wrote to say that Woelffel had also been wounded at Touba;43 but he went on to add some more disturbing developments: Lieutenant-Colonel Klobb had set out from Timbuktu to take command of Voulet’s mission en route for Lake Chad, and had an arrest warrant to bring both Voulet and Chanoine back to army headquarters. ‘Reasons: atrocities committed and known to the Ministry (from where the order came) by the intermediary at Dahomey. All this is going to make a holy commotion in France.’ Meanwhile, the Dreyfus affair was still raging in France, and in June 1899 the Court of Appeal overthrew the original decision condemning Dreyfus to exile on Devil’s Island and referred the matter back to the Military Court Martial, which was to reconvene later that year. The social unrest in France gave Gaden cause for concern about his return home: I think I am going to return to France to find the country very agitated. The decision of Court has not surprised me. The result of all this for me is that Dreyfus is culpable, incontestably, but the material proof is lacking and some of it fabricated. These are the mores of the Italian republics of the 15th century with the difference that the dagger and poison have been replaced by falsehood and counterfeits. I would have applauded the dagger, an assassination in broad daylight, but I cannot excuse the forgery. (JHG-F, 9.6.99) Gaden had now gained further confirmation of the Voulet mission from other sources: I have heard from two different men that Colonel Klobb has left for Say, where he is going in search of Voulet’s mission. Voulet has been employing violent means. I do not know what has been happening; in any case, I wrote a note to Voulet to assure him of my sympathy no matter what may have occurred. (JHG-HJEG, 8.6.99) As more information about the mission emerged, however, Gaden’s sympathies became more qualified:

42 See Woelffel’s letter of 7.5.1899 to Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/1 (14). 43 Letter from Dr Boyé at Kayes 31.5.1899; Letter from Donnant 27.5.1899. Both at CAOM 15 APC/1 (14).

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I hear reports of unbelievable drivel recounted about Voulet’s mission. Klobb is charged with having to arrest Voulet and Chanoine. They have committed in the cercle of Say acts of savagery, even sadism, that I dare not entrust to paper for reasons of discretion and in fear that it might be read. Think of Voulet’s poor father who lived only for his son of whom he was so proud. I have much affection for Voulet, and that is now completely upturned. I wrote to him to assure him of my every sympathy; but I can only explain it as an act of madness. This does not prevent me from rejoicing egotistically for not having been part of the mission as well as for not having to prevent the atrocities. Gaden was preparing to leave the Soudan and he planned to be in Kayes by 9th July to pick up the steamer, Le Vauban, which was due to arrive in Marseille during the first fortnight of August. The full horror of what happened to Voulet and Chanoine was then to become apparent.

INTERLUDE: FURLOUGH IN FRANCE II

The increasingly vociferous accusations made by the Dreyfusards from 1898 onwards, following the publication of Zola’s open letter ‘J’Accuse’ to the press, and the referral in June 1899 by the Court of Appeal of the original judgement back to the Military Court, were two issues that dented the prestige and reputation of the army. It had been subject to much criticism and its procedures were under scrutiny. The last thing the military needed now was another scandal; but this was exactly what threatened to blow up with the Voulet and Chanoine mission. The military expedition had turned into a ‘veritable infernal column’ that massacred populations who refused to supply it with provisions on its way through the area of Say. Allegations first emerged from Lieutenant Péteau, who was on the mission but was released from duties; he later recited the atrocities committed by Voulet in a letter to his girlfriend, and the details leaked out. In early May, the village of Birni N’Konni with 10,000 inhabitants fell to Voulet, whose company raped, shot and hanged women, men and children, and the settlement was razed to the ground. Colonel Arsène Klobb, the commander from Timbuktu sent to arrest the two officers, on his way along the devastated trail of the column found children hanging like black seedpods from trees. On 14th July 1899, having crossed some 2,000 kilometres in pursuit of the men, in an area between Say and the town of Zinder, Klobb approached Voulet’s column. Voulet opened fire, and Klobb fell dead and his adjutant Meynier was wounded. Voulet then declared to his men: ‘I am no longer French, I am a black chief. With you, I am going to found an empire’. Two days later his Soudanese troops mutinied and killed Chanoine and then Voulet the following day. Lieutenant Joalland, one of Voulet’s adjutants, who was later exonerated as being constrained to act under orders, and Lieutenant Meynier, Klobb’s second-in-command, took the now renamed column on to its destination at Lake Chad; the army could later announce the part this mission played in the conquest of Chad. The explanations for the officers’ actions at the time were given as ‘severe Soudanite’ and ‘the effects of the ferocity of the African sun’. The incident provoked much fierce debate and discussion.1

1 See for further details on the Voulet-Chanoine mission: Régis Guyotat, ‘La colonne infernale de Voulet-Chanoine’ (2004); Porch, The Conquest of the Sahara (2005: 181–197); Girard, La Soudanite (2002); Taithe, The Killer Trail (2009).

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The military fought desperately hard to keep news of this scandal out of the public eye, but it became the subject of an official enquiry. Not only were innocent African civilians massacred, but also one French officer had killed another in cold blood. The Dreyfus affair and the scandal of the Voulet mission were entangled in a web of conceit that threatened to undermine completely the military’s standing. The Right in French political circles made the mistake of identifying itself with the anti-Dreyfus campaign, and it sought to defend the army and the Church, both of which were compromised by the affair. The Left took advantage of this, in particular Clemenceau and Jaurès, who saw that their cause could profit by supporting Dreyfus. What complicated matters further was that Captain Chanoine was the son of General Jules Chanoine, a former Government Minister and high-profile anti-Dreyfus campaigner. The final annulment of the decisions against Dreyfus was announced in 1906; the army was purged and an atmosphere of distrust soured relations between officers suspicious that their fellows might inform on them. Gaden’s feelings of affection for Captain Voulet, his one-time companion from Bandiagara, were destroyed once he learnt of the full extent of the atrocities that had been committed. While other officers were known to have committed excesses in their campaigns, ‘effervescences’ as Gaden referred to them, the scale and the sustained brutality of this mission seemed to shock him. The mental instability that prolonged exposure to conditions in the Soudan could provoke in a man deemed ordinarily quite decent in Gaden’s view, must have had a sobering effect on him; it must have reminded him of the fragile thread of sanity by which they all hung, the precarious grip by which officers clung to the vestiges of normality in the deranged world of France’s overseas colonies in Africa. Gaden’s second tour of duty in West Africa attracted mixed reviews from his superior officers. The Commandant of the South Region in 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Bertin did not report well on Gaden’s early accomplishments: Having some qualities but showing himself unequal, giving proof of his intelligence, activity and initiative but only intermittently, appearing to lack experience and weight, having the need to be directed and supported. However, after the 1899 campaign against Samory, Colonel and then General de Trentinian was much more enthusiastic: An officer of much value, showed himself to be a very good administrator and proved, during the course of the operations against Samory Toure, much

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endurance, energy, sang-froid, and initiative. Contributed personally in large part to one of the operations that led to the capture of the Almamy.2 With the arrest of Samory Toure the last major obstacle to French annexation of the Soudan was removed, and this heralded the end of military campaigns against organised, large-scale African resistance in the region. It was ironic that Gaden had been instrumental in removing one of the very reasons for his interest in overseas postings in the first place – the opportunity for military action. Gaden and Gouraud were, however, already plotting their next moves, which would involve them pairing up at some future point for another tour of duty in French territories in Africa.

After the Samory campaign, Gaden spent around 14 months in France from August 1899 to October 1900. During his period of furlough, he visited his friend Flye-Sainte-Marie’s family in Brittany, and made plans to visit him in Tunisia. Flye-Sainte-Marie was a fellow Saint Cyrard and Gaden hoped his friend might give him advice about a future posting overseas. By the middle of November Gaden was en route by boat to Tunis, and he was pleased to learn that Flye had managed to gain permission from the colonial authorities for a 15-day trip to the south of the country. The north African climate suited Gaden better than the late autumn temperatures of France; it was more like what he had become used to in the Soudan. Flye and Gaden visited Tripoli, toured the Gulf of Gabès and the island of Djerba, and stayed overnight in Ben Guerdane, a village created by Flye in the cercle he commanded. They also visited Matmata, a troglodyte village, which Gaden photographed in an amusing composition.3 He returned to France in mid December and admitted to his father that he would not seek a posting to Tunisia, ‘the situation that we [the French] have made is damnable and inferior, and I would like a thousand times more, if I were to move from Africa, to be in Algeria’ (JHG-F, 15.12.99). As he was returning from Tunis, Gaden was delighted to hear news of Gouraud’s promotion to Chef de Bataillon. Gaden was anxious to learn whether Gouraud had heard any more about preparations for a French mission to Chad, a place that both of them had discussed as a possible future posting (JHG-HJEG, 16.12.99). Gouraud had in fact received an invitation from Lieutenant-Colonel Peroz, who had taken part in earlier campaigns

2 See reports filed on 15th July 1898 and in 1899, in Dossier de Candidature, ANS, Dakar, 1 C 9. Gaden quoted this passage in a letter to his father (JHG-F, 9.4.1900). 3 The photograph is lodged in the Municipal Archives in Bordeaux.

152 interlude: furlough in france ii against Samory, to join him on a mission to establish a new military territory between Zinder and Chad. Gouraud would take command of a battalion, and Gaden now saw his chance for a new posting with Gouraud, who would be able to use his influence to gain a place for Gaden on the mission. By the end of December 1899, Gaden and Gouraud were exchanging letters planning their next postings. Gaden transferred to a new regiment, the 83rds, and joined them on 23rd March 1900. He had also picked up rumours that Governor General Chaudié was to be replaced in a few months: ‘that would be perfect (but keep it to yourself)’ he told Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 1.3.00). Gaden had also got wind of the creation of a colonial army, ‘les troupes d’infanterie et d’artillerie coloniales’, and he was keen to transfer to it, for only certain army officers would be able to be put at the disposition of Ministry of Colonies and so conduct overseas missions and expeditions. ‘It is in the colonial army that I have more of a future or rather a future that conforms more to my tastes and where I would best be able to use my talents. I am persuaded that you [father] will be of the same opinion’ (JHG-F, 9.4.00). The new army cadres would be strongly aug- mented, and this would allow him longer furloughs in France between tours of duty.4 On 21st April 1900 Gaden and Gouraud received news that heartened them both: on the banks of the River Chari [Shari] a few kilometres from Lake Chad, the rendezvous had taken place of the three French columns which had set out some two years earlier from Algeria, the Soudan and the Congo. The remnants of Voulet’s column were now headed by Joalland and Meynier, and the one from the Congo was under the command of Emile Gentil.5 Commandant Lamy, from the North African column, assumed authority over the three sets of troops. He engaged the formidable Central African conqueror Rabah, who had entered the region from Darfur and established a camp to the south of Lake Chad. Rabah’s camp was attacked, razed and the rebel leader was killed in the ensuing battle; his head was later paraded around on a stick by the conquering troops for all to see. Commandant Lamy was mortally wounded in combat, and the French fort built in the area after the victory was named after him – Fort Lamy. Gouraud recounted later that ‘the victory of civilization over barbary’ was sealed by

4 The creation of a new colonial army was ratified by law on 7th July 1900. 5 Emile Gentil (1866–1914), a French colonial administrator, naval officer and military leader, had planted the French tricouleur on the banks of the lake in 1897. His story is taken up in the next chapter.

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the spilling of Lamy’s blood.6 The French conquest of Chad left the region open to annexation by a subsequent French force that would be sent out as soon as the preparations could be made. The French colonial vision, propa- gated by expansionist-minded politicians such as Eugène Etienne, was to create a ‘Greater France’ in Africa that would stretch from Dakar in the west to Abéché in the remote eastern regions beyond Lake Chad, and from Algiers in the north to Brazzaville in the Congo. (See map 3.) By September, Gaden was still trying to persuade his military superiors to approve his attachment to the new overseas mission, and he mobilised all his contacts. While the colonel of his regiment was having none of it, Gaden pushed all the levers he could find, contacting his brigadier, his old colonel-in-chief, and two army generals. Their views could over-ride what his regimental colonel might think, he hoped. He also wrote to Auguste Terrier on 24th September asking for his advice on the matter, and enquir- ing too whether he had suggestions about any other future missions or expeditions.7 Now based in Toulouse for 28 days with a company of reserv- ists with whom he conducted manoeuvres, Gaden continued to chew over the fat of the previous campaign with Gouraud. The aftermath of Voulet’s disastrous mission was still felt, for the affair was dragged out by Voulet’s father who was conducting a campaign in the press to rehabilitate the reputation of his disgraced son: ‘all perfectly stupid … this man has lost all sense’. Gaden’s fear was that the campaign simply fuelled the anti- militaristic stance of some parts of the government, and stoked up the

6 Gouraud, Zinder-Tchad, (1944: iii). 7 See Fonds Terrier, Correspondence VIII (5898) for the letter in which Gaden apologised for this importunity, a formulation that suggests he was still on quite formal terms with Terrier. Gaden later addressed his correspondent with the much more informal ‘my dear friend’. Auguste Terrier was a member of the rather shadowy lobby group Le Parti Colonial, made up of influential politicians, businessmen, newspaper owners and merchants. Army officers comprised one of the constituencies to which it appealed. Eugène Etienne was a high profile member of the group, which also included Delcassé and Hanotaux, two government ministers in 1898, and Ernest Roume, later a Governor General of French West Africa, 1902–07. Le Parti lobbied for an expansion and development of French colonies seen as vital to the nation’s self-image as a world power; its big business backers also saw commercial advantage in such a programme of overseas expansion. The Devès and Chaumet trading house based in Bordeaux and Senegal was one of its major financial contributors and its representatives sat as members of Le Parti’s committee. Gaden’s contact with the group was no doubt facilitated by his Devès family connections. Members of Le Parti were also founder members of four Comités, one of which was headed by Terrier as Secretaire Général and was dedicated to ‘l’Afrique française’. Henri Gouraud it seems was also heavily involved with the group, whose contacts he used throughout his career for future postings and appointments. See Abrams and Miller, ‘Who were the French Colonialists?’ (1976); Persell, The French Colonial Lobby (1983); Roshwald, ‘Colonial dreams of the French right wing’ (1994).

154 interlude: furlough in france ii flames of discontent with the army among the population as a whole. He also confided in his friend more intimate encounters while he was in Toulouse, such as an incident that occurred during his stay in one of the town’s hotels. ‘I went down to the hotel and after 10 minutes I heard my neighbour [a woman] panting heavily in a most significant way. I do not know whether she amused herself alone or if she had company, but it is certain that she was not bored. It is deadly dull for her neighbours’ (JHG-HJEG, 25.9.00).

CHAPTER FOUR

THE MALLAM AND THE QADIS: A POSTING TO ZINDER, 1900–19031

Setting a Course for West Africa

In October 1900, Gaden found a berth on the steamer Mananhao to travel from France to West Africa. He was part of Gouraud’s new mission under Colonel Peroz to Zinder in Niger, an area of increasing importance now that Chad had been stabilised. An outbreak of yellow fever had occurred in Dakar, and this prevented Gaden from disembarking at the port and heading overland through Senegal to the Niger and beyond. Instead, he went around the coast into the Gulf of Guinea, calling at the port of Conakry and then on to Kotonou in Dahomey. From there the column of men and supplies would travel directly north along the border with Nigeria until it reached the Niger River, where it would have to make its way east towards Zinder on the fringes of the Sahara desert. Gouraud had left France about ten days earlier than Gaden and with him were travelling the two Lieutenant-Colonels who were responsible for the new mission: Gaden’s superior officer from Bandiagara, Destenave, now promoted in rank; and Peroz, a tall, thin man of Spanish origin with a hooked nose, piercing eyes and a moustache in the style of Louis XIII. Destenave was to take charge of the mission to Chad, now ‘pacified’ after the defeat of Rabah and his armies. His party continued on board their ocean-going steamer until the mouth of the Congo, which they would navigate up as far as its tributary, the Ubangi, following its course until they reached the area around the Chari River. From there they would descend the river in the direction of Chad. Peroz, who headed up the mission to the region now designated the ‘Third Military Territory’, would be based in Zinder, a town perched above the frontier of British-held Nigeria almost exactly halfway along its east-west axis. The Third Territory was to be divided into two regions, with Peroz allocating himself the eastern part and the western part he gave to Gouraud, under whose orders Gaden envisaged himself serving once they arrived.

1 A mallam is the title of a respected Muslim religious leader or scholar in West Africa, and a qadi is Muslim judge with jurisdiction over religious and secular matters, who oper- ates in relation to the prevailing consensus among the community of scholars, the ulema.

156 chapter four

S A H A R A

F R E N C H W E S T A F R I C A

Bilma TERRITOIRE DU NIGER

Gao Agadez TERRITOIRE MILITAIRE DAMERGOU DU TCHAD DJERMA Battle of KANEM R.Niger GANDA Tahoua Zanguébé Djadjidouna L.Chad Bir Alali OUADDAI Filingué le Guidam Mao rc Dankori e Zinder Baroua Sansané C Bado Ngouri Ati Abéché Niamey Haoussa e Battle of Guidjigaoua L.Fitri d Tessaoua c Galma Moito Sorbo Haoussa? r Yao

A Goulfei Say Kazaoure Mai Bokoro R.Batha Sokoto Fort Aîche Dikoa BARGHIRMI Sana na? Lamy Gaya Kano Kousseri Tchekna Badanga Karnak-Logone Massenya Bahr Erigg Mel Kandi Mandjafa BORNU R.Logone R.Chari Bahr Salamat Bousso (German)TO GO Fort Archambault Parakou Laï Ndélé DAHOMEY NIGERIA

(British) Bahr Sara R.Bamingui R.Gribingui R.Bénoué Logone Occidental Abomey Zagnanado Fort Crampel Porto Novo Lagos R.Niger OUBANGUI CHARI Logone Oriental Krébedjé Kotonou CAMEROON (Fort Sibut) (German) Fort de Possel Bangui Douala Zongo Yaounde Mongoumba

FRENCH R.Congo EQUATORIAL AFRICA

R.Ubangi Libreville FRENCH CONGO Cap Lopez BELGIAN CONGO

R.Kassai Brazzaville Stanley Pool 0 200 miles 400 Leopoldville R.Congo 0 300 kilometres 600 Boma Matadi

Map 3. Missions to Zinder 1900–1903 and to Chad 1904–1907.

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The route to Zinder was going to be much more difficult than the river- ine access to Chad, for the town was at the centre of a semi-desert region. Its climate presented severe difficulties to human travellers, animals found it hard to survive and the production of foodstuffs was limited. There were no water courses to follow, the soil was arid and sandy under foot and the temperatures could rise to the limits of endurance for many Europeans. The supply of provisions and potable water for troops, porters and their beasts of burden was going to be a logistical nightmare. Gouraud described the region as ‘the country of sand’, compared with ‘the country of water’ that was the eastern sector, an area dominated by the three major rivers that Destenave was about to negotiate, and by Lake Chad itself.2 An additional complication that Gouraud and Gaden were going to face was how to plot a course around the north-west corner of Nigeria. Britain and France had signed a convention on 14th June 1898 that had attempted to define the frontier between their two respective territories, and an arc of a circle 100 miles in radius around the town of Sokoto had been agreed. The French had crossed the arc on a number of occasions, much to the annoyance of the British, and reports sent back by these French missions suggested that there was no route around the north-western corner of the country that provided sufficient supplies of water for a large company. A line of wells ran through the British territory just inside the arc, but these would be off-limits to the French column.

Gaden was pleased with the prospect of working with Gouraud in the western region of the territory, ‘this combination does me very well’, and he looked forward to taking over one of the cercles within Gouraud’s patch. Gaden had already placed an order with a book supplier in France prior to his departure to have a number of copies of the Qur’an dispatched to him, no doubt with a view to presenting them as gifts to local informants and for his own use (JHG-F, 27.10.00). The Maranhao disgorged its party of French officers and men on the wharf at Kotonou on 3rd November, and Gaden was met by Gouraud, who had travelled south from Porto Novo to greet his companions.3 Included in the party were comrades of the two Henris from earlier missions, such as Lts Chédeville, Cotten and Georges ‘madman’ Mangin. Kotonou was

2 See Gouraud, 1944: iv. 3 Gouraud recounted these same events in his memoir, Zinder-Tchad (1944), but the dates he recollected in his work do not always coincide with the contemporaneous letters dated by Gaden.

158 chapter four frightful in Gaden’s eyes, a town comprising ugly colonial buildings constructed on a tongue of sand that separated the sea from a lagoon. The native settlements around the lagoon struck him as curious, the kind of thing one might imagine witnessing in prehistoric Europe. From the port, they took a small gunboat up the river to Porto Novo, a town that nestled among a wild profusion of attractive vegetation, but whose climate was humid and unhealthy; and then to Sagon, from where they had to travel overland because the river was no longer navigable. This they did but not by conventional means: they were carried in a rudimentary sort of sedan chair and the passenger sat bestride a piece of cloth or ‘hammock’ stretched between two poles that were supported on the shoulders of two porters.4 Gaden found this mode of transport at once amusing and the most annoying he had ever known. Each hammock was allocated six men, two of whom acted as porters at any one time, and the others worked in relay as the men tired. Sitting or lying on the hammock, his nose the height of the porters’ shoulder blades, Gaden could see nothing as they passed through the long grass, which whipped his face and left him soaked by dew during the early morning. By late afternoon, he was drenched by another source of mois- ture: the sweat pouring off the porters’ heads. Plunging into bogs in which their porters’ legs sank up to their knees, Gaden and Gouraud contrived to race each other, encouraging their porters, now four to a hammock, to push on as fast as they might. The two officers cried and shouted with joy at their ridiculous situation, and they ran the risk of being turned into the muddy marshes at any minute. They laughed their heads off, although we are not told whether the porters found the game quite so amusing. On reaching Parakou, some 300 kilometres from the coast, they started to put together their first proper convoy and abandoned their hammocks for horses. ‘It is the most beautiful lot of nags I have ever seen. Of the 30 horses, there are a good 15 that are incapable of walking, even without a rider, for more than three days.’ The landscape now resembled what Gaden was used to in the Soudan, a more open country, drier, dotted with trees and marked out by more obvious open pathways between villages. A column of 27 Europeans and around 500 porters to carry provisions and baggage was assembled to push its way north to the village of Say on the Niger. In Parakou, Gaden learnt news of the details of his posting: he would not be in command of a cercle under Gouraud’s authority, but instead was to be appointed as the assistant to Colonel Peroz to collate and analyse all

4 This type of seat was known elsewhere as ‘filanzane’.

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the political and topographical information collected by other officers. While he thought this task would be interesting in itself, he would have much preferred the command of a cercle that would have allowed him a lot more independence. Slightly crest-fallen and uncertain of his relationship with Peroz, with whom he was ‘destined to live during the whole tour of duty’, he could not prevent himself from feeling overlooked. ‘The Colonel has up till now been excellent towards me, but he is a man who has been very quick tempered, and has a reputation of being difficult to serve. I will be obliged to watch myself constantly, and I would have preferred to leave him and go [to dine] at the table of my comrades.’ The one consolation was: ‘I can only learn by being in the presence of a chief of much value, very true and very loyal, something different from [his previous experience of] Destenave or de Lartigue’ (JHG-F, 19.11.00). By 27th November the convoy had reached Kandi, less than 100 kilometres from the Niger, a beautiful village containing large huts framed by tall trees, a picturesque scene shrouded in the smoke bellowing from the villagers’ fires used to cook their evening meal. This was the country of cattle herders, the Peul, whose beasts and herds of sheep and goats returned to the settlement at twilight. This was familiar territory for Gaden, who by now was conversant in a dialect of their language learnt during his time at Bandiagara. From Kandi they pressed on to Gaya, the last French post on the border with British territory, and crossed the Niger in pirogues or dug- out canoes. The village of Sanafina marked the last settlement they passed through in the Soudan proper, for they were now entering a country neighbouring the desert regions, where date palms were the only significant signs of life among the sparse vegetation. They finally arrived at Say on 12th December, a meagre village now past its former glory as a centre of commerce ever since the Hausa caravans had stopped passing that way. Situated on a low-lying plain close to the river, which inundated the area when in full flood, Say was inhabited by marabouts who earned a living from dispensing Islamic talismans and cures and from alms donated by the faithful. Their straw dwellings in the village were dominated by the tall-roofed buildings of the French post that stood nearby.

Sejourn in Say and Sorbo Haoussa

As information officer, Gaden was now in charge of drawing up maps on the basis of geographical details provided by officers sent out on reconnaissance missions to the east. With only the slightest hint of jealousy,

160 chapter four he remarked that Gouraud had gained his independence as commandant of the western region and was responsible for tours of the country, while Gaden lived cheek-by-jowl with the colonel, and had his nose stuck in paperwork. Gouraud would come and eat from time to time with Gaden and the colonel, but these meal times were an ordeal for Gaden since the colonel was a colonel 24 hours a day, and the dinner table was not a relaxing place. He appreciated, nonetheless, Peroz’s qualities despite his prickly character: ‘[He] makes an effort to be benevolent, and is very much so with me.’ Gouraud was due to leave Say with 200 riflemen on the 23rd December to head north towards Djerma Ganda, a region on the left bank of the Niger which was yet to come under total French control. Gaden met up with Captain Joalland, the replacement leader of the Soudan column that had finally succeeded in reaching Lake Chad. He now had the chance to hear first hand about the horrors of Voulet’s trek across the Soudan that had ended in disaster at Dankori, west of Zinder. Gaden now learnt how Voulet had changed completely after the departure of the mission and had become absolutely unbearable over the course of the journey. Apart from the assassination of Klobb by a fellow officer, an event unheard of in recent times, Gaden found it difficult to understand why the officers who were part of the mission seemed to abnegate completely their sense of personal responsibility for what had happened. Why hadn’t they intervened earlier? Just up-stream on the Niger from Say, the village of Sorbo Haoussa became in mid January 1901 the base for the mission’s reconnaissance sorties to find a route through to Zinder, around the arc of the circle of Nigeria. While still at Say, the party received a visit from an officer who brought a letter of protest from the British authorities complaining about a violation of the territorial boundaries. A telegram from the French high command quickly followed instructing the mission to ‘take the route [to the north of the arc] despite the discomfort’. No further encroachment on to British territory would be countenanced. Gaden was relieved to leave Say and to arrive in an area that was much more heavily populated, better cultivated and completely tranquil. Despite the high temperatures, the sand and the dust, the village was a healthier place and Gaden no longer felt the need to continue with his quinine against malaria. Gouraud was on the march and Gaden, ‘more and more riveted to the colonel’, found Peroz to be terribly proud and authoritarian, and he needed all his self-discipline and compo- sure not to tell him to go to hell. ‘I have no independence and would have preferred any other situation in spite of the advantages that this one brings.’ They planned to set out for Zinder in three weeks’ time, but first had to find a route through the desert zone without wells to replenish their water

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supplies, and this would make for an arduous journey during the dry season. ‘The country around Zinder will be a true paradise next to this’, Gaden observed (JHG-F, 12.1.01). Gaden was installed in two straw huts, similar to native ones, although they were joined together by a light and airy covered passage in which he worked during the day. His ‘palace’ had been put up by half-a-dozen riflemen in two hours, ‘which will give you an idea of its dimensions and comfort; I am obliged to wear my helmet all day, for the sun enters [the huts] through every side’, he told his father. He shared this grand residence with his aide-de-camp and his boy, a young Peul. ‘Neither one nor the other speak a word of French, and I stumble on in Bambara with one and in Peul with the other. … My two blacks snore’, he remarked (JHG-F, 12.1.01).

Stuck in a Sea of Sand

Gaden had counted on being en route to Zinder by the end of January 1901, but as each day passed, the heat increased and the drought worsened, and their preparations looked far from being complete. Colonel Peroz was in a poor state of health, having arrived in West Africa almost three months earlier already fatigued and lacking energy. They planned to reach Tahoua, a post on the fringes on the Sahara in the heart of Tuareg country, and then push on to Zinder; but they required camels for the desert journey, oxen to carry their effects, and cow hides to make up as containers for water. The Tuareg in the region had not submitted to French rule, and so any incursions into their territory would be fraught with danger, in addition to the problems of travelling 200 to 240 kilometres without reliable access to water. Captain Moll had recently completed a trip of 60 kilometres through the desert over rocky ground, and had lost almost all of his beasts of burden. The prospects did not look good. The one high point for Gaden was that Gouraud returned with his company of men from his reconnoitre and brought back valuable information on the geography of the area, which allowed Gaden to fill in a blank space on his map. However, other news was discouraging, for there were only two small expanses of water to the north- east, around which millet, some very poor beans and cotton were cultivated. ‘I barely understand what it is that we are doing in this filthy place we occupy, where the only things of interest I see are a few ostrich feathers and very little ivory’ (JHG-F, 12.1.01). As an extra duty Gaden was charged with looking after the soldiers’ mess, a task he found particularly disagreeable, for it involved a daily battle

162 chapter four against the villagers to extract from them a few eggs and some inedible beans. They were reduced to eating two portions of rice per day, one in the morning and the other at night, all prepared by a ‘detestable and unclean cook’, whom Gaden discovered washing dishes and plates in a calabash he used for his own feet. ‘This detail is for mother’, he announced (JHG-F, 12.1.01). His frustrations with the inertia and seeming hopelessness of the mission were getting to him. It was now almost three months since he had set foot again on West African soil, and the column had travelled only around 900 kilometres in that time, having spent one month loitering on the left bank of the Niger. Orders and counter-orders were regularly issued by Peroz concerning the actual date of departure from Sorbo Haoussa for Tahoua, nonetheless by mid February Gaden was expecting the company to leave very soon. Once they reached Tahoua, the idea was that they would try to establish a route through to Tessaoua, a village some 300 kilometres to the east, over half way to Zinder. This village was just south of Dankori, the infamous place where Klobb had met his demise at the hand of Voulet. They did not know what reception awaited them if they passed through this region, although they suspected that the local inhabitants would be hostile to any sort of French presence. Gaden’s concern was that they would be stuck in Tahoua, surrounded by belligerent populations who, at the very least, would not supply them with the pack animals they would need to continue on (JHG-F, 9.2.01). Gaden was so absorbed with preparations for the march to Tahoua that did not write to his parents for over one month. He arrived at the post on 9th March 1901 and was given responsibility for all the arrangements of the camp, finding suitable water supplies and establishing relations with the local populations. Tahoua, around 190 kilometres north of Sokoto, was a large village of rather miserable straw huts housing a population of between 3,000–4,000 inhabitants, who supplied agricultural produce to the nomadic Tuareg. It was one of the most northerly inhabited settlements in the area, an island of straw in a sea of sand, which was whipped up each day into a haze of dust by the north-easterly winds that blew in from the Sahara. The only crops that could survive in this environment were millet, a little cotton that did not thrive well at all, indigo and some wheat, which provided the company with the ingredients to make a barely edible black bread. Herds of animals competed with the cultivation of crops for the meagre supplies of well water and, as Gaden remarked, the Tuareg pastoralists were the ‘great destroyers of cultivation and trees’, which were at the mercy of their hungry beasts. The French post was established on a dune to the north-west of the

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village, and the officers improvised shelters of straw in the shape of half melons resting on the ground in which they pitched their tents. Arbours made from arched branches covered in dried grasses provided them with additional shade during the hours of scorching sun between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Gaden wrote to Auguste Terrier on the 17th March about Tahoua: ‘You recall the words of Lord Salisbury on the Gallic cock. Poor cock. I’m afraid that no matter how much energy it has to scratch in the sand, it will never find anything there of value. This is a sad country…’.5 Rumours circulated in March that Colonel Peroz would return to France by the end of the year, for his health was poor and the harsh conditions were taking their toll on him. If this were to happen, Gouraud would be withdrawn from the western region of the territory to replace him, and Gaden himself might then be given a separate command, a prospect much to his liking. Gouraud and his column had by now managed to gain the submission of the Tuareg living in the area, and he developed a new strategy to reconnoitre the fringes of the desert and their populations. He organised five detachments among his company, split into small platoons of around 50 men, and mounted them on camels to patrol the desert. These mobile, quick response units were called meharistes, the camel-corps, and were some of the first to be deployed in West Africa.6 Georges Mangin headed up one such platoon, and he took up the life-style of nomadic desert folk with relish. These French forces coursed through the desert ‘to pacify’ warring bands of Tuareg, whom they increasingly came to resemble in all but name. Gaden remarked ironically that the success of these detachments and the presence of French troops in the region along the northern frontier with Nigeria provided the British with an excellent corps of border guards, a human shield against encroachment from the menace of the Saharans. Always the eager hunter and forever keen to pick up knowledge about the habits of animals, Gaden spied the occasional game and other animals that came close to the post from time to time – hyenas, jackals and sometimes antelope. He puzzled about where they found access to water holes, for all the human settlements relied on wells to supply drinking water, and local people reported that there were no permanent pools nearby where

5 Gaden was referring here to Lord Salisbury’s quip made some years earlier when, as the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary under Queen Victoria, he compared the territories held by the British and the French in Africa, remarking that a region should be judged by its value, not merely by its size. The French were given a free hand in parts of the Sahara: Let the Gallic cock sharpen his spurs in the desert sand, he added. 6 See for further information, Grévoz 1994, Les Méharistes.

164 chapter four the animals might gather to drink. He met a hunter, dressed in sheepskin, whom he interrogated on this question. The best centres for hunting were in the mountains some 12 hours march from the nearest wells, and the man passed on to him a piece of local knowledge. When in need of water, one could kill an antelope and suspend its entrails from a tree. If the entrails were punctured at the bottom, water would seep from a hole and could be collected in a calabash resting underneath. ‘It seems that this déjà bue is a great pleasure when one is thirsty’, Gaden stated. The hunter went on to elaborate his ideas about a society of bush animals which, he claimed, were organised into villages with animal masters who controlled their drinking holes. His evidence for this was that he had killed antelope with red mark- ings like those on domestic cattle, and giraffes with rings through their noses like camels – these were, it seems, the ‘masters’. ‘My man certainly mocks me’, was all Gaden had to say. Gaden’s appreciation of local knowledge went only so far; he could well accept the practical tips on survival techniques in the bush, but was not ready to countenance the mythopoet- ics espoused by his hunter informant.

Arrival in Zinder

The column of troops and its convoy left Tahoua on the evening of 25th March 1901 marching east through the night towards Zinder. The mountainous route they took to Guidam Bado was picturesque at the outset, although it was an increasingly hard slog as the night wore on and as the attractions of the landscape could no longer entertain the eye and divert the mind. They passed through settlements inhabited by dependent black populations that served Tuareg masters, and they found a welcome reception from the sedentary folk. The Tuareg were another kettle of fish altogether. On 2nd April, the colonel, Gaden and the party destined for Zinder set off, leaving Gouraud with 75 riflemen at Guidam Bado. His role was to ‘install’ a French presence in the country and to patrol the western sector of the Third Territory in an attempt to cajole the Tuareg into submission. Installation was often a euphemism for the suppression of populations that resisted French annexation, and already the passage of the column through the region had stirred up hostilities in its wake. Villages had been pillaged and couriers had been ambushed en route by Tuareg between the military posts. Gouraud had engaged one party of them, who charged bravely on camels at the small company of men formed into a defensive square; the attack left four riflemen dead and a number wounded. The attackers

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suffered heavy losses and scattered after half an hour of combat. ‘The success is very certainly going to bring about their definitive submission’, thought Gaden (JHG-F, 29.4.02). Meanwhile, the convoy continued on its way to Zinder, and their attempts to find water each morning on their arrival at a new stop-over pushed the men to the limits of endurance. In the early hours of 3rd April, they came across a dried-up pond in the middle of the bush, and needed to dig down two metres into the sand before water seeped through into the pit. These scant supplies had to provide for 300 men and 37 horses. The demands placed on Gaden to organise the march increased as Peroz became evermore ineffective and was overcome by sleep whenever the chance presented itself. The colonel was not himself, and Gaden carried responsibility for the whole company. Some time later as the convoy plod- ded along, the party was overjoyed at seeing a pool of water shimmering on the surface of the land. Not a mirage, and surrounded by date palms, the stretch of water glistened in the harsh light of the Sahelian sun, and the scene was animated with local people passing to and fro to draw water. The exhausted travellers were cheered by the sight, for this was the first fresh water they had seen since leaving the Niger, some 750 kilometres to the west. On 20th April 1901, the convoy entered Zinder with all the pomp and ceremony the company could muster given its rather dilapidated state. The colonel had been cantankerous for the last few days of their march, but Gaden had managed to keep a cool head and not rise to provocation. It had taken the company over five months to reach the town from the time they had docked in late October at Kotonou in Dahomey, an epic voyage that had left everyone drained. The route through to Zinder around the arc of the Sokoto circle had been completed by a large company of men and pack animals, and the military posts the French left dotted across the region were now hives of activity as the men stationed on the inhospitable margins of the desert dug wells and built dwellings. These were the future points for provisioning convoys and for aiding communication with other parts of French West Africa.

The Town of Zinder

Zinder is a town set on an up-thrust of granite forming a plateau that dominates in all directions a sandy plain spread out below reaching into the far distance. The country attached to this capital, Zinder, is known as

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Damergou, a semi-fertile region that supports large numbers of horses, sheep and troops of camels. This is the granary of Zinder, producing millet, vegetables and some cotton. The town, with a population of around 3,000 at the time of Gaden’s arrival, was a great emporium of trade across the Sahara between the Hausa states of the south and the Tuareg regions and Tripoli in the north. Formerly under the suzerainty of the empire of Bornu in northern Nigeria, it shook off the yoke of the Bornu sultan after his defeat by Rabah a few years earlier. It had since then maintained its independence, and the growing French presence from the late 1890s guaranteed that it would be protected from further incursions threatened by other regional powers. The town itself was encircled by high earthen walls some ten metres deep at their base and rising to over eight metres in height; they presented a daunting sheer face to the external onlooker. The wall stretched for about ten kilometres around the circumference of the town, and it was pierced by seven gates and cut along its length by saw-tooth battlements through which archers standing on the galleries could fire off volleys of arrows. It gave protection to the town’s houses, some built of mud, some of straw, set out along narrow streets that were planted with many grand trees. A number of the mud dwellings were impressive, rectangular in form with finials displayed along their rooftops. Clusters of enormous boulders lay strewn across the town, as though cast by some giant hand from the sky. The vast French fort, known as Fort Cazemajou situated just outside the town, was similar in appearance to the native settlement itself, but it presented a more barren urban space of mud buildings and was studded with slabs of rock and rounded boulders that had been washed and weathered by the occasional rains over many years. Around one-and-a-half kilometres to the north of the walled town was the village of Targuie de Zengou, comprising only straw huts and populated by 4–500 inhabitants. This was a place of commerce, with a lively market frequented by traders from all points, including a large number of Tuareg and North African merchants. High quality leather goods, especially the knee-length boots worn by local dignitaries and French officers alike, embroidered bridles, jewellery and decorated calabashes were all on offer. Another highly important commodity was salt from Bilma, an oasis in the Sahara desert. Gaden found quarters inside the walls of the town itself, where he was sheltered from the distractions of the post. The heavy, iron-clad gates of the town were closed every night, and so added to the sense of isolation from the outside world. He occupied, along with the mission’s interpreter, Landeroin, buildings attached to the house in which the colonel was

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billeted, where Captain Moll usually resided. Moll was the town’s long- standing commanding officer. Gaden’s accommodation was overbearingly hot inside, and so he and his companion slept in the open-air courtyard at night; conditions were insalubrious, the place was infested by cockroaches and rats, and they shared their lodgings with 35 chickens that regularly ran amok. Living as such close neighbours to the colonel caused Gaden to suffer the inconvenience of being on hand at every moment; and Peroz was turning into a ‘more austere chief than the most austere Quaker’. Some of the indigenous buildings were grand and sumptuously decorated, the most spectacular of which was the Sultan’s palace with its spacious courtyards and pillared porticos and terraces. Another was that owned by Mallam Yaro, the chief of the commercial settlement at Zengou, and an important and influential trader in the town. He lived in a house that Gouraud later compared with the sort occupied by a 15th-century Maghrebian lord in a north African kasbah. It comprised a labyrinth of courtyards, corridors, keeps and rooms, two of which were richly adorned with deep velours, silk and gold. Mallam Yaro impressed Gaden immensely, whom he described as the most intelligent inhabitant of the region. Gaden later described him as a ‘most precious man’, who served the French mission loyally. Mallam Yaro was of Tuareg stock, from one of the servile populations, a figure of medium build who wore a long Soudanese gown and white turban. Overall, the town struck Gaden as ‘perhaps the prettiest situation that I’ve seen in the Soudan’ (JHG-HJEG, 28.4.01). It was well provisioned, apart from a lack of sugar and the unpleasant well water. The town of Zinder was the seat of the Sultan of Damagherim or Damagaram, whose country included the Damergou region to the north.7 The colonial frontier with Nigeria, drawn between British possessions in the south and French territories on the desert margins, had cut the Sultan’s country in two, with some of the richest lands now lying in British-held areas. Not only did the border cause problems for the French, but the Sultan had lost a good deal of productive land under the imposition of colonial rule. The country was divided into cantons, each of which was under the authority of a local chief. The cantons or their sub-sections were allocated to two important groups of palace officials: the Sultan’s eunuchs and his captives. They levied taxes and regulated the affairs of their respective territories, which also provided men for military service. Most of these

7 For further details on the Sultanate see Gaden 1904, ‘Notice sur la Résidence de Zinder’, and Sailfou (1971) and Baier (1980) for further details on the history of the polity and region. See also Veillard (1939).

168 chapter four officials lived in Zinder itself and constituted a court around the Sultan’s opulent palace; indeed, captives and eunuchs formed the majority of the population of the town, with freemen and their families in the minority. These latter lived mostly outside the town in the surrounding villages where they practised agriculture and commerce. The Sultan himself was by and large isolated from his subjects, and a complex code of etiquette governed relations with him, to the extent that he only received supplicants shielded from them by a screen. Male inhabitants paid homage to him on bended knee, and would pour handfuls of sand and dust over their heads in his presence. (The women did not have to perform this custom.) His court was a hive of intrigue in which courtiers would jostle for position, and the demands of his many courtesans and wives diverted his attention as well as a large part of his income. The Sultan’s eunuchs, around 40 of them, carried a range of titles including: the Moustarama, who was responsible for receiving and distributing the Sultan’s gifts; the Bellama, a kind of prime minister, charged with the supply of millet and beef provisions in the territory, and with the administration of the Sultan’s harem that comprised between 300 and 400 women. The women were kept in purdah and no [complete] man could gain access to their court apart from the Sultan himself. Eunuchs were allowed to marry, but this custom was seen as a moral outrage by the local Muslim leaders, who attributed droughts to the displeasure that Allah felt towards this unnatural practice. The eunuchs came from the ranks of the captives, and those selected for the honour were taken to the village of Ifra close to Zinder, where the operation was performed by a blacksmith. Gaden estimated that only three out of ten such chosen men survived their change in status. Those who did were presented by the Sultan with a handsome horse and elegant gowns, and they could look forward to a life of luxury. Despite the dangers of being incorporated into this elite corps, Gaden stated, volunteers were not lacking for this high office. In Gaden’s time as Resident, an impoverished freeman had volunteered and survived the operation, and another poor fellow had presented himself a number of times at the fort asking to be made into a eunuch to serve either the Sultan or the Residence itself. Gaden responded that this form of employment was not included in the colonial budget, and so he could not give the man any satisfaction. The Sultan’s captives were also given a range of offices that bore titles: from the Serky M’Bay who commanded the freemen and the captives of the town; the Serky N’Touraoua, a kind of minister of external affairs who dealt with the whites, that was the Arab traders prior to the arrival of Europeans;

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to the Serky N’Shanou who was charged with responsibility for collecting taxes from the cattle herders who pastured their animals in the Sultanate.

The Murder of Captain Cazemajou8 Gaden’s postings in West Africa often followed the first wave of French penetration into regions recently opened up to annexation by colonial forces. He was often part of the first contingent of officers to arrive and install a permanent French presence in newly acquired territories. He had been stationed at Bandiagara in 1894, coming not long after the successful military campaign pursued by Archinard to ‘pacify’ the area. But there was often a spectre of defeat that hung over these missions; in Bandiagara, a shadow had been cast by the massacre of Colonel Bonnier and his men at Timbuktu around one year prior to Gaden taking up his post. A similar pattern of events had also run their course in Zinder before his arrival in the town. In the late 1890s Captain Cazemajou had been charged with reconnoitring a route from the Niger through to Chad, Kanem and Ouaddai in central Africa, into regions yet to be claimed by the French towards Darfur in the Sudan and the Nile. This was territory that had been overrun by the ruler Rabah some time earlier, and he represented a threat to French progress into the area north of Nigeria and further east. Cazemajou arrived in Zinder in April 1898 with his interpreter, Olive, and some Soudanese riflemen; initially the party was well received. On 5th May 1898, the day on which the two French officers were due to bid their farewells to the Sultan of Zinder and travel further east on their mission, they were bludgeoned to death with clubs and their bodies thrown down a well. The role of the then Sultan, Amadou I, in Cazemajou’s death was never fully determined, but he died in battle against French forces led by Joalland and Meynier in September 1899. These two officers were part of the ex-Voulet and Chanoine column that passed through the town en route to Chad. With the help of the new Sultan, Amadou II (the late Sultan’s brother), and Mallam Yaro, the merchant, the assassins were hunted down and executed. Captain Moll and 150 riflemen reached the town to relieve Joalland and his company, and the captain remained in Zinder until Colonel Peroz’s party limped in to the newly-named Fort Cazemajou in April 1901. Gaden discovered later that the qadi, Mallam-Suleyman, and two marabouts in Zinder had been consulted by officials in the court of Sultan Amadou I, but the religious leaders had refused to give their consent to the

8 See Gaden, Notice sur la Résidence de Zinder (1904: 68–9) and Gouraud (1944: 83) for accounts of Cazemajou’s murder.

170 chapter four murder of Captain Cazemajou. However, a third marabout, recently arrived in the town from Kano, counselled death to the two infidels, and the deed was carried out by some of the Sultan’s captives.

As Peroz and his company of men arrived in Zinder, news came through of Gouraud’s victory on 13th April at the battle of Zanguébé in the west against Tuaregs, the Kel Gheress. The battle was a bloody, hair-raising encounter in which the French had to hang on grimly until the very last Tuareg had fallen. Two of them at the end had charged alone on foot towards the French lines, where they were gunned down by the new ‘74 rapid-fire rifle. The effect of this new weapon was frightening, for it could bring down a group of charging men and camels with one sustained volley. Gouraud himself had a close escape when a rifleman was hacked apart by a group of Tuareg only 200 metres away, and they then turned upon him; he had to fight for all he was worth to save himself. ‘These fellows there are astonishing’, Gouraud exclaimed, adding later that ‘the resistance of the Tuaregs at Zanguébé [was] heroic. For once the word is not exaggerated’ (HJEG-JHG, 16.4.01 & 25.4.01). Gaden sent him his congratulations on ‘your brilliant affair’, and the colonel planned to mention Gouraud’s feat in dispatches to the Governor. A mission was in the offing for Gaden too, who was eager to grab a bit of the action for himself; he planned to travel north into the Damergou, an area on the fringes of the Sahara, with a company of 120 rifles to establish a post there. He would have to travel more than 60 kilometres across inhospitable country without access to water, a fact he had learnt from reading the reports left by Commandant Foureau, who had been part of the Algeria column headed for Lake Chad and had travelled south from north Africa across the Sahara some years earlier. His expedition would be wholly ‘pacific’, and his understanding was that the local Tuareg were at war with each other, so his role would be ‘simply that of a referee’; or perhaps he would adopt the well-known colonial strategy of playing one group off against the other, in the hope of eventually gaining the support and the submission of the victorious party. He needed camels for the mission, a scarce commodity in Zinder. Some local caravaneers plying their trade between the desert and the town had refused to enter Zinder for fear that their animals would be requisitioned by the French for their convoys. Gaden enquired hopefully of Gouraud, following on from his success against the Tuareg, whether he would soon announce the capture of camels, cattle and sheep, and of women as well. Gaden hoped he might share in the division of war booty to supply his mission. Not only were camels on his

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mind, but women were too. Indeed Gaden had found Captain Moll installed in a village a few days’ march away ‘in the midst of ten women who make up his harem’. ‘Always a charming lad but who appears to be half asleep among the delights of his post’, Gaden observed (JHG-HJEG, 26.5.01).

Deception in the Damergou

Gaden left Zinder on 5th May 1901 with a company of riflemen to head north to the Damergou on a mission that would last around one month. He wrote to his father from the village of Djadjidouna, the capital of the region, on 11th May. Despite the hardships of the journey through arid landscapes, with few trees, detestable water and a dust-blown breeze in which one could not avoid continually swallowing sand, he was keen to savour a period of liberty and independence from the post and the stern authority of the colonel. His march north went without incident, and he found only half abandoned villages from which many of the inhabitants had fled fearing the presence of French troops. They camped outside villages next to wells, and the riflemen were under orders not to enter settlements to avoid the possibility of ugly confrontations. Villagers provided the company with supplies and Gaden had not been obliged to ‘take any for themselves’ without approval. Local confidence in the French mission was slowly recovering, and Gaden reported that he had made contact with Denda, a local Tuareg chief, who had sent him letters apparently offering his submission; but he was elusive and decamped whenever the French came near to his positions. ‘The Tuaregs are with their women, children and troops of camels in the bush where they are losing many to thirst.’ He went on: ‘I could follow them and raid them, but I will try all means before hunting down these unfortunates.’ He was concerned that the critical situation the Tuareg found themselves in might force them to conduct reprisals and raids against passing caravans. ‘This would be highly disagreeable for us all.’ He wrote to all the Tuareg chiefs in the hope that meetings could be convened; but would they come? Two weeks later, Sultan Ibrahima based in Agadez indicated his intention to offer submission to the French, and this was ‘a very great political success of which the colonel ought be absolutely proud’, Gaden suggested to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 26.5.01). Indeed, Gaden attributed some of his success to Gouraud’s actions in the west, following his victory in the battle of Zanguébé one month earlier. The initial distrust of the French among the sedentary African villagers, rather than the nomadic Tuareg, was starting to

172 chapter four dissolve. The villagers had now started to report to the Soudanese riflemen, in whom they obviously had more confidence than the white officers, that for the last five or six years they had been constantly pillaged by the desert nomads. Gaden hoped that the French presence and a military post under construction at Guidjigaoua would help prevent further raiding. ‘Everyone has been delighted [with the post] and [villagers’] attitudes have changed immediately. As regards the Tuareg, I am floundering in the midst of a thousand difficulties with them.’ Gaden then experienced a significant set-back, which concerned the letter he had received from Denda, the local Tuareg chief. The letter, poorly translated by a marabout from Agadez, turned out not to be an offer of the Tuareg’s submission, but instead was a ‘very highly insolent’ missive that greatly offended Gaden. Totally misled, Gaden now rethought his strategy towards Denda, and considered sending him an ultimatum (JHG-HJEG, 26.5.01). Gaden worried that the deception played on him over the content of the letter would cause trouble with the colonel. However, for the moment Gaden could report to Gouraud that Colonel Peroz had ‘married’ a local girl in early May and that he hoped his mind might be elsewhere; the Sultan’s wife, however, had disapproved of the marriage. But how long would it be before Gaden himself took the plunge and tied the knot, his friend wanted to know (HJEG-JHG, 28.5.01)?

Resident in Zinder

Gaden had heard little from Gouraud for many weeks, apart from a short note received on 7th June. When he returned to Zinder at the end of June, Gaden’s concerns mounted about his friend’s safety. Gaden had written to him on 10th June, but was still waiting for a reply, and again on the 28th. Gouraud was no doubt back in action in the west with his small column of men, and Gaden reported to his father: ‘I am sorely afraid for him’ (JHG-F, 30.6.01). French hopes were premature that the defeat of the Kel Gheress at the hands of Gouraud’s company in April would bring about their submission, and Gaden’s experience in the Damergou suggested that dealing with the Tuareg was not straightforward. Other news worried Gaden too, particularly rumours that Fadel-Allah, the son of Rabah, had mobilised his troops and was on the move south of Lake Chad. While these developments were far from his immediate situation, Gaden had mused over the idea with Gouraud of meeting up at the lake side at some point in the future with their old friend Captain Millot, now serving in the east with Destenave’s

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company. ‘A jolly crowning of our Soudanese careers’, Gouraud called the idea; but this plan would be seriously compromised if the intelligence turned out to be true. Gaden was not unhappy to return to Zinder. While he had enjoyed the freedom of movement and independence from the colonel, he had suffered from ennui. Gaden was still smarting from being given the run-around by Denda, and felt that the marabout had purposefully misled him over the translation of the letter. What Gaden learnt on his return was that the colonel had been on the point of suspending Gaden’s mission over the confusion with the letter, and Mangin had been primed to tell Gaden to return immediately. Gaden would have been humiliated had his bête noire been sent to recall him, and he questioned the colonel’s judgement: ‘I have been rather vexed, as you might think, by this conclusion’, he admitted to Gouraud. However, the colonel was in his own spot of bother with the Governor General, for he had received a dispatch from St Louis in which the Minister of the Colonies in Paris had expressed serious concerns over indiscretions reported to him that appeared to have been committed by troops from the Third Territory. Gaden was unsure of the exact details (JHG-HJEG, 28.6.01). In June, Gaden transferred to the position of Resident of Zinder, replac- ing Captain Moll, the man with expansive tastes and a large harem of women. Moll took over Gaden’s role as assistant to the colonel. Gaden’s new position involved mundane tasks like organising convoys and couriers, as well as providing provisions for the enormous garrison at the post: ‘one ton of millet and two head of cattle per day’, he reported. Gaden would have preferred a transfer to Chad, where the stirrings of Fadel-Allah and his men would have given the posting a sense of urgency and importance. ‘Here I am once more washed up, and I will no doubt stay here for some time’, he grumbled to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 28.6.01). Dejected about his prospects and angry with the colonel (‘this appalling man’), the post had become for him a place of bleak sadness. ‘All this will end, I hope, with his [the colonel’s] departure’. One consolation with his new post was that Gaden was spared the pain of dining with the colonel every day.

‘Since Kotonou’, he complained to his father, ‘I was invited morning and evening to my colonel’s table, constrained from the first day to the last. It was becoming odious to me. I breath more easily [now] with my friends … [and] we are free to say whatever passes through our heads, and this is an appre- ciable relaxation… I was under the master’s eye, and a terribly authoritarian master too. I have rarely seen a more difficult man to serve, nor one more difficult in the [colonial] service. I am delighted to be no longer in daily contact

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with him, and I would be delighted if he were to take himself off on his travel projects and be absent for the longest time possible.’ (JHG-F, 30.6.01) Gaden was relieved to receive news of Gouraud, who had engaged the Kel Gheress yet again, this time on 18th June at Galma, a village situated just north of the arc of the Nigerian border, where he inflicted another bloody defeat. It seemed that the beating they had taken two months earlier ‘was not a sufficient lesson’. ‘All Tuareg, I believe, are so proud and fierce that they do not submit unless forced at knife-point to the throat’, Gouraud observed. However, the women and the herds of animals that Gouraud’s forces had taken after the battle were a cause of some concern. Detailed instructions from the colonel suggested that Gouraud should keep some of the women at Guidam Bado, and the wives of the chiefs should be sent to Zinder. The problem was that they had so few cavalry to escort them, and Gouraud’s attempts to recruit local men for the task had so far yielded only seven volunteers, whereas he estimated that 150–200 would be necessary (HJEG-JHG, 8.7.01). There was resistance among local Hausa populations to sign up for service with the colonial forces, and the only reliable source of men was from the Soudan, many weeks’ journey from their positions. Moreover, the news that many of the Tuareg might be persuaded to join the gathering forces of the Hausa Muslim Mahdi, known as Sidi el Mahdi, represented a real threat that might undermine their efforts in bringing them to submission. The Tuareg tactic so far had been to empty the country surrounding the French posts, migrating to distant points in the Sahara, so avoiding coming under control of the European infidels and depriving them of the camels and other animals needed for food and transport. Gaden’s strategy was that the Tuareg should be constantly raided and pillaged until they were so enfeebled and impoverished that they would have to seek contact and open negotiations with them. However, the prospect of having to battle it out with each Tuareg group to gain their surrender was not a realistic strategy for the forces of the Third Territory. As relief from his immediate worries, Gaden now returned to an old theme in his letters home: trade and commerce. He was pessimistic about the commercial potential of the region, which had little to offer his father’s colleagues and family back in Bordeaux. I do not see therefore what we are doing in a country in which we are only able to hasten commercial ruin, and where we will end up only presiding over exchanges of salt, cattle and millet between the Tuareg and the populations from the south. I can see no place here for our trade, and we are only after all border guards for England. At least we can aim to prevent the English conspir- ing against us in the Sahara. (JHG-F, 12.7.01)

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Gaden also reported to his father that the manuscript, collected many years ago during his tour of duty in Bandiagara and sent to Octave Houdas for translation, had now been presented to the Bibliothèque Nationale for publication under his own name. The text had been due to appear in 1900, but it still had not been published, and Houdas had taken four years to complete the translation from Arabic to French. His brother, Philippe, now turned 18, was also a cause for worry in the family. Gaden’s attitude towards his younger brother was becoming increasingly caustic, and he thought him pampered and good-for-nothing. As Philippe moved toward maturity his future prospects came under discussion. Gaden opined: ‘It is probable that he does not understand, except in the last resort, the necessity of work, and a visit to Germany or England in the midst of people engaged in fever- ish activity will do him no end of good.’ Philippe represented for Gaden the kind of ill-disciplined and feckless youth who lacked moral backbone and commitment for any serious occupation. This was a symptom of the age and of the moral decline of France. After his victory, Gouraud was in a sentimental mood, an attitude towards past achievements that he would evoke increasingly as the years passed. He had met up with a number of comrades from the ‘98 Soudan campaign against Samory, and he reminisced about places and those he missed – in particular Millot, now in Chad, and Gaden. His maudlin outlook was perhaps in part triggered by the news of the death of the missionary Father Hacquard on 22nd May, who it appeared had drowned in an accident involving one or two children from the church mission in Segou where he had been stationed. The shock of the news of the catastrophe was made more acute by the possibility that Gouraud’s own children could well have been caught up in the incident. Gouraud went on to reflect that he was most certainly feeling his age, particularly as regards women: Moussos no longer appeal to me at all, or very little. Where are the Khadidjas and the Siri Sidibes of yesteryear? First of all, I do not have the time to concern myself with them, and after journeys of the sort I’ve seen, I need sleep; and then this type of plump woman is not my sort. I have always liked thin and slender women. And you my friend, are you married? According to Vellet [a companion], who is after all a gourmand, the square in Zinder is teeming with pretty women. (HJEG-JHG, 8.7.01) Whether Khadidja or Siri Sidibe were Gouraud’s or Gaden’s ex-moussos, we cannot be sure [perhaps one of them was Gaden’s ‘woman-on-a-string’ from Bandiagara?]; but it does appear that his post-battle nostalgic mood led him to muse over all sorts of past conquests. He signed his letter off with

176 chapter four a lewd story about Rip Titi – a young girl who becomes a pretty young blonde … – which he thought might amuse Moll in particular.

The Departure of Colonel Peroz

By July, Gaden’s life revolved around the calm routine of the daily tasks at the post: provisioning the company of men and managing the affairs of the mission. Beyond the walls of Zinder, however, things were heating up. The great annual caravan of the Kel Oui from the north, composed of Arab traders and merchants from Kano and Zinder, was pillaged by Tuaregs and their Hausa dependents from the Damergou. The loss of the caravan was enormous, all their merchandise of millet and cotton stuffs was stolen, and six of the nine Arab traders were killed. Captain Moll was sent off with a company of 150 riflemen and 30 spahis to ‘chastise’ the attackers, but the likelihood of finding them in the vast expanses of the desert was minimal. The situation was grave, trade routes were threatened and commercial traffic was diminishing, particularly along the north-south Tripoli-Soudan axis entering sub-Saharan Africa at Zinder, Chad and Kano. Ever since Fadel- Allah, Rabah’s son, had entered the area around Bornu, commerce there had been on the decline. The east-west route from Ouaddai, however, continued for the moment to prosper. To the west, the Kel Gheress started to raid the villages again along the supply routes to Zinder. ‘The Tuaregs are most disagreeable neighbours’, Gaden remarked to his father (JHG-F, 30.7.01). These disturbances in trade caused by pillaging were accompanied by disruptions to the usual paths of seasonal movement of the nomadic Tuareg, who pastured their animals in the north during the wet season, and moved south with the onset of the dry season. The plans for Colonel Peroz’s departure from Zinder and repatriation to France were taking shape. He would be gone by October, it was thought, and then Gouraud would replace him as the commanding officer of the Third Territory. This was a prospect that Gaden relished: ‘I would look on this change with the greatest pleasure. The colonel, despite his very great qualities, has an impossible character’ (JHG-F, 30.7.01). Details about the colonel’s spot of bother were starting to emerge. It was an improbable story involving three deserters from the Fifth Marine Infantry, employed by a Belgian from the Ivory Coast, who had gone thieving and pillaging in British-held Nigeria. In June an English officer, Captain Keys, had been sent to apprehend them and had been shot by the renegades as he tried to arrest them. They had then fled into French territory and had been arrested by

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Captain Cornu, the commandant at Filingué, a post to the west of Zinder. Colonel Peroz, the commander with responsibility for these marines, initially had tried to send the culprits back to Nigeria to face British justice, but had been reprimanded by St Louis for not having sent them to the French Governor General immediately. The affair clearly had international diplomatic repercussions, with all the potential to blow up into a major incident between two of the colonial powers in West Africa. Peroz was going to have to face the music. In August, the supply routes west towards Filingué and Sorbo were still under attack from the Tuareg and, together with the rains of the hivernage, the trek across country was even more hazardous. While rainwater might collect in surface pools to serve the passing convoys, virtually all the wells dug in the previous months were unserviceable, and a number of riflemen had been lost to thirst and exhaustion along the route. Gouraud joked that ‘you have not starved to death in Zinder this year, and that is a result’ (HJEG-JHG, 7.8.01). In Paris, Auguste Terrier, and the African Committee that he headed, set in motion a move to have the 1898 Frontier Convention rectified, with the intention of relieving the problem of the Sokoto arc (JHG-HJEG, 29.8.01).9 Some of Gouraud’s men, in particular Cotten and Armand, suffering from an attack of ‘soudanite’ had meandered off alone across the desert. Gouraud received a note from his commanding officer that left him unsure as to whether he had been undisciplined or impressive in his handling of the matter. ‘I claim humbly to be neither one nor the other’, he confided to Gaden. Meanwhile, Gaden himself was keeping a watchful eye on the movements of various Tuareg groups around Zinder, some of whom he thought were on the point of submission. He wrote to Gouraud: ‘This is in every way the end of heroic times and the opening of the period of negotiation’ (JHG-HJEG, 15.8.01). Acts of arms now seemed the least likely route to success in the annexation of French possessions of West Africa. Gaden’s present position was now getting to him: ‘For my part, I am only a sort of clerk of court, a worried shopkeeper … I am deadened intellectually as I have never been, and I am starting to be disinterested in what I do. I attribute this to the narrow tutelage under which I have lived for the last eight months’ (JHG-HJEG, 15.8.01). There were now 48 Europeans living in Zinder, more than necessary in Gaden’s view, and keeping this population fed and watered posed a growing problem. Reliance on the Kel Oui Tuareg

9 Changes were made to the Convention some years later.

178 chapter four to help provide transport was not always satisfactory, for they often regarded the French as allies from whom benefits could be extracted. For Gaden the benefits seemed to flow in the wrong direction. The post had also run out of money to pay for grain, and Gaden asked his father whether he might see his way to provide some sort of financial assistance to tide them over. It would just be an arrangement for that year, and ‘it would render a real service to all the Europeans in the Territory’ (JHG-F, 14.8.01). At the end of August 1901, as he waited for money, Gaden received parcels sent from France by his father in May and June, some three months earlier. The postal service was poor and often unreliable in these marginal parts of the colony. One commodity in short supply in Zinder was sugar, so he had his father send out two containers of saccharine, which would have the same power to sweeten as 100 loaves of sugar. He explained this fact to the market chief and merchant Mallam Yaro, whose eyes shone when gazing at the miraculous powder. Gaden struck up a good working relationship with Yaro, who was a pivotal figure in assisting the French administration in Zinder. Despite his close relationship with him, and the complimentary things he had to say about him to Gouraud, Gaden described Mallam Yaro to his father in the following terms: ‘the famous merchant is only at base an awful Jew, but he is a precious man because he has a commercial instinct. As regards future commerce, he is the only one.’ Gaden continued that the chiefs of the Kel Oui, who represented the commercial interests of the Tuareg merchants in the market, ‘are thieves, liars and bone-idle beyond all hope. Cowardice and theft are the national virtues of these gentlemen’ (JHG-F, 30.8.91).10 The Kel Oui provided men to support the Sultan of Zinder in his mission to suppress fighting and pillaging in the regions around the town. The Tuareg merchants obviously had an interest in halting the attacks on their caravans as they travelled through the desert, and the Sultan was keen to attract trade and prosperity to the town. In these matters, Gaden, the Sultan

10 We have met Gaden’s anti-Semitic views before, especially in the Dreyfus case, and here he expresses them yet again. There might also be a sense that Gaden is playing to what he knows to be his father’s favoured racial and colonial prejudices. By comparison, Gaden rarely had recourse to such gross stereotyped attitudes in his letters to Gouraud. This might be, of course, because they shared a common understanding, a taken-for-granted cultural environment whose ideas needed no explicit articulation. Whatever the reason, it is in Gaden’s letters to his father that the clichés of the colonial imagination find expression. One other striking feature of the letters to his father is Gaden’s continued interest in local and regional trade, although he is never as passionate or as persuasive as he was during his Bandiagara days. The position of Zinder, isolated above Nigeria, would never have been able to provide the same wealth-generating potential as the untapped resources of Niger bend.

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and the merchants all shared similar concerns, except over one matter: the prevalent trade in human captives. The Sultan and the Kel Oui, not averse to a little slave-trading, planned a campaign against Denda and the Tuareg from the Damergou after the departure of the colonel. The Sultan was full of confidence and his hands full of rifles lent to him by Gaden from the garrison’s arsenal. ‘He will cover himself in glory, and I will recommend him for a medal’, Gaden mused. A number of officers were laid low with dysentery, including Cotten and in particular Mangin who, despite his sickness, was enraged at not being able to set about the Tuareg himself. He demanded without success his own column of men to go in search of Denda (JHG- HJEG, 29.8.01). Gouraud too faced problems with personnel in his sector of the Territory, and had travelled to the post at Filingué where Captain Cornu was stationed. The captain had apprehended the deserters who had violated British territory and shot an English officer, and Cornu was trying to take the glory for their capture and arrest. Gouraud said of him: ‘Cornu is not intelligent, and he lacks good sense, and he will remain to the end a man who believed he had won the battle of Austerlitz for having arrested three deserters’ (HJEG-JHG, 17.10.01). But there were other troubles that brought Gouraud to the post. The garrison was up in arms against Cornu, who had treated the men like brutes and animals. Whippings, beatings and suspen- sion of pay had been meted out by the captain as punishments for the least act judged to be offensive in some way or other. He had been violent towards his men, never said a word to them, and showed a total lack of interest in their affairs. Prior to his arrival at Filingué, Gouraud had received numerous accusations made by individual soldiers against Cornu, and his task was now to calm this outbreak of ‘effervescence’. ‘Cornu wasted his thousand qualities of hard work and activity by a lack of judgement and a ridiculous style’, thought Gouraud. Two other issues were on Gouraud’s mind. The first was the lack of millet that was leading to famine in the areas around Sorbo. He pored over the projected tax returns from the different districts, and considered the demands to be beyond the means of the populations. He seemed less concerned, however, about the fate of the local populations than about the survival of the garrisons posted across the region. The second issue related to the inconvenient consequences of having led a wandering life-style: how was he going to find someone to marry amongst all the women that were available? He envied his friend Millot his good luck, for he had heard news via Emile Gentil, now the Governor of Central Africa, that ‘he has married a white Arab [girl], thin and vibrant as one could wish’ (HJEG-JHG, 27.8.01).

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The mousso of another French officer, Albin, had also just remarried, but this time to a Soudanese corporal and not another white – a fact that Gouraud evidently found noteworthy enough to remark upon (HJEG-JHG, 18.9.01). The colonel was due to leave Zinder on 17th September and Gaden, delighted with the prospect of freedom, was preoccupied with trying to put the affairs of the post in order. How Peroz had run things left an awful lot to be desired. The provisional local budget needed to be sorted out, the difficulties with the supply routes remained, and the colonel’s policy towards the Tuareg had yielded few results. On top of all this, the camels at the post were dropping like flies, and those Tuareg who might supply them with more were migrating east along with their troops, herds and flocks. Gaden thought that the reason for the demise of the French camels could be found here: they were not being moved out of the humid southern regions during the rains like those belonging to the nomads. While he prepared to take over the command of the post, Gaden made plans to write a monograph on Zinder.11 He looked through the archives at the post for any information on the area, its peoples and their history, but found nothing. He could not believe that Moll, his predecessor, had done so little over the six months prior to Gaden’s appointment as Resident. What had Moll achieved?, he asked: ‘No doubt the [title of] Pasha in the middle of his ten women which he had on our arrival’. Gaden went on: ‘What an infernal idea for us to be installed in such large numbers at the limits of such a territory before anything was organised … In truth it has been hardly worth coming here just to do administrative paperwork’ (JHG-HJEG, 4.9.01). The book represented a consolation for Gaden since it would involve him in getting out of the post and interviewing local informants and knowledgeable figures in the community. This would provide much relief from the bureaucratic functions of the Residency.

Nostalgia and Banditry

Gouraud wrote to Gaden on 29th September 1901 from Sorbo Haoussa at one o’clock in the morning, obviously in nostalgic mood, probably having laid back on the chaise longue he had just found, smoking for while as he dreamt of times past. It was three years to the day since the two Henris had

11 This appeared as Notice sur la Résidence de Zinder, par Le Capitaine Gaden, published in Paris by Henri Charles-Lavauzelle, 1904.

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charged through the camp of Samory Toure in southern Guinea and captured the legendary leader of the Wassulu Empire. Gouraud could not sleep without writing Gaden a note; he was thinking of how they had spent these very hours of the early morning of the 29th trying to get some rest in the forest clearing before the assault on the camp at first light. Gouraud was going to organise a fête that morning to celebrate the occasion with shooting competitions, racing, games and tamtams, since his men – ‘the poor fellows’ – had not had much enjoyment and gaiety for some while. Colonel Peroz had met Gouraud a few days earlier on his way through to return to St Louis to face the music over the Argoungou affair. Gouraud found the colonel to be rigid and grumpy, but he had a good heart and an upright character. Gouraud liked him very much, but then again he had not had to suffer him at close quarters as Gaden had. Gouraud signed off his letter: ‘I embrace you with joy just like in the Almamy’s hut three years ago’ (HJEG- JHG, 29.9.01). While Gouraud was being moved by his memories of earlier campaigns, Gaden, seldom a victim of such mawkishness, wrote to his friend with not one mention of the anniversary. Instead, he was basking in the ‘exquisite, priceless tranquillity’ of his life since the colonel’s departure. He was, however, troubled by the Cornu affair and the thought that the captain might escape severe punishment for what he meted out on his company – Gaden did nonetheless seem more concerned about the withholding of pay from the men than the accusations of beatings and whippings they may have suffered at Cornu’s hand. The Sultan left Zinder on a mission into the Damergou to join up with the Kel Oui, and in his absence the Sultan’s elder sister, who was 40 years old and held the title ‘Magaram’, took over command of local affairs. She was a powerful figure in her own right with tax raising powers, who maintained a large court and cavalry and who oversaw the affairs of the women in the palace, in particular the 300–400 concu- bines that made up the Sultan’s harem. The harem was also protected by a group of palace eunuchs. What excited Gaden especially was the news of the death of Fadel-Allah in southern Chad at the hands of a group of spahis under the command of Colonel Destenave, Gaden’s old superior officer from Bandiagara. Not only was the leader killed, but important members of his family and other chiefs were captured and all their belongs repossessed. ‘This time, this appears to be the definitive pacification of Bornu’, the Nigerian state that had been under attack from Fadel-Allah’s troops. Gaden went on: What irony in these events! This news was carried back by one of the Sultan’s men who was charged with taking to Fadel-Allah a letter in which the Sultan

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made propositions of peace and friendship [towards the Muslim warlord] on the part of the colonel. The envoy found Fadel-Allah’s head at Dikoa but returned with the letter, having judged it not appropriate to tell the Shaykh of Bornu the message he was to convey. … There it is, a jolly success for Destenave … vive Destenave! (JHG-HJEG, 25.9.01) Here was Gaden cheering a man who only a few years ago he had attacked with vitriol over his handling of affairs on the Niger bend. What the victory meant for Gaden was that he now hoped the ban which prevented him from going to Chad would be soon lifted; the prospect of a trip to the banks of the Chari River to meet up with his friend Millot was now homing into view. By the middle of October 1901, Gaden raged that he had no more camels left, and that those Tuareg who might have been able to re-supply them had now migrated far to the east. Here is the result of the colonel’s pacific policy and of the excellent idea of going west just at the moment when all interest is focused on the east. … Pacification, goodness and justice etc, what beautiful words, but which have brought us so little. Our great man [Peroz] could have sat with more brilliance at the Kangaba [a local] academy than at the head of a territory like this one, where it was necessary to strike quickly or not engage oneself in Tuareg politics. (JHG-HJEG, 18.10.01) Yet again, Gaden found it difficult to deal with those in authority, and especially when he felt he had been placed in a position where he had to rectify the errors made by his superiors. This had happened with Destenave in Bandiagara, then with de Lartigue during the Samory campaign, and now with Peroz in Zinder. What chance would his relationship with Gouraud, now in command of the territory, have of withstanding the rigours of Gaden’s demanding attitude towards authority? Gouraud’s nostalgic thoughts eventually triggered an odd flicker of recognition in Gaden, who thanked his friend for his memories of Samory and 29th September. Gaden rarely indulged in sentimentality for the sake of it. ‘Yes, they were good, excellent memories, and those that we recruit this time are so different. What a difference between our two countries? An awful country, antipathetic populations. Where are our Bambaras and Malinkes?’ He yearned for his company of auxiliaries and the bush of the Soudan, for he needed to escape, at least mentally, from the boredom of administration as Resident, and from the torment his unfinished writings on Zinder brought him (JHG-HJEG, 30.10.01). He yearned to pass his lot on to someone else and take up a more active life or just go home (JHG-F, 31.10.01).

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The Sultan returned to Zinder on 5th November after a tour of the area to collect taxes from and distribute gifts to local settlements and camps. It had been portrayed as a military expedition accompanied by men from the Kel Oui but in fact was a pacific mission which had rather carefully avoided all contact with other Tuareg groups. The only one piece of action the group had seen was that one of the Sultan’s eunuchs had carried off a young Tuareg girl sent ‘to buy millet and pillage’ in the local market. Without comment on the morality of the eunuch’s conduct, Gaden then went on to reflect on an ingenious strategy some Tuareg groups pursued in their relations with the settled agriculturalists. They would arrive at a village with their cattle and donkeys to buy millet, which they then loaded onto the asses, leaving a number of cattle behind as payment. When the donkeys reached the rest of the Tuareg caravan, some of the men would return to the village on camel-back and carry off the animals already sold to the villagers. This was, Gaden pointed out, a highly efficient method of exchange that usually succeeded, and it seemed to him that barter must have been invented for the Tuareg. Gaden was learning quickly from his Tuareg foes, and he too indulged in a little raiding and theft of their caravans and herds from time to time. ‘I have myself done my small bit of pillaging.’ A band of Tuareg from Aïr, travelling through to the east to rejoin the other dissidents, had the naivety to pass a few kilometres from the post. ‘I gathered them up. It was all done properly without firing off one cartridge… I naturally confiscated their caravan [or part of it]… that was little touched by the loss of 160 camels’ (JHG-F, 14.11.01). This addition to the resources of the post at least helped relieve Gaden’s immediate problem of the lack of camels. To Gouraud he admitted that he had ‘played the bandit a little’ and that bad instincts had awakened in him. Gaden’s conscience nagged him and he thought he would be ‘blamed for showing himself to be so inhu- man’. He showed fewer scruples, however, in not reporting the full extent of his pilfering to the colonel, who was still loitering in Tahoua. One colleague eager to play the bandit for most of the time was Georges Mangin, who – recovering from dysentery – was straining at the bit to be let loose with his camel-corps to rampage through the desert, living like a nomad and thieving like a nomad. ‘Mangin is from one day to the next a crashing boor. It is really bad luck that it should be precisely he who has been left here [at the post]. If he were like anyone else, I would be able to give him some topography to do, but I know him well enough not to want to let him loose, and I have him [instead] on my back’ (JHG-HJEG, 29.11.01).

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The commissioner for local budgets had been at Zinder for most of October, and together he and Gaden had gone through the tax receipts from each settlement. Once Gaden’s monograph was finished he planned to put in place a definitive new tax system, and he and Gouraud exchanged ideas on the best way forward. In the Soudan a head tax was levied from all adult inhabitants at a level determined by the wealth of the area, but usually in the region of one to three thalers.12 Colonel Peroz, by contrast, had arbitrarily fixed a figure that each settlement around Zinder had to raise in taxes. As Gaden pointed out, though, the levels of tax had not been fixed with respect to the resources of each cercle, but after the prices of a totally arbitrary set of diverse foodstuffs and wares. Neither of the two Henris looked forward to sorting out the financial system of the Territory, which would come under Gouraud’s authority soon. Indeed, Gouraud had recently started receiving official correspondence in preparation for the handover from Colonel Peroz, and he was already feeling the weight of paperwork: ‘Ouf! What paper. What letters! Where is the time when I could stroll freely without a worry along the Soudanese pathways with 100 good fellows behind me, and where I had as a register of correspondence only a modest white exercise book, sewn at the spine with thread’ (HJEG-JHG, 17.10.01). As an outlet for his frustration he decided he had a score to settle with a Tuareg group that had assassinated one of his men. The idea was to raze the Tuareg camp to the ground as a punishment, but first he had to fix a deadline for a fine to be raised. If they did not paid the fine as demanded, then he would act: ‘distasteful as it is to destroy these villages, but too bad for them if they have not changed their minds before my arrival’ (HJEG-JHG, 17.10.01).

A Heavy Load for Gouraud to Bear

One month later, in November, after issuing his threat of destruction, Gouraud received the submission of the Tuareg group, who agreed to pay a war reparation of 40 camels, and an annual tax of 80 head of cattle and 1,000 sheep, as well as providing transport between French posts. Meanwhile, Colonel Peroz could linger no longer in the Third Territory; indeed, he received in mid November a formal dispatch from St Louis holding him culpable for the Argoungou affair, relieving him of his functions, and giving him orders to return to France by way of Dahomey,

12 A silver bullion coin used in world trade from the mid 18th century onwards.

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the route the party had taken over one year earlier. Control of the Territory now passed to Gouraud, who was made provisional commandant forthwith. Gouraud had just turned 34 years old, and on his shoulders was the responsibility for the command of the whole Third Territory stretching from the Niger through to the border with Chad. ‘Gouraud finds himself with a heavy load to bear’ was Gaden’s response to his father (JHG-F, 14.12.01). What would this bode for the relationship between the two Henris? Gouraud, aware of the implications this might have for their friendship, tried to reassure Gaden and pointed out a few changes that might have to occur in the light of his new responsibilities. Gouraud was happy to recognise, friendship apart, that Gaden was there in Zinder to be relied upon for his ‘sang froid’, his understanding of native affairs, his good sense and level-headedness. That they would now be exchanging a flurry of official letters should not lead Gaden to ‘forget behind the cold and formal style to see still your old and devoted friend’ (HJEG-JHG,17.10.01). Gouraud returned to the theme later, obviously concerned that his elevation would become an obstacle to their friendship: I ask of you beyond the official correspondence … to continue to chat with me over a range of questions, as we would chat if I were in Zinder. I mean that even when you have executed an order, if you persist to hold the contrary opinion, you will give me your reasons. You know that I do not make myself out, like the colonel, to be infallible. Let us try to continue by letter these conversations as though they had been face to face. (HJEG-JHG, 15.12.01) Gaden had disagreed with Gouraud on a number of occasions: for example, over the handling of an earlier incident at N’Gourou, where the local ruler had decided to free himself from the overlordship of the Sultan of Zinder, who in turn had sent a contingent of men to bring the ruler to heel. The Sultan’s men had suffered a humiliating defeat and the rebellion had begun to spread throughout the region. Captain Moll’s men had taken the village of Tiétéssouma in an assault on 1st January 1901, crushing the uprising and installing a new ruler dependent upon the Sultan. All this occurred before Gaden’s arrival in Zinder, but he still considered the tactics heavy-handed. Moll had made little or no attempt to find another solution from the outset. Gouraud had few doubts about the response and was convinced of the undisputed benefits of the application of military might. Gaden was often much more cautious and hesitated in making decisions that might involve a recourse to violence as a means to solve political problems.

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So while the nature of their correspondence might have to change, Gouraud retained the hope that their relationship would not be adversely affected. Gaden’s wit, dry sense of humour, his pithy style and searching intellect were qualities Gouraud greatly appreciated in him. ‘Your letters make me content. First they are interesting in the facts they contain, and then, without wanting to flatter you, you have a very witty pen, and to read this or that line really amuses me. It seems to me in reading you that I hear recounted the famous story of a collapsed womb, a mule, a woman and an archivist at Bapins de Bigorre’. This is most likely Gouraud trying to be witty himself, concocting a parody of a title of a La Fontaine-like fable (HJEG- JHG, 4.12.01). On 4th December 1901, Gouraud reported to Gaden that Captain Cornu from Filingué was dead; ‘Sad news and so unexpected.’ Cornu had left Gouraud in Tahoua on 3rd November in good health, if a little yellow and thin, but still equipped with an extraordinary appetite. He fell ill on the 15th, the medic arrived at 7 p.m. on the evening of the 18th, and by 8.30 p.m. Cornu died suffering most atrociously. Gouraud always looked to the best in people (‘Cornu was not perfect … but…’) and his death relieved Gouraud of making a decision about how to punish the officer for his inappropriate behaviour. Trying to be true to his word about the intended conversational style of his letters, Gouraud then proceeded to relate his latest gossip. His brother, Pierre, a cavalryman based in France had his sights on a posting to West Africa. However, he had announced his marriage recently in Paris, a fact which would probably scupper his plans for an overseas posting. Gouraud was annoyed with him: He is anxious, doesn’t know what he wants, [then] has to get married. … He is not happy and moreover is only 28 years old. I am starting to envy that age! Marriage is perhaps what he merits most, but it is a lottery, which frightens me, even when getting out of them. These remarks were just a preamble to what he had to report: A propos of which, did I tell you that I am finally married: during my trip through Sandiri, I picked up the ex-wife of Albin, ‘Hadji’, very amusing and chatty. I am very much in love, but too much paperwork and then I am no longer 28 years old! This was the very woman Gouraud had been so concerned about when she remarried a Soudanese corporal less than three months earlier. No doubt it was not just the shock of her remarrying an African rather than a European that had affected him then, but he himself had eyes for her too and had

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been beaten to it. We are in the dark as to what happened to Hadji’s marriage to the corporal, or indeed what his fate was.13 Having just exposed himself in this intimate way, Gouraud perhaps reflected on how this openness might compromise his position, particularly at some later date if his career were to continue to take off. He signed off: ‘Adieu my old friend, we will continue more than ever, n’est ce pas, our official correspondence, the means to remain on good terms. … You understand as well as me the prudence and the reserve that my functions impose upon me’. Gouraud wanted to have his cake and eat it: he desired to remain on close personal and informal terms with Gaden, but distance was demanded by his new appointment; indeed, the prospect of his past coming back to haunt him clearly played on the mind of this ambitious fellow (HJEG-JHG, 4.12.01). Yellow fever had appeared again Dakar, a suspected case had turned up at Segou, but Zinder, by contrast, was tranquil and unaffected by the epi- demic. Indeed, local people were now returning to the town after years of absence, for many of them had left following the Cazemajou affair. The town’s Thursday market was increasingly animated with greater numbers of traders and buyers, and a broader range of commodities was now on sale, including fish, barley sugar, bundles of tobacco, and cotton from which cloth was woven by local weavers. Thread was sold by the skein, which was hung from a stick by traders, who appeared as though they were fishermen using rod and line to catch a fish. Gaden found little to attract him in the market women, for their teeth were stained an awful red colour from chew- ing sticks and kola nuts. The supreme elegance for these women was to daub their hair with a mixture of butter and indigo, and it was coiffured into an elaborate braided style and worn high on their heads in the manner of a helmet. Their hair glistened with a metallic blue hue, and they scrubbed their faces, arms and hands with this mixture too. They adorned their right nostrils with a piece of coral worn as a stud, or for those who could not afford this luxury, a piece of wooden dowel especially fashioned for the purpose. Butchers ringed the market place on market day, and they would install themselves behind a circular heap of sand onto which a pile

13 See an interesting case from Bâ’s semi-factual novel, The Fortunes of Wangrin, 1999, in which there is a young African chef in the service of a French commanding officer. The young man falls in love with the most beautiful woman in the village, on whom the commandant also has his eye. Not being able to resist the advances of the French man for fear of the possible consequences, she agrees to a relationship with him, while maintaining the trysts and assignations with her lover behind the commandant’s back. Any parallels between this case and Gouraud’s are purely coincidental.

188 chapter four of burning embers was placed to cook meat prepared on skewers and dusted with millet flour to give it a breaded-like crispy coating. The situation around Zinder was looking optimistic by December 1901. Gouraud had made progress in the west in receiving offers of submission from a number of Tuareg groups, one in particular from a clan of Muslim marabouts, who traditionally occupied a neutral position in relation to other Tuareg groups during the internecine wars that took place in the desert. Conversions of such clans to the French cause were politically important, for it gave a lead to others that important Muslim figures could do business with the infidel and remain on reasonable terms with him. Gaden too was making steps forward with a number of the Tuareg groups in the Damergou, including the chief of a marabout clan from Guidam Bado, who had sent a deputation to discuss submission to the French. Denda too, the Tuareg chief based in the capital of Djadjidouna in the Damergou, had indicated an interest in submission. Native groups coming under French authority had to pay an initial submission levy, and then surrender an annual tax often in the form of animals, produce and services. The levels of the submission levy were still to be set for this group, and it was still too premature anyway. The essential thing was to bring groups within the French orbit and then estimate what resources they had. ‘It is not for me to fix them [taxes]. They [Tuaregs] are forewarned that they will have a tax to pay, and that they [the taxes] will be fixed by you [Gouraud]’, he announced to his friend (JHG-HJEG, 9.12.01).

Mangin, a Crashing Boor

Despite the tensions between Colonel Peroz and Gaden, the ex- commanding officer of the Third Territory had the grace to send Gaden a copy of the praise he had showered upon him. In a letter of recommendation for Gaden’s promotion to a senior rank, Lieutenant-Colonel Peroz wrote on 7th January 1902, in a hand-written letter from Sorbo Haussa on the Niger: ‘Captain Gaden is an elite officer; his far-reaching intelligence, his broad and well-balanced mind, his qualities of work and tact mark him out especially for difficult and delicate tasks and for confidential missions.’ He added that ‘the pacification and definitive organisation of the central region of the Third Territory pivoted on the very particular qualities of administration of M. le Capt Gaden’, and commented too on ‘his remarkable knowledge of the natives’. All this amounted in Peroz’s view to a clear justification for his inclusion on the list of the names (‘tableau’) to go

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forward for promotion. Peroz signed off his letter rather poignantly ‘Lieutenant Colonel, ex Commander of the Third Territory’.14 While the shadow of Peroz still cast its form over Zinder, the figure of another difficult figure remained a cause for concern. It was Mangin, ‘this phenomenon’, who was creating havoc at the post by telling his Soudanese platoon that as the best soldiers in the world, conquerors of the region, they had certain rights that were being denied them by his superiors. We do not know what Mangin looked like, but if he took after his brother, Charles, later a renowned general, he would have had a broad face with a square jaw, a steely look about him, with cold, cowled eyes set under a high forehead. Mangin had received a number of tongue-lashings from Gaden, but their effect on him was negligible. ‘This Mangin is quite simply a crashing boor. … Did he not come by the other day to complain about the way in which a woman had gone about her sweeping duties!’ (JHG-HJEG, 23.12.01). He and Gouraud used to joke that some years earlier when Mangin had been told to take additional French lessons he had signed up instead for a course in Bambara! He was incorrigible; he was a constant source of idiocy, frustration, and ill-disciplined behaviour. Gouraud seemed to have more sympathy for him than Gaden, but on this occasion however he stood firm with Gaden: ‘He [Mangin] must understand that in order to march in a few weeks’ time, I must sit down first and require [from him] some demonstration of wisdom’ (HJEG-JHG, 15.12.01). Some days later, Mangin again caused problems. He had been to see the Sultan in Zinder, to whom he had said that the French were planning to march north towards to Agadez. This put a cat among the pigeons, and threatened a series of delicate negotiations and diplomatic manoeuvres Gaden was planning. Having reassured the Sultan that no such precipitate action would take place, Gaden gave Mangin another dressing down, after which he had ‘a rather contrite air about him’ (JHG-HJEG, 26.12.01). Mangin was truly unbearable. Gaden signed off his letter with an adieu to his dear friend, and the hope that his new command would bring him neither boredom nor unrealisable orders from St Louis. Another headache for Gaden was a fire at four o’clock in the morning on a mid December day that destroyed the compound occupied by the post’s interpreter, Bakary Diallo. The straw huts went up in minutes, and luckily everyone and all the animals managed to escape, although Bakary Diallo was badly burnt. Gaden feared he would be unable to work for 15 or more days, which was a great inconvenience since he was the only man in Zinder

14 For a copy of the original hand-written letter see CAOM, 15 APC/1 (3), and for a formal version submitted to Paris, and dated 1903, Dossier Personnel, No. 7Ye 486, SHAT.

190 chapter four who could speak both French and Hausa with any fluency. The fire was caused by one of the soldiers in the garrison, whose identity was yet to be discovered, but who would stand before a court martial once apprehended. This was evidence of the kind of ill-discipline and discontent that Gaden had detected amongst the men, an attitude he attributed in part to the actions of some of his officers, Mangin no doubt being one of them; and all this made his task of commanding the post even more difficult. Unruly bands of riflemen had also been raiding and pillaging villages along the supply route between the Niger and Zinder. He launched into one of his diatribes against Soudanese troops: ‘…the riflemen are true bandits …. These people understand only the cudgel and only respect those who use it abundantly. With them all other methods are a pure waste of time, at least in new territories like these, where they openly consider that everything belongs to them.’ He also complained to Gouraud that ‘the so-called new Residence built according to the colonel’s plans was horrible’. The granite from which it was being made was impossible to work with the tools they had to hand, and ‘all this comes from the folly of grandeur and a pride worthy of Louis XIV’ (JHG-F, 14.12.01). Having cleared up the post-Peroz mess, both Henris started seriously to address the issues that still confronted them. Gaden’s mission to the east of Zinder with his company of men had convinced him that they were not yet properly prepared or capable of sustained and disciplined military action. Rumours circulated that Turkish forces from Tripoli might be keen on securing Bilma, the centre of salt production in the Sahara some 400 kilometres due north of Lake Chad; it was also a point of access into West Africa for traders seeking to acquire slaves. If this were to fall to the Turks, Gaden thought, they might then be in a position to push on south into Chad itself and threaten the military posts recently established there. Both men worried about the vulnerability of Zinder itself, with its large fort that would be difficult to defend and with its uncertain supplies of millet, water and munitions for the military garrison. ‘It could not be held’, was Gouraud’s opinion; ‘Keep all that to yourself. Useless to stir up imaginations, above all among the boys, the moussos, and one does not know where it will stop.’ Gouraud added that he planned to remain in Tahoua, situated halfway between Zinder and the Niger in the west, from where he could issue orders in the case of emergency in either the western or eastern sectors of the territory. This decision disappointed Gaden, who had hoped that Gouraud would join him in Zinder (HJEG-JHG, 9.1.02). The start of the New Year in 1902 was seen in by Gouraud and his officers at Tahoua with a tin of tuna, two cold chickens, some Russian salad,

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champagne, and for dessert a tin of ‘plum pudding’. The New Year for Gaden saw Mangin still itching for action. Mangin also pressed him on the benefits of engaging a group of runaway conscripts. Gaden asked Gouraud for his advice: should he grant Mangin permission or would Gouraud prefer him to hold back? Mangin pushed him on this question; Gaden’s reply was: ‘do not occupy yourself with these men until I know whether I should close my eyes to their engagement [or not]’. It all depended on what Gouraud thought. The unwelcome news at the turn of the year was that Cherif Fadel, a man suspected of involvement in the murder of Captain Cazemajou three years earlier in Zinder, had returned to town. ‘What an ugly scoundrel. I believe his soul takes after his face. This man would wear the same hideous smile when assassinating us…’ (JHG-HJEG, 5.1.02). Fadel was the subject of further investigations by Gaden, who suspected there was more to the story of Cazemajou’s murder after his interpreter, Bakary Diallo, had let something slip in a conversation conducted in Hausa. At first Gaden had not wanted to rely on his own competence in the language for fear that he might have misinterpreted this chance remark. He discussed the background to the case with Mallam Yaro and then met confidentially with the Sultan to discuss Fadel’s suspected culpability. The Sultan confirmed the information that he had gleaned from Diallo; but more intriguingly, he learnt that Fadel had got himself on the right side of Abdoulaye Dem, the then interpreter with the colonial mission. It was owing to Dem that Fadel had not been included in the number of those found guilty and executed for the murder (namely Kaymaga Dabo, a slave of the Sultan, and Mallam Mohamman, a Muslim cleric). Gaden was now in a quandary: was it not too late for justice to be done; but given that only the Sultan and the interpreter Diallo knew that the French knew, perhaps the matter could be left to blow over? Gaden sought Gouraud’s advice, although he counselled his friend not to let the matter rest: ‘I believe it is not too late and that Fadel could be judged before a court martial constituted in the same way as the one which adjudicated the case of Samory’s devoted griot, Amara Diali. … This is a dangerous man’ (JHG-HJEG, 18.1.02). Gouraud responded promptly to this urgent news from Zinder, and his letter of 25th January reads like an official communiqué rather than an exchange between companions; it comprises a series of numbered points, each one addressing a specific issue. On Cherif Fadel, his view was that ‘it is better to have him with us than against us’, and that nothing should be done for the moment except that he be carefully observed and his activities mon- itored. It was too early to act, and Gaden should keep up appearances with

192 chapter four him. On the question of the ill-disciplined riflemen (the arsonist and others), there were probably only three or four brigands, and the answer was simple: ‘shoot them’. Mangin was to be told that the runaway conscripts had disappeared and that it was impossible to know what had become of them. This hardly seems a convincing story, but then again we do not know how gullible Mangin was. Gouraud was firm, however, in his insistence that there should be no extension of their sphere of influence north of Agadez towards Aïr in the Sahara desert; their first priority was to link up with the territory of Chad in the east, and Mangin should not be allowed free rein outside the town.

The Third Wife of Henri

Other news reported in January lifted their spirits: Gaden had married again. Did I tell you that I have a third wife? [no doubt counting the ‘woman-on-a- string’ in Bandiagara and ‘Salome’ Samory from Guinea] It is a young lass from Kazaoure, very pious but who adores pearls and 100 sous coins. Besides this classic blemish, she is kind, of very good character and I think this [match] will be definitive. I delighted the family at Kazaoure, where I found her. This merited a letter to me from the chief of Kazaoure in which he thanked me profusely. There it is, and no diplomatic incidents created. (JHG- HJEG, 20.1.02) The village of Kazaoure was situated in British-held Nigeria about 100 kilometres south of Zinder, and was the site of a small state in a buffer zone between Kano and Demagherin, the Sultanate of Amadou II. Gaden had had the temerity, it would seem, not only to pass over into the territory of another colonial power, but also to conduct negotiations to contract a customary union with the daughter or perhaps captive of a local chief.15 It would seem that the young woman attributed a certain amount of cynicism to Gaden’s dealings with her family and, indeed, Gaden was not proud about the number of camels he had given in exchange for her. She obviously thought that she could have done better. He commented wryly that ‘this does not prevent me from having rather white hair and passing for 80 years old, in the Sultan’s appraisal. At this age one is a philosopher, and

15 We only learn later, in a letter written by Gaden in 1905, that he had a relationship in Zinder with a young woman called ‘Diouma’; perhaps this is she? Gouraud also fell in love at the same time with a woman called Ourma when he was staying at Gaden’s house some time later. Nothing more is known about her.

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I am one’, he quipped (JHG-HJEG, 20.1.02). Gouraud responded by sending his congratulations: ‘That is perseverance’, Gouraud wrote from the burnt- out ruins of the post at Tahoua, which only the night before had been struck by fire, leaving nothing apart from his own hut untouched by the flames (HJEG-JHG, 10.2.02). Gaden’s gift of precious camels for his new bride is astonishing given that the mission had lost more than 300 head over recent months, the result of a combination of poor climatic conditions and inexperience on the part of their handlers. What is even more noteworthy is the coincidence of the announcement of this marriage to Gouraud. Gaden had only recently written to his father to discuss a letter he had received from a lady in France named Marguerite. Perhaps this was the same Marguerite who had sent him effusive congratulations on his 21st birthday when he was in Paris. He sent his greetings to her via his father, and added: ‘This young person is going to be a new acquaintance to make on my return [to France]’ (JHG-F, 6.1.02). No mention of his marriage to a local woman was made to his father, and presumably the young lady in question too would have been kept in the dark regarding his West African dalliances. Gaden’s ability to dissimu- late is clear. Gouraud had learnt that his tour of duty was not going to be prolonged beyond its current term, but he would remain as the Commandant of the Territory until then. Gaden too expressed his wish not to extend his stay in Zinder, and thought that he would see out the year, 1902. He had hoped that Gouraud would visit him in Zinder, but had now given up any expectation that he would come. ‘As a result I want only to come back as soon as possible’, he admitted to his father. The isolation of his posting was frustrating and boredom preyed on his mind (JHG-F, 6.2.02). Gaden was also in touch with Auguste Terrier back in Paris, sending him copies of his latest pictures, and no doubt seeking advice on what his next moves should be.

A Beautiful Death for an Officer

Rumours were circulating about Destenave’s mission in Chad, particularly the offensive he had been leading in Kanem, an area yet to be ‘pacified’ by the French in a push against the effects of Sennusi-inspired Muslim leaders from North Africa. Gouraud had picked up word that there had been a disaster of some sort, but now had reason to believe that the rumours were unfounded. ‘At Filingué, the story was recounted to Vernier by his mousso who gave the following account: Destenave massacred with all his officers

194 chapter four and four companies of men. Venier adds only that his mousso had never heard tell of Destenave. This is rather curious.’ He concluded that Destenave’s offensive in Kanem was a success and not a failure, despite the fact that Gaden had also got wind of ominous news (HJEG-JHG, 10.2.02). The fog of war was difficult to penetrate under the best of conditions, but along the fringes of the Sahara where communications were poor and unreliable, it was often impenetrable. Neither of the two men knew at that time that a letter from Destenave was making its slow and tortuous way from Chad to Zinder. The postal service between Chad and Zinder had been badly disrupted and numerous dispatches had been lost, and it was some time in early February when Gaden received Destenave’s letter, dated 21st October 1901.16 The letter, four months late, devastated both Gouraud and Gaden. Their dear friend Captain André Millot, a comrade particularly close to Gouraud from their time together at Beauvais in 1899, had been killed in action near Mao in the battle of Bir Alali during the Kanem offensive in late 1901. Millot, a tall, fine-featured man, with hair swept back with an off-centre parting, a fulsome moustache and lively eyes, had been in command of a reconnaissance company of 200 soldiers when he came up against a large force of Tuareg with around 50 riflemen. The battle had been long and dogged, and had left Millot, Dr Morel and seven riflemen dead. A French sergeant and 28 Soudanese troops were also injured. Gaden and Gouraud exchanged detailed notes about when they had last heard from Millot, whom they had planned to meet up with on the banks of the Chari River. ‘What a blow! You know how much I liked him’, mourned Gouraud (HJEG-JHG, 19.2.02). It was Gaden who broke the news of Millot’s death to his friend, and he added: ‘Poor Millot, it is however a consolation to think that he was killed by gunshot’ (JHG-HJEG, 20.2.02); this was ‘a beautiful death for an officer’. Gouraud echoed these remarks and pointed out that ‘he was not overcome stupidly by an illness in his bed.’ There was concern too over what had happened to Millot’s body, for it appeared that the Tuareg had taken it away from the scene of the battle, and it was ‘frightful to think of this poor man not having a grave’. By the end of March, it was

16 Destenave’s letter, contained in the Fonds Gouraud, appears to be dated 21st Xth 1901. In his book Zinder-Tchad, Gouraud gives the date of Millot’s death as 9th November 1901, and states he heard the news by letter on 5th March 1902. But from Gaden’s and Gouraud’s letters we know that they were discussing his death in mid February. Gouraud’s sense of historical accuracy appears in a number of places to be less than reliable. Gaden informed his father of Millot’s death on 6th February 1902 having just received a note from Destenave (JHG-F, 6.2.02).

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known that the body had been retrieved and that a burial had taken place (JHG-HJEG, 21.3.02). Communications with the western part of the territory were now becoming critical, and it was impossible to reach the Niger River without travelling through British Nigeria because of pillaging and the problems of finding water en route. It was forbidden for all convoys to pass south of the arc around Sokoto and the movement of all personnel had ceased, except for cases that involved the repatriation of officers back to France. Supplies at the Zinder post were running low, there was no money to pay the garrison, discipline among the men was poor, and worse still their stocks of wine were diminishing. Gaden’s fear of the monotony of life at a military outpost and his sense of captivity increased even further. Following the death of Millot in Chad, the spectre of mortality stalked about with grim regularity much closer to Zinder. On the morning of 6th March, Gaden lost his adjutant, Picard, a lieutenant in the cavalry, and a person Gaden liked a great deal: ‘He was one of the most upright and loyal comrades I have known. We got on well together and I had much affection for him’ (JHG-F, 6.3.02). Over the previous four days he had suffered from fever and fitting, which did not lessen until half an hour before his death. Picard came out of his coma around 6.30 in the morning, said to the medic ‘adieu captain’ and then ‘thank you’. These were his last words, and he then passed away quietly and without pain. He was buried immediately, after the post had been dispatched. A few days later, Gaden heard from Gouraud that Governor General Ballay had passed away in Porto Novo in Dahomey, along with a French merchant and an administrator. News of other deaths came through from Chad, this time one of Lieutenant Cotten’s fellow grad- uates from Saint Cyr, an officer named Pradier, and then a group of 12 men were taken by surprise when travelling up the Chari on the river vessel the Léon Blot. A grey and melancholic mood descended on the garrison. Gaden had to deal with Picard’s affairs following his death. This was no simple matter of the demise of one single individual: Picard leaves a wife and a young girl. Naturally I will take them into my care, as well as [Dr] Chapeyrou’s mousso. This woman is from close by to Garoubou. If Chapeyrou comes to look for his mousso, I will probably send Picard’s one on her way then, or even send her home at the same time as my own repatriation. For I think I will not be forgotten here. I cannot divert money for the mousso when I do not have enough dispos- able cash myself to take Picard’s mousso and captive into my charge. Picard leaves a horse, exchanged with the Sultan for some cloth [along with other items]. If what remains of the cloth … is insufficient, I will sell the horse to the

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Sultan to the profit of this small family. I am sending an account of what I am doing to … [Picard’s] brother. The brother, being an officer at Lyon and probably rich, will certainly find all this very natural and will send to the commandant of the cercle a supplementary amount. Be this as it may, I have done my best, and am persuaded that Picard would support me entirely. (JHG-HJEG, 6.3.02) Why Gaden would not be forgotten in Zinder is not clear from the context of the letter; whether these additional women simply found lodgings in Gaden’s household or whether they formed the nucleus of a harem, à la Captain Moll with his bevy of ten, we do not know. Another possibility is that Gaden left children in Zinder, which would certainly have been a memorable trace in the history of the town. Gaden, in the midst of sickness and misfortune, reported to his father that he remained in good health; in fact he was the healthiest European in Zinder. He attributed this to having ‘the digestive tract of an ostrich’, but he grumbled to his father: This trip is not alas like the previous ones, when there was time for me to dash around the bush with my company of men in the good countries of the south. Here, too much paper and the constant preoccupation of feeding everyone. It is an enormous post, and questions of material life and of maintaining discipline among all the personnel occupy a large place in my life. (JHG-F, 7.4.02) Gouraud, aware of his friend’s desperation, advised that if he were to take a tour of the region then his temporary replacement should continue Gaden’s beneficial policies and not disrupt relations in the town; however, Gouraud warned: ‘do not leave the command of the post to Mangin’ (HJEG-JHG, 16.3.02).

I Desire to be Received as the Colonel Was

The depths of Gouraud’s grief over Millot’s death found little relief over the next few weeks. Gaden kept feeding him information as it trickled in through dispatches from Chad about the battle of Bir Alali and how their friend had met his end. The two men tried to console each other as best they could, and Gouraud especially sought company in this time of ‘complete isolation and devastation’. One great consolation for both of them was to be Gouraud’s official visit to Zinder, something Gaden had hoped for ever since taking up his post in the town. It would be a chance for the two Henris to unburden themselves of their worldly woes, and to reminisce about Millot. Gouraud left Tahoua on 15th March for a tour of the region

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that would take in Zinder as part of the itinerary. There were outbreaks of ‘soudanite’ in the west, but Gouraud saw it as his duty to come to the east of the territory to become better acquainted with the town. Zinder was after all the official headquarters of the Third Territory, and Gouraud as its commanding officer had not yet been there. Indeed, it was more than one year since the two men had seen each other. They had a lot of catching up to do. Gouraud’s worries about Gaden’s health grew, and perhaps the presence of his friend and senior officer would bring Gaden some relief, physical and mental. Poor discipline among the garrison at the post was testing Gaden’s patience to the limit, and he looked to Gouraud to provide him support in his battle against lawlessness and disorder. Gaden had to endure unrest from the local complainants, who he thought had been stirred up by the actions of ‘this animal Mangin’. ‘I have never seen a more bothersome, more clinging, individual; he sometimes causes me real exasperation. Then sens- ing some sort of control over his acts, [he] is all of a sudden a crashing boor’ (JHG-HJEG, 24.11.02).17 The riflemen were up to all sorts of mischief too, and Gaden had to rely on the Sultan’s men for support. A few days previously, five soldiers armed with bludgeons had run away on seeing some of the Sultan’s guards approach. The guards heard cries for help, and a Dyula trader was found, having just been relieved of his goods by the five soldiers. One of the culprits was apprehended, and he later led Gaden to the rest of the gang. These men, it turned out, were part of Mangin’s detachment and they seemed to be under the impression that they were authorised by their commanding officer to raid and pillage in the countryside. Mangin was now in the process of lodging a formal complaint with Gouraud against Gaden, a prospect the latter relished for it would give him the chance to expose the way in which Mangin commanded his company of men. In addition to Mangin’s antics, he was also besieged by a series of thefts, complaints and reclamations involving members of the town’s population. Gaden had to oversee these cases and assist in implementing decisions made by the local judiciary. As Gouraud marched nearer to Zinder, the two Henris discussed what arrangements should be put in place for the visit of the territory’s commanding officer. Rather than thinking of pomp and ceremony, Gaden’s thoughts were turned to how to accommodate and how to feed and water such a large contingent of men. Gouraud was accompanied by six European

17 Gaden’s letter is dated 24th November 1902, an error that even Gouraud pointed out to him since he received it on 28th March 1902. It should be 24th March 1902.

198 chapter four officers, including Dr Chapeyrou, along with 70 riflemen, 35 spahis and a convoy of 40 camels.18 Chapeyrou had been en route for the Niger and then for France at the end of his tour of duty, and was carrying many of Gaden’s photographic plates with him, but he could not get around the arc of the Sokoto circle; he was now no doubt in search of the mousso he had left in Gaden’s charge. Gaden listed the combinations and permutations of which officers would share with whom, and in which huts and houses. Gouraud, needless to say, had his own very specific ideas for the visit: he listed accommodation units by letter – building H, I, J, K etc – along with their occu- pants arranged by order of seniority and rank; he would not have a single mess for all the men, but two – one for the officers and another for the rank and file troops and medical staff. He raised an eyebrow at Gaden’s suggestion that he, Gaden, would move out of his own accommodation in the Residency along with his bevy of women and occupy other quarters. Gouraud insisted on etiquette: ‘it is natural that the Resident lives in the most imposing building after that of the military commander [Gouraud himself].’ He added that it would appear odd in the eyes of the ‘natives’ if an officer junior to Gaden should be given accommodation more beautiful and larger than his own (HJEG-JHG, 30.3.02). Gouraud lodged in Zinder in the imposing and exquisitely furnished house of Mallam Yaro. The next major issue for Gouraud was the composition and organisation of the official welcoming party for his mission to Zinder. There had to be a presentation of the troops, a file-past and review, and then a parade. But wary that the Sultan and his cavalry would want to put on a show, galloping around, firing off their arms and mounting mock charges, Gouraud cautioned: ‘disorder and dust evidently’ (HJEG-JHG, 2.4.02). The exact layout of the parade ground, the positions of the various groups of men, the movement of troops and cavalrymen, all this had to be organised with obvious military precision and coordination. How better to impress ‘the natives’? Gouraud specified the precise details of his grand entry into Zinder, but the overall impression he wished to convey was clear: ‘In principle, I desire to be received as the Colonel [Peroz] was. In filling the same functions, it is necessary in the eyes of the blacks not to make a difference.’ He went on: ‘… a review without a parade is not a review, at least for the public’, and he drew a comparison with what Parisians might witness at Longchamps, no doubt recalling to mind his own memories of the triumphant return of troops he had seen as a young man when General Boulanger had paraded

18 See Gouraud (1944: 79–96) for his account of his trip to Zinder.

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on his white steed many years ago. ‘… I count on having a parade after the review. I will send you an official note on this subject’, he informed Gaden in an authoritarian style (HJEG-JHG, 27.0.02). Gouraud was due to arrive in Zinder on 5th April, but would meet Gaden a few kilometres from the town the night before, where his party would camp and prepare themselves for the spectacle. Gaden had hoped to travel to meet them earlier and then accompany the convoy himself. But the death of Picard meant he was short-staffed and could not afford time away from the post. A few days before Gouraud’s arrival, Gaden conducted a dress rehearsal for the event according to Gouraud’s plan. He experimented with two companies of men, but the mise en scène had not worked out at all. ‘There are a lot of difficulties in assembling where you say, rocks and trees being incommodiously placed; we have to change the direction point for the file-past and the point of concentration [of the troops]; in brief, it is not practical. … As regards the parade at the gallop of the Sultan and those that you call his troops, I confess to you that I do not want to see that at all’ (JHG-HJEG, 31.3.02). On the night of 4th April, Gaden met Gouraud and his party six kilometres from Zinder. Gaden emerged from the dusty gloom only when he was almost under their noses, being camouflaged in his khaki uniform against the sand-coloured backdrop. Gouraud greeted him with great affection, and they sat to dine and discuss the grand entrance into Zinder. The following morning the officers, now dressed formally in their starched white military uniforms, lined up behind Gouraud, the Commanding Officer of the Third Territory. Around two kilometres from the town, the Sultan accompanied by 1,000 cavalrymen and his troops, more or less in line, met Gouraud. The Sultan waited at the centre of a semi-circle of his cavalry under a rudimentary parasol, dismounted from his horse and advanced with some difficulty through the sand towards Gouraud. He held a cane, an embroidered mauve handkerchief and a piece of perfumed sandalwood. He was dressed in traditional garb, completely shrouded in white cloth, with a turban and white veil that hid his face, revealing only his two dark eyes. Gouraud described him thus: ‘it was not a man but a mummy, dressed in a monstrous bundle of material which disguised his human form’.19 The Sultan, a stocky young man, was made to look even more robust by the many layers of clothing he wore, all pulled in at the waist by a belt and by two straps across his shoulders. He held himself upright in a dignified posture, his head thrown

19 Gouraud, 1944: 82.

200 chapter four back in a slightly haughty manner. In front of the fort the garrison was lined up, comprising a large company of riflemen, a platoon of auxiliaries, two cannon and the spahis who had just arrived – 380 men in all. The presentation and review went well, and then the Sultan set off on his frenzied gallop, whipping up clouds of dust through which the horsemen – some were archers, others musicians playing their instruments, some were wearing coats of mail – could only just be picked out. The spectacle went off well, and it satisfied even Gouraud’s exacting standards. However, Gaden’s gloomy post-parade thoughts turned immediately to the demands of material life: ‘many mouths to feed, a ton of millet per day…’ (JHG-F, 7.4.02).

We are Not Against Islam

In February 1902, Gaden received a visit from the Sennusi Shaykh, Mohammed Esseni, who was linked to the Muslim brotherhood from the Cyrennaica in North Africa, whose followers were resisting French annexation of the country to the north and east of Chad. Gaden now assessed the local threat of the Sennusists to be less than that portrayed in the French press at home. The Shaykh, also known as Sidi-el-Mahdi, a title that indicated he was seen to be on a divine mission to revitalise the faith, was based in Djadjidouna, the capital of Damergou just north of Zinder, where he had established a religious lodge. He had earlier met with a cool reception from the other Muslim brotherhoods in Zinder, in particular from the Tijanis and Qadiris who were represented by their respective marabouts or religious leaders, Mallam-Hassan and the Tijani qadi, who ran a small Qur’anic school. Mallam-Hassan’s father, Mallam-Suleyman had died a few years earlier, and his grave was the site of much veneration among the faithful. The son also ran a Qur’anic school and lived only 800 metres from the military post. The French were particularly fearful of the role the Sennusists might play in West and Central Africa, and their experience of them so far had been unfortunate. Tuareg from across the Sahel flocked to their cause in Chad, and it was some of these men that accounted for the death of Millot and others. Gaden found Mohammed Esseni a very reserved and distant character, but he was always correct in his dealings with the French. The Shaykh had tried to broker a deal between the Kel Oui trans-Saharan traders who operated out of Zinder and the other nomadic Tuareg groups in Damergou who frequently pillaged caravans. The Shaykh had also advised that they would submit to the French if assured of the colonialists’ support for peaceful

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commerce in the region. The Shaykh came to seek out Gaden in Zinder, perhaps to gain an impression of how the French regarded the Sennusists following the battles in Bir Alali in Chad. Gaden wrote later to reassure him that ‘we do not make war on the marabouts, … we leave them completely free, but on the condition that they do not make propaganda against us’ (JHG-HJEG, 29.2.02). This relationship with an important Muslim religious leader was just one of a series of links Gaden developed increasingly with Islamic scholars and teachers. The research for his monograph on Zinder had led him initially to establish connections with local notables, Muslim intellectuals and other informants in order to collect material on the history, politics, commerce and religious life of the town. He was regarded by them as a scholar in his own right, and earned the title ‘Mallam’ from the local Muslim community. ‘Mallam’ Gaden was also involved with the town’s two leading Muslim figures in the operation of a local court dispensing justice to members of the town’s community. One of the key moments in the town’s judicial affairs came with the imprisonment of the native interpreter who was in the Sultan’s sphere of influence. ‘A small revolution here a few days ago’, was how Gaden described it (JHG-F, 9.5.02). The case involved an influential Tuareg who had had his goods confiscated by the Sultan following testi- mony from a local chief. The interpreter’s role in the misrepresentation of the affair made him culpable in the eyes of the court. This case then led to a tide of claims from aggrieved parties against the Sultan and what Gaden saw as a protest against the dispensation of judgements that often went in the ruler’s own favour. Another notable case in June involved a village chief who had offered hospitality to one of the Sultan’s agents. When the agent left his host’s house he stole two small donkeys as a souvenir. The host then went to the Sultan to lodge a complaint that he had been robbed. In return, he was condemned by the Sultan and had all his goods removed from his house. This was the recompense ‘for having given lodgings to a thief!’ was Gaden’s conclusion (JHG-F, 9.6.02). The local court was set up to deal with these claims, and Gaden explained to his father how the system of justice worked:

The claims continue to rain down against the detestable existence of the Sultan. This makes a lot of work for me but I am happy to render a service to the poor devils who are outrageously pillaged. Thankfully, there are two marabouts here, one of whom is the qadi, who has an excellent reputation and who, supported [by us], has loosened everyone’s tongues. It is they who judge and I who apply the judgements. The Muslim religion here can be strengthened, but since the marabouts are in no way hostile to us we are not against

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Islam here. There is no reason not to employ it [the religion]. Anyway, their justice is simple and supported by the facts of natural justice and by Qur’anic texts. (JHG-F, 25.5.02) For Gaden the establishment of the court during Gouraud’s stay at Zinder was evidence of the increasing sense of law and order that had settled on the town. He was an agent of justice, a harbinger of the rights of ordinary people against the tyranny and arbitrary demands of the Sultan. These ideals sounded as though they were lifted straight from the Third French Republic. Gaden relished his role of ‘listening to and inscribing’ the numerous cases brought against the Sultan. He wrote down the judgements issued by the Islamic legal authorities, and then followed up with the application of the sentences upon the guilty. This produced an excellent effect in the country, he observed. The local markets were now better supplied, and goods were arriving in abundance for sale and barter – clothes, material, luxury harnesses and leatherwork. The area of land under cultivation was greater than the previous year, and the harvests and tax income were all on the rise. Gaden, the son of Bordeaux who held firm to the benefits of law and order, and the opportunities of peaceful commerce that this allowed, now reflected on the impact of the local tribunal and the pax Gallica. The rosy outlook that emerged was an excellent testament to what could be achieved by an administration that combined direct and indirect methods of rule, Gaden thought. Gaden the belligerent was giving way to Gaden the domesticator. This signalled a shift in his attitude towards a view that was founded on the concept of development through reciprocal exchange, not only of goods and commodities, but also of ideas and ways of knowing the world. It was a policy that was to become known as ‘domestication’ [apprivoisement], which became the hallmark of his later colonial strategy. One arm of this policy was the giving of gifts, such as the copies of the Qur’an he had brought out with him, to local notables. These helped cement the relationships he nurtured among those he thought worthy of cultivating – usually high-standing officials, intellectuals, Muslim scholars and religious leaders. He received a parcel from France at the end of March containing costume jewellery, which he no doubt distributed to his mousso among others; he also had shipped out a number of knives, a favoured gift, the largest of which he presented to the Anastafidet Yato, the supreme authority over the Tuareg confederation in the Damergou, from whom he hoped to acquire manuscripts that he had been seeking for more than a year from Agadez. Another knife was destined for Meli Mougou, the Prime Minister of the Sultan of Agadez, who had given fine service to the French

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Saharan mission. Of him he said: ‘He is the most honest and one of the most intelligent blacks that I have ever known’. However, a gift to the Sultan caused a certain amount of amusement and embarrassment. Gaden had taken a photograph of the Sultan some time earlier and he now presented him with a copy of it. It was given to him without any particular ceremony, but its effect was more than Gaden could ever have imagined. This imbecile to whom I had given it by hand in my office … put on celebrations for the gift over two days, and wrote to [the Sultan of] Kano to announce that I had given him a most inestimable object… . The effect has been disastrous … he wears the photographic plate pinned to a deputy’s sash that was given to him … as though it were the grand cross of an extraordinary order. (JHG-F, 12.7.02) Gaden’s estimation of the Sultan obviously did not match the regard he had for those considered to offer intellectual or cultural insight into local affairs. The Islamic tribunal’s role in dispensing justice had clipped the Sultan’s wings. But besides this, French policy aimed at restricting another aspect of the ruler’s position. The main concern for the French was the suppression of slavery, which represented a significant source of income for the Sultanate. A pragmatic policy prevailed, whereby the worst excesses of human trade were prohibited, but it was not stamped out completely and some of the commerce across the Sahara remained in place. One commodity that had been in particular demand north of the desert was eunuchs, and Gaden wrote an article on this subject some years later when stationed in Chad, the production centre of eunuchs for trans-Saharan trade.20

A Beautiful Way

Gouraud’s presence in Zinder seemed to have a galvanising effect on Gaden, who sprang into action, recovered his zest for life and developed a set of new interests in the form of the tribunal. ‘Gouraud’s arrival has done me much good in the sense that it has doubled my appetite’, he reported to his father (JHG-F, 24.4.02). His friend was due to leave Zinder and eventually return home to France, and Gaden would follow or even accompany him on his travels. The plans revolved around the appointment of a replacement Resident in Zinder, and Gouraud promised to recommend Gaden for

20 The piece was entitled ‘Les Etats Musulmans de l’Afrique Centrale et leurs rapports avec la Mecque et Constantinople’, Revue des Questions Diplomatiques et Coloniales, 1907, Vol. 24, 436–47.

204 chapter four a promotion to the rank of Chef de Bataillon in his report at the end of his campaign. Gaden had failed in an earlier attempt at promotion, but was hopeful that with Gouraud’s renewed backing he would succeed. His friend also counselled him to lobby those he knew in France, so he wrote to his father asking whether he might be able to help out, specifically if he could make overtures in the direction of Eugène Etienne, the political operator within the influential circle of the Parti Colonial. Gaden’s family’s status as a major Bordeaux trading house that supported the Parti’s aims would give the father an entrée to Etienne’s sphere of influence. Important developments took place in April 1902 in the Gaden household back in Bordeaux. Two of his sisters, Germaine and Marie joined a holy order, the Petites Soeurs Dominicaines Gardes-Malades des Pauvres, and the news affected Gaden greatly. Although he was not surprised by the announcement, he longed to have been there before they took their vows so as ‘to see them again as I knew and loved them’. He worried that their departure would have an effect on family life, on the gaiety of the home, which would now be emptied of the laughter and enthusiasm that they brought to the place. He seemed more concerned that the loss of Germaine in his father’s life, perhaps the bubblier of the two women, would be the greater shock to bear, and he had little to say about his other sister Marie. The thought that they might have entered a contemplative order exasper- ated him, and he was pleased to learn that their choice was for a vocation that would allow them to share their human qualities with the young and the sick. How would his other two sisters, Mine and Hélène, take this loss? His longing for home was heightened by a sense of quasi-bereavement that he felt towards his sisters. He adopted an unusual register when talking of them to his father, a religious tone that sat uneasily with his habitual cynicism and excoriating wit: ‘We have in effect only to erase ourselves, to resign ourselves, and to thank God, if He really has given them a vocation’ (JHG-F, 24.4.02). Later in May, in response to his father, who must have expressed surprise at Germaine’s decision, he stated: ‘I do not share your astonishment over Germaine’, and went on to add that he was happy if his two sisters were satisfied with their choice of vocation. He drew a parallel with Gouraud’s sister, who had also wanted to take up holy orders but the father had been against it because of the state of her health; he held out for two years. He finally gave in the following year, but some short time later the sister died. Perhaps this was a salutary lesson for Gaden’s father to accept the girls’ decision in good faith. The Gaden sisters took the veil at a ceremony held in the summer, and Gaden again waxed reflexively: ‘…our poor sentiments no longer count, they have to be blotted out before those who

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offer up the same sacrifices… they have found their way and this way is so beautiful’ (JHG-F, 29.9.02). His brother Philippe, by contrast, was still a concern for the father, and he was being packed off to Algeria in the hope of jolting him out of his parasitic state.

Homeric Odyssey

The difficulty of communications between Zinder and Chad in the east and the Niger in the west raised its head again as the hivernage started to set in. In April 1902, German forces had arrived in Dikoa, the capital of Bornu, just south of Lake Chad, on the border with the British-held territory of Nigeria, and in the north-western corner of German-occupied Cameroon. This would mean further complications for the French in gaining access from Zinder to their central African lands in the east. To the west, towards the Niger, the British had given permission for French convoys to pass through the Sokoto arc, but only until 1st November, when the route would be barred. The French desert route, so painfully traversed by Gaden and party on their way to Zinder two years earlier, was impassable and would probably remain so at least until the end of October. All this might mean that Gaden’s escape route from Zinder would soon disappear. By July, Gouraud’s replacement, Colonel Noël, was en route to Say, having already landed on the coast of Dahomey at Kotonou. Once Noël took over command of the region, Gouraud would be released from duty and could spend some time travelling through West Africa, much to the envy of Gaden. ‘I would not be surprised if the star of this excellent Gouraud leads him to Chad, precisely on the arrival of the colonel. As regards me, I will be tethered more and more to the Residence. For 13 months, I have not left the post, the people of the area do not complain perhaps, but I would have loved a slightly more active life’ (JHG-F, 25.7.02). The most annoying thing was that Gaden himself had heard little news of his own replacement, someone who would liberate him from his captivity. Gouraud left Zinder on 9th September 1902, for his replacement had recently arrived in the west, and a handover of the command of the territory would soon take effect. Gaden finally heard news of his own replacement, a Captain Barcelone, who was travelling towards Zinder where it was hoped he would arrive in the next few weeks. Gaden then received news that the new officer had gone down with dysentery in Filingué, and had promptly died on him. This news added to his depression, and Gaden now had absolutely no idea when a new replacement would be sent, or even if a

206 chapter four new officer had been appointed. All this could be months away, and soon the frontier with Nigeria would be closed. Gaden’s woes were further compounded: his bugler was too ill to travel, having gone down with severe syphilis; 40,000 frs had just been received from the administration to pay the salaries of his garrison at the fort, but that sum would be exhausted immediately simply by making the back- payments due to his men. He estimated that around 100,000 frs was required to meet all the salary demands at the post. The final straw for Gaden, the continual thorn in his side, was Mangin, who had disappeared into the desert and no-one had heard from him. ‘You know’, he wrote to Gouraud, ‘that I cannot be suspected of having any particular friendship towards him’, but he still could not understand why Mangin had ‘to chase after imaginary raiding parties’ (JHG-HJEG, 12.9.02). Gouraud remarked that Mangin’s long silence became more and more extraordinary as time went on (HJEG-JHG, 15.9.02). A few days later, Mangin washed up at the post and left a report of his travels, ‘his odyssey retraced in Homeric terms’ (JHG-HJEG, 17.9.02). Gaden was not impressed. However, after having taken some time to digest the contents of the report, Gaden relented a little in his opinion of Mangin: ‘Very interesting, much audacity and energy in the reconnaissance by the 20th [company] of the wells. Perhaps some abuse by small detachments. There were no accidents because there were no Tuareg. In the end it is good all the same’ (JHG-HJEG, 27.10.02). The blue veils of the Tuareg were the least provocation that mad-bull Mangin needed to break into a charge and create mayhem all around him. At least the mission had been spared these outbursts. But he was still the same, for Mangin now demanded to be sent to Bilma, the desert oasis from where salt was extracted, since it had been reported that a Turkish flag had been seen flying there. Mangin was obviously straining at the bit to have a go at these impostors too. Gaden advised Gouraud on the futility of such a mission.

Beau Brummel and Captain Bloch Arrive

A thread linking back to Gaden’s time in Bandiagara emerged around this time. An envoy of the last of Amadou Sheku Tal’s Futanke faithful from Masina came to ask permission from Gaden to pass through the territory and then on towards Mecca. Some 4–5,000 of them were on an exodus to the east, in search of a country where they would find no whites and no taxes, a land free of the infidel. This was not the last time Gaden would have dealings with these Futanke.

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News came through that some help was on its way for Gaden. Gouraud had been using his good offices with the new colonel to provide some relief in Zinder. A lieutenant named Bertrand was to be attached to the Residence, and the order was for Gaden to watch over him for a few months. The young man evidently lacked political and administrative experience, which he would receive under Gaden’s tutelage. Bertrand, a young officer in the marine infantry, arrived in Zinder in mid October 1902, and made an instant impression: ‘I fear that this will not be a good acquisition. He is a young pampered poser, perfumed thanks to [a top French perfumery], who does not appear to have a place in this corner of Africa. Perhaps he has reserves of hidden energy in him but it does not appear so’ (JHG-F, 13.10.02). As the weeks went by, this ‘Beau Brummel’, more perfumed than ever, probably came to represent for Gaden everything that he feared about the cosseted younger generation in France: ‘I would like to be able to push him around for some time in order to perfect his education’ (JHG-HJEG, 27.10.02). He was eventually dispatched north into Damergou where he could spread the scent of his sweet perfumes through the dust-laden air of the desert margins. As a distraction from the assault on his senses, Gaden found solace in his small menagerie that included an excessively gentle deer that followed him around like a dog. ‘This animal, as interesting as it might be, does not prevent me from wanting fervently to come back’ (JHG-F, 27.10.02). Gaden’s thoughts returned to the situation he would find at home on his arrival back in France. He had started reading newspapers and the Havas again, or at least whenever they managed to get through to Zinder. He was particularly revolted by what he read; and the changes in the political landscape were viewed by him as a descent into a form of internal fighting at the ‘hands of intelligent but low forms of life’. ‘If all this continues’, he remarked, ‘we will get what we deserve, a dictator, and that would be sad’ (JHG-F, 27.10.02). What interested him especially was the news of Emile Zola’s death on 29th September (the anniversary of Samory Toure’s capture), which he commented on in a letter to his father on 10th November:

… a Havas announc[ed] the end by asphyxiation of Zola. For a man so proud, to die like a simple working girl, asphyxiated by a mobile stove (this is probably appropriate) is to die twice. I think that his burial will have been an occasion for the demonstration of much good taste. We truly live in a strange epoch. (JHG-F, 10.11.02)

This outburst probably represented years of pent up frustration on Gaden’s part at the prominent role Zola played in the Dreyfus affair, especially his famous ‘J’Accuse’ article printed in 1898 that triggered an upsurge in

208 chapter four support for the beleaguered officer. Gaden vented his spleen in no uncertain terms, and seemed to derive a sense of satisfaction from the manner of the great writer’s death. Again the anniversary of the capture of Samory went unremarked by Gaden, although Gouraud indulged in his usual sentimentality (HJEG-JHG, 30.9.02). November brought Gaden news of his replacement, Captain Bloch, ‘an experienced man of absolute integrity’, ‘thoughtful and calm’, was on his way. ‘I am overjoyed to be in the process of shedding this heavy weight’, and he hoped to be in France by April 1903 (JHG-F, 8.11.02). By the end of the month he was expecting Bloch to arrive in the first few days of December, but his wait was not yet over. He remained at the post with only two other European officers, Landeroin, the interpreter, and the fort’s medic; meanwhile, the perfumed dandy had been proving his worth on the desert margins and had caused no disturbances. Gaden set his sights on marching by 10th December in order to sneak through the Sokoto arc before the closure of the extended deadline, now on 1st January 1903.21 One of his last thoughts in the final letter we have to his father on 24th November was for Mallam Yaro, the rich merchant chief from the market settlement outside Zinder: ‘[he] is decidedly a precious man’. Gaden was on the move by January, later than he had anticipated, and true to his predictions he was home by April 1903, at the same time as his friend Henri Gouraud.

21 It was not until after a conference between the two colonial powers, France and Britain, that a practical route between the Niger and Zinder was agreed upon, and six months later the modified frontier was determined on the ground. Gaden had been influential in mediating between the French and British forces in the area, and had acted as transla- tor of official communications for Gouraud. His expertise in English, along with his evident skills as a linguist of local vernaculars, was an attribute that marked him out from other colonial officers. See Gouraud’s letter to Gaden on 15.9.02 in which he expresses his reliance on Gaden’s ability to translate letters to and from English officers based in Nigeria, especially in Bornu, the centre of interest for the three European powers in West Africa – Britain, France and Germany.

INTERLUDE: FURLOUGH IN FRANCE III

A Mission in the Making

The prospect of a new tour of duty in the recently annexed central African lacustrine region excited Gaden, and in anticipation of a posting to Chad he transferred in October 1903 to the Third Colonial Infantry Regiment. He had mulled over the possibility of going to Chad many times with Gouraud before leaving Zinder, and a major step forward came during a dinner, organised by the Colonial Cotton Association, that Henri Gouraud attended on 31st October 1903 in Paris. Dining together were Gaston Doumergue, the Minister of Colonies, Eugène Etienne, and a number of army officers, including Gouraud, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, commander of the disastrous Fashoda mission 1896–98, and Charles Mangin, a Saint-Cyrard, the elder brother of Georges ‘the madman’, and also a member of the Marchand mission to Fashoda. The idea of a French territory stretching from the Niger to the Nile still played on the imaginations of members of the Parti Colonial, whose interests were represented in the figure of Etienne. Minister Doumergue was also preoccupied with the question of French annexation of Chad, and was concerned to stem a vociferous campaign waged in the Parisian press, especially in the newspaper Le Temps, that called for an evacuation of troops from the area around the Chari [or Shari] River. This campaign had gathered pace since September 1902, but colonial interest groups planned to consolidate the French presence rather than leave the territory to their colonial rivals. Commandant Largeau, then stationed in Chad, was due to return to France at the end of his tour of duty and, on Etienne’s encouragement, Gouraud was offered the replacement position. He was invited to the Minister’s office the day after the dinner of the colonial cabal, and Gouraud jumped at the chance of the new tour of duty. He would be able to hand-pick his men for the mission; Henri Gaden was near the top of his list of officers he wished to accompany him.1 During the final months of 1903 and from the start of following year, Gouraud and Gaden made preparations for their departure on a new adventure that would take them through the heart of the ‘dark continent’, up the

1 See Gouraud (1944: 128–132) for details of the ministerial meeting and preparatory arrangements for the mission.

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Congo River and then down the Chari into Chad, a journey that would take an estimated four months to complete. The territory of Chari-Chad had been assigned to the Governorship of the Congo, and they would come under the authority of the Central African colonial administration. Gaden travelled up and down between Bordeaux and Paris to assist Gouraud in organising the mission, to discuss the details of the posting, and to buy goods and supplies to support the campaign. Large quantities of decorative beads were purchased to be used either as small change in local transac- tions or to supply to African women to make bracelets and necklaces or to adorn their hair. They also acquired pieces of coral, highly desired by women in the area as a form of jewellery worn as nasal studs. The two men bought up too large quantities of thalers, a type of European coin in wide circulation in central Africa, which was also called a ‘Marie-Thérèse’ after the image of the Austro-Hungarian Empress impressed on the large silver piece. This currency was purchased by weight in Paris at two-and-a-half francs per coin, but the official rate of exchange in Africa was three francs; the local Chadians, however, valued them highly and they subsequently changed hands at a rate of around five francs along the River Chari. Gaden and Gouraud had mixed feelings on the eve of their departure from France for their next tour of duty. Gaden had led an ‘absolutely vegeta- tive life’ in Bordeaux, where he had risen every morning at 9 o’clock ‘with a tranquil conscience and a sense of duty accomplished’ (JHG-HJEG, 11.2.04). His inaction and lethargy was the cause, in his view, of a looming sentimentality that affected him prior to his departure. But there was another cause. In February he had written to a female companion, ‘la grande M’, and had received a reply from her. This was no doubt Marguerite whose acquaintance he had promised to renew on returning from Zinder: ‘…this dear child responded to me, a very kind letter but highly amusing because of a very intense orthographic imagination’, which indicated certain personality traits, he thought (JHG-HJEG, 12.2.04). Parting from family, friends and admirers was painful, but Gaden wrapped himself in his habitual cynicism and scathing wit as an emotional protection. He wrote to Gouraud: ‘I see you from here between this mother and this sister [of yours] in tears. What share of unconscious egoism there is in these most pure affections’ (JHG- HJEG, 11.2.04). Gouraud was also tearing himself away from a young lady called ‘Gaby’, a figure who first appeared in his letters two years earlier at the end of the Zinder tour of duty.2 He fretted over leaving her behind in

2 Gouraud sometimes spells her name with a ‘y’ or an ‘i’. I have adopted ‘Gaby’ throughout, unless in quotation from one of his letters.

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France, and Gaden tried to console him, referring to her as ‘this poor brave little G’ in the flower of her youth. Gaden went on: ‘For us, life is made up of movements. Our sentiments are no longer appropriate and we live a most intense life in France. Separations are cruel, but the memories that are held on to are only the best’ (JHG-HJEG, 11.3.04). Gaden was perhaps better at insulating himself from his feelings than Gouraud, who would continue to suffer emotional turmoil in his relationship with Gaby. Marguerite never seemed to occupy the same place in Gaden’s life, nor did he let any affection he felt for her get the better of him.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME: TCHEKNA, CHAD, 1904–1907

An Odiously Long Voyage

Gouraud left Paris by train on 15th March 1904 for Bordeaux, where he would meet up with Gaden before embarking on the old tramp steamer Ville de Macéio. Gouraud had assembled what he regarded as a loyal group of officers, including Captains Gaden, Rivière and Bablon, the latter from the Bir Alali campaign which had seen the loss of Millot; Lieutenants Freydenberg, Gerhardt and Georges Mangin also joined them. This band of war-worn officers was accompanied by the Commissaire Général, Emile Gentil, who was to replace Alfred Fourneau as Governor of the Congo. Gentil, who had played a role some years earlier in the colonial annexation of Chad, now brought along his wife and daughters, and they would live as a family in Brazzaville. The cramped steamer, an ageing tub that plied the route between numerous small ports along the coast of Guinea, left the port of Bordeaux on 20th March 1904. It would not be a comfortable voyage. On board the poorly equipped vessel conditions were unspeakable, and the large party of officers, the Governor and his family, along with a number of merchants travelling to West Africa, suffered the indignities of living on top of each other. Gaden did not want to share with his parents certain details of life of board for fear of disgusting them, and the dining they enjoyed was definitely inferior to what was offered on other steamers. Gentil, however, made a fine impression on Gaden: ‘a very good man, remaining very informal and friendly, and only a touch “military”, in the best sense of the word, very frank and correct, and of very independent views. I am very happy to make this voyage with him’ (JHG-F, 23.4.04). The boat stopped over in Dakar and then continued on its way around the West African coast, visiting each and every port en route, providing a kind of ‘bateau-omnibus’ service for the local colonial communities. The steamer plotted its slow and wearing passage around the Guinea coast, and at the end of the first week of April 1904 the party reached Kotonou and landed for a few hours. This gave Gaden the chance to meet up with Captain Bloch, the officer who had replaced him in Zinder two

214 chapter five years earlier, and Gaden was heartened to catch up on news of his old friends and contacts from the town. He anticipated with some sense of dread, however, the prospect of another week or more at sea before finally arriving at the mouth of the Congo River in Matadi – ‘an odiously long voyage’, he remarked (JHG-F, 10.4.04). There were two more stop-overs in Libreville and Cap Lopez before they reached their destination. Emile Gentil disembarked at Libreville (‘beautiful vegetation, but a dead town’, Gaden observed), the capital of what was to become Gabon, and the Commissaire would meet up with the party later in Brazzaville, the capital of the French Congo, before the party headed north towards Chad. By 17th April, the Ville de Macéio reached Boma near Matadi at the mouth of the Congo, where the violent, swirling, yellow-brown waters of the river forced their angry way into the sea. Matadi, a settlement created by Henry Morton Stanley, the Anglo- American journalist and explorer of the Congo, stood at the foot of a rocky outcrop. The heat was unbearable, but the party did not stay long. A narrow-gauge railway snaked its course from the town up the side of the mountain, clinging to it precariously, and on to Leopoldville the Belgian capital on the banks of Stanley Pool some two-days’ journey away across ravines and through tunnels hewn by African labourers into living rock. King Leopold of Belgium had had the line constructed some years earlier at the cost of many thousands of lives; it connected the mouth of the Congo with the navigable river beyond the rapids just inland from the coast, and was used primarily to export rubber extracted from the interior. Having set foot on African soil again, Gaden was thrilled by the sights and experiences of the continent he loved. A boat from Leopoldville took them across Stanley Pool, a journey of around two hours to Brazzaville on the right bank of the river. The town was a rudimentary settlement set on reclaimed land carved out from the bush, and it made a sorry sight to Gaden’s eyes. It had no buildings of note nor much of a quay, and comprised mainly of a collection of unattractive flat-roofed colonial constructions lifted off the ground on piles and encircled with terraces. Trees grew intermittently between houses, which were situated in small groups of three or four built on plateaux separated one from the other by ravines and lush vegetation. The largest house was occupied by a Dutch merchant involved in rubber export; but the accommodation for the French officers was disappointing: it was rented from a local company that operated rubber factories, and the men were squeezed in two to a room. Some of the ranks were under canvas, camping in small, shared tents on parcels of land dotted here and there. Despite the lushness of their surroundings, feeding a party of men was not

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easy and there was little meat to be had. Nonetheless a hippopotamus provided sufficient ‘beef steaks’ to keep all of them satisfied during the reception dinner arranged by members of the local community. While waiting for the arrival of Gentil, Gouraud heard that he had been appointed commandant of the territory and of the battalion of men stationed in Chad; Gaden learnt that he would be posted to the cercle at Laï on the banks of the Logone river on the border with German-held Cameroon. It was a disappointment to him, for while the area was well-populated and a potenital source of large tax revenues, the inhabitants were ‘fetishists’ and had been under constant threat of attack from the Sultan of Baghirmi. By comparison with Zinder, it would be a small command, probably quite tranquil; but at least it offered the attraction of a nearby population of Fulbe cattle-herders, whose language he spoke. The journey north from Brazzaville was going to be a headache, for once the party reached the point where the rivers were no longer navigable it would have to rely on human portage. Local populations had abandoned their villages, so fearful were they of being pressed into portering duties for French convoys. Gaden was not impressed by what he saw of the colonial organisation in the territory: Congo is an absolutely stupid, absurd colony which has not passed through the habitual and necessary stages, in which the native is exposed to every arbitrariness, where the agents of the administration, having no other traditions than those of a day-to-day existence of explorers, are for the most part incapable and insane. (JHG-F, 21.4.04) These were strong words of condemnation from a man who had been in the territory for less than a week.

A Rising Tide of Outrage The town of Brazzaville was named after the French naval officer and explorer Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza.1 A contemporary of Henry Stanley (who

1 Italian by birth, but a naturalised Frenchman, de Brazza (1852–1905) was of noble extraction and educated at the naval college at Brest; he organised exploratory missions in Gabon and the Congo in particular. His early missions were mostly self-financed, and he campaigned against slavery and brutal military intervention in Africa. He was not universally accepted in army circles, and was nick-named ‘farniente’ or ‘the idle’ by Commandant Largeau’s father, Jean Victor, also a colonial military man. De Brazza was suspicious of French officers (such as Gaden) who had close links with companies involved in local trade and extractive industries. He was appointed Commissaire Général of the Congo in 1885, but later fell out with Paris over French policy in the region.

216 chapter five had found David Livingstone and then worked for King Leopold of Belgium in establishing the Belgian Congo), de Brazza vied with his Anglo-Saxon rival for influence in the river basin. In 1880 during the undignified scramble for colonial possessions in Africa, the Frenchman signed a treaty with the Congolese ruler, Makoko of Mbe, on the right bank of the river to establish a French protectorate centred on the site where the town was later founded. He and Stanley carried out a public feud over their relative ‘discoveries’ in Africa, and each man’s attempts to out-manoeuvre the other were the cause of much resent- ment. De Brazza was to have a central role in the affairs of the region into which Gaden was heading in 1904. The colonial territory had become infamous after the Toqué-Gaud scandal broke in France following the 1903 July 14th celebrations conducted in perverse colonial style at Fort Crampel, a French post through which Gaden was about to travel en route to Chad. A colonial administrator, Georges Toqué, and a clerk, Fernand Gaud, had executed a native guide at the fort by attaching dynamite to his body and igniting it to celebrate the French national day. This murder was the cause of much anguish in Paris, and added fuel to the campaign for the evacuation of French forces from Chad. The culprits were found guilty and later imprisoned, although the sentences they served were surprisingly short. This case sparked a sense of national outrage among French politicians and influential figures, and it came at a time when a rising tide of opposition in the whole of Europe and also in the United States was mounting against the revelations of colonial atrocities in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold’s rule. Horrific descriptions of events and the conditions of life for Congolese rubber collectors, forced to work under a slave-labour regime and subject to the most hideous brutalities, came to light through the investigative work of a young British shipping company official, Edmund Morel.2 This was Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in its full gory historical detail. Morel’s campaign against the appalling situation in the Congo reached its peak during the first years of the 20th century when international condemnation of the Belgian colonial administration was heard the loudest. Conditions in the French Congo were perhaps little better, and the Toqué-Gaud affair triggered recognition in France that an official investigation of their own territory was necessary. De Brazza was commissioned with this task, but he did not embark on the mission until 1905, once Gaden had been settled in Chad for some while. This backdrop of horrific events and maladministration informed Gaden’s view of the Congo as he passed up the river towards the new French territory.

2 See Adam Hochschild’s gripping account of this story: King Leopold’s Ghost (2006) and Viaene’s two scholarly contributions 2008a & b.

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The other significant colonial figure in this part of the story is Emile Gentil, whose pioneering feats in the annexation of Chad were lauded amongst colonial expansionists. Gentil’s first experience of the Chari-Chad region had been when he managed to reach the lake in 1897 to fly the flag for France on its banks. He had also concluded treaties with two local rulers, Gaourang, the Sultan of Baghirmi, and Mohammed al Senoussi, the Sultan of Kouti, to establish a French protectorate against the threat posed by Rabah, a local leader then at the height of his powers. A campaign against Rabah, who marauded through the region, had been organised and Gentil took command of the mission, which subsequently suffered a heavy defeat in late 1899. A little later, Gentil had then headed the Congo column that had rendezvoused with the two other French missions from Algeria and the Soudan (ex-Voulet-Chanoine) in 1900 on the banks of the Chari River, and he had been part of the combined column that had defeated Rabah on 22nd April 1900 at the Battle of Kousseri.

The Sepulchre of a Friend’s Stomach

Gaden left Brazzaville on 2nd May 1904 aboard a steamer named after the town. A party of around a dozen officers, three civilians, five sub-officers and 40 riflemen was packed together on the small vessel; they steamed across the length of Stanley Pool and then up the Congo River, which had gouged a one-kilometre-wide corridor through the mountains, whose slopes were covered in thick tropical rainforest. For Gaden it was ‘a desert of water and greenery’. Compared with the Niger, the Congo River was more impressive, but it lacked the life and animation of human activity found in the Soudan. Further up stream, they were confronted by a labyrinth of islands and sandbanks. The steamer would be tied up each night at some isolated post where a European took charge of a small band of woodcutters, who spent the hours of darkness restocking the vessel with wood to fire its boilers. Members of the local populations that Gaden came across did not make a favourable impression on him: I have never seen such horrible people. All the men and women file their front two teeth. The fashion otherwise among the coquettish women is to shave their eyebrows and pluck out their lashes. With this they have the most bestial physionomies, and the fair sex is very well represented here. (JHG-F, 9.5.04) Some two kilometres up stream on the Congo, they turned in to a tributary, the Ubangi River, to navigate their way over 500 kilometres toward the town of Bangui. At Mongoumba, the terminus for river steamers, they waited for

218 chapter five lighters or river barges to take them on further, and spent their time talking to officers from Chad who were on their way south to be repatriated. They camped on sand banks, for there was not sufficient accommodation for the 25 Europeans who had gathered at the post. ‘All of this is not disorder, but a total lack of organisation, an anarchy which is the rule in the Congo, and which makes this colony, happily, resemble no other’, observed Gaden. Indeed, he learnt that a factory close by had been raided two days earlier: Forty-three natives from the pillaged factory have been killed, then eaten. The natives of the region, the Bondjos, are in effect impenitent cannibals. A Bondjo proverb: “There is no better sepulchre than a friend’s stomach”… The flesh of factory employees is particularly valued, because as they eat salt everyday, they [the Bondjos] are supplied with a more salted meat. (JHG-F, 21.5.04) It was reported that the Europeans working there had managed to escape, but there was still concern for two whites who manned neighbouring posts. An adjutant had been dispatched with 20 men to seek revenge for the killings. The theme of cannibalism amongst the Congolese was a constant refrain in colonial discourse. In part a construction of the colonial imagination, these ideas provided an ideological justification for intervention by French forces and bolstered a sense of European superiority. There does appear to be evidence of cannibalism, but this occurred under conditions of extreme social disruption caused by the harsh European regime put in place to extract rubber from the area, and colonialism did little to alleviate these conditions. It is doubtful whether cannibalism was ever an established custom of routine daily life, but in extreme circumstances it is not unknown as a practice in the face of starvation (both in this case and in modern cases of warfare and natural disaster). Indeed, it would seem that some years earlier it had been a survival strategy for the remnants of Samory Toure’s camp followers after the devastation of local communities that Samory and the French wreaked during the course of their encounters. Colonialists however revelled in the chance to label particular African communities as ‘anthropophagic’. Gouraud warmed to the theme of cannibalism in his memoirs when discussing the ‘Bondjos’, an ethnic name he attributed to a local deformation in the pronunciation of the French word ‘bonjour’. They had neither sheep nor cattle, Gouraud reported, and ‘the need for meat has made the populations cannibals. For them, dead human flesh is their meat’. Stories about eating human flesh circulated within the expatriate European community,

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and they read like present-day European urban myths. For example, the commandant at the post at Bangui related the following ‘amusing’ tale: ‘A man was badly bitten by a crocodile and sent to hospital to have his leg amputated. On coming round from the anaesthetic and seeing his leg removed, he demanded to have it returned to him in order to eat it. This could not happen because the local surgeon had already done so.’ Gouraud also reported that the same officer greeted the party headed for Chad with the words: ‘I am the fourth Commander of Bangui, the only one still not to have been eaten’.3 In June, the party of men left Bangui by small river barges and dug-out canoes,4 and they made their way up to Fort de Possel and then on to Krébedjé, at which point the river was no longer navigable. The convoy had to take an overland route to the headwaters of the Gribingui River, which fed the Chari that flowed north-west towards Lake Chad. No pack animals or beasts of burden could survive in the humid conditions, so they relied on human porters to carry their effects. Men were requisitioned from the locality to carry the luggage, and Gaden was given charge of 180 porters in an advance party. He complained that there was no means of possible surveillance; the porters march as they will; it is necessary to remain at the rear in order to stimulate the laggards and they are numerous. These unfortunates do not receive foodstuffs; they are given at the beginning, as payment for their two days, six coffee spoons of beads and one of salt. Since there are no villages, except for some abandoned ruins on the route, the porters cannot buy anything, and live on the meagre provisions they are able to carry themselves and on fruit that they collect from the bush. These unfortunates are starving to death. (JHG-F, 22.6.04) Gaden and his party of porters made their way through the eerie, empty countryside, and they covered the distance from Krébedjé to Fort Crampel over a period of six days. The total cost to the administration of the convoy for this part of the voyage was, therefore, 18 spoons of beads and three of salt per man. Gouraud continued his way towards the next post at Fort Archambault by river, but Gaden and Rivière went overland, a trip less odious than sitting cramped up on a river barge for days on end. Gaden preferred the freedom that a march over 13 days would allow him, even if it meant long and difficult stages through the bush. There would be rivers to ford, frontiers to cross and abundant game to shoot. He departed from

3 See Gouraud, 1944: 149–152, for these details. 4 The men’s effects were sealed in large metal barrels the size of oil drums, called conzas, which would float if they were lost overboard.

220 chapter five

Fort Crampel on 24th June and expected to be at Fort Archambault by 6th July. Fort Archambault was the first post in the territory of Chad, a modest station with tall thatched huts of straw, whose roofs almost reached the ground. These unusual constructions offered shelter from the incessant rain for the offices, storehouses and magazines that contained coffers, papers, munitions and sacks of provisions. The fort was the supply station for the posts further north. Maintaining the supply lines and communications over 500 kilometres to Fort Lamy, the military and administrative centre of the territory, would tax the ingenuity of the commandant over the next few years. Fort Archambault and the valley of the Bahr Salamat were under constant threat from the forces of the ruler of Ouaddai, whose capital lay some 500 kilometres to the north-east at Abéché. The region commanded by Gouraud from Fort Lamy was vast, covering an arc of roughly 500 kilometres in radius that swept from the south through the east and up to the north; it was over 1,000 kilometres at its maximum length. To the west and north of Fort Lamy lay the northern part of German-occupied Cameroon whose regional centre was at Goulfei, a post only 100 kilometres downstream on the left bank of the Chari towards the lake. The western side of the lake abutted the British territory of Nigeria. The French territory included eight cercles and residences, at Kanem, Moito, Melfi, N’Dele, Fort Archambault, Laï, Baghirmi and Fort Lamy itself. It would take weeks, if not longer depending on the season, for messages to be sent from one side of the territory to the other. With hostile groups of Muslims to the north and east, the dispersed and isolated outposts, as well as the mail services, would be vulnerable to attack unless treaties could be drawn up. From Archambault to Fort Lamy, the river Chari flowed across a vast open plain, broken only by rocky outcrops about 100 kilometres downstream. It was monotonous for those navigating the river by boat, but for Gaden there was pleasure to be had, even if the countryside was not as picturesque as he had hoped. This was compensated for by what he encountered en route in villages where: the inhabitants are real savages but the most brave in the world, a species of giant Herculean in size, who roar with laughter at the slightest thing and who are dressed in goat skins. They wear aprons, but at the back not at the front as one would have thought. I do not recommend this voyage for young modest girls. As regards the women of these brave people, chiselled as though by the blows of an axe, they wear a small bouquet of three or four green leaves as their only clothes, fixed by a string around the small of their backs. Certain mature and over-weight matrons are completely horrible but they go about their business tending to their needs with dignity. At Fort Archambault, we

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found women who, under the guise of ornamentation, place in their lower lip a disk of wood as large as coffee-cup saucer, and a much smaller washer in their upper lip… the result is altogether horrible. (JHG-F, 29.7.04)

A Vast Termite Mound

Gouraud and Gaden arrived by boat at Fort Lamy on the morning of 17th July, almost exactly four months from the time they left France. It was an ugly, muddy post with a ruined air about it. Commandant Largeau, the man demitting office to Gouraud, was pleased to see the fresh arrivals, who sig- naled his return home. By this time Gaden had learnt that he would not be given the command of the cercle at Laï, now his preference, but instead was to be Resident to Sultan Gaourang of Baghirmi and based in Tchekna. The effects of years of slaving by neighbouring groups had left much of the region poorly populated and trade routes had been badly disrupted. ‘Everything here is misery, the country of Baghirmi is above all devastated. In this enormous territory there are, according to our information, only 130,000 inhabitants, which is ridiculously few. The country is picking itself up slowly, but will not be of much value to us’, he reported to his father (JHG-F, 22.6.04). Gaden already missed Zinder and the contacts he had made there during his last tour of duty. By comparison with Chad, ‘It [Zinder] is a country which has very real elements of native wealth and which can nonetheless be prosperous without having to give us anything.’5 This nostalgia for Zinder was prompted by a chance meeting with a Peul marabout who had been in the town three months earlier, and who reminded him of the prestigious nickname generously given to him by the Zinder community: ‘mallam’ or Muslim scholar. He hoped that his new acquaintance, this learned marabout from Fouta Jallon in the Guinea highlands, would supply him with further Arabic manuscripts of the sort he had collected earlier. Gaden’s abilities in the language of the Fulbe or Peul reassured him that he could now pass as an interpreter, and that this would help in his relations with local cattle herders, who were unfortunately rather thin on the ground in this part of Chad. Arabic, of which Gaden spoke little, was the lingua franca in the region: ‘But really’, he exclaimed, ‘this is too many different languages.’ Gaden left Fort Lamy for Tchekna by boat on 1st August. He was accompanied by Commandant Largeau and Jacquin, the same Jacquin who had

5 See Gouraud (1944:160) where he expressed the opposite view of Zinder.

222 chapter five been part of the Samory campaign and who had tried to gain all the plau- dits himself for the Almamy’s capture. The ‘lad’ was now in charge of the battery stationed at Tchekna. They took the river barge, the Léon Blot,6 down to the village of Mandjaffa, where a convoy of donkeys was awaiting them to take their trunks through the rain-sodden country to Tchekna. From here they struck out overland to Massenya, the capital of Baghirmi, next to which the French post of Tchekna was constructed. The trek followed the path of the Bahr Erguig, a watercourse that filled during the rainy season, as it now was, and their passage was hazardous. The donkeys floun- dered in the mud, trunks became dislodged from their backs and plunged into the water, and the horses paddled along the flooded river banks covering everyone in sludge. Later, passing over shifting sands, a horse was lost, a violent tornado hit them, and it took the party four hours to cover a distance of 12 kilometres. Exhausted, they arrived in Tchekna in the afternoon of 6th August, and Gaden was disillusioned by what he saw: The post is a vast termite mound. I have never seen so many termites. Nothing can be left on the ground or against the walls. At midnight, a tornado. The badly made roof let in water, and the great rains have only just started, which promises much joy. Today the cannoneers erected a canvas roof [over my hut], but I do not know if it will hold against the gusts of wind. (JHG-F, 7.8.04) Tchekna was a little-known military post on the margins of the French Central African colony. It was large and well-ventilated, sitting on the top of an incline that reached down to the Bahr Erguig. Apart from the termites and the swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed around in the valley, Gaden thought the position not an unhealthy one. The village of Massenya, made in straw and with a population of around 6,000 inhabitants, began only 200 metres from the post, and the palace of the Sultan was situated some 1,200 metres away. The local market was small and, while few Hausa traders came any more, some from Bornu did buy cattle there. After drying out his effects, he paid a visit to the Sultan Gaourang, who was told to behave and not to bother Commandant Gouraud in Fort Lamy. The Sultan promised to visit the post the following day, after he had recovered his health. Commandant Largeau proclaimed: ‘the Sultan of Baghirmi is a weak man, if he does little good, he does little bad’.7 Gaden observed: ‘I am the Resident in the void’ (JHG-HJEG, 8.8.04).

6 This steamer had been brought to the territory by Gentil during his first mission to Chad. It had been dismantled and hauled overland by porters from the Ubangi River to the Chari. 7 Reported in Gouraud, 1944: 159.

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During his first week at Tchekna, Gaden started to gain a sense of local affairs. He was initially concerned that so few villagers came to the post, and he suspected Jacquin and his cannoneers of putting people off. ‘But you know Jacquin’, he wrote to Gouraud, ‘He is a terrible big-mouth, [and] pushes people around’ (JHG-HJEG, 8.8.04). The Sultan paid him a visit, but clearly still unwell he had been of little help in advising the Resident about the Sultanate. Illness too had struck the post’s herds of cattle, and bovine tuberculosis was later diagnosed. They were corralled near the post in a boggy area, up to their legs in mud; and the sheep were in little better condition living in a ‘cesspool’. They were herded there, Jacquin admitted, to prevent thefts of milk from the animals; better to lose some milk than lose animals, thought Gaden. Jacquin’s bad influence had been felt already in the first week of the mission.8 Gaden signed off his first letter from Tchekna to Gouraud: ‘My faith, Jacquin is a good brave lad, but his mouth is too big.’ He added that he was not busy seeking out a mousso or wife quite yet, since he wished to ‘continue to give a good example of every virtue’ (JHG-HJEG, 12.8.04).

Populating the Void

Gouraud encouraged Gaden to think of the opportunities that Baghirmi offered: he was the first Resident to the Sultan, and the kingdom had only been liberated from Rabah’s raiding parties four years earlier. ‘You say that you are the Resident in the void; you will change that very quickly.’ Gouraud went on in typical colonial style: ‘This Sultan would appear an above- average man for his race, but after all he is a negro and he has to be directed.’ He advised Gaden that the direction to be taken should stem from the ‘power of moral prestige’, which the latter seemed to heed given his self- control over the issue of local women. Gouraud counselled that they should not intervene too much in the politics of the Sultanate, but if they had to intervene then their advice would have to be heard: ‘at base they are blacks’, he observed. He added: ‘It is time, you see, for an experienced and wise hand to take hold of the affairs of Baghirmi’ (HJEG-JHG, 19.8.04). The situation elsewhere demanded other methods, Gouraud proposed, in particular to help open up communications with Zinder, at a distance of

8 Gaden was nonetheless impressed by the quality of the pack-saddles Jacquin had made for the donkeys used en route to the post; they had stood up well despite the conditions, and had not injured the backs of the animals.

224 chapter five around 750 kilometres as the crow flies to the west of Fort Lamy. ‘We are far from the pacific conquest [of the region] by gifts’. This was a strategy that Gaden increasingly had come to prefer in Zinder; and since his arrival in Chad he had sent letters to his old acquaintance Mallam Yaro and others and had dispatched some books to them. Gaden’s hope was to create commercial relations between the two places.9 By contrast, Gouraud’s hand had already clamped down on the affairs at his post: a thief accused of stealing guns at Fort Lamy had been hung quick and high behind the market, and the suspicion was that he had acted on the advice of one of Sultan Gourang’s representatives (HJEG-JHG, 25.8.04). Towards the end of August, Gaden received his first letters in Tchekna posted over three months earlier by his father in France. His parents were to visit Grenoble to witness the induction of his sister Hélène, taking up holy orders among the Sisters of Orléans;10 Gaden was pleased to learn that his brother Philippe had left home, for it was time for him to get out from the house where he was so obviously frustrated. He was now 21 years of age. The parental house was therefore almost emptied of its family members, with only his elder sister Mine still there. While the Gaden family home in Bordeaux was emptying, Gaden reported to his father that more people in Baghirmi were passing by the post now. This made his life a little less monotonous and empty. The void was slowly being populated. Gaden found a new outlet for his interests. He had been working with five Hausa marabouts to develop the market in Tchekna. They had spent four days together inscribing numerous pieces of paper with Qur’anic script in Arabic characters set in beautiful designs. These precious sheets of paper were then placed in an earthenware pot with the tail feathers from two red cocks, the beards of two goat kids, bristles from a young bull, a little millet, rice, wheat, maize and cotton. Thus filled, the pot was then buried in the ground in the market place. The talisman was meant to attract crowds of Hausa merchants to the Tchekna market.11 Mallam Yaro and others from Zinder would also have a large role to play in stimulating trade from Zinder

9 Mallam Yaro and Chettima Ahmed Kiari both wrote to Gaden in late September 1904 thanking him for the gifts received. See letters contained in the Fonds Gaden, CAOM APC 15/1 (7). 10 A portrait photograph taken at around this time at a studio in Orléans of Hélène in a nun’s habit is contained in the Conqueret-Guibourd archive in Bordeaux. 11 Gouraud related the same story, although he appears to have altered some details compared with Gaden’s version. Interestingly, Gouraud includes a description of this event in a report of his visit to Tchekna in May 1905; the two occurrences appear to be synchronous for Gouraud. Gaden’s account of the ritual was written in September 1904, prior to Gouraud’s arrival.

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into Chad, Gaden thought, irrespective of the workings of the talisman. Gaden noted that the Sultan regarded the marabouts’ goings-on with a certain air of indifference; ‘a good negro but he needs to be guided’ (JHG-F, 6.9.04). Gaden warmed increasingly towards the Sultan Gaourang, and his relations with the ruler were easing by the day. He did not have to face in his dealings with him the kind of sordid opposition and resistance he had had to fight against in Bandiagara with the ruler Agibou or in Zinder with the Sultan Amadou. Gaden came to the opinion that Gaourang was a generous man in whom he could have confidence, but his view of the Sultan was to fluctuate markedly over the next few years. (See plate 8 of the Sultan or Mbang Gaourang, on the left, and his official Kolak Doudmourrah.) The Sultan, who went by the local title Mbang, was appointed ‘chef de guerre’ by the French authorities and was responsible for a guard of 50 men armed with rapid-fire rifles and 30 cavalrymen whose main duty was to act as couriers. They were in the charge of a number of sub-officers, and organised under a system that resembled a European military model. Rumours

Plate 8. The Sultan or Mbang Gaourang and the Kolak Doudmourrah (fig. 90 from G. Bruel, L’Afrique Equatoriale Française 1918, reproduced by kind permission of the General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, USA).

226 chapter five that Gaourang was a secret ally of the ruler of the Ouaddai had now been cut short, and he was proving to be a loyal servant to the colonials. In August, Gaden was summoned to meet the ‘Queen Mother’ of Baghirmi, the mother of the Sultan. To Gaden’s astonishment, the Queen or ‘Maguira’ turned out to be a respectable old gentleman with a white beard. It was explained to him that the Maguira had died a few years earlier, and the elderly man had been employed to carry out her functions in the Sultanate. The Sultan presented Gaden with a leopard at the beginning of September: a young male four to five months old, already with sizeable teeth and claws. The animal let Gaden stroke it and it played like a cat albeit rather brutally. One evening the leopard broke free from its tether and went straight to the henhouse, where pandemonium broke out. Birds in a state of high distress flew madly from one side of the hut to the other. The leopard was eventually found hunkered down under the interpreter’s bed. A rope was attached around its neck and, entangled in a bedcover, it was retied to its post. The only human injury was to a guard, whose hand was bitten. The following morning, Gaden reported, the leopard was in the best of playful moods, having been fed a number of the chicken carcasses and a dead guinea fowl that had resulted from its visit to the henhouse. Gaden was in the process of building up a new menagerie in his new post, and he styled himself by the English label ‘a gentleman farmer’ in a letter to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 31.8.04). The start of September also saw an increase in the numbers of Hausa coming to the market. The wonders of the marabouts’ words buried in the market place seemed to be plain for all to see (JHG-F, 6.9.04). Gaden’s restraint on the matrimonial front did not last very long. Three weeks after arriving at the post, and despite his protestations about upholding moral virtues, he engaged the head blacksmith to seek out a suitable woman for him. He specified very precise conditions: she had to be of Fulbe or cattle-herder stock, of good character and a willing soul, not too sluttish, and her father must not be a thief – he did not want to be put in the position of having to lock his father-in-law behind bars. ‘The three conditions must be difficult to fulfil for the search has gone on for a while’, he reported to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 27.8.04). A few days later he added that he was still not married, and the blacksmith had scoured the villages and countryside but had turned up no serious candidates. ‘I therefore still await this rose, but with an ever decreasing patience’, he added (JHG- HJEG, 31.8.04).

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The Sultan is a Slave-Trader

September 1904 also saw Gaden trying to sort out what taxes to impose upon the Sultan and his territory. There were numerous problems, the most difficult of which was that the Sultanate had financed itself by raiding for slaves in the regions to the south and by the production of eunuchs for export across the Sahara. The situation was made trickier owing to the treaty signed many years earlier by Gentil and the Sultan. It left matters unclear about how taxes should be raised and what sources of income the Sultan might continue to maintain for revenue. In addition, the treaty did not refer to the local noble families who had considerable land holdings, interests in trade and in slaving. The diminution of slave trading under French influence had deprived the Sultan of a valuable source of revenue, and the production of eunuchs – as in Zinder –, another important human commodity transported across the Sahara to Mecca and Constantinople, was under increasing French scrutiny.12 The treaty signed by Gentil did not mention ‘workers of two sexes (a beautiful euphemism)’ – a reference to servile males and eunuchs – Gaden remarked, and it appeared that Gaourang was no mug when it came to understanding the implications of the less-than-comprehensive treaty. Gaden, becoming increasingly annoyed at the deadlock in his negotiations with Gaourang, insisted that slaves could not be accepted as any part of the tax payment nor would any income derived from this source be acceptable. Gaourang, on the other hand, seemed determined to press ahead with the production of further eunuchs after the harvest, presumably with an eye to future trans-Saharan trade opportunities. This was a testing time for both men. Gaden’s frustrations overflowed in an invective about Gaourang to Gouraud. ‘Despite his so-called Arabic culture, Gaourang is a negro to the tips of his fingers, and it is necessary to treat him as a negro.’ The Sultan’s vanity prevented him from regarding the value of developments beyond his own perspective, and he had no notion of administration, Gaden now claimed. ‘He will do everything that we want, I believe, but he is only a negro.’ ‘Gaourang is, like all blacks, a slave trader’ (JHG-HJEG, 31.8.04). Gaden later smoothed things over by offering the Sultan a number of gifts, the price of his cooperation. The ruler was honoured and flattered by the

12 See Gaden 1907, Les Etats Musulmans de l’Afrique Centrale, in which he described the situation of eunuchs in three Central African states (Baghirmi included), and their place in trans-Saharan links with Mecca and Constantinople.

228 chapter five presents; Gaden played skilfully on his vanity. Levels of tax were set and accepted at the rate of 30 kgs of millet per hut, one head of cattle for every 30, one sheep in every 20, and one thaler per horse. The thorny issue of slavery was left for another day.

Human Traffic of a Different Sort

The colonialists too indulged in the enforced transfer of human beings, and it was women whom they trafficked. In early September, Gouraud complained that there were no women to be had at Fort Lamy, and Lieutenant Gerhardt’s attempts to procure any had failed; even Captain Ruef, a fellow Saint Cyrard now stationed in Chad, had conducted many fruitless searches too. To the rescue came Gouraud’s native interpreter, a man called Abd er Rhaman, once a close ally of Rabah and now turned colonial employee. He had a wide network of contacts and knew many women. He advised Gouraud that Tchekna was known for its beautiful women, and named a number of them who might be worth pursuing: Mariame and Fanagana the Bornuans, and a light-skinned Arab girl Salamata, the daughter of Ngar Falkiré. The latter in particular sought a white husband, it was claimed. If Gaden could send over this bevy of beauties to Fort Lamy, ‘under the heading of marriage or subscriptions’, Gouraud said he would be doing both Gerhardt and him a great service (HJEG-JHG, 4 & 8.9.04). Gaden wrote back some days later to say that he was looking into the matter. He later dispatched an Arab girl to Ruef, a gesture from which he drew much pleasure given the Sennouist background of the girl’s family. The irony of a French alliance with the Muslim enemy obviously tickled Gaden. As regards the other young ladies suggested by Abd er Rhaman, there were complications, he informed Gouraud on 16th September. Salamata, the daughter of Ngar Falkiré, was in fact married to a local marabout in Tchekna: ‘I would not want to take this woman from the marabout who is very close to Gaourang. It would have a detestable effect.’ He went on: ‘As regards the other two from Bornu, these are the women who were sent away from Fort Lamy by Largeau after being denounced by Abd er Rhaman, and he has to be some holy father to dare to propose to have them return for you and your adjutant’ (JHG-HJEG, 16.9.04). That Gaden had considered the possibility of depriving a native man of his wife, as in the case of Salamata, to be pressed into ‘colonial service’ for the pleasure of an officer suggests that the practice was not uncommon. It seems to be only because of the political implications of the proposed

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enforced separation that he resisted sending the woman to Gouraud. In Zinder some years earlier, it would seem that Gouraud himself could well have deprived a Soudanese soldier of his wife, whom the superior French officer had envied for some time. Gaden rose to Gouraud’s request and he started to excel in his role of match-maker: I have something for Gerhardt. A likeable Arab girl who was brought to me by her mother and who wants to marry a white. She honoured me with flattery of the first order. I would have very probably accepted her myself for the young thing is amicable and speaks Peul, but she had been the wife of a can- noneer who absconded after the revolt of the battery, and I prefer not to take her because of that. But she will do the business, I believe, for Gerhardt and I will send her at the first opportunity. She is called Haoussa [Hausa]. It is, I think, the only English word that she knows…. (JHG-HJEG, 16.9.04) (See plate 9, ‘a bevy of beauties’, a selection of unnamed photographs from Gaden’s collection in Bordeaux.)

Gentleman Farmer

Meanwhile, Gaden had been quietly working hard on trying to procure a wife for himself. He wrote to Gouraud on 12th September: I still do not have a wife. Last night a young child around ten years old was brought here, [and] I immediately sent her back to her mother. I cannot bring myself to like such green fruit. There is a difference of some 20 years, no doubt. I am still patient about it. This is difficult. (JHG-HJEG, 12.9.04) But he was happy to announce four days later, along with the news of his matchmaking exploits, that he had now found a suitable mousso: As regards me, I have been married since yesterday. She is a little old and already has a child. She reminds me a little of my woman-on-a-string [femme à la ficelle] from Bandiagara, and I did not have a huge choice, so I had to decide. The first who was brought to me was ten years old. The second I thought appeared as in a convex mirror; she had her head sunk in her shoulders, a large face as though compacted since her childhood by overweight husbands. I would not have been able to look at her without laughing. I took number three. She would be very beautiful if she were three years younger. I hope to discover her qualities. (JHG-HJEG, 16.9.04) His new wife was not the only addition to Gaden’s growing household. He now had a small cat, a pet he seemed to prefer over dogs, and the animal was excessively affectionate and likeable; it slept against his inkwell on his

230 chapter five

Plate 9. ‘A bevy of beauties’, untitled photographs taken by Gaden of women most likely in (a & b) Zinder and in (c & d) Chad. Could 9c be ‘…something for Gerhardt. A likeable Arab girl…’? Could 9d possibly be an image of Gaden’s mousso, named Niorga, ‘la grande mademoiselle sous la Fronde’? All images courtesy of the Municipal Archives, Bordeaux, and the copyright © cliché A.M. Bordeaux, photographer Bernard Rakotomanga. desk. His life as a ‘gentleman farmer’ took up more of his time, and he had a hatchery for guinea fowl eggs and a reserve of duck eggs for the next incu- bation. His leopard was admirably domesticated, in his view, but it still retained a brutal look in its eyes. ‘I can no longer complain’, he admitted, ‘about living in a void’. There was file of people each day who sought his advice or assistance, and he was obliged to do paperwork each evening until late. He planned a number of tours of his territory, particularly to try to cultivate relations with groups of ardent Muslims from the north. While Gaden and Gouraud were arranging local marriages with women from the area, they were still in correspondence with their two respective lady friends from France. Gouraud received a very enthusiastic letter and good news from his ‘petite Gabi’, who did not miss a single post in writing

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to him. She sent Gaden her regards (HJEG-JHG, 8.9.04). Gaden’s ‘grande Marguerite’, ‘this dear child’, had sent her first letter to him at Tchekna. She had been ill, bed-bound for one month, and added: ‘“you can judge by the temperament you know me [to have] if I have been happy”. Adorable naivité’, Gaden added, ‘she is quite likeable but what a little anarchist at root and in appearance’ (JHG-HJEG, 16.9.04). In Gaden’s mind, thoughts about his relationship with Marguerite were closely associated with his local marriage plans, for his reflections on Marguerite’s letter were followed immediately in his letter of 16th September with the conjoining phrase: ‘Since we are on this subject…’ and he then went on to outline his matchmaking proposals and the announcement of his own marriage referred to above. Once in Africa, a different morality and mode of conduct in personal relationships with women seemed appropriate to him, although the asso- ciations of thought expressed in Gaden’s letters suggest a close connection between women at home and those at military outposts. By mid-September Gouraud received the announcement of his promotion to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and the award of Officer of the Légion d’Honneur. Gouraud promised to put Gaden’s name forward in the next round of promotions and had written to Governor Gentil to that effect (HJEG-JHG, 13.9.04). Gaden announced the good news of Gouraud’s promotion to the Sultan at Tchekna, and this stimulated a round of celebrations. Cannons were fired, rifles discharged, and the Sultan’s cavalrymen galloped in front of the post and his eunuchs and musicians came to play and dance by Gaden’s hut until late into the night. All of this exuberance annoyed him greatly, and he viewed the festivities as disproportionate to the nature of the announcement. He was happy to report that during the military-style salutes of the Sultan no-one was killed, which he took as a good omen for Gouraud. Gaden was still content with the Sultan, even if he was terribly lazy, in his view.

Holy War in the Ouaddai

Gouraud had been going through the archive of official papers left by his predecessor, Commandant Largeau, who was, it seemed, excessively indul- gent towards Sultan Gaourang. More importantly, Gouraud was concerned that Largeau had misunderstood the nature of relations with local leaders and in particular with Djerma Othman, one of the major chiefs in the Ouaddai to the north-east of Fort Lamy; they were not as cordial as he had been led to believe. The translation by Grech, the current colonial

232 chapter five interpreter, of a letter written in Arabic from the ruler revealed that rather than there being an entente between the two parties, the Djerma was hostile to the French. Gouraud now suspected that there could be serious trouble brewing in the Ouaddai, and this issue had raised its head just as the calls for the evacuation of Chad were being heard again in Paris. ‘One step backwards and it is the end of [our] prestige, and who knows what will follow’, he concluded (HJEG-JHG, 21.9.04). Even more disturbing for Gouraud was that he had found a letter from the local Imam Golo Sliman to one of the Ouaddai chiefs, that was found after the battle at Bir Alali some years earlier and now translated. It read:

I, Sliman, Minister of the Sultan with Raman Gaourang, serve as an intermediary between him and the infidel Christians, who commit evil in the territory, and do no good. But our desire is that you intervene between the impious Christians and us at the moment assigned by Allah to you and to us, and assigned to our lord the Mahdi for a holy war. We will submit them to a cruel death and their goods will become those of our brothers… . I, Imam Sliman will be with his brothers [those of the Mahdi], his soldiers, all those who obey him and concern themselves with the holy war against the polytheists, the impious and the Christians. (HJEG-JHG, 21.9.04) Gouraud thought that Gaourang was not implicated in any intrigue, and that Sliman had been acting independently. The question was what to do with the Imam? Send him to Brazzaville, as Gentil had requested, detain him or even leave him somewhere in Chad? Gaden held that Gaourang would oppose the Imam’s dispatch to Brazzaville, and was suspicious of Gentil’s motives for wanting him there. Gaden was in communication with both Djerma Othman and the Imam, and he counselled caution: ‘it is necessary to remember from time to time Don Quixote and his windmills and not to see dangers and dark machinations everywhere’ (JHG-HJEG, 8.10.04). He advised Gouraud that there would be no serious attack. Nonetheless, Gaden checked the stocks of ammunition, and found their condition was lamentable; Gouraud ordered no troop movements other than those necessary to safeguard the military posts. It was apparent to both men that Largeau’s policies had failed, and a new era of diplomacy had to start. Gaden now seemed to be coming around to his lot in Tchekna, but Gouraud still thought he needed encouragement. ‘You will transform Baghirmi’, he told him, and then went to mention the qualities he most valued in him: his wise head, intelligence and negotiating skills, and his counsel over difficult questions of politics and strategy (HJEG-JHG, 21.9.04). Gouraud had been caught up short by a letter sent to him by Gaourang, who had indicated most discreetly that his predecessor had written to him

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in Arabic, something Gouraud was unable to do. Gouraud replied by saying that while his predecessor may have written in Arabic, he had not sent to him a ‘brother’, namely Gaden, as the Resident. Gaden’s ability to be on good terms with the local community and especially to speak a number of languages, Peul in particular, was a boon to Gouraud’s political intentions.

Mildew and Aperitifs

On 23rd or 27th September,13 the First Soudanese Company headed by Captain Cotten and Lieutenant Freydenberg arrived from Zinder via a route that took them around the north of Lake Chad to Fort Lamy. This opened up the route between the Soudan and the Central African colony without the need to cross British or German territory. Gouraud gave a lecture to the new arrivals on the mores of post life at Fort Lamy, whose quasi-Arab setting demanded of them a different dress-code and manner from what they had been used to during their time in the desert. They were required to wear western clothes and be sensitive to community life at the post. Cotten needed ‘to meld the qualities of an administrator with those of a purely military man’, leaving behind the attitudes of an ‘officer of the bush’. He went on: ‘Those who would only want to be company officers run the high risk of becoming mildewed during their aperitifs…’ Then Georges Mangin, an individual who fought continually against the mildew of post life, finally rolled into Fort Lamy. He was laden down with unspecified ‘seizures’ [camels no doubt] acquired somehow during his desert mission. These were sold in a local market for ‘3,000 and some hundred francs’, quite a haul for a party of meharistes roaming through the territory on camel-back (HJEG- JHG, 28.9.04). Mangin was up to his old tricks again and living the life of a nomad in the desert. Two months later he was reported to have had a dis- agreement with a rifleman who wanted to kill him. Quite by chance, this rifleman was one whom Gouraud had just appointed to the rank of corporal and had a superb record. Gouraud was not, however, too harsh on his old friend: ‘Mangin demands very exacting service from his riflemen [who are] transformed into nomads. He is very good but he must at the same time show a little more sensitivity’ (HJEG-JHG, 22.11.04). Accompanying the military party from Zinder were a number of envoys sent by the town’s traders in the hope that they could forge commercial

13 Gouraud gives two different dates for this, one in his letter to Gaden on 28th September and the other in his memoirs, 1944: 171.

234 chapter five links between the two territories. Gaden’s old friend Mallam Yaro brought news that Gaden’s gift of books to his old Muslim acquaintances had been an immense success. Chettima Ahmed Kiari ben El Imam Mohammed El Berkoui also wrote to Gaden to thank him for the scientific dictionary and a work on Islamic theology. ‘It is evidently the most sensational present that one could make’, Gouraud told his friend (HJEG-JHG, 28.9.04). Mallam Yaro sent two of his two children, Hamid and Salihou, as his representatives, and they accompanied Cotten’s party from Zinder. They brought with them merchandise to trade on the local markets, and Yaro asked Gaden in his letter to watch over them and their goods while in Chad.14 One man who would not be mixing Gaden’s aperitifs for a while was Tati, his cook, a native brought up as a Catholic and trained by missionaries for colonial service. He turned out to be a ‘thug’ who could not cook, stole from the kitchen, and was a liar and insolent to Dr Couvy, who was in charge of the officers’ mess. Gaden slapped him behind bars for a week: ‘If that does not sort him out, when he leaves I will break off with this so-Catholic person and send him south into the grasp [of an administrator], the personal enemy of all who are boys or cooks…’. Gaden used this opportunity not only to point out his domestic concerns to his mother but also to launch into a scathing attack on the Catholicism espoused by the cook, and by her. The cook’s simple notions of the good Lord and the devil playing games over the future of human souls, Gaden ranted, condemning some to paradise and others to hell, were ridiculous. ‘Unfortunately for me the good Lord, rather niggardly in this territory, only gives us small amounts of flour and fat. And the devil helps my cook who … stole from us half of our flour and three- quarters of our fat’ (JHG-F, 7.10.04). Not only did he have problems in the kitchen, but the officer’s mess had run out of wine and he had had to resort to a locally brewed millet beer called ‘peepee’, to which Gaden attributed his ill health and upset stomach. The wine problem was solved temporarily ten days later by Camy, who brought with him a couple of cases; ‘One can drink a little and that does me an enormous good and has restored my head. Perhaps I am an alcoholic, in any case I await the return of the ration with impatience’, he told Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 17.10.04).

Traders and Taxes

By mid-October, the party of traders from Zinder arrived in Tchekna to see Gaden. They were overjoyed by their visit to Chad, and had had gifts

14 See Fonds Gaden, 15 APC/1 (7), Etudes et Travaux I, CAOM.

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lavished upon them by Gouraud. As well as a horse, each one of them had received a fine turban, a fez, a rosary and a boubou or gown from Baghirmi to illustrate the kind of goods on offer locally. Gouraud remarked caustically: ‘As these excellent parasites came without mounts’, he had been obliged to give each of them a horse so they could return home (HJEG-JHG, 11.10.04). The Zinder traders parted willingly with their thalers in the Tchekna market, and Gaden was excited by the prospect of a new set of commercial relations with the town, whose trade convoys in the future could be provided with a military escort from time to time to maintain security along the route. In addition, merchants from the town of Abéché, the stronghold of the Ouaddai rebels, were arriving in increasing numbers in Tchekna, an index of their rising confidence in the French administration and in its pacific intentions, so Gaden claimed. ‘The Sennousists [sic] appear to have renounced the fight completely, and I think from that particular side we can be tranquil’ (JHG-F, 22.10.04). Meanwhile, Gouraud had received news from home: ‘La petite Gaby’ still wrote to him, but his friend, Carpechot, who passed by to see her every week had stopped writing. Gaby regularly saw not only Carpechot but also Chideville, an officer who had served in the Soudan. These events disconcerted Gouraud (HJEG- JHG, 19.10.04), who let his emotions towards Gaby pour out: ‘I admit to you that I love this sweet child as on the night of my departure’ (HJEG-JHG, 23.10.04). Almost one month later, Gouraud heard from his friend Carpechot, who had not written because of a serious eye complaint, and informed him that he had dined with Gaby on 11th August. To Gouraud’s delight he then received three letters from Gaby, ‘his poor dear’, and they were ‘full of tenderness’ for him (HJEG-JHG, 17.11.04). Gaourang was planning a tour of his territory but had delayed his departure owing to the demands of sorting out with Gaden what kind of taxes might be raised from the local population. The Sultan viewed his tour as a means of collecting his own version of taxes, namely the seizure of children as captives to punish those populations he regarded as recalci- trant. He invited Gaden to join him on the mission. Gaden explained that he was revolted by the idea of the mission and that he could not be seen to be associated with the practice of kidnapping children. His aim was to reduce this kind of activity, not encourage it. While Gouraud also embarked on a tour of the territory, Gaden took over the general functions of commanding the region. The period of Ramadan had begun, and the ‘village is overcome by a state of torpor’. ‘It is a period of slumber by day for the Muslims, and the force of inertia among Gaourang and his entourage has increased’ (JHG-F, 22.11.04). Despite his extra duties

236 chapter five as interim commander, some of which he neglected, Gaden found time to devote himself to the study of the language of Baghirmi, with a view to publishing a work at a later date.15 After that he envisaged some research on Maba, the language of the Ouaddai, which was virtually unknown, but he had a large community of Maba-speakers from the region now resident in Tchekna to rely on. The effect on the local population and his close personnel in particular of his picking up ability in local languages was profound: many of them did not believe their ears, for no white man had ever dreamed of speaking their language before, he reported to his father (JHG-F, 22.12.04). The issue of taxes, both local and regional, raised its head again after Gouraud’s return to Fort Lamy. He was having difficulties with Governor Gentil, who had given Largeau hell over the budget deficit of around 400,000 francs for the year 1902–03 during his command of the territory. Gentil was trying to make economies in order to help finance a new railway line through the French Congo, and so not be reliant on the Belgian’s transport system to take goods and men beyond the lower Congo River rapids. An administrator was appointed to visit Congo-Chad to investigate the budget deficit: Emmanuel Merlet was due to arrive in December. Gouraud was happy to welcome him, he reported in his memoirs, ‘there was nothing to hide, au contraire!’ Gaden took a more cynical view at the time: ‘With regard to Merlet, is he coming to look for money? It’s all at Brazzaville…’ (JHG-HJEG, 14.11.04). Gentil sent letters to Gouraud asking for an explanation for the deficit incurred by Largeau; but Gouraud could not excuse Gentil for ‘the violent and acrimonious tone of his letters to me in response to Largeau’s letters… I hope that when he responds to me he will employ another style’, he complained to Gaden (HJEG-JHG, 23.10.04). One major issue between Gouraud and Gaden, on the one hand, and Gentil in Brazzaville, on the other, was the on-going problem of the system to be implemented to raise taxes. This issue continued to occupy all three men. Gentil wanted a head tax and ordered a census be conducted to arrange for its collection from each adult in the region. Gentil had also been writing to Sultan Gaourang on the subject of taxation, who was disquieted by the correspondence. ‘It is essential to convince the Sultan that we act in his interests’, Gouraud advised Gaden (HJEG-JHG, 24.11.04). Gouraud and Gaden, by contrast, supported the idea of a wealth tax, of the sort Gaden

15 Gaden published his study, entitled Essai de grammaire de la langue Baguirmienne suivi de textes et de vocabulaires Baguirien-Français et Français-Baguirien in 1909, published by Ernest Leroux, Paris. He also wrote a shorter piece on the dialect of Peul spoken in the Sultanate, see ‘Note sur le dialecte foul parlé par les Foulbé du Baguirmi’, par M. Henri Gaden, Chef de Bataillon d’Infanterie Coloniale, Journal Asiatique, 1908: 5–70.

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had discussed and agreed earlier with the Sultan. Nonetheless, Gouraud organised a census of the region in order to move forward with the head tax on all the inhabitants. Jacquin and another officer started the work, which would take a good deal of time to complete. Gaden was not pleased at all. For the moment, he kept his thoughts to himself about taxes and what was going on between Gentil and Gouraud. But he did write in December to his father that Gentil was trying to command the region of Chad from Brazzaville, and Gouraud appeared to let him do it without protest. It was deplorable. ‘I have never seen a grimier colony than the Congo’, he complained (JHG-F, 6.12.04).16 Gouraud also floated an idea with Gaden, which Sultan Gaourang might find attractive. It was this: the Sultan’s eldest son, the Tchiroma, should be sent to Brazzaville to be educated under Gentil’s guardianship. It was for Gaden to work on the Sultan, for he would no doubt find this suggestion initially difficult to swallow: ‘I hope that you will be able to dissipate his paternal fears’ (HJEG-JHG, 23.10.04). Gaden had thought this a good idea when first mooted in October, but in the meantime he had some work to do on his relationship with Gaourang. The period of Ramadan, which ended at the beginning of December, had taken its toll on Gaden’s relationship with the Sultan: I am incensed with Gaourang and his clique since the beginning of Ramadan… . Gaourang is bone-idle … [and] does not even know how to command obedience. I quite shook him up, recommended greater severity from him. [But] he orders some of his chiefs [to do something], and it is the same eight days later… I have still not been able to obtain a list of chiefs with their villages and the taxes they anticipate… . There is an immediate force of inertia in normal times, increased tenfold during Ramadan. (JHG-HJEG, 28.11.04) One relationship that was going well was with the qadi at Abéché, a figure with whom Gaden felt he could work. The qadi was delighted with the gifts he received at the end of Ramadan from Gouraud and sent via Gaden. Always sensitive to local custom, Gaden had to change the colour of the red gown that Gouraud had dispatched unthinkingly, for this was a colour marabouts did not wear. White or green was required by them. Despite this shaft of light, Gaden’s ennui returned for the usual reasons: the monotony of post life, a sense of entrapment at not being able to leave and tour the bush. In addition, his stomach had taken a poorly turn again,

16 Gouraud himself alluded to this problem in his memoirs when he wrote his sanitised version of events: ‘At Brazzaville a decision is taken; it arrives three months later and it turns out to be not actually executable.’ (See 1944: 186.)

238 chapter five notwithstanding the restocking of the wine cellars. He was not in good spirits at the end of 1904.

Creating Bad Blood

Gouraud thought more about the security of the region, and especially about the limited military resources at his command. He decided to create small mobile cavalry units that could respond rapidly to any trouble that might blow up. He had officers such as Mangin and his meharistes roaming the desert margins on camel, and now needed to complement these units with squadrons of cavalrymen working further south. The idea of horse- backed units was one that Gaden had mooted some months earlier. Nonetheless, Gouraud asked Gaden if Tchekna was a healthy environment for the animals, and whether they would have to pass the rains elsewhere. The answer to Gouraud’s question was obvious and simple: ‘Horses live well in Tchekna, the proof is that Gaourang has many of them, even during the hivernage when they are kept under shelter’, Gaden remarked tetchily (JHG-HJEG, 2.12.04). Gentil backed the idea of mobile cavalry units and recommended that a chef de bataillon be appointed to command them. The commander would have responsibility to protect the Salamat valley to the east and the threat of the Ouaddai forces from Abéché. Gouraud suggested that this could be the chance for Gaden to gain the promotion he sought: ‘I want this a good deal on the condition that it is you [who is appointed]’, Gouraud told him (HJEG-JHG, 28.11.04). Gaden was happy with the idea of a promotion,17 but it should not come at too high a price, in his view. That price had already been sketched out by Gentil, and part of it was the transfer of the military headquarters from Fort Lamy to either Tchekna or Fort Archambault in the south. This was an absurdity, thought Gaden. The Gallic cock sharpened his spurs and tore into a number of areas of Gentil’s policy. Gaden concluded: ‘This man Gentil is a shambles who would do best to leave us in peace. He disgusts me more and more with his arbitrariness and his meddling, his fear of Paris…’. Gaden felt that the Governor was intervening too much in

17 Some time earlier Gouraud had put pressure on Paris to authorise a promotion for Gaden, and he had written to a number of key figures, including Eugène Etienne, who might then make a recommendation to the Minister of Colonies. Gouraud had also contacted Colonel Peroz, Gaden’s old commanding officer from Zinder. Peroz, in a state of bewilder- ment at the harsh treatment he received on his return to France, appeared now to have forgotten Gaden. Gouraud put his faith in Etienne to deliver a promotion for his friend.

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the affairs of Baghirmi that were rightfully his responsibility as Resident; he wanted not be dictated to by the commissaire. In particular, he wanted the Sultan to collect taxes locally himself, and then to pass a pro- portion on to the authorities at Brazzaville. Gaden then added a final note of criticism directed at Gouraud himself and at the census for the head tax: he sincerely wished that Gouraud was not simply doing this in order to follow Brazzaville. Gaden’s growing irritation with Gentil’s instructions drips from the pages of his letters, as does his contempt for what he considered to be poorly thought-out policy issuing from Brazzaville (JHG- HJEG, 2.12.04). Aware of his friend’s increasing sense of frustration, Gouraud tried to bring Gaden round with words of support and sympathy: ‘I think this indisposition [the stomach problem] is temporary, and with the dry season you are going to be much better. Take yourself off for a little exercise. A few gal- lops. Shake up the Sultan and his men.’ Gouraud also reminded Gaden gently that he was still waiting on the census returns from Baghirmi, one place along with two others that had failed to complete the survey. Gaden was asked to send whatever information he had, for ‘Tchekna should not be the only place to send nothing’ (HJEG-JHG, 3.12.04). Gaden was obviously dragging his feet over this matter, not wanting to comply with Gentil’s absurd system. Gouraud was distressed a few days later to read Gaden’s attack on Gentil in a letter of 2nd December: I beg you do not excite yourself so much …. I remember your letter from Zinder [during their last posting] in which you were not kind towards the colonel [Peroz] and yet you served him to your best; but it is not good to create this bad blood. Gouraud then took on the voice of authority and went on to list a number of complaints he had regarding Gaden’s behaviour, including his resent- ment at doing official correspondence. Gouraud added, ‘when my successor reads this he will be taken aback’. Another matter I do not look well upon is your criticism of the accounts of the third trimester political expenses. The political funds are not secret funds, and all expenses are made in the full light of day. What is more simple than to complete the accounts, and cut short all the sagas? Gouraud ended his letter with a strange little personal twist: ‘It is true that I have a woman, who disgusts me, what a pity that economies cannot be made there as with the military payroll’ (HJEG-JHG, 8.12.04). He went on to give Gaden news from his family back in France, perhaps as a gesture to mollify his authoritarian tone.

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More vitriol was to come from Gaden’s pen over the next few days, testing their friendship and the limits of military authority to the full. On 10th December 1904, Gaden began: ‘My dear friend. I am sending you this famous [census] roll that you demand with such insistence’, adding the complaint that he had not received the ones Gouraud promised. He went on to explain that he was still under the weather and had taken an emetic, ipécacuanha derived from a plant, to purge himself, and he attributed his going off the rails somewhat to his illness. ‘Decidedly, Tchekna is not good for me. It is probable that I have not taken sufficient exercise…. I was well during the hivernage and I have been ill since the Bahr flooded.’ He continued: ‘My friend, I do not see that I am taken up again by the spirit of contradiction as in my criticism of [Colonel] Péroz, but I am not at all of your opinion.’ He then listed the areas of policy with which he profoundly disagreed: the tax rolls, over which he attacked Gentil again; the punishment of an officer – ‘all together unjustified in my view, I cannot take it in’; the issue of mobile units of spahis – he was opposed to the idea of small cavalry squadrons and strongly counselled for a concentration of a single large force in one place. ‘In placing your active cavalry at Tchekna … you handicap all of your system. Frankly, I find your idea detestable. I give you my opinion with a certain brutality, but in sincere faith.’ He signed this letter off: ‘I am not Gaourang’s man, no more than I was Ahmadou’s [of Zinder], but each situation brings with it, in relation to a superior interest, limits on what cannot be crossed without distorting everything’ (JHG-HJEG, 10.12.04). Gaden was doing no more, in a way, than what Gouraud had asked him to do when, back in Zinder after taking over command of the Third Territory during their last tour of duty together, Gouraud had requested that he give his honest opinion of orders and policy plans. Gouraud would probably not, however, have anticipated the vehemence of Gaden’s criticism. Gaden wrote again on 14th December, having received Gouraud’s complaints about his behaviour, and softened his earlier invective. It is correct that I have in effect exceeded the bounds in my official correspondence…. But it is also correct that Gentil gets up my nose. Strongly. Concerning Tchekna, I will admit, that we do not need his intervention in order to try to increase [tax] yields. I have steered myself in this direction since my arrival, [and] his type of intervention is quite useless. The upshot has proved that it was inopportune and clumsy. (JHG-HJEG, 14.12.04) While Gaden and Gouraud were exchanging blows, the Sultan’s affairs could not be neglected, and Gaden needed to address a number of local difficulties, especially the problem of his native interpreter in Tchekna. This was a particularly sensitive time when feelings were running high and the

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subtleties of diplomatic language could not be rendered faithfully in either Baghirmi or French. Gouraud offered to send over his own native interpreter Abd er Rhaman, who spoke both Baghirmi and Arabic, or the official one, a Maltese officer called Grech, about whom Gouraud was divided: ‘He notably lacks all judgement, but in his role as an interpreter he gives good service’ (HJEG-JHG, 28.11.04). Grech came over to Tchekna some weeks later, and his arrival was a key moment whose significance was only later to become apparent. Gaden also tried to clear up a misunderstanding that had arisen over a passage in one of Gaourang’s letters to Gentil: the Governor had taken offence at the Sultan’s conspicuous reference to a monkey, thinking it to be a personally directed insult. Gaden’s interpretative abilities were stretched to the full: ‘it means that it is an intelligent animal with which it is good to make an alliance’. This nuance had escaped the Governor. Gaden went to see the Sultan to reassure him with the following words:

One does not let go one’s prey to seek the shade. We have, you and us, an assured acceptance, [which] we will only change if we have to in order to seek benefits for all. Gentil does not want anything else. Let us look together at what there is and if one can take more, it will take time to complete the work. When we have finished, if we recognise that a change should produce better, we will change; if we recognise it is not, we will maintain the status quo, for then change would be folly. Just like I would be with you in the praise of Gentil, so too in the censure of Gentil; work sincerely with me. (JHG-HJEG, 14.12.04)

Gaden advised that Gaourang be invited by Gouraud to visit Fort Lamy to cement further his relationship with the local administration. Gouraud responded to the points made by Gaden in a number of his last communiqués. He showed a generous heart towards his old friend, and took account of Gaden’s critique of policy. Gouraud apologised for not sending him a complete set of census rolls he had collected from elsewhere; he lifted the punishment that Gaden thought unjust on the offending officer; he adjusted his plans for the deployment of his cavalry units; finally, he agreed with the suggestion of a visit to Fort Lamy by the Sultan. Perhaps Gouraud’s mood was lifted by news from France: he was delighted that his sweetheart Gaby had been writing regularly and she seemed devoted to him; and he marvelled over the ease with which she so tenderly expressed her sentiments – it was a matter of habit, he concluded. She sent as usual her kindest regards to Gaden (HJEG-JHG, 22.12.04). Gaden’s black mood lifted a little too. His mousso was about to leave Tchekna to visit her brother, who was ill, and she hoped to catch up with

242 chapter five her mother and father. This would afford Gaden a moment of tranquillity during which he could convalesce following his poorly stomach. His spirits were buoyant because he had just moved into his new huts: a grand building with three rooms – an office, a bedroom and a junk room – a well close by and separate straw huts for his wife, his boy, his henhouse and of course a latrine.

Merlet’s Mission

The arrival in Chad of the administrator Merlet and his razor sharp companion Sabatier caused a good deal of concern throughout the region. Sabatier had been cutting through the paperwork in the hope of discover- ing more about the budget deficit, although Gouraud seemed at ease over how the investigation was proceeding: ‘…for my part I am persuaded, but it is true that I am not an accountant. We can only wait on his [Sabatier’s] response’ (HJEG-JHG, 22.12.04). Merlet and party were to be in Tchekna in early January, and Gaden suggested he would take the Sultan to Fort Lamy, and then accompany the administrator back to Tchekna for an inspection of the local accounts. In Tchekna since the end of Ramadan, there had been an uninterrupted series of fêtes, first to mark the end of the fast and then a number of celebrations in particular to commemorate the circumcision of the Sultan’s eldest son of around 12 years old, who went by the title ‘Tchiroma’. Around 200 other boys had been initiated with him, and it was considered an honour to have undergone the operation on the same day as the heir presumptive of the Sultanate. Huge crowds from distant parts including Arabs, Fulbes and Hausas, along with local villagers, had gathered in Tchekna to witness the event, and they looked on as the boys dressed in the white garb of initiates filed past to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing of the court musicians. The costs of this extravaganza were met in part by the taxes collected during Gaourang’s tour of the territory, and these amounted to some 200 thalers. Gaden could not, however, condone the source of this revenue. ‘This tax in slaves is deplorable. It has occurred over centuries in this country that suffers from a state of moral decomposition, distress, inse- curity, pillaging by one group on another, the sale of children by their own parents; there is no hope of betterment for them until such time as this tax is withheld’. Gaden was not, however, going to draw a halt to this practice. ‘It is natural for him [Gaourang] and I hold myself back’, he commented (JHG-HJEG, 18.12.04). Gaden had by now come again to admire and respect

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the Sultan, whom he found to be charming, and Gaden hoped that Gouraud would similarly warm towards him when the two men met face to face in Fort Lamy. The administrator’s investigations into the budget deficit were already having repercussions. It had been judged prudent during the visit of Merlet to Fort Lamy to suspend all political credits charged to the local account. Gaden relied on this account for payments and gifts to support his network of informants and collaborators: ‘I am obliged to make these indispensable expenses from my own pocket. This is what it is to be in an excessively poor and badly administered colony as this one’ (JHG-F, 22.12.04). Gaden travelled to Fort Lamy at the end of December with the Sultan, who was accompanying his son on the first part of his journey to Brazzaville, where the boy was to be educated in a French school under Gentil’s guardianship. Gaourang’s departure from his palace was marked by customary rituals of separation, which involved the Queen mother – the elderly bearded man – performing the role of a distressed parent to mark the temporary rupture of social relations. The Sultan’s entourage, which set out before Gaden, was made up of 150 horses accompanied by a long line of women, cooks and escorts that followed in their wake. Despite the prospect of the fine dishes that would be served to the Sultan en route, Gaden decided to forsake these pleasures and travel alone. The trip to Fort Lamy did much to restore Gaden’s jaded spirits. He was back in the African bush he always yearned for, indulging in hunting wild animals, and the biggest trophy on this trip was a huge wild boar shot during an overnight stop. It provided delicious filets for his evening meal. He then arrived at a village some kilometres short of Fort Lamy, from where Gouraud rode out to meet him for dinner on 3rd January. It was just like old times, the two friends dining together under the stars and passing the time exchanging personal news and gossip from their respective posts. The Sultan’s son embarked on a boat from the Fort, taking him up the Chari River towards Fort Archambault and then on to the Congo, from where he would descend towards Brazzaville. The Tchiroma was delighted by the prospect of his first river voyage, and he embarked on the river boat excited if somewhat anxious by what awaited him in the colony’s capital. He would be there for four years. His father had appointed an entourage of aides to accompany the heir presumptive to Brazzaville, and they would assist him in his education and upkeep. A tutor would help him with his studies and keep an eye on the young boy; he had been given a wife, a woman much older than he, who would be responsive to the first signs of desire stirring in the boy and would initiate his first sexual experiences; an

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Arabic secretary would also give him religious instruction; and two young boys his own age were included to act as companions and playmates, and who would also receive a French education.18 Gaourang enjoyed a number of palavers at Fort Lamy organised by Gouraud, and the visit was profitable to both parties. At the end of January 1905, Gaden left Fort Lamy for Tchekna with Inspector Merlet, taking the Léon Blot up stream towards Mandjaffa, and then striking out overland to the post. Gaden was, however, curious to discover an alternative route often used by local traders. Along the way, he discovered a village previously unknown to the French administration; this would provide another welcome source of tax revenue, especially in the eyes of Inspector Merlet. Abundant game along the route provided Gaden with a distraction and much work for his Winchester rifle, and he proudly announced having shot two lions resting peacefully in the grass. Gaden held Merlet in high regard, ‘the best man in the world’, whose acquaintance he had made some time earlier. Gaden was going to need all the good will he could muster, for the administrator’s nerve was about to be tested during the journey back. Gaden recruited two local guides in a village they passed through, for he required help to beat a new trail home; but it quickly became apparent that the guides did not know the route either. Gaden was soon lost in the middle of the bush, and so he decided to plot a course in the direction of the river to gain his bearings. They stumbled across a man from German Cameroon who had just bought illicitly a captive at Tchekna and had passed the night with him without a fire in the open bush in the hope of not being discovered. On seeing Gaden approach, the captive immediately ran towards him, and the slavemaster vanished leaving behind his affairs – his arms, a sheep bone and an ancient pistol – where they lay. At two o’clock the next morning Gaden’s party resumed their journey, and Merlet was no longer smiling. Not being used to a horse, and having already completed a 30-kilometre stage, the administrator had a sore backside. He could not keep his eyes open for lack of sleep and crashed confusedly into jujube trees whose hooked thorns ripped his skin and stuck to his clothing. On each new contact, a variety of curses were heard issuing from Gaden’s beleaguered fellow who brought up the rear of the party. They went their separate ways the next day after two or three hours sleep. Gaden judged the whole affair to be an amusing escapade, and he presented Merlet with the pistol he had acquired en route as a souvenir of their adventures. Gaden continued on

18 Reported some time later in JHG-F, 15.9.05.

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his tour through the bush and Merlet went on to Tchekna by a more conventional route (JHG-F, 6.2.05). Gaden vowed to take trips like this away from his post every month, which would be ‘most agreeable and most profitable also’. On arriving in Tchekna, Gaden wrote to Gouraud to say that he had just sent back to Fort Lamy a woman who had ‘pandered to their depravities’ during his short tour (JHG-HJEG, 5.2.05). The sexual favours expected by officers from local woman seemed to extend even to trips of a short duration, after which they were sent on their way after having performed their temporary duties. Gaden announced in mid February that he was a bachelor again. It would appear that his mousso had died, for around six weeks later he remarked to Gouraud that he was getting over the grief of widowerhood. (We are not told any of the details of her demise, but we know she had returned some time earlier to her native village when her brother was ill.) Gaden discussed his personal problems with Grech, the interpreter, who was certainly expert in matters concerning local women: I pointed out to him my bachelor circumstances, not urgent because of the troubled situation.19 I mentioned to him Madame Favert, rather attractive skin, but her behaviour? This depends above all on how she was with Favert, for being in Tchekna I would prefer a woman who had lovers at Fort Lamy than one with them in Tchekna. (JHG-HJEG, 12.2.05) Gaden was aware of how his position as Resident at Tchekna would be compromised by an unsuitable match with a local woman.

A Disagreeable Gentleman to Travel With

Rumours flew around the region in February 1905 that an attack by Djerma Othman and his forces was imminent following the battle at Yao.

19 This is a reference to the battle of Yao on 4th February that involved Capt Rivière, who scored a ‘brilliant success’ against Ouaddai forces. There was a concern that Djerma Othman would seek revenge, although Gaden was more sceptical of the ruler’s intentions. Gouraud had mooted the idea of marching on the Ouaddai capital, Abéché, but this would have repercussions in Paris, even if success could be assured. Gaden espoused his own philosophy of engagement: ‘… we do not enter “pays noir” for the pleasure of conquest, but in order to pacify and prepare the way for our merchants, for we are a great productive nation which needs markets to sell its products…. What we desire simply is an understanding with the Ouaddai, as the English have an understanding with Darfur, such that the commercial routes are free and the frontiers respected. But if the Ouaddai attacks us, we are ready to give it a slap from which it will not recover… personally, I think that we would make the best of the affair in counting on tribute and a serious treaty [with Ouaddai] than to occupy a filthy country so far away’ (JHG-HJEG, 13.2.05).

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The garrisons in outposts were put on constant guard, and troops were summoned from every corner of the region to mount a defence against a possible offensive. As a precaution, even Gaden had mounted a long- range machine gun on the roof of one of the magazines at the post. He hoped he would not have to illustrate the capabilities of this weapon in earnest, and he invested as much confidence in the speed of his horse as in the power of the new installation to save him, if it came to it. Gaden was impressed by Gouraud’s sang froid during this period of planning: ‘The calm with which you envisage these things is truly admirable’, and this contrasted with the feeling in Tchekna, where ‘The Ouaddai still inspires a real fear in this country’ (JHG-HJEG, 17.2.05). By now, Gouraud had heard from the Ministry in Paris that an invasion of the Ouaddai would be out of the question. Nonetheless, Gouraud hatched the idea of a mission to the north involving Gaden’s company of men and the Sultan’s troops, and they would all assemble at an assigned meeting point to conduct reconnaissance together. Gouraud left Fort Lamy on 19th February and planned to rendezvous three days later with Gaden and the Sultan at the village of Mai Aîche. Gaden sent instructions to Gouraud on how to find his way there, and he sent to guide Gouraud along the way one of the Sultan’s most important dignitaries; he was a eunuch who went by the title of Ngarmané: ‘he is an upright man, serious’, Gaden explained. Gaden reached Mai Aîche on 21st February and waited on the imminent arrival of Gouraud. In the meantime Gouraud had forged on past the rendezvous point, having met the Sultan’s eunuch at a village east of Fort Lamy. He now planned to join forces with Gaden and the Sultan at their destination, Bokoro, but this game of cat and mouse was to continue for the next few weeks. By now, marching with Gaourang and his guard was proving to be a painful experience for Gaden. The Sultan was distressed about the departure of an attachment of local men who had tagged themselves on to the convoy; he harassed and entreated Gaden to allow him more cavalrymen as part of his entourage. Gaden agreed to this, hoping that Gouraud would not object, but Gaden was becoming increasingly alarmed at the number of boys and porters who dragged along behind the convoy, around 50 in all. This was, however, only one quarter of what the Sultan was used to bringing with him on his travels. ‘It is really not easy to get on the move’, Gaden complained, adding: ‘A black Sultan is a disagreeable gentleman to travel with’ (JHG- HJEG, 24.2.05). The Sultan had also asked to appoint an extra 30 eunuchs to the mission, explaining that since they were not ‘men’ they should not be counted among the number. Gaden opposed the idea.

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As the days passed, more and more folk attached themselves to what was now becoming the Sultan’s travelling circus, which included a number of chiefs from Tchekna who had caught them up en route and had no authorisation to be there. Gaden now realised what was going on in the Sultan’s mind: what was important was that the Sultan should not arrive in Bokoro, the seat of Shaykh Kaba, a rival political figure, with only 30 cavalrymen. This would be too shameful, for his prestige demanded a large entourage of followers. This set Gaden’s mind to worrying about what might be happening in Tchekna itself, with neither the Sultan nor any European officer left to oversee affairs, and with most of the chiefs swelling the Sultan’s company. Gaden was philosophical: Conclusion: one cannot, despite the best will in the world, transform a negro Sultan into a commandant of a company. He has two tents, one of which is enormous; he offers tea every day surrounded by a circle of courtiers; he is loaded down by a heap of baggage and a horde of boys…. Happily the Ouaddaiens are far away. (JHG-HJEG, 26.2.05) Gaden finally arrived in Bokoro at the end of February, and from there he acted as a fixed link in the chain of communication with Gouraud’s mission, which by the first week of March was in Yao. Gouraud issued precise instructions for Gaden to have built for him at the post a number of huts whose designs were sketched out in his letter; he could work and find shelter from the sun in them during his stay there on his return. Gaden’s stop- over could not have been more trying on him; it was ‘a disheartening monotony’. Added to this, the Sultan’s guard did very little exercise, and the Sultan himself put back on any weight he might have lost during the outward journey. News from Tchekna of a spat between one of the men remaining in the garrison and a local dignitary made Gaden anxious to set off for the post. He left Bokoro on 16th March; Gouraud returned to Bokoro just afterwards and he remained there for most of March.

A Natural Protector of Chiefs

During his return to Tchekna, Gaden met up with Shaykh Djibril, a dignitary based in the village to the south of Bokoro. The Shaykh confided in Gaden over his frustration at his treatment by the colonial authorities under the previous regime. He said: Our fathers were in the habit of going to greet the Sultans at festivals, and it is a custom that we liked. It is you who are the masters now, but still Gaourang is our old Sultan. From the time of Capt Lebas, I had permission to go and

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greet him, and I went there with pleasure. Then came Capt d’Adhémar, and I asked him for permission. He refused and forbade me to go to Tchekna, saying that we should no longer depend on anyone other than the French. Then I asked again for permission from the captain at Bokoro, and he equally refused me, and as I insisted, he said that there would be risks and perils involved. I was frightened and I did not go there. Now that you tell me I can go to Tchekna for festivals, that gives me much pleasure and I thank you. (JHG- HJEG, 18.3.05) Gaden went on to comment that the officers in frontier posts were at fault: ‘There is an attitude which took root under Largeau and which can only be badly interpreted in this country.’ He found the same hostility towards local leaders at the post currently commanded by Captain Ruef, a fellow officer and Gaden’s acquaintance from Saint Cyr. Gaden proclaimed: ‘I will be the natural protector of these chiefs if Ruef looks to extort from them more than is reasonable…. For the Commandants of frontier cercles to prevent the customary paying of homage appears to me to be a small indignity caused by us that the natives only take for weakness on our part’ (JHG- HJEG, 18.3.05). This is a remarkable statement from Gaden, who was becoming more and more sympathetic to the predicament of local dignitaries suffering from what he perceived as the arbitrary injustices of the colonial administration. He had already defended himself earlier against Gouraud’s accusation that he had become ‘Gaourang’s man’; but it was by now evident that his stance in favour of local interests marked a sea change in his attitudes to both the excesses of colonialism as a European project in Africa and the preservation of local custom in the face of radical change. His critique of the civilizing mission of French colonialism, which began in earnest during his voyage through the Congo, was now becoming much more profound. Gaden’s sense of alienation from his home country and its values increased at a time when, as a counterpoint, his sympathies for the plight of Africans under colonialism really began to take hold. He spoke of a bank- ruptcy in an elementary moral sense in France, a grave and disquieting symptom of malaise, he thought. He was highly critical of the Church in France and of the role of Christianity in society; yet at the same time he appreciated the role that Islam played in Africa: it offered him an alternative vision of a society that could still be motivated by strongly held values and customs. These were, however, non-European values and customs, which he found strangely less offensive than those from his native country. His contradictory stance over the role of traditional values in society is certainly noteworthy. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, in which files were being drawn up on army officers about their religious beliefs, he added: ‘If

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I have a file I will surely be treated as a clerical reactionary’. Gaden then warmed to his theme: We cannot be accused of being assiduous religious officers; it would be difficult at least for us to become Muslims, and I do not find the necessity for it, although I think that at base all ways of worship are good and that ritual acts are the only essential thing. I might go even further if I were to risk scandalis- ing you in saying that I am an awful disbeliever. (JHG-F, 7.4.05) His lack of faith would have been a blow to his mother and the three of his sisters who had taken the veil. However, he quipped that together his mother’s and sisters’ piety represented a large compensation for his own disbelief. Some five months later, he returned to a similar theme in a letter to his father, in which he vented his increasingly jaundiced feelings towards the Catholic Church: There are institutions that have seen their day and are an anachronism in our era, and the education provided by the laity [by contrast] has the effect of opening the intellect to a much larger conception of life and the rights of the individual towards his fellows; even the excesses which will have marked the fight for it to be represented [the attacks on convents and religious orders] will not be regretted. (JHG-F, 15.9.05) There is a shift in his view, which previously held that all ways of worship were equal, to an outright condemnation of the Church, evidence of Gaden’s increasing alienation from organised religion in France. He was, however, anxious about the state of religious institutions in view of the violent attacks on convents and what they might mean for the safety of his sisters. While he became increasingly distant from Catholicism, he maintained and developed his interest in and appreciation of Islam in Africa. He was fascinated by the role the Muslim religion in general, and Islamic intellectuals in particular, played in society. Gaden settled back into life at Tchekna by the end of March, and he quickly dealt with the quarrels that had blown up at the post in his absence. He mulled over the possibility of appointing a Sultan chosen by the French to govern the town of Abéché if Djerma Othman were to be removed.20 But Gaden had returned to the solitude of domestic life at Tchekna, and his thoughts turned to finding a new mousso. Grech had written to him and had spoken much about his attempts to find him a future wife.

20 As early as 1904 Gaden discussed with Auguste Terrier the names of possible appoin- tees for such a position, were it to arise. See Fonds Terrier, Correspondence VIII (5898).

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I do not count on having my spouse before the 3rd [April] at the earliest. I have started to get over my widowerhood. I have found a young poppet whose qualities appeared to me altogether exceptional, unfortunately she has had too many nippers because no doubt she has gallivanted around too much. (JHG-HJEG, 1.4.05)

A Poet, Dreamer and a Madman

In early April 1905, it was decided that Gouraud had to travel south to see Governor Gentil, perhaps in May or June. There were important issues to address, such as tax systems, the budget deficit, security in the Ouaddai and so on. But more importantly, he was summoned to meet Count Pierre de Brazza, the first French Commissaire Général of the Congo, who was now charged with an enquiry into conditions in the French territory following on from the shocking revelations in the press of forced labour, abuses and atrocities in the Belgian possession along the river. The commercial exploitation of rubber in the colony had imposed virtual slave relations on the Congolese populations. The Toqué-Gaud affair had also triggered outrage in Paris. De Brazza headed up what was called the ‘Commission d’enquête. Les Populations Congolaises’, and he had arrived in Brazzaville to conduct his survey. Since he could not travel up to Fort Lamy, Gouraud would have to make the long journey south to meet him, perhaps at Fort Crampel or even Bangui. From there Gouraud would travel on to Brazzaville to see Gentil.21 Clouds were gathering around Governor Gentil, who was under severe criticism for the military action at Yao led by Capt Rivière, and a concerted press campaign in Paris was being waged against him. Calls were made for his return to France, even before de Brazza had completed his mission. Gouraud sympathised with Gentil and was not looking forward to his meeting with de Brazza, whom he held in some degree of contempt: It is very clear that M. de B[razza] understood his mission [to be] against M. G[entil], in my opinion…. But de Brazza has the style of a poet and is a humanitarian dreamer, that the affairs of the administration and questions of the budget do not affect him. … [T]o tell the blacks that they do not owe taxes, that one does not have the right to force them to work, to enquire left and right of boys, porters etc. to know the number of whip [chicotte] lashes given during the last year; all this in the midst of populations who demand only to

21 See Gouraud (1944: 211–33) for an account of these events in his memoirs. See also HJEG-JHG, 10.4.05.

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do nothing will produce a very infelicitous effect…. This is the policy of Schoelcher [the French politician and anti-slavery campaigner]. If we want to be understood, given these ideas, evacuation and leaving the negroes alone is all there is. Do you remember the interesting rubber factory we visited in Brazzaville? M. de B. went there and said to the blacks who brought the … [raw material] that they were not forced to bring it. Soon after, the factory closed. (HJEG-JHG, 10.4.05) Gouraud had filled out a questionnaire issued by de Brazza and had written ‘100 pages’ in the best defence he could muster against the evacuation of the region. He awaited the upshot. Gouraud now held completely opposite views from Gaden with respect to the kind of social relations each deemed worthy of upholding in the French colony: Gaden, the natural protector of chiefs; Gouraud, the apologist for forced labour. Gaden received news that opened up old wounds in his relationship with his bête noire, Georges Mangin, the Frenchman-turned-desert-nomad. Captain Bablon, stationed in the Kanem, wrote to Gaden to explain that he had lost control over Mangin and the captain made a formal complaint against Mangin. Bablon cited two incidents: first, Mangin ‘bumped off’ two of his own riflemen, probably for refusing to obey orders; second, he had entered territory which had been ruled out of bounds to him. ‘This is proof that Mangin is decided upon sacrificing his sincere desire to obey me and wants only to satisfy his renowned taste for war’, Gaden said to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 20.4.05). Gouraud seems to have ignored these accusation for there is surprisingly little in their correspondence on this subject. Gouraud, who had a soft spot for Mangin and was a close associate of his elder brother Charles, would no doubt have wanted to brush the matter under the carpet. In his memoires, Gouraud expressed his high regard for Georges: The reign of Mangin junior. He has his faults as everyone else, but also magnificent qualities, and to command a platoon of meharistes, to transform our good and hefty Bambaras into nomads, living on pasture with their animals, to lead raids in good fortune, without being sure of finding water at the end of 200 kilometres, he has no equal.22 One month later after Bablon’s accusations and Gaden’s letter to Gouraud, Mangin was travelling south with Gouraud as part of the delegation from Chad to meet de Brazza.23 This way Mangin could be kept out of trouble and his excessive behaviour might be quietly forgotten. But Gouraud’s

22 Gouraud, 1944: 192. 23 See Gouraud, 1944: 217.

252 chapter five choice of such a loose cannon to be part of a representative mission to give evidence on the relations with local people in Chad could not have been more bizarre. Georges Mangin, whose bloodthirsty reputation was well known and who had been formally exposed in Bablon’s accusations, was to speak to de Brazza and his companion, the philosopher Challaye, on the question of brutality under the colonial regime! In other circumstances, he could well have been one of the first to face de Brazza’s firing squad.

A Mousso and an Official Visit

On 13th April, before Gouraud started to travel south, Gaden left Tchekna for a short tour to Bousso, where there was a French post sited on the banks of the Chari River, upstream from Tchekna. He had earlier received reports of a mysterious band of Fulbe pilgrims roaming the area. Some sources suggested that they were the last of the partisans of the late Amadou Tal, the son of the jihadist Al Hajj Umar Tal, from Bandiagara. Gaden thought it would be really naive to let them escape without finding out who they were; and in any case it was best to keep under surveillance a rather large band of armed men. Gaden had wanted to go off immediately in search of them himself, but he was holed up in Tchekna with much to do. The situation was unclear and the intelligence coming in to him was confused. He therefore took the opportunity of a tour to Bousso to find out more.24 Gaden returned later with no further news of the Fulbe pilgrims. He did find at Tchekna, however, that his new wife, Niorga, a woman of Peul cattle- herder stock, was behaving herself. He had thought to delay his trip to Bousso and postpone his ‘honeymoon’, but he had pushed himself to go all the same for fear that others might believe the worst of him for indulging his desires and not travelling. Sitting down to relax on his veranda on a late April evening, looking out over the beautiful view towards the Bahr, an animated scene now that bustled with human activity, Gaden had an unusual

24 It was not until almost 18 months later, with rumours of sightings still circulating, that the Fulbe pilgrims did indeed turn out to be the last of Amadou Shayku’s Futanke followers. They turned up on the banks of the Chari river, after having sought refuge in Sokoto, and continued on their arduous journey through Nigeria in the hope of reaching Mecca. Gaourang invited them to settle in Baghirmi under Gaden’s watch in September 1906. Gaden wrote a four-page ‘Note sur les Toucouleurs récennement arrivés à Fort Lamy’ some time in 1906. It details their history and itinerary since Bandiagara, and names some of the more prominent members of the band: Aliou Tierno and Ma Bassirou, brother and son of Al Hajj Umar Tal respectively; Aliou Ousman, the brother of the previous Sultan Tijane of Bandiagara. See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC/1/(4), document 65.

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bout of nostalgia and an upsurge of emotion. The scene reminded him of his terrace in Zinder, where he and Gouraud had dined together many years earlier. They had gazed out over rocks on one side to the north, and to the south on to the comings-and-goings of the town’s folk, who crossed the rocky foreground, and on to Lake Birni with its ring of green vegetation. He wrote to Gouraud: ‘I would willingly return to three years ago [in Zinder]. It was the moment when you came to court Ourma; whilst I had a night in my tent under the stars and that good Diouma, whom I appreciate more and more’ (JHG-HJEG, 26.4.05). An old flame whose light still flickered in the present illuminated this poignant moment of reflection, and it came to Gaden in the midst of his return to a new wife. Just before his arrival in Tchekna, Gouraud acknowledged the power of this moment for him as well: ‘It will be three years and one month since I found you in Zinder. Me too, I miss the terrace and the sweet Ourma’ (HJEG-JHG, 2.5.05). Before Gouraud went south to meet Gentil and de Brazza, he was due to make his official visit to Tchekna. While Gaden looked forward to meeting up with his old friend, he was not altogether overjoyed by the prospect of a formal review of the post and all the disruption the visitors would cause: ‘I would so much prefer that he was not the Commandant of the Territory. I am going to be obliged to move out of my own hut and put him up there, and I will have to camp … for at least ten days’, he grumbled to his father (JHG-F, 20.4.05). His feelings about giving up the Residence for his superior officer were never divulged to his friend. In addition to these worries, Gaden did not look forward to the prospect of a greater burden of responsibility, especially the temporary military command of the territory, while Gouraud was away in Brazzaville. The final preparations were put in place for the arrival in Tchekna of Lieutenant Colonel Gouraud, Commandant of the Territory of Chad. Gouraud asked to be met on his way to the post by one of the ‘Sultan’s functionaries’, and he demanded the correct and proper formal ceremonial entry into the post. He specified his requirements:

I bring back around 100 porters in my convoy and eight scouts. This is to make an honourable entry into Tchekna [echoes here of the Sultan’s need for a large entourage on entering a rival’s village]. Anyway, I will go on the eve of my arrival to sleep some eight to ten kilometres from Tchekna so as to arrive in the morning around 8 o’clock with a sizeable detachment. The Sultan will come before me at a distance that you judge appropriate, you will tell him to dismount before he approaches me. I will dismount myself, and we will chat for a short while…. It is important that Gaourang makes an act of deference… (HJEG-JHG, 2.5.05)

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Gaden had a swelling in his groin that made mounting and dismounting his horse painful. He was advised that if he could not do this, it would be better for him to wait inside the post. To remain on his horse while Gouraud dismounted after the Sultan, would be disrespectful to his superior officer. Gouraud recommended rest so that he would be best able to take part in the welcoming ceremony. On 4th May, Gaourang duly welcomed the Commander of the Territory to his Sultanate. Gouraud was received by the Sultan and his cavalry, whose horses were caparisoned in gaily coloured cotton leggings. The Sultan’s escort, decked out in splendour and decorated with ostrich plumes and other finery, comprised musicians playing metre-long trumpets, drums and bells. Gouraud was eventually ushered into a large room in Gaourang’s palace, where the Sultan sat surrounded by his courtiers and aides, some 100 chiefs and eunuchs squatting on the floor about him. The Sultan spoke first, overflowing with compliments for Gouraud and the French mission. Gouraud then responded, his words translated by Grech, the colonial interpreter: Allah protects Baghirmi and the Sultan in giving him the support and aid of the French. Rabah wanted to resist; he has been killed and his power destroyed. Baghirmi possesses fertile land; the inhabitants are good cultivators. Your adobe granaries in the form of tall bottles capped by roofs like straw hats are well known throughout the region. Your country is bordered by a river teeming with fish. Finally, many of your men are industrious, knowing how to weave and dye with indigo. The country starts to raise itself from the ruins caused by the raiding of slavers. In order to help you, French support will not fail you; it did not yesterday and it will not tomorrow. The best proof that I can give you of this is that I have designated as Resident for you [toi], Sultan, the first of my officers, Captain Gaden, a man already known for his wisdom. Your counsellors, I say looking them in the eye, can have confidence in him: God has given him the gift to read the hearts of men. May Allah protect you!25 During their short time together in Tchekna, the first period of companion- ship they had shared since their arrival in Chad about one year earlier, Gaden and Gouraud discussed many topics. No doubt Mangin was a subject of debate, as was Governor Gentil’s health, which was affected by the stress of facing de Brazza’s mission to the Congo. The two friends discussed their respective domestic arrangements, and Gouraud met Gaden’s new spouse, the initially unnamed young woman who had a clutch of children

25 Reported in Gouraud, 1944: 207–8.

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by other men, but now named by Gaden in his subsequent letters as Niorga. The official order for Gouraud to travel south arrived and he prepared to leave Tchekna on 9th May 1905 to return to Fort Lamy, before heading back up the River Chari towards Fort Crampel for his rendezvous with de Brazza. Gaden planned to move to Fort Lamy, where he would take command of the military and administrative affairs in Chad. Gaden estimated he would be there for four months; the paperwork and administration awaiting him there did not excite him at all.

Little Tyrants that No One Controls

Gaden too left Tchekna on 9th May and reached Fort Lamy nine days later. He awaited impatiently the final departure of Gouraud so that he could move into the commandant’s quarters. In June from his river barge on the Chari, Gouraud wrote words of encouragement to Gaden: ‘It is you whom I ask to take the helm…. You alone have the seniority, the moral authority needed to make the thing work’. While Gaden would for the moment have to put aside his study of the Baghirmi language, this new posting would secure him a promotion to the rank of Chef de Bataillon, and he would be elevated to Colonel for his next tour of duty, Gouraud assured him. But then as he headed upstream Gouraud resorted to the voice of authority: ‘Keep me up to date….You will send me political reports and important political letters, with a summary note indicating in what way you have responded, what instructions you have given’ (HJEG-JHG, 9.6.05). By the start of July, the focus of the de Brazza mission was becoming clearer, and Gaden was able to pick up from the newspapers the mood in France regarding conditions in the Congo. The murder of a native guide by Toqué and Gaud on 14th July 1903 was now the focus of attention. The two culprits were busy trying to implicate others in their heinous act, and Gaden congratulated himself on the fact that he had snubbed Toqué by turning his back on him the year before at Brazzaville and then at Fort Crampel. I was taken to be a boor [when turning his back on the culprits] but events have proved me right. If the Brazza mission just watches and listens, it will learn about some mischief. But one would never dare to write the true history of this African colony from its beginnings …. This one [colony] for all sorts of reasons evolves much slower than the others and it is for this that horrors have taken place here…. Man is a very nasty animal when he is not maintained by the fear of the police…. Who will tell of how the decorated traders, who are today the glory and hope of the colony, began to make their fortunes

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in selling meat on the hoof, human [flesh] to the cannibals along the river? This colony has never had sufficient means to succeed. It does not have enough administrators, they are not regularly supplied with provisions, and are not even in regular communication with their headquarters. There are not enough military troops, they are poorly paid and badly nourished and the length of the Congo, the Ubangui, and the Gribingui [rivers] they are starving, the blacks above all. The agents of the administration at the posts are each one little tyrants that almost no-one controls; the factory agents are also. The population is horribly brutalised … and all this turns in a vicious circle and there is not any way to escape it. And what administrative personnel! There are some men of value, but they are few. The rest, explorers not administrators. All of them form a small mutual administrative society, very closed regarding I know not what sort of indiscretions. Toqué and Gaud were destined to be great men. They were warmly put forward for rewards and Fourneau [Gentil’s predecessor], who is however an honest man, gave them marvellous evaluations… recreation Toqué-style is not to our taste. (JHG-F, 3.7.05) Gaden’s analysis of the situation reveals his awareness of the atrocities per- petrated in the lower Congo region, and it speaks too about his Hobbesian social philosophy, in which man requires a sovereign, in the form of a police force, to maintain order and to prevent the manifestation of the excesses of human nature. This overall view of the political situation contrasts with the one held by Gouraud – indicated earlier – in which he saw little fault with the colonial administration and resorted to condemnations of the native population for not submitting to the atrocious labour conditions imposed by the rubber factories and other commercial interests. Gaden had now come to welcome the inspection mission and he applauded what was happening in the name of France. Gaden also did not share Gouraud’s view about the future of the colony, and he went on in the same letter to his father: ‘Above all we [the colonial administration] are a bankrupt organisation. I repeat this to Gouraud, but he does not follow my reasoning.’ Meanwhile on his descent south, Gouraud had got wind of what the inspection mission was about, and had heard that a colonial inspector named Saurin, who was part of the delegation, was concerned about the condition of prisoners held at French posts. Gouraud wrote to Gaden:

I know that in all conscience we have done nothing for which we can be criticised, but I wonder if the inspector, moved by your stories, will probably raise an eyebrow over the prisoners held in chains at Fort Lamy. You could perhaps still liberate some of them, those near to the completion of their sentences, and only keep in chains those who are dangerous. However, this treatment is not barbaric and our prisoners are nourished, as one can observe… (HJEG- JHG, 19.6.05)

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Gouraud’s nerves were obviously on edge prior to his meeting with the inspection team and his concern about being exposed as someone guilty of perpetrating acts of brutality played on his mind. Gaden took the whole business much more lightly, and he remarked to his father: ‘I would have preferred to be a hooligan; I would surely have made fun of this furious bourgeois [de Brazza]’ (JHG-F, 3.7.05). Gouraud met de Brazza’s inspection team at Fort Crampel on 3rd July 1905. The head of the mission was accompanied by his wife, a philosopher, two administrators and the inspector Saurin, who had been taken gravely ill on his arrival. Gentil remained in Brazzaville in a state of nervous exhaustion. Gouraud fought to save the French mission in Chad, and he reported that de Brazza appeared to be touched by what he had to tell him. But the Toqué-Gaud affair had provoked an outcry, and the reaction to Gaden’s initial report on the trade in eunuchs from Baghirmi across the Sahara caused a stir in Paris. The political fallout from the affair and the report, both of which violated metropolitan humanitarian sentiments, could produce a complete about-turn for the French colonial presence in Africa. Gouraud was not optimistic about the outcome and hoped to fend off a threatened political coup and the recall of troops (HJEG-JHG, 7.7.05). Gouraud was outraged and later wrote in his memoirs: ‘Are we going to abandon our dead, those who fell on the road to Chad in order to unite in the last effort the French of Dakar with those of Brazzaville?’26 Gouraud continued south to Brazzaville to meet Governor Gentil, accompanied by the ailing inspector Saurin. Fort Lamy had been reprieved from the indignity of an inspection of its gaols, although Gaden expressed the wish that the inspector had come in order to dispel the insinuations of the civil government that the blame for the horrors of the colony lay with the military. All the Congolese were compromised, Gaden thought (JHG-F, 26.8.05). Gentil returned to France at the end of August and expected to be sacrificed as the person responsible for the appalling situation uncovered by de Brazza’s mission in the Congo. De Brazza himself left Brazzaville some days later but he died during a stop-over in Dakar en route to France, and rumours flew around that he had been poisoned by his enemies, of which he had many in the Congo.27 Emile Gentil was relieved of the governorship of the Congo and was later replaced by Alfred Fourneau, his immediate predecessor in the colony. The press campaign against Gentil was

26 Gouraud, 1944: 221. 27 De Brazza’s report was never formally completed, and the draft he had been writing prior to his death was shelved once it arrived in Paris, never to be published.

258 chapter five vicious and Gouraud called it ‘unjust’, a series of ‘lamentable polemics and calumnies thrown at him’;28 Gaden saw the hand of the Freemasons behind the attacks, and especially that of Governor Ornières of Gabon (JHG-F, 6.8.05). Unknown to Gaden at this time was that Gouraud had just received news at Fort Archambault of Gaden’s imminent promotion to Chef de Bataillon, a fourth stripe that would be conferred at some point during the year; he was ranked 14th out of 25 candidates on the promotion table. Gouraud had been in touch with Etienne and the matter had been placed in his hands; Etienne was to take over temporarily at the Ministry of the Colonies the following month during the absence of the Minister, and so everything was in place for his elevation to be confirmed. Gaden’s official record notes that the promotion took effect from 26th December 1905.29

A Lowly Housemaid

The situation around Fort Lamy was calm during the initial period of Gouraud’s absence in the Congo, and Gaden consoled himself that he would be back in France during the following year, 1906. His one concern was that he had heard no news from Gouraud for weeks, although Gaden was expecting his arrival imminently and certainly within the next month. Gouraud would disembark at the post one fine morning without having announced his return and surprise them all, or so Gaden thought in mid- August (JHG-F, 15.8.05). Gaden continued to write to Gouraud even though the latter had not responded during the whole of August and half of September. News and gossip from the Fort was passed on by Gaden: Gouraud’s menagerie had been expanded to include a monkey and a wild boar; something of a wife-swap had taken place in Chad with Ruef taking up with Gaden’s ex-lover from Tchekna, Hourra (Gouraud’s ex-mousso) had also been sent to Ruef, and Rivière had just sent his wife packing, the prettiest woman in Fort Lamy, for having played around too openly with a rifleman in Bokoro. Grech, the interpreter, was also having problems since he was due to return to France at the end of his tour of duty, and he was

28 Gouraud, 1944: 253. Gouraud was an unwavering supporter of Gentil. He wrote: ‘I wish that all the people, who chatter so loudly in the name of humanity, would have done as much as M. Gentil for this humanity. Who established the French peace in this corner of central Africa, the den of slavery, if not M. Gentil? Who therefore saved thousands of human lives, in destroying Rabah, if not M. Gentil?’ 29 Dossier personnel, No. 7Ye 486, SHAT.

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suffering greatly at the thought of separating from his mousso, Doumé, and his daughter. He did not speak and walked around like an automaton. Gaden’s own mousso, Niorga, who had accompanied him to Fort Lamy, returned to Tchekna to see her mother. But Gaden was beginning to tire, and the workload, responsibility and monotony of life at the Fort were getting to him by early September. Georges Mangin was still a thorn in Gaden’s side, particularly now that he was back with his meharistes in the desert after his trip with Gouraud to Fort Crampel. He still would not listen to orders, although he always gave the impression of intending to obey: Mangin has always been like this, he feigns to listen with attention and promises all that is asked of him. In reality he hears nothing and everything slides from him like water off a duck’s back. I have known him for too long a time and know well his ways. Regarding me, I have no illusions. I have known for a long time that Mangin does not give a darn about me. I have not followed up this story about the soldiers at Aouak [the incident Bablon reported to him] because I am only a captain, otherwise he would receive a summons that would perhaps make him reflect. (JHG-HJEG, 3.9.05) Nonetheless, Mangin still seemed to retain Gouraud’s faithful support, and his commanding officer was impressed by what he achieved. During a tour of the region, Gouraud had once met Mangin and his band of meharistes, some 45 men on camels accompanied by fifteen cavalrymen. He had been impressed by the sight of his officer travelling through the sands on large dromedaries, living just like desert nomads under tents the height of sand-dunes, exposed to the gusts of sand-blown air and the scorching sun. It was a rudimentary existence, but one which suited Mangin. He kept his camels in prime condition and they were the envy of the nomads themselves. Gouraud’s only concern was that he often went off alone with his band of men to conduct counter-raids, and the threat of ambush was very real. How much longer would Mangin’s good star guide him through scrapes and battles? Gaden’s view was that Mangin’s hotheadedness always caused more problems than it solved, and the way Mangin spoke to local populations only ever inflamed delicate political situations. By September 1905, Gaden was angry about his situation in Fort Lamy and the fact that Gouraud had left him all the responsibilities of the region and failed to communicate with him. ‘I will take away a bad memory from this territory, that I am a lowly housemaid’, he complained to his father (JHG-F, 15.9.05). One day later, after grumbling of his lot, Gaden finally let his feelings be known to Gouraud in a letter.

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I am very disappointed to learn of your abrupt decision to go down to Brazzaville. I thought that the reasons you had for going were important rather than the ones enumerated in your letter…. For it would be regrettable that the voyage was for nothing. You find me, I hope, in good health, but certainly not happy with what you call my command, but simply a lame supply post of this so-called command. It was evidently not possible to do otherwise but I regret that in all the Territory an older person could not have been found to do this drudgery in my place. The cercle that you bestowed on me over and above the deal we struck brings me a considerable increase in work. All this makes for an excessive workload and I can’t wait for the end of this good situation on your return…. Fort Lamy is so monotonous that I need the bush more and more. (JHG-HJEG, 16.9.05)

On the same day that Gaden sent off his complaints to his friend, Gouraud wrote him a letter to say how pleased he was with his trip, and among his successes was the reinstatement of the supply of wine to full rations— such a long voyage for such a small reward! He reported too that Toqué and Gaud, the perpetrators of the murder at Fort Crampel, had each received five years’ imprisonment. The two Henris did not write much to each other over the next few weeks, a sign no doubt of their strained relations. By mid-October Gouraud had still not returned and Gaden was in a state of nervous exhaustion in Fort Lamy. News of the increasing tensions in Europe and in North Africa between France and Germany concerned him a good deal. Germany, the land of his forefathers, was uppermost in Gaden’s mind, for there was a military post not far away in German-held Cameroon that was well armed. Relations with the German post in Cameroon had changed recently, and Gaden feared that there were preparations underway for another war in Europe.

Here, our relations with the Germans after having been very friendly have become correct and ceremonial. They used to write [to Fort Lamy] in French, [but] now they only write in German probably following new instructions. I heard the sounds of machine-gun fire near to Kousseri [the German post], it was no doubt to make known to us that they had just received one. With the English at Bornu, we have started to have good relations. They send us two French newspapers and even two illustrated ones in English. I responded to this act by sending them some English publications … unfortunately rather old. Chad is an international cross-roads where we do not occupy the best place. (JHG-F, 17.10.05)

Gouraud finally got in touch to say that he would arrive Fort Lamy on 1st November 1905. After all the rumours about a French evacuation from the region, Gouraud thought it crucial to organise an official entry to the post to impress the importance of the French mission on the people of Fort

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Lamy. Gaden was charged with this responsibility, and was given detailed instructions as usual by Gouraud as to what he required: the garrison was to form a guard of honour and present arms to their returning commander; local notables and dignitaries should gather on the opposite side of the square; when the vessel, the Léon Blot, sounded its hooter, three reports from the cannon should be let off. An unofficial reception party was also to be organised, and this was to include Cobra’s (Gouraud’s mousso’s) family – ‘her mother and her sisters, Fatmé and the wife of Tijane’. Gouraud had taken Cobra all the way to Brazzaville with his delegation, and the family was to assemble on the river bank to welcome home their distinguished relative (HJEG-JHG, 31.10.05). Cobra, it would appear, contributed to the intelligence that informed Gouraud’s policy, although he did not always remember what these contributions were, and had to be reminded of them. For instance, when discussing a local population in Chad on their way back from Brazzaville, Cobra had informed him about a number of important families; but it was only after his assistant had raised the same point later did Gouraud recall his wife’s intervention. Gouraud’s opinion of her does not seem to have been high: ‘Cobra chats willingly about things of her race when she has the confidence to do so’, but he thought his mother-in-law, Myriam, would be a better source of information (HJEG-JHG, 4.10.05).

A Perfect Baghirmist

Gaden arrived back in Tchekna on 23rd November after a detour through the bush that delighted him very much. At the post, he found his leopard had grown enormously in the meantime, much bigger than Gouraud’s, but it had now become rather disagreeable. It had broken free from its chain on the day of his return and attacked three of his chickens (JHG-F, 4.12.05). Some time earlier his adjutant named Bala, who had been left to hold the post at Tchekna, had informed him that his leopard had escaped its leash three times and had gone roaming through the bush; on the last occasion it attacked a sheep. Only Bala could approach the animal now, and Gaden had given him permission to kill it, fearing that sooner or later it would cost the life of a child or an elderly person in the settlement (JHG-F, 15.9.05). Bala had obviously not carried out Gaden’s wish. Gaden’s faith in his ability to domesticate wild animals was beginning waver, but he still retained the faint hope that his menagerie was redeemable even when the evidence suggested the contrary. Even he could not bring himself to shoot his leopard.

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During Gaden’s absence the Sultan had gone from strength to strength, and the village was prospering. Gaourang had put a tax system in place for the Arabic-speaking population in the Sultanate, and had compromised his position by doing so; but he had placated those who had objected to his scheme with gifts. The post itself however was in a pitiful condition with the roofs of the huts in need of repair and papers scattered all around inside. Ramadan was coming to an end, and preparations for the celebrations were underway. It was a joyful time to return. What was more, Gaden’s photography, which had continued in fits and starts throughout this tour of duty, was a great success in the village. He had developed pictures of the Sultan and his son on their arrival at Fort Lamy the year before, and people now queued up to see them; indeed, many of the notable families sent their wives and womenfolk to him to be photographed. Only one thing darkened this bright scene, but Gaden hesitated to commit the matter to an official letter to Gouraud: The Sultan asks … whether the purchase of captives by Baghirmians on the left bank of the river would be tolerated? In a certain sense, I think that it would not be inconvenient to close our eyes to the passage of three or four small caravans. What might be annoying could be caravans with long lines of chained captives. But the importation of some units is not inconvenient. I think therefore that, without official authorisation, one can close one’s eyes to a discreet traffic … I said to the Sultan that an account of the pillaging by chiefs in Kirti country had reached Brazzaville, and had a bad effect on Gentil… (JHG-HJEG, 15.12.05) In the aftermath of the de Brazza mission, it was highly problematic to tolerate these kinds of officially proscribed practices. Gaden had been given the responsibility of trying to re-negotiate parts of the original 1897 Gentil treaty with Gaourang, which had allowed for some slaving missions to take place on the left bank of the river. Gouraud thought it vital that he reach an agreement with the Sultan and root out all slave raiding; but Gaden’s solution was a long way away from what might have been acceptable to the colonial authorities. His sympathies for the Sultan, and his attempts to come up with a compromise that would avoid a confrontation with other figures in the Sultanate, led him to frame the solution outlined in his letter to Gouraud. In his reply to Gaden’s request for tolerance, Gouraud made no mention of this issue directly and only remarked teas- ingly: ‘You have become a perfect Gaourangist and Baghirmist. Frankly, do you not find that Baghirmi has done royally by France?’ (HJEG-JHG, 21.12.05). Gaden was offended by this suggestion and replied: I do not believe myself to be a Baghirmist. I have done all that I can since I have been here to prevent them from being harmed and I have just about

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succeeded. I am absolutely of the opinion that the [people of the left bank] be protected… . All these excellent reforms will increase our revenues but are also going to increase the charges [taxes] very much. (JHG-HJEG, 28.12.05) Until then, chiefs had been able to raid the left bank of the Chari almost at will; but Gaden argued that Gaourang had sensed that changes were in the air and that beneficial effects would be felt by everyone in a year or two. Gaden was concerned about the immediate fiscal situation of the Sultanate, and he took a longer-term view on how changes would occur and how slaving would eventually be eradicated. Meanwhile, the tolerance of a little slave trading in the short-term was the price Gaden was willing to pay in the interests of future benefits for France and the Sultanate. Gouraud invited Gaden and Gaourang to Fort Lamy to knock out a new convention that would be acceptable to all parties and replace the 1897 Gentil treaty. The party from Tchekna set out in late December 1905, and a new agreement that formally proscribed the raising of taxes by enslave- ment was signed in the New Year. No doubt the gulf between words on a piece of paper and the specifics of local social practice still left room for all sorts of negotiations and compromises on the ground. The Sultan, who had not been told about Gentil’s demise for fear that he might worry about how his son was being looked after in Brazzaville, looked forward to hearing news of the lad’s progress in Fort Lamy. Indeed, the philosopher who had been on the de Brazza mission had published a congratulatory piece in the press that had mentioned the Sultan’s son as a fine example of humanitarian colonial practice. This item would no doubt stoke the Sultan’s paternal pride. After his visit to Fort Lamy, Gaden returned to Tchekna by river to Mandjaffa, and then took a detour through the bush to inspect the area along the banks of the Chari. Here he found people resettling in greater numbers, and was encouraged that French policy was now having an effect. It was five years since the overthrow of Rabah, whose raids had denuded local settlements of population. He travelled with just his boy and his cook, and everywhere they went villagers danced into the night around their camp and sang Baghirmian songs and fired shots into the air in celebration. Gaden, who was now conversant in the language of Baghirmi, could deci- pher some of the words of the songs: ‘The captain [Gaden] is our father and our mother’.30 ‘One must say that the Baghirmians have not forgotten that

30 He also picked up the nicknames of other officers used by local folk: Largeau was called ‘Commandant Gassoubougou’ or ‘the nape of a roan antelope’, and a junior officer named Blard was ‘Lieutenant Cammara’, or ‘the eye of the caiman’.

264 chapter five we rid them of Rabah, and that Gentil has a popularity here that would surprise the detractors of Brazza’s party’, he explained to his father (JHG-F, 6.2.06).

The Sultan’s Captive

On arriving at Tchekna, Gaden was pleased to see his leopard recognise him, sniffing the air on his approach, touching his hand in its paw, rubbing up against him affectionately, and licking him with obvious pleasure. Not only were local populations apparently tamed by the benevolence of French colonialism, but wild animals themselves could not resist similar charms; such was the power of the French civilizing mission. Gaden’s wild cats acquired some time earlier were, however, impervious to this power; they had now become too much to bear and were beyond his attempts at domestication. He gave them away to the villagers. His two domestic cats were doted over, and they were pleased to see him return. More worrying was the state of some of his officers. ‘Soudanite’, the condition of colonial folly or ‘the influence of the climate’, was starting to become apparent. One person in particular who was now seriously affected was the Maltese interpreter Grech. He had started to behave very strangely back in June and July 1905 over the prospect of the end of his tour of duty when he would have to leave behind his mousso and his daughter by her. At the time, Gaden had joked with his father that Grech ‘has taken well to native customs and is a famous phenomenon’ (JHG-F, 16.6.05). But Grech let slip over dinner one night that he had a young daughter in France and without any prompting declared that it was his paternal love that kept him at Fort Lamy (JHG-HJEG, 18.6.05). It then turned out that his daughter by his mousso was poorly and ‘he is more worried than if his daughter in France were ill… It would be a pity if this little one [the daughter] disappeared [died]; she will offer delights to our successors in 14 or 15 years’, Gaden remarked callously (JHG-HJEG, 3.7.05). In other words, Gaden considered children born to local women and fathered by colonial officers to be part of the social reproduction of potential moussos at colonial outposts that would be available to future generations of French officials. In February 1906, Grech began to write disturbing letters to Gaden and Gouraud, which indicated an increasing mental instability. It now came to light that during Gaden’s absence from Tchekna, Grech had approached the Sultan to ask for a captive girl for his mousso, and had said that he had Gouraud’s approval for the request. The Sultan gave the best one he could

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find, a young girl the same age as the Sultan’s own son. It turned out, however, that the Sultan had made a mistake and the young girl was destined to become a concubine to the Sultan’s son. She had been given directly to Ammi, Grech’s then mousso. On realising his mistake, the Sultan asked whether the girl could be exchanged for another one. Grech did not want to comply. Gaden commented: ‘I still have not spoken to him about it, but this gives you an idea of Grech’s morality. I am highly annoyed by this interpreter’s shortcomings, and it is not possible to leave him unpunished for an escapade this serious’ (JHG-HJEG, 7.2.06). On hearing the news of Grech’s indiscretions, Gouraud hoped that it had been made known to the Sultan that he had not authorised the request, and he wanted no formal complaint made against the interpreter. Ammi was now involved with another officer, and Gouraud commented: ‘These stories are annoying in which officers, sub-officers and women are mixed up together’ (HJEG-JHG, 14.2.06). Further twists and turns of Grech’s story would not be revealed to Gaden or Gouraud for over another month. Gaden himself was having problems with his own mousso, Niorga, who had complained about being left at Tchekna during his trip to Fort Lamy with the Sultan. She demanded a coral necklace from Gouraud, who had inconvenienced her so much by calling her husband away. Gaden inquired of Gouraud: ‘If you can [give her some coral], I would let her leave [to collect it] with pleasure, which will give me 12–15 days freedom. If you cannot, there is no point in her travelling’ (JHG-HJEG, 7.2.06). Gaden awaited Gouraud’s response. Gaden was probably banking on Gouraud inviting Niorga over to Fort Lamy for he was fed up with her. He complained that ‘she has put on weight, has aged, and I have had more than I can cope with.’ He added a footnote to his letter: Having thought of my mousso and of my return to Tchekna, I remembered a picture by Kops representing an enormous [woman with] rolls of fat who leaves her bed and hurries with open arms towards a small old man who arrives with a suitcase in his hand. Approximate caption. The joys of return erase the pain of absence.31 (JHG-HJEG, 17.2.06) The reputation of the woman he was living with was not spared his acerbic wit nor his acute and cruel observations.32

31 The artist referred to by Gaden is perhaps the German painter Franz Kops, 1846–96. 32 Gaden reported to Gouraud at the same time that he had received a letter from ‘la grande M’, his acquaintance Marguerite, ‘this dear [who] is in a new state of disarray’. It would appear that she and Gaden were no longer sweethearts, if they ever really were, for she had a ‘good young fellow [who] caused some ugly business and then abandoned her’.

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Niorga left Tchekna to pick up her present from Fort Lamy on the evening of 22nd February. She was accompanied by an escort led by one of the Sultan’s eunuchs, as well as by the wives of some of Gaden’s and Niorga’s close relatives. Oxen followed carrying provisions, and Gaden had given his wife eleven thalers with which to purchase tea and sugar in the market. As she made her way to Fort Lamy, Gaden added further disparaging remarks about Niorga: She has some incontestable representative qualities [of her sex] but I treat her deliberately as a sister who is charged with housework. As regards her skin, she is not especially likeable. Reassure yourself, I will hold myself back during her absence and rounds of women will not be seen at my place [as occurs elsewhere]. (JHG-HJEG, 22.2.06) His relationship with Niorga does not appear to have been a particularly passionate one by this point, and later he admitted a little more to his friend, when discussing what presents he and Gouraud gave to their respective moussos: If you reimburse the gifts made by Cobra it is no doubt that you are reim- bursed for them by Cobra. Here I do not reimburse those [gifts] my wife makes, also she rarely makes them, and often only small; but I am not amorous, a difference [from Gouraud] that I find to my advantage. (JHG-HJEG, 7.5.06) The implication is that Gouraud, with perhaps the greater libido of the two men, got due sexual reward for the niceties he showered upon Cobra, whereas Niorga had to be content with a much more parsimonious regime that exchanged few favours of either variety. Gaden went on to explain more about Niorga’s visit: the Sultan had said nothing to him about the Grech affair, and he reported that it was Niorga who had told him the story of the request for the captive girl. Gaden was not going to raise the matter with the Sultan and get embroiled in these kinds of issue. But the story took another twist on the day Niorga left for Fort Lamy, when Gaden was visited by a captive of the Sultan’s son’s mother to say that the eunuch, Aguid Mlezan, who was accompanying Gaden’s mousso, Niorga, was to recover the young captive girl from Fort Lamy, either in exchange for another one, or for a sum of money if Ammi preferred. All this was now becoming rather difficult and delicate, for the eunuch and a slave woman obviously knew all about the affair. Niorga turned up at Gouraud’s office in Fort Lamy at 5 o’clock on the evening of 27th February, and she made a stunning impression on him: … a sensational entrance: in a red silk blouse, a gown of green silk, bracelets up to her elbow, riding crop in her hand, she spoke to me and it made me

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think of la grande Mademoiselle under the Fronde.33 I introduced her to Cobra [Gouraud’s mousso] and the ladies immediately discovered a lively penchant for each other. They chattered all night; it was perfect. I will see that she makes her purchases. (HJEG-JHG, 28.2.06) Niorga and Cobra got on so well together that Gaden’s mousso divulged the whole story of Grech and his captive to her new friend. This annoyed Gouraud a good deal, for ‘these stories discredit us a little…. I asserted however that I did not know a word in order to give myself some peace.’ Gouraud was concerned that the story was gaining wider currency, which would be ‘very disagreeable’. He added a final comment on Grech: ‘…as it says in his file, “makes an excellent negro king”.’ Before Niorga left Fort Lamy, news of the confirmation of Gaden’s promotion to Chef de Bataillon came through. Gouraud called Niorga over immediately to tell her the news, and she was overjoyed: she was moved to sing and dance, proclaiming the praise of the ‘Sultan of France’. She stayed over an extra few nights to take part in the celebrations of drumming to mark Gaden’s new status, and Gouraud noted that she would be ‘hungry to press you to her breast’ on her return. He also wrote to the Sultan to inform him of Gaden’s success and sent 408 thalers over to Gaourang to fund celebrations of the Resident’s fourth military stripe at the Tchekna post (HJEG-JHG, 2.3.06). Niorga wanted to complete the return trip in four days, as she had done on her outward journey. Gouraud puzzled over why she might want to return so quickly, and surmised that it was the lure of further celebrations with her husband that hastened her pace. Niorga and Cobra, the daughter of nobleman from among the Djellabi, continued their relationship and frequently sent each other messages. While the two officers’ moussos struck up a close relationship, Gouraud was fretting over his lady friend in France. Gaby, who had written regularly to him during the early months of this tour of duty, now no longer corresponded with him: ‘Nothing from Gabi [sic] which has got me thinking that it is all over? All quite sudden, for her last letter of 18th August was kinder than ever. At least some bastard is not enjoying her letters [stolen from the mail], they don’t give a shit about me!’ (HJEG-JHG, 28.2.06).

33 This is no doubt a reference to Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, the Duchess of Montpensier (1627–1693), who was known as ‘la grande mademoiselle’ during the period of civil war in France, referred to as the Fronde. A princess of royal blood, the cousin of Louis XIV, the niece of Louis XIII, and the grand-daughter of Henri IV, she reputedly took command of troops during an attack on Orléans, and her portrait was painted many times by numerous artists, in particular by Pierre Mignard and his school. One such painting hangs in the Musée de Versailles and shows her dressed in rich gowns and finery, the sort that Gouraud had in mind when he first set eyes on Niorga.

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The Wild Unleashed

After all the excitement of the previous few weeks, Gaden wrote to his father in a dissimulatory style to report that ‘My existence continues with a remarkable monotony’ (JHG-F, 5.3.06). Nothing had ever been mentioned to his father about Niorga or his domestic arrangements with her or any other mousso. While Niorga was away, he continued with his study of the Baghirmi language and was putting the finishing touches to his report on the eunuchs of three north central Africa states, later published in 1907 under the title Les Etats Musulmans de l’Afrique Centrale. The Sultan had publicly renounced the practice of ‘eunuch production’, although it was still reported to be going on in the Ouaddai. The death of Djerma Othman, one of the Ouaddai chiefs, was announced to much rejoicing in the Sultanate. However, relations between the French and the Germans continued to deteriorate. Gaden had dined a number of times with German officers at Fort Lamy, but he had complained that the newly arrived officers were mute and spoke not one word of French. Gaden looked forward to ‘a day that they [the French] cease being beaten by 1870’, for the memories of this debacle were still felt deeply some 35 years or more after. He commented ‘… we are so lost in this nasty place that we risk being completely forgotten during the whole war, if there is one. A future quite dark for everyone’ (JHG- F, 21.4.06). Gaden consoled himself and awaited the return of his ‘majestic spouse’, and ‘to listen to her spouting an endless collection of famous pieces of gossip’ (JHG-HJEG, 7.3.06). Tax revenues from the Sultanate were very healthy, and even the Arabic- speaking populations to the north had rendered a sizeable sum in this first year of their inclusion in the system. Gaourang was delighted. Gaden had again struck up an excellent working relationship with the Sultan, whom he admired a great deal as a man of integrity and good faith. He explained to his father: ‘We are on the best of terms and I have become a type of prime minister to him, in whom he seems to have great confidence. I will be delighted to pass all this on to my successor’ (JHG-F, 21.2.06). Gaden’s relationships with other figures in Baghirmi were excellent. He received regular visits from a group of marabouts and the qadi, ‘a very intelligent and learned man who previously played a role in the Ouaddai’. With this group of Muslim intellectuals, he oversaw dispensing justice in the region, and he played the same role in the local tribunal as he had done in Zinder many years before. In Zinder he had earned the title ‘Mallam’, whereas in Tchekna he was nicknamed ‘Captain Muslim’. (He reassured his mother he had not converted when he broke this news to his parents.)

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One of Gaden’s main informants on Islamic affairs, on historical and cultural matters, as well as on political intelligence was Mohammed el Nour. Indeed, Mohammed el Nour was by now a key figure in Gaden’s intelligence network, and through him and his wide range of contacts Gaden kept an ear to the ground on political developments in the Ouaddai. Things had not always been so rosy, for when Gaden arrived in Tchekna, the marabout had been suspected of having Sennouist leanings and had served under the previous Sultan. Back in 1904, Gaden had soon found him to be ‘a precious agent of information’ and immediately employed him as an informant on a salary of 30 francs per month (JHG-HJEG, 18.10.04). Gaden had recorded details of el Nour’s background after his arrival in Tchekna, and the cleric gave Gaden an account of his earlier life spent in Abéché. He had been the Imam of the town, the capital of the Ouaddai, and had previously performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.34 El Nour was very keen to make the pilgrimage to Mecca one more time before he died. Gaden was very satisfied with the service the cleric had provided the mission and he wanted to support him personally in his quest. Gaden asked Gouraud for authorisation for el Nour to travel and put in a request for the necessary travel expenses to Mecca to be met from the post’s coffers (JHG-HJEG, 7.3.06). Gouraud was not happy about el Nour’s proposal, for while he felt he could not oppose it, the man was a key player who would be difficult to replace. He pointed out the delicacy of the situation, and wondered what precedent it might set regarding others in a similar position. He left it to Gaden to do his best to sort things out (HJEG-JHG, 13.3.06). In later years, Gaden dipped into his own pocket to finance the travel costs of pilgrims on the Hajj, but it is not certain that he did so in this case. Towards the end of March a tragedy hit Tchekna, and there was an inevi- tability about what happened. Yet again, Gaden’s leopard broke free from its chain, this time while he was dining one evening. He heard piercing cries ring out. He jumped up and ran out of his hut with an axe and came across the leopard crouching underneath his veranda. It had attacked a young girl of six or seven years old, the domestic captive of his wife Niorga, who had been grabbed by the neck and was bleeding badly. Gaden chased off the animal and then summoned a group of riflemen, who finally shot it. The leopard found its way back into a hut where it sought refuge to die in peace, but Gaden poked his gun in through a hole in the thatch and finally

34 See, Fonds Gaden, CAOM APC15/1 (4), Doc. 65, and also Gaden’s drafts of Rapports Politiques from 1904 to 1906 which drew heavily on information passed on by el Nour (CAOM APC15/1 (6), Doc. 96).

270 chapter five dispatched the animal. He said: ‘It still looked as though it was about to pounce on me, but without showing its claws.’ The little girl had sustained a number of wounds but nothing serious, in Gaden’s view, and she would be back on her feet in a few days. Gaden could not understand what had happened to his pet: ‘I hope that a similar accident does not happen with yours [Gouraud’s], but these nasty beasts, so gentle as they are, are taken by such a ferocity one fine day that they can kill or badly injure someone that it becomes a perfect nuisance’ (JHG-HJEG, 27.3.06). His faith in his ability to tame the savage had not been undermined by earlier incidents when the animal had escaped, and he seemed almost impervious to evidence that suggested that the leopard remained true to its instincts as a hunter. He now expressed regret to his father and stated rather disingenuously that he should have killed it earlier had he known it was capable of such acts. The incident upset everyone at the post; but how the community regarded officers keeping wild animals as pets, we do not know. It certainly cast a shadow of Gaden’s view of his life in West Africa, and he no longer wanted to return to this ‘nasty country’. He now just wished to return home (JHG-F, 22.3.06).35

Grech, Pure and Simple

By late April 1906, Grech the Maltese interpreter was back in France, leaving behind him a mousso, an ailing daughter and the debris of the affair surrounding his request for a captive from the Sultan. Expert not only in creating diplomatic incidents in Chad, he now went on to stir up a furore in Bordeaux. Grech descended from the train at Bordeaux station to find a lieutenant flanked by a number of nurses who asked him to step into an ambulance that would take him to the military hospital for a check-up. The reception had been arranged by Grech’s French wife who had evidence, she thought, in the form of his correspondence from Chad that he had gone completely mad. After a good deal of debate on the platform, Grech refused to get into the ambulance and took a car to the hospital instead, while the nurses followed behind. He stayed in hospital a number of days for observations, tests and medical examinations. An order then arrived from Paris relieving him of his duties. Grech went to see a lawyer to seek a divorce from his wife on the grounds of the humiliation he had suffered at the station and that he could no

35 In May 1906, Gaden wrote to Auguste Terrier and very politely enquired about the progress on a decision to come home: ‘I hope my repatriation will be decided one day’. (JHG- Terrier, 16.5.06), Fonds Terrier, Paris.

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longer share a bed with such a woman. He also visited Gaden’s father in Bordeaux to up-date him on his son’s activities and the situation in Chad. This was standard practice, for returning officers could relay to relatives the very latest developments in Africa. Gaden’s father had given him advice in the hope that he would not continue with the divorce; but Grech persisted in his plans. On hearing of the meeting, Gaden wrote to Gouraud: ‘You can imagine what his [Grech’s] state of mind was when he came to visit my father.’ ‘This is Grech pure and simple’, Gaden remarked. Grech’s wife was now seeking to file for a divorce herself and Grech’s career seemed to be in ruins. Grech also threatened to seek redress in the form of compensation from the government, and requested an immediate posting as the Resident to Baghirmi (a position Gaden occupied). Gaden thought this idea highly amusing: ‘In one or two months I am perhaps going to pass on to Gaourang the Grech-Ammi association! It would be quite good’ (JHG-HJEG, 28.4.06). Gaden received word some time later that Grech appeared to be rejuve- nated, and had been seen in Paris walking to the Folies Bergères with a sumptuous woman on his arm, crying out to all and sundry that he didn’t give a damn about his wife. Meanwhile, Gaden was becoming increasingly concerned at the irregularity of the correspondence from his father and the rest of his family. His father had been unwell, but his mother had written in his place on occasion. Little had been heard from the family and Gaden was worried about them. Gaden continued to write home, despite the sporadic nature of the responses from his family, and he gave them select news of developments at the post. Gaden broached the subject of Grech with his father in a letter in early May. He explained that Grech had without cause written aggressive letters to his wife, who took him to be suffering from Soudanite. Here he led the life of a native and had no more moral sense than a black interpreter. Since his departure I have learnt unimaginable things about him. He evidently did not recount how many times I gave him a dressing down and how one time I fined him 21 thalers… he is stupid to behave like this with her [his wife]. … I wrote him a letter in which I moralised to him on the subject of native women. (JHG-F, 6.5.06) Aware no doubt of the potential damage that the Maltese interpreter could do to his own reputation with his father, one gets the sense that Gaden was trying to distance himself from the kinds of activities Grech might have described to his father, and to indicate that he, the son, had indeed taken a high moral stance against such goings-on with native women. Whether this cut any ice with his father is debatable. The paucity of correspondence

272 chapter five from his father was only going to continue, and the situation reached crisis point towards the end of 1906, just prior to Gaden leaving Tchekna.

The Worst among the Whites

A number of thefts took place in Tchekna, and by late April Gaden himself was a victim. Thieves got into his household and took a number of his chickens, a mosquito net and other items. A trunk full of mementos from Gaden’s travels was also taken from a neighbouring hut, but it was later recovered and suspects were arrested, including some of Niorga’s relatives. According to Gaden the thieves had enormous audacity and an exact knowledge of the household and the place’s routine. The prime suspect was an old Peul shepherd who had visited Gaden’s household many times recently. Gaden remarked: ‘The Foulbes [Peuls] of Baghirmi are the filthiest band of villains I have ever seen.’ Once the stolen trunk was recovered, Gaden and Niorga went through its contents together, and she started to reminisce about her childhood. She had never cooked in her life because when she was young her father had had domestic captives, and her previous Baghirmian husband had captives, and now with Gaden she had them too. She then came up with an unusual expression, which Gaden found particularly amusing and he reported it to Gouraud: ‘With you, I have only learnt to move around in a trunk’.36 Presumably Niorga spoke this sentence in French, as Gaden reported it. Quite what she was referring to is not totally clear from the context of the letter, but the ‘trunk’ was no doubt Gaden’s recovered coffer containing his travel mementos. What she certainly had not learnt to do during her time with him was to cook. He went on: There it is, something truly amusing in the life of a native. Much later she will remember these events [her captives, the thefts, the trunk of mementos] of this period of her life, [and] she will date them from the time when she moved around in a trunk. (JHG-HJEG, 22.4.06) Gaden probably found this infelicity in her French phrasing particularly drole because the word ‘caisse’ for ‘trunk’ or ‘coffer’ was also colonial slang for a brothel. In other words, the suggestion might have been that the only thing she had learnt since living with him was how to move around in bed.

36 The exact phrase in Gaden’s letter was: ‘Chez toi, je n’ai appris qu’à bouger dans une caisse.’

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Around the same time as the trunk incident, a female domestic captive made a complaint to Gouraud about Gaden. In a letter to Gouraud, Gaden outlined the situation and then went on to explain that he was the only white at the post not to own or give any captives to his wife, although Niorga retained three of them in the household. Gaden claimed that he had nothing to do with this arrangement. She bought them with her pin-money, but as she is free to buy bracelets, beads or clothes with this money, the captives do not count as being given by me. I am completely indifferent and leave myself to the exoneration of Allah. The result is that she is going to buy a fourth captive with the gold that I have given her. But it is well understood that I am not involved in this new acquisition since she is perfectly able to look after her own gold. I am therefore the worst among the whites. (JHG-HJEG, 22.4.06) This was a rather disingenuous argument on his part, passing responsibility to his mousso and closing his eyes to the situation in his own household in a way that was not dissimilar to what he suggested should have been the French response to the Sultan’s request to continue slave-raiding on the left bank of the river to raise taxes. Gaden was certainly becoming a good Baghimrist in many regards. Progress in the case of the theft from Gaden’s house took a new turn in early May, when Niorga came running at the double to the post, followed by a group of breathless women in her wake. All of them were in a state of great excitement for they had just found one of Niorga’s rings that had been stolen from her hut. This find led to two men who had originally been arrested for theft. They were now at liberty following the negligence of the local police, who had let them escape. Cavalry were sent out to hunt them down, and one of them was captured while the other the fled into the mountains where he was shot. Gaden reported to Gouraud: ‘this morning the head of one thief and the other individual, who was on foot, were brought back.’ The poor Peul shepherd whom Gaden had initially accused and imprisoned was not involved at all. He was released from gaol and given an indemnity of ten thalers. Another thief was then caught red- handed committing his third consecutive crime. The Sultan wanted him punished by cutting off a hand and foot; Gaden objected to this and authorised his execution, which took place immediately. By now Gaden was truly fed up to the back teeth with his posting in Baghirmi, and all he wanted to do was return to France. Gaourang was starting to annoy him again, this time with his ‘purile and ridiculous bigotry’ which was an excuse for his ‘incurable laziness’. Gaden had heard nothing of his replacement at Tchekna and put some of the blame for this situation on Gouraud, who had not

274 chapter five requested his own replacement in time. Whether the Ministry of Colonies was fully aware about how long the two officers had served in Chad was open to question, especially now that Gentil had been relieved of his duties (JHG-HJEG, 11.5.06).

We are All Slave Traders

Gaden arranged a tour of a number of outposts to the east of Tchekna, from where he departed towards the end of May. He first stopped at the post at Melfi for a number of days and fell in love with the place, not with the post itself but with the surrounding countryside. It struck him as beautiful. The post stood at the foot of mountains some 3–400 metres high, and by the light of the moon Gaden could believe that he was looking at the upper valleys of the Pyrenees. He also had a grand view across the plain from which rocky outcrops and large massifs emerged to cut the skyline in jagged relief. In the mountains Gaden found evidence of prehistoric settlements, stone axeheads, sling-shot, polished stones and so on. He collected a sample of stone artefacts to take home with him. He suddenly found a release from his sedentary duties at Tchekna, and his only regret was that while the mountain was beautiful, ‘the women here are too scarce. I have quite modest needs, but even that is too much for here’ (JHG-HJEG, 5.6.06). Some weeks later, after visiting the area around Yao, Gaden discovered more interesting archaeological remains. In addition to stone artefacts, like those found in the mountains around Melfi and Badanga, he uncovered human remains and burial sites near to Yao in the Fitri region. He was intrigued by the bones and skulls he had unearthed, and they appeared to date from our period but were very different from modern skeletons. They were red in colour and friable, and he took care to wrap his samples as best he could, fearing they would be reduced to powder by the end of their journey. He planned to bring these specimens back to France for examination by museum experts in Paris.37 Gaden completed his tour of the region with visits to Baganda, Bokoro, Yao – the site of the recent battle with Ouaddai forces – and Moito, which he reached at the end of July. He conducted court martials and chaired local tribunals at each stop-over. What was important, Gaden thought, was

37 Much later when he was in St Louis he published with Dr Vereau, from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, a scholarly article on the subject of these archaeological finds: ‘Stations et sépultures néolithiques du Territoire Militaire de Tchad’, L’Anthropologie, T. XXX, 1920: 513–543. The human remains turned out to be neolithic.

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the effect of the court martials in instilling fear in the riflemen and in giving them a reminder that they had not signed up as mercenaries, pillagers or thieves. But he came across something much more disturbing on the frontier with Ouaddai territory, where there was a terrible food shortage. Villagers were selling their children or stealing other people’s children to sell to Arabic traders in exchange for millet. Gaden reported that some officers had taken it on themselves to seize the captives in order to punish the villagers and traders. Gaden concluded that ‘the captives are protected from poor treatment among us, and they can always be bought back by their families at a later date since they are not far away.’ He went on to add that this was not to be called slave trading,

for on this count, we are all more or less slave traders in authorising our moussos to buy captives! The questions of captivity are shocking but one must not push prudery to an excess at the expense of going against the interests of the captives themselves. (JHG-HJEG, 26.6.06)

Gaden was not unaware of the contradictions in his stance regarding his own or his mousso’s dealings in captives, and perhaps this had played on his conscience during his travels away from Tchekna. His tour of inspection ended in early August when he returned to Fort Lamy and made an entrance without any great ceremony or solemnity on the 6th. Gouraud wrote to Gaden before his return: ‘I believe that your tour will have excellent results from the point of view of the intellectual and moral orientation of officers, without which nothing can be done’ (HJEG- JHG, 12.7.06). Gaden met up with his old friend at Fort Lamy and prepared for the anticipated departure of the commander of the region once his replacement turned up. While Gaden had been away a number of developments had taken place. One of these was that Gaden’s final report on eunuchs in three north Central African states was sent to Gouraud, who read it through with interest. A version had already circulated through the colonial administration but this one was to be published in a French journal, and Gouraud believed a few changes would have to be made to its content in view of the sensitivities in France since the de Brazza mission. He wrote to Gaden wanting to know ‘if yes or no, as to whether eunuchs are still produced in Baghirmi. M. de Brazza was struck by this issue.’ The report gave the sense that the Sultanate had been a great supplier of eunuchs, but Gouraud wanted Gaden to insist ‘on the impossibility that the production of eunuchs continues’. Gouraud also removed a passage where Gaden praised the beauty of the women and the number and quality of the eunuchs. ‘It is quite useful in

276 chapter five your thesis to recall the details of all the Baghirmi atrocities and that one of the sultans had 1,000 eunuchs’ (HJEG-JHG, 20.6.06). This would surely make a better impression on those readers in France who would be keen to see evidence of the civilizing mission of French colonialism. In the published version, Gaden included a note to the effect that no further eunuchs were produced from the time of the French occupation, but he retained the passage about the beauty of local women and the quality of the eunuchs.38 Disturbing news from Zinder reached both Gouraud and Gaden. Their old friend the merchant, Mallam Yaro, had been arrested along with Sultan Amadou and the native interpreter Ali. The accusation was that the Sultan had conspired to assassinate a number of officers during the course of a palaver and would then go on to attack the French post. An enquiry led by Commandant Gadel and Captain Lefebvre had concluded that Mallam Yaro and the interpreter Ali were also implicated, and that elements from Kano in British-held Nigeria were involved too. Both Gouraud and Gaden were staggered by this turn of events, and neither could understand how someone like Mallam Yaro could have been involved. ‘He is too precious and he appears to me really too intelligent to have been mixed up in this’, remarked Gaden. So much hope for the development of trade between the two territories had rested on Yaro’s shoulders; now this was dashed. Gaden had heard rumblings that there was a personal problem between the merchant and Captain Lefebvre, and he suspected that the captain did not like his old friend (JHG-HJEG, 26.6.06). Gouraud worried about what kinds of policies had been pursued in the town: ‘I have the idea that this would not have happened in this way with you as Resident’ (HJEG-JHG, 20.6.06). Ironically, just over one year earlier, Gouraud had received word from the two officers, Lefebvre and Gadel, newly posted to Zinder. They had reported that Gaden was remembered warmly in the town, and that the policies of the new men would remain faithful to the tradition that Gaden had established (HJEG-JHG, 20.3.05). Something had gone seriously wrong, but neither Gouraud nor Gaden could do anything about it. Gaden’s dream of trade links between Zinder and Chad took a body blow with one of the town’s main agents now under arrest.39 Another blow for Gaden was news he received during his tour of the territory: Georges Mangin had been awarded the Cross of the Légion

38 The offending part for Gouraud, that remained in the published version, was: ‘Renommé pour la beauté de ses femmes, le Baguirmi le fut aussi pour le nombre et les qualités de ses eunuques…’, Les Etats…, 1907: 441. 39 The Sultan was later removed from office and was not replaced; the area was put under the charge of one of the Sultan’s ministers, the Bellama, a eunuch.

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d’Honneur, the 11th accolade Gouraud had achieved for the men serving under him over a period of three years, he pointed out proudly.40 Gaden took a different view: ‘I have seen [news of] Mangin’s cross. It is recompense for real service, but is at the same time a bonus for his disobedience’ (JHG-HJEG, 1.6.06). Gaden’s view was that Mangin was pursuing a personal war against the Ouaddai and Darfur, and was only excited by the prospect of battle. Mangin regarded these groups as his own personal enemy; he was ‘hypnotised’ by them. Gaden remarked: ‘I do not understand what Mangin is made of, but he appears to me unconcerned about executing orders…. A mission that does not permit him to raid gives him no pleasure at all’ (JHG-HJEG, 26.7.06). Mangin had nonetheless landed himself in trouble with Gouraud, who normally indulged his excesses, for on a recent mission he and his band of meharistes had run out of food and other provisions, so they attacked a settlement in the desert and stole their wheat. One rifleman was wounded in the raid. These were precisely the kinds of unruly, lawless practice the French were trying to stamp out among the desert nomads who lived by pillaging and raiding other groups, and so disrupting trade and peaceful cultivation. Mangin had announced to those unfortunates who had just been on the receiving end of his strategy of ‘pacification’ that he did not want to conquer them but he certainly was capable of doing so. He came away not only with quantities of wheat but also 150 camels. Around 20 of his enemy lay dead. Mangin had written to Gouraud to say that he was ‘somewhat contrite’ about the incident; but that was before he learned of a 15-day sentence that Gouraud meted out to him – and that at the going rate of less than one day for each native life lost (HJEG-JHG, 26.6.06). Gouraud received news that Colonel Victor Largeau, who had been in command of the region prior to him, had been appointed as his replacement in Chad, and he was on his way to the region. Nothing however had been heard of Gaden’s replacement, and Gaden worried that he would have to stay on in Tchekna or Fort Lamy for another few months or more. Gouraud was delighted for another reason: his lady friend Gaby had taken up her correspondence with him and she wrote with the same tenderness as before: ‘you can imagine the happiness that this letter from my petite Gabi gave me’ (HJEG-JHG, 11.6.06). ‘She has never stopped writing to me [and] some scoundrel stole my letters for six months’, he pointed out indig- nantly (HJEG-JHG, 12.7.06). She seemed however to be seeing a good deal of Gouraud’s friend Chideville in France.

40 See Gouraud, 1944: 267.

278 chapter five

The Sixth Wife of Henri

Gaden remained in Fort Lamy for a few weeks in August 1906 along with Gouraud. Largeau’s arrival was imminent and Gaden was relieved to hear that a Captain Tyl was travelling with the new commandant to take over as the Resident in Baghirmi. The English explorer Savage Landor then turned up in Fort Lamy on his voyage across the widest part of Africa from Djibouti to Dakar. The traveller met up en route with Largeau (who completed the journey from France in a record time of only two-and-a-half months) and he took a lift on the boat taking the colonel down-river to Fort Lamy. Landor made a fine impression on the officers at the post, and was lauded as the man who had voyaged through Tibet and had suffered many deprivations there: … a very good man, travels without much baggage, with a straw hat and does not take quinine, which upturns all our notions of hygiene in Africa. I will not however follow his example knowing very well what it will result in for me. This eccentric left yesterday for [Lake] Chad. (JHG-F, 16.8.06) He was to visit Zinder and Timbuktu on his way west. Savage Landor described the post, occupied by around 20 officers, and the reception he received: Fort Lamy was an unattractive residence. There was not sufficient accommodation for the officers, and huts were being put up in a hurry. … The terrible weather which prevailed in this swampy district was chiefly to blame for the bad condition of the place. Buildings collapsed as soon as they were built. Much to my sorrow, Colonel Gouraud … insisted on placing a whole house at my disposal, while I knew some of the officers must be put to inconvenience. … The kindness I received from all officers in this place was unbounded.41 He took a photograph of a group of officers assembled under a tree at the post and went on to describe some of them: Colonel Largeau, ‘a man of extraordinary coolness and with a well-balanced head’, and ‘another

41 This was Arnold Henry Savage Landor, who later published an account of his trip under the title: Across Widest Africa: An Account of the Country and People of Eastern, Central and Western Africa seen during a Twelve Months’ Journey from Djibuti to Cape Verde. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1907. The quotation is taken from Volume 2, 205–06. Gouraud dated the visit in his memoirs as May 1906, but Largeau was not at Fort Lamy by then; Gaden’s letter in which he announced his arrival is headed 16th August 1906, as is a similar letter he wrote to Terrier that mentioned the visit (another example of Gouraud’s lack of historical accuracy, perhaps?). However, Gouraud added a fine detail about the Englishman’s style: he travelled light but carried with him a dinner jacket and starched white shirt kept flat between two boards. See Gouraud, 1944: 211.

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Plate 10. ‘Famous French Officers under the historical tree at Fort Lamy (Shari River)’ a photograph from A. Henry Savage Landor’s, Across Widest Africa, vol. 2, 1907, reproduced by kind permission of the General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, USA.

interesting figure…is Commandant Gaden, notable for his work in the region of Zinder’. (See plate 10.) After this entertaining diversion from the routine of post life, Gaden returned to Tchekna by way of Bousso to inspect the French post, and Gouraud left Fort Lamy on 30th August for Brazzaville to pick up a steamer for France. While he was at Bousso, Gaden met up with his replacement, Captain Tyl, who had been taken ill with a high fever and gastric problems since travelling up from the Congo. Gaden’s frustrations overflowed: ‘I am marvellously well and cannot understand how this animal was able to catch a fever en route…. everything is against me and prevents my return home’ (JHG-F, 11.9.06). Tyl was supposed to accompany Gaden to Tchekna but was shipped on instead to Fort Lamy to see the post’s doctor; Gaden went alone to Baghirmi and arrived there on 21st September. On 25th September, Captain Tyl died at Fort Lamy of ‘typho-malaria’. Gaden did not know what this disease was for it was not mentioned in any of the medical manuals he used. Once again, bad luck had struck just at the moment when he was about to depart, as it had done at the end of his Zinder posting when

280 chapter five his replacement also died en route. The Sultan was pleased to see Gaden return to Baghirmi and he showered him with presents which were brought to his hut – sheep, goat kids, wheat and pumpkins. Everyone spoke of their hope, taking Allah as their witness, that Gaden would remain for another two years; he, by contrast, only wanted to take a trip back home. In a letter to Gouraud in September 1906, Gaden referred to a new wife, his sixth during the period of his colonial service over his numerous tours of duty in West Africa. It is uncertain exactly what happened between Niorga and him, but his feelings for her by February and March of 1906 were not warm. Whether the incidents surrounding the thefts from his house and the initial indications that implicated her relatives were to blame, we cannot tell. One other puzzling feature is that Gaden referred in October 1906 to getting married to his new wife ‘last year’. If this is correct he might well have been polygamous, enjoying the pleasures of two moussos. He described to Gouraud his feelings: ‘I fear I might seriously regret having met Salam [his new wife]’ for he had to give her his full attention (JHG- HJEG, 23.9.06). Later he recounted to his friend an intriguing event. He was putting the finishing touches to his study of the Baghirmi language, had ordered the words alphabetically in the lexicon (now containing over 700 items) and was analysing a set of songs sung by women in the community.42 More work was still required on the grammar. The songs or ‘sangos’ were fascinating – particularly amusing, he found – and were sung to tam- tam accompaniment. They discussed the gossip in the community, were improvised and provided a kind of revue of the events of the year. He had not been spared the embarrassment of featuring in them himself, ever since his marriage to the beautiful Salam ‘last year’. He had been carica- tured as ‘the oaf of the villages in the bush’, a ‘blundering foreigner’. This refrain was sung because the villagers believed that he had jilted Niorga; but Salam was not spared their sharp tongues: ‘a tethering post for a handsome horse, a donkey is now attached’. This song, of some length, had evidently been chanted in front of assembled guests and the Sultan himself on the day when Gouraud had visited the post the previous year. Another song was dedicated to Gouraud and included the lines: ‘the colonel braver than a lion chased away with his 30 rifles the Djerma [Othman] who ran to hide in the mountain caves’ (JHG-HJEG, 21.10.06). There were also songs of insults which were reported to be quite remarkable, but Gaden did not tell

42 This work was published in 1909 and entitled: Essai de grammaire de la langue Baguirmienne, suivi de textes et de vocabulaires Baguirmien-Français et Français-Baguirmien, Henri Gaden (Chef de Bataillon d’Infanterie Coloniale). Paris: Ernest Leroux. 147 p.

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his friend any more about them. Gaden does not seem to have disclosed these details or what Gouraud’s local nickname was. Perhaps he was trying to save his blushes. Gaden seemed to find these sorts of thing entertaining and was not at all put out if he was the butt of local ridicule; Gouraud’s reaction might not have been the same. Gaourang himself featured in these songs, with allusions made to his sexual prowess: ‘little girls [in the harem] who have seen him are now pregnant, are pregnant and have given birth’. Gaden wondered whether ‘he [the Sultan] was at all different with his eunuchs’. Niorga, ‘la grande Mademoiselle’, still appeared to be on the scene, even if she were no longer married to Gaden. He remarked: She has given herself over to cultivating a guinea worm; she becomes quite clinging but I forgive her for this because she is a remarkable professor of Baghirmi, and she comes to understand what I want and disentangles the roles of different elements of phrases and words, which is rare. (JHG-HJEG, 21.10.06) This is the first time Gaden spoke positively about the qualities a woman might offer to him, other than those male obsessions driven by lust. Here he seems to appreciate her qualities as someone who had a mind that was intellectually able and could respond to his own research interests. It is remarkable that a 19th-century European male recognised a woman as a near intellectual equal; but this was not just any woman, she was an African one at that. While his intellectual pursuits had led him into close and productive relationships with Muslim scholars and legal experts, his relationship with Niorga had opened up a new horizon for him about local women. Moussos were not just ‘sleeping dictionaries’, as they were referred to in British colonies, but they were professors of syntax and grammatical structure.

Silence and Last Rites

By November 1906, Gaden was distinctly puzzled by his father’s lack of correspondence, and all sorts of things were going through his mind. What had Gaden’s father made of his encounter with the eccentric Grech, and what passed between the two men earlier in the year in Bordeaux? One thing seems clear: the decline in the number of letters from Gaden’s father cor- responds to the period that started after Grech had visited him on his return from Chad. Gaden himself had been concerned about the impression Grech might have made upon his father, and what might have transpired

282 chapter five between the two men. Indeed, he had written to his father in May to try to distance himself from the sorts of goings-on Grech had been so expert in. Was the decline in correspondence in some way a reflection of his father’s feelings of disgust at what Grech might have divulged about the life of an officer, especially his son, and liaisons with local women? Gaden had been scrupulous in not mentioning anything of his private life or his domestic arrangements to his father. It seems implausible that Gaden’s father would not have heard tell of tales of the lurid life-styles of French officers in the African bush. While this may not have been unknown to him, he no doubt did not imagine or want to imagine that his own son would indulge in such things, or that such tales would ever reach the family home. Gaden’s mother held deep religious convictions, and she would not have approved of her son’s antics in Chad. Gaden wrote to his father in November: What is your idea of stopping writing to me all of a sudden? I do not recall having written [to say] that I was coming back since I have always written that my departure is put back further and further. It is already painful to be so distant, but when I no longer receive any news, it is more painful still. (JHG-F, 6.11.06) Again in December, he berated his father for sending no news from home: ‘What bad game are you playing? I cannot talk to you when I know nothing about you’ (JHG-F, 1.12.06); or in January 1907: ‘I truly do not understand why this persistence in not writing…’ (JHG-F, 1.1.07). Gaden himself obviously felt that the situation was highly unusual and that something must account for his family’s strange behaviour. It is not unreasonable to suspect that Gaden had concluded that Grech had spilled the beans to his father. Gaden’s behaviour during his period of furlough in France in the summer of 1907, as we shall see, is not inconsistent with the idea that Gaden became estranged from his family in Bordeaux. Gaden prepared to leave Fort Lamy by mid-January 1907 and to return to Tchekna to pack his trunks and organise his effects for the voyage home. He planned to be underway by February. His sergeant, who acted as his secretary, would occupy Gaden’s position at the post until the late Captain Tyl’s replacement arrived. Gouraud wrote occasionally during his trip south to Brazzaville: once to pass on news of his own father’s death in Paris; another time to ask Gaden for news of his mousso Cobra in Fort Lamy. He was anxious about her and wondered whether Gaden could take a photograph of her for his collection. He wanted a memento of their time together. Such sentimentality rarely seemed to disturb the waters of Gaden’s soul in the same way.

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Just before Gaden left Fort Lamy, another tragedy hit the community. Gouraud had left his leopard to Gaden because he had not wanted to kill it – even after the earlier accident in Tchekna involving Gaden’s animal. Largeau had not wanted to get rid of the animal either because of Gouraud’s feelings towards it, and the result of all this indecision was that the leopard had survived, and then escaped and entered Gouraud’s old hut, now occupied by another family. The animal pounced on a young boy, the son of a Soudanese rifleman named Moussa Traore, who was part of Largeau’s escort of men. By the time the alarm was raised and armed guards summoned, the child had bled to death. The body was buried in the French cemetery at the post: ‘It was with great shame that I followed the cadaver of this unfortunate kid’. He ordered the immediate execution of the leopard and of the two lion cubs (now rather large) that wandered around at liberty in the courtyard of the post. He added, ‘You can imagine the effect on the Senegalese, I almost fear the revenge of Moussa Traore’ (JHG-HJEG, 2.12.06). Gaden issued an order that forbade the raising of all further wild animals at the post. Gaden was provided by the Sultan with a royal reception when he entered the post at Tchekna for the last time in January. All his cavalrymen were assembled, village people swarmed around in the millet fields, musicians played and praisesingers chanted, the horsemen charged and fired off their guns – ‘a horrible racket’, Gaden commented. As he passed through the village, invisible women folk watched the procession and celebrations through holes made in straw screens, which hid them from public view, to take in the passage of the Resident and the Sultan’s party. ‘It was a beautiful entrance … a supreme honour’, he wrote (JHG-F, 22.1.07); but he wondered about what celebrations he would have to endure when the Sultan marked his final departure.43

43 An anonymous note recorded in Gaden’s personal dossier in 1906 states: ‘His aura will leave a desirable memory of humanity and of justice at Tchekna as at Zinder.’ Gaden, Dossier Personnel No. 7Ye 486, SHAT.

INTERLUDE: FURLOUGH IN FRANCE IV

Gaden was back in France by June 1907, in other words over three years since he had set out for Chad in March 1904. It had been a long and arduous posting, much longer than he had anticipated and indeed longer than he had been led to believe when he transferred to the new colonial army some years earlier. We do not know a great deal about his almost one year’s leave in France before he left for Mauritania in late spring 1908, for there are no extant letters from either Gouraud or from Gaden to his father that cover this period. Gouraud’s correspondence to Gaden picks up again once they both return to West Africa in 1908, and there are no more letters from Gaden to his father in the archive at Aix-en-Provence. It is uncertain whether they might have simply been lost or not lodged with the Centre; if the latter, one wonders why those letters in particular might have been withheld by the family. It could be of course that their correspondence just stopped abruptly. Illness might have been a cause, although his father did not die until 1913, some six years after this silence; yet his father’s illness would not necessarily have prevented Gaden from continuing to write to him. Another possibility might be that a rift between father and son, caused by Grech’s revelations when he visited Gaden’s father in Bordeaux during his Chad posting, became unbridgeable and they simply stopped communicating with each other. Indeed, his mother and father do not feature as much after this in Gaden’s letters to Gouraud. Gaden seems to have become particularly close to Gouraud’s mother, and he cultivated relations in the coming years not with the Gaden side of the family, but with those connected through marriage to the Gadens. One other peculiar feature of Gaden’s period of furlough was that he spent most of it not in Bordeaux, where his family lived and as he had done on previous occasions, but in rented accommodation in Perpignan, at the Hotel de la Loge. Photographs of his apartment were taken by him and are part of the collection held in the Bordeaux archives. His quarters were finely furnished and decorated in the sumptuous taste of the period. Is this fact about his residence another indication of the strained relations between father and son? During this period he added the final touches to his manuscript on the Baghirmi language, which was eventually published in 1909. While Gaden was in Perpignan he wrote two letters to Auguste Terrier regarding a report

286 interlude: furlough in france iv on Bilma, a centre of salt production and trade in the Sahara desert some 500 kilometres north of Lake Chad. The lengthy report, some ten chapters in all, was submitted to Terrier along with photographs of the area by Lieutenant Crépin, and it was sent to Gaden by Terrier for comment on its strengths and weaknesses. Gaden explained to Terrier in his letter of 21st August 1907 that ‘unfortunately my state of mind does not permit me at this moment to write to you on all that I know of these subjects’.1 Five days later Gaden returned to Terrier the photographs taken by Crépin that accompanied the report. Again, some mystery surrounds why Gaden was not in a fit state of mind to respond to Terrier. One might be tempted to speculate that the cause could have been the presumed rift between his father and mother over the question of his dalliances with West African women. Another thing on his mind might have been any children he might have had by one or more of his moussos. And there are certainly indications in his early letters of perhaps one male child in Beyla after the capture of Samory Toure. But as we will see, some children do turn up later in this story, children that he recognised as his own, and these two métis offspring might have been occupying his thoughts as he sat in the opulence of his Perpignan apartment. Not all officers recognised their offspring by West African women, and we know that Gouraud did not acknowledge the boy claiming to be his son in Kayes, nor any of the other children Gaden referred to in Beyla as being fathered by Gouraud.2

One Last Chance at Pacification

Henri Gaden’s previous posting to Chad was perhaps the most intense period in his relationship with his friend and superior officer Henri Gouraud. They would look back on these years from the perspective of their old age with a great sense of warmth, and they came to consider this time as the high point in their African adventures. But while there was a personal intimacy between the two men and a subsequent feeling of nostalgia about what had happened in Central Africa, fault lines in their relationship can be detected too. Sometimes enervated by Gouraud’s sense of pomposity and self-regard, by the tensions Gaden felt towards him as a higher military authority, especially when he found his leadership morally

1 See Fonds Terrier, ‘Correspondence’, IdF, Paris. 2 The story of Maurice Delafosse’s last-minute recognition of two métis children by a woman from the Ivory Coast just days before he married Alice Houdas is well known. See Louise Delafosse, 1976, Maurice Delafosse: Le Berrichon conquis par l’Afrique.

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or intellectually suspect, Gaden must have wondered where his own career might lead at this point. They had had disagreements over policy in Chad, had fallen out over orders Gouraud had issued, and Gaden had sometimes given voice to these differences in official documentation. Gouraud seemed much more secure in his sense of where he wanted to go in his life, and it was always onwards and upwards within the military hierarchy and beyond. Gaden was plagued by a greater sense of self-doubt and bore a more ambivalent attitude as a military officer than his friend. He rarely sought the limelight, was self-effacing in much of what he did, and did not hanker after the kind of prestige others sought. His sympathies lay increasingly with the native populations under his command, and his intellectual endeavours in African history, geography, linguistics and the study of Islam allowed him to find an avenue for his curiosity and a form of expression for his sensitivities towards issues more complex than could be contained within a purely martial perspective on the world. Gaden’s next posting to Mauritania to accompany again his friend Gouraud, who would be his commanding officer once more, began to reveal the extent of his disillusion with the way his life was heading and to what Gouraud later called the ‘bifurcation’ in their respective life courses.3 Despite what Gouraud had said during their last posting (that opportunities for military action were virtually eliminated now that much of the region had been relatively well annexed by French forces), Mauritania offered one last chance to engage in military ‘pacification’. A career move into administration could wait. In July 1907, Gouraud got the call from the Minister of Colonies, on the recommendation of the Governor General of French West Africa, Ernest Roume, to head up a mission to Mauritania. What was needed was a military chief experienced in training meharistes, a camel-corps, who also had sound administrative abilities. Gouraud fitted the bill. Prior to his receiving this message, Gouraud visited North Africa with his faithful adjutant Gerhardt, his companion on numerous earlier

3 One difficulty in assessing the depth of Gaden’s feelings and the range of his opinions during this period is the lack of extant letters from him to Gouraud. From his last one written at Fort Lamy in December 1906, the next letter was penned in St Louis in May 1911, some four-and-a-half years later. It is not certain why none of these letters seems to have survived, for we know they were writing to each other given Gouraud’s replies to his colleague over the period. Gouraud saw military action during the years 1908–10 and was often on the march or pursuing missions in various parts of Mauritania. Perhaps Gaden’s letters were lost during this itinerant spell or even later once Gouraud returned to France. We do know that at the end of this period Gouraud was trying to piece together all of Gaden’s ‘voluminous correspondence’ during the Mauritanian campaign; but it is puzzling why not one single letter remains.

288 interlude: furlough in france iv missions, at the invitation of General Lyautey who was based in Algeria. Lyautey had pacified the territory to the south of the French headquarters at Oran and was in command of the Oran French Army Division. The French were at this time moving into Morocco, and Gouraud entertained ideas of a future career in the Maghreb. He came back full of admiration for the work of Lyautey in North Africa, and the prospect of a future posting to Morocco whetted his appetite. Gouraud left France for his mission to Mauritania at the end of October 1907 and arrived in Dakar, now the capital city of French West Africa and its colonial government. Here he met General Audéoud, the commander of the West African troops, who asked him to lead an expedition into the Sahara desert to a region known as the Adrar that was populated by nomadic groups of Moors hostile to the French presence further south. Audéoud was known to both Gouraud and Gaden when he was still only a colonel almost ten years earlier, for he had replaced Colonel de Trentinian during their tour of duty to the Soudan for the Samory campaign. Gouraud succeeded Colonel Montané-Capdeboscq, and was appointed the Commissaire du Gouvernement Général en Mauritanie. Gouraud’s mission was to try to complete the pacification of the northern reaches of the territory, a task that was cut short under the leadership of Colonel Xavier Coppolani who was killed on 12th May 1905. Gouraud was thus the second figure to take the vacant role left by Coppolani in a projected new attempt to annexe Adrar.

The Land of the Moors Coppolani began his Mauritanian mission in 1903 under a policy that proclaimed the defence of oppressed desert nomadic groups who suffered at the hands of their warrior compatriots who raided their caravans and exacted onerous taxes on servile and other groups living under them. What better justification for the civilizing mission of French colonialism than the liberation of those living under the yoke of oppression? Mauritanian (bidan or Moor) society was divided broadly speaking into two classes: warriors or hassani groups, and Muslim clerics or zwaya groups.4 Coppolani had much success in bringing on to the French side two influential Moors with high status among the warring factions, and initially the colonial strategy was to work with such

4 I will continue to use the term ‘Moor’ throughout this text, despite its somewhat colonial and orientalist overtones. To speak in terms of the individual factions, groupings and coalitions in Mauritanian society would only serve to introduce a range of indigenous names that might ultimately not serve to render the picture any clearer.

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‘clerical’ figures. These were Shaykh Sidiyya Baba, a respected Muslim cleric, and Shaykh Saad Buh, the brother of the infamous leader Shaykh Ma el Ainin who had his base at the mysterious town of Smara just south of Morocco.5 With the support of these two men, Coppolani made gains for the French in the area just north of the Senegal River valley and had pushed into Tagant with the hope of reaching Adrar further north. He fell in hostile territory at Tidjikdja en route to Adrar, and the news of his death was received as a great victory for the cause of the independent Moors. One of his legacies was the name that he coined for the territory, that is ‘Mauritania’, the land of the Moors; a country of sand marked by great dunes running in parallel in the west; to the south, flat scrubland with spiny bushes and sparse vegetation; to the east and north-east, vast rocky plateaux cut through by ravines. In short, a desert country where water and pasture were rare, and the extremes of climate, both hot by day and cold by night, would sap the strength of even the most hardy of European soldiers. The French policy of an expansion northwards was put on hold after Coppolani’s death and his successor Montané-Capdeboscq made no further progress; but by 1907 new moves were afoot to address what the colonisers regarded as the ‘problematic’ situation in Mauritania. Gouraud was to pick up the threads of the abandoned mission and put an end to the threat from hostile Moorish groups. Pacification under Coppolani was to become conquest under Gouraud. The influence of Ma el Ainin, from his fortified town of Smara in the desert, spread south into the Adrar, where an emir of his choice and one of his Muslim students was appointed in the town of Atar. Ma el Ainin’s son, Shaykh Hassana, lived in Adrar and had as much authority over the local Moors as the emir himself. Ainin had sought help and material assistance from the authorities in Morocco and made a plea for support to respond to Coppolani and the continuing French presence in Mauritania; the Sultan himself was thought to be implicated in the Moroccan support for the rebel cause. Ma el Ainin, a man of learning in Muslim theology and law, who nursed a claim to the Sultanate in Morocco, cast himself in the role of the champion of a resurgent Islam and wanted the country rid of the Nasaras, the Nazarenes or Christians. The fact

5 This town was the goal of the young French romantic writer and traveller, Michel Vieuchange, whose fateful journey to the walled city in the middle of the desert was conducted in 1930, during which he was often disguised as a woman or stuffed into a pannier on the back of a camel to avoid the hostile intentions of the local Moors towards the French. Vieuchange completed his mission, remained in the then abandoned town for only a few hours, but died of dysentery on his way back to meet up with his brother in southern Morocco. See Smara: The Forbidden City, New York: Ecco Press 1987 [1932].

290 interlude: furlough in france iv that Ma el Ainin’s brother, Saad Buh, had come over to the French cause was a triumph for Coppolani and the colonialists. The other significant figure supporting the French was Shaykh Sidiyya Baba. He first visited St Louis in 1898 in the company of Bou El-Mogdad II, a distinguished colonial functionary who was employed as an interpreter in the administration. Bou El-Mogdad’s family, the Secks, played a central role in French commercial, political and military relations, especially in south- western Mauritania from the late 19th and into the early 20th centuries.6 As Robinson states ‘Bu El-Mogdad’s ability to reassure a fellow cleric [Sidiyya Baba] about the good intentions of the French was crucial.’ The Shaykh also appeared in public with Coppolani in St Louis in 1902 and had then travelled with the colonel back up to Trarza, an area just north of the Senegal River valley, to the town of Boutilimit where his grandfather Shaykh Sidiyya al Kabir (‘the Great’) had established himself. Just after this, Sidiyya Baba issued a fatwa, an Islamic decree that sought to establish legitimacy for Muslims living under ‘infidel’ rule. Muslims were not in a position of strength or unity nor did they have the resources to oppose the French presence, so Baba argued that they should accommodate themselves to the colonial authorities. Indeed, he assured the faithful that the French had demonstrated that they would not interfere with the practice of the faith and would moreover give positive support to their religious, educational and legal institutions. Furthermore, the anarchic situation (fitna) among warring factions of Moors in the region, which had wreaked turmoil amongst local groups, would be brought to an end by French rule, and the peace and stability offered by the colonial presence would enable Islam to prosper. Part of Baba’s fatwa reads: ‘It is evident that the obligation [to wage] holy war disappears in the face of the inability to accomplish it […]. The inability of this land [of Muslims] to fight the force of the Christians is obvious. Any sane man who hears and sees is aware of the absence of unity among Muslims, the absence of a public treasury necessary for any action, and the inferiority of their weapons in comparison with those of the Christians […]. [Not necessarily the case as Robinson points outs.] [There is also no obligation] to migrate, en masse or in part, from the territory conquered

6 Bou El-Mogdad II’s father, El Hajj Bou El-Mogdad (1826–1880), had been the chief interpreter and counsellor to the French colonial government in the 19th century, and his status as a high ranking Muslim who had conducted the pilgrimage to Mecca made him a significant ally for the French administration in St Louis. In later life he gave up his colonial employment and was appointed as qadi in St Louis, where he became the leading figure among the town’s Muslim community. A river boat named after him used to ply the Senegal taking merchandise and personnel to ports upstream. A tourist boat on the river now bears the same name. See also Robinson 1999, ‘Shaikh Sidiyya Baba: Co-Architect of Colonial Mauritania’, Islam et sociétiés au sud du sahara, for details on this family.

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by the ‘infidel’, because of poverty as well as the absence of destinations where the necessary security and resources exist.’ He went on: ‘They [the French] do not oppose the exercise of religion, but they provide positive support in the construction of mosques, appointment of qadis and provision of a good organizational structure’.7 At around the same time, Saad Buh wrote in a similar fashion to his fellow Muslims and endorsed the Shaykh’s ideas.8 This played particularly well into French designs for it showed that these two renowned figures could live under foreign rule without threat to their religious faith or practices. It also encapsu- lated the idea that France could act as a ‘Muslim power’, a European regime that knew, understood and could accommodate those of the Islamic faith. The Frenchman who was to take up the baton and work with Sidiyya Baba was Gouraud. His aim was to implement the Paris Government’s decision ‘to put an end to the intolerable situation’ in Mauritania where French commerce and native trade and cultivation on the northern bank of the Senegal was threatened by the hostile presence from the north: ‘our penetration of Mauritania was the logical and necessary consequence of our African empire which brought about progress and security through civilization’, Gouraud claimed.9 The path towards a commitment for action from the government was not however easy. In March 1907, Sidiyya Baba went again to St Louis for several weeks to celebrate five years’ service to the French mission. During his stay in the town, Baba was met by the Devès brothers, with whom Gaden had family connections, and they tried to dissuade the Shaykh from lending the French his support. The Devèses had got wind of the plans to conquer Adrar and they sought to block any efforts in that direction for fear of disruption to

7 For this and other details see Robinson, 1999. 8 An undated manuscript some 28 pages long by Shaykh Saad Buh can be found in Fonds Gaden at CAOM 15 APC 8, item 127. In it he states: ‘the well-established and closely followed traditions of the Prophet forbid us to carry arms in times of revolt, I could do no other than come to you [the French] to give my counsel and advice.’ He added later in relation to his brother Ma el Ainin taking up arms that there is a proverb of the zawayas [clerical groups]: ‘he who takes up arms abandons virtue’. Some years later the exiled leader of the recently formed Mouride (Murid) brotherhood in Senegal, Shaykh Amadou Bamba, who is today viewed as a symbol of Muslim resistance to the French occupation, also released a fetoun. He wrote on 29th December 1910: The French found our country in flames and full of pillaging warriors who killed people and took their goods; they took hold of this unfortunate situation and allowed us to sleep in the shade of peace which they established in the country where the herds reconstituted themselves and where well-being returned. You should be loyal to them in all things, neglect nothing in being dutiful and not disobey in anything. See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC 8. 9 H. Gouraud, Mauritania-Adrar, 1945: 15.

292 interlude: furlough in france iv their trading interests and sphere of influence. The Shaykh would hear nothing of these ideas and continued to pursue his strategy of accommodation and assistance. In mid May 1908, the Minister of Colonies, Milliès-Lacroix, arrived in Dakar. Gouraud, accompanied by Shaykh Sidiyya and the son of the ex-Emir of Adrar who was in exile (a young man named Sidi Ahmed wuld Moktar wuld Aida), went to open discussions with the Minister. Sidi Ahmed was being groomed as a possible successor and colonial appointee to the emir- ship in Adrar. There was intensive lobbying for an immediate start to the campaign, and the Minister was influenced by the arguments for intervention. He agreed to the military mission, but later got cold feet over his decision and told Gouraud to hold back. However, the new Governor General in Dakar, William Ponty, authorised Gouraud in a hand-written letter to continue his preparations. Gouraud described Ponty as being of the ‘Archinard school’ of administration, that is one in which Paris was not always aware of how policy might be applied in the colony. Archinard was a military figure from West Africa just prior to Gaden’s Bandiagara posting, and he had been recalled to Paris after pursuing his own policy initiatives in the Soudan in opposition to those of Paris.

CHAPTER SIX

CONFIDENTIAL RELATIONS: BOUTILIMIT, MAURITANIA, 1908–1911

A Loyal Band of Brothers

Gaden left France on 22nd May 1908 and he arrived in Dakar some seven months after Gouraud had travelled out to West Africa. Gaden had completed a period of furlough of just under a year in Europe, and was now part of a new mission headed by his old friend. He now went under his recently acquired title of Chef de Bataillon. Gouraud assembled a loyal band of brothers to assist him in this campaign, and it included a number of familiar names: Captain Gerhardt, Gouraud’s adjutant; Jules Chesnel, Gouraud’s secretary on earlier missions; and a number of officers from the Chad mission. These included Captains Bablon, Camy, Repoux, and the young Plomion who had caused a bit of a stir in Chad. Dr Couvy, the trusty medic also from Chad, was in the party, as was Captain Georges Mangin, the desert nomad extraordinaire and Gaden’s bête noire. Bou El-Mogdad II was assigned as Gouraud’s interpreter. Whatever Gouraud’s foibles and however much he indulged officers such as Mangin, he knew from a military perspective exactly the kinds of men he required for the job at hand. He was loyal to those officers who had provided him service in the past, and relied on them again to perform similar kinds of task. Mangin, the uncontrollable mehariste with a blood lust and passion for battle, was chosen alongside Gaden, a measured and considered figure more given to intellectual pursuits than gung-ho politics. Mangin would excel in the wild open spaces of the Mauritanian desert; Gaden would add the diplomatic and cerebral touch necessary for handling delicate matters; his tact would be useful in the more intimate surroundings of Boutilimit. Gaden was posted to the town as the Commandant de Cercle with a special responsibility as Resident to Shaykh Sidiyya. It was Gaden’s task to maintain Sidiyya’s favourable disposition towards the French and to establish with him a relation of trust and confidence so that intelligence and advice concerning native affairs and political leaders could be acquired during the campaign. Prior to Gaden’s arrival in West Africa, William Ponty had taken over from Ernest Roume as Governor General of West Africa in February 1908.

294 chapter six

The two Henris differed in their views over the choice of the new man: ‘I do not hold at all to your opinion on Ponty’, Gouraud stated, but both men agreed that the new incumbent would continue Roume’s policies of association. Ponty had a boyish appearance, came over as proud, and was virtually the same age as Gaden and Gouraud - young to be a Governor General. Mangin was charged with training a new corps of camel-back patrols and he was performing service with his usual aplomb, having turned up earlier with 300 camels acquired somehow or other from the desert. One of the early casualties of the campaign came with news of Repoux’s death at a French outpost over 200 kilometres north of Boutilimit. Repoux had taken part under Rivière’s command in the successful battle at Yao with the Ouaddai forces in Chad some years earlier. Now he had succumbed to the Moors in similar circumstances: the post had been attacked and Repoux took out a small platoon of men to pursue the aggressors. Privately, Gouraud was displeased with the officer’s actions: [He was] the victim of his own imprudence and disobedience. I will say nothing more because he is dead, but he had firm orders not to go beyond a certain limit. […] And there it is, off he goes into the open Adrar with [only] 40 men. He met up with between 250 and 300 Moors. Gouraud’s conclusion, given that only two were dead and two wounded on the French side, was: ‘in sum, very beautiful combat’ (HJEG-JHG, 13.4.08). Gouraud and Gaden finally got together in St Louis in June 1908, where Gaden stayed for ten days while waiting for a river boat to take him up to Podor on the Senegal. He would then head north overland to Boutilimit. This enforced stop-over in St Louis did everyone good; the two friends enjoyed each other’s company, and Gaden also met up with his brother, the feckless Philippe, who was now employed with the Devès and Chaumet trading house in the town. The two brothers went to eat with Gouraud every morning and evening, and none complained about the delay in Gaden’s departure. He finally left St Louis on 16th June 1908, and his first task was to organise a convoy for the post at Akjoujt, outside which Repoux had lost his life. The last caravan had been attacked by Ma el Ainin’s forces, who were trying to block the supply route to the garrison. Just as Gaden arrived in Boutlimit, news came through of Georges Mangin’s last stand only 80 kilometres from the spot where Coppolani had met his fate too. Mangin had been out in the pastures that provided grazing for the garrison’s camels and was in the process of digging out an old well that had become sanded up. His small patrol of only 30 men was set upon by 150 Moors, who massacred many of the French contingent. Gouraud’s view of

confidential relations: boutilimit, mauritania, 1908–1911 295 ey Say A am Ni ERM A GAND DJ a ouss 400 Ha 200 R.Niger Gao Sansané S A H R metres A 100 miles 200 kilo 0 0 tu ndiagara uk Ba urao mb Go Ti nne i Je bo opt M F R E N C H L.De AN FRANÇAIS Sansanding W E S T A F R I C u go SOUD Se

NA R.Niger SI MA ta

o Ki R.Dio or Ni GANT HODH a TA dj ik a dj i s e Ti A ab jil Smar ul Id Kaye R A NI d’ uraud Bafo Chinguett a udia rt Go A ADRA jeri ASSAB Ko Fo l i ud NA ke ed

Mo R.Senegal GORGOL ar Ba Ka At m ANI SH BRAK TA MAURI ta t Bogué t Ma SAHAR SP uj I tilimi jo ZA Aleg

u R I O EGAL Ak dor Bo Po N gana D E O R O R.Gambia TRAR Da INCHIR derdra SE ll Me os To s ard a ri rb c kchott mi Rich illa Cisner an uis ua Map 4. The Colonial Territory of Mauritania c. 1930 (Fort Gouraud established in 1933). Gouraud of (Fort Mauritania c. 1930 Territory Map 4. The Colonial V p Ba p Ti Lo No p Bl Ca ienne Ca r St Et Ca rt Daka Po

296 chapter six the debacle was that: ‘Georges Mangin was a victim of his exaggerated confidence in the machine-gun, a confidence that led him to confront the attack with only 30 men.’1 The gun had jammed, and Mangin and another French officer were the first to be killed. One of the riflemen’s ‘wives’, who had followed the party and carried cartridges to the firing line, was also mortally wounded. This news was received with delight in Adrar as a notable triumph over the infidel. While Repoux’s actions were considered fool- hardly and attracted Gouraud’s censure, those of Mangin escaped any criticism from his superior officer. Even in death, Mangin was favoured.

Boutilimit and a Marabout for the Whites

The French post at Boutilimit was enclosed within the immense bordj or stone citadel of Shaykh Sidiyya. There was a vast inner courtyard around which a large square construction was built whose rooms opened directly on to the enclosed space. It was here that the Shaykh would make his daily prayers, kneeling on a skin mat to make his devotions facing the east. Behind him stood a thatched shelter supported by roughly hewn branches. A chicken might run around the yard at this hallowed time, oblivious to the holy man’s acts of worship. From the main gate of the settlement the French redoubt stood four square overlooking the courtyard from its upper storey arched openings, and the watchtowers on the opposite side of the perime- ter wall raised their heads above all the surrounding buildings. This solid reminder of human habitation nestled near the bottom of a valley between two sand dunes. During the hivernage the heat was unbearable, and the discomfort was aggravated by dust storms that blew in from the north-east across the desert penetrating every nook and cranny. The winter months were easier on its inhabitants, for the days were not too hot and the nights cool. Boutilimit had been developed into the most important staging area for the campaigns in the north, and it boasted the most advanced telegraph station in Mauritania that connected the post to St Louis. It was a training post for meharistes, and with Gaden stationed there its role was now to ensure the maximum flow of information between the forward troops under Gouraud’s command and the administration in St Louis. Gaden was

1 Gouraud, Mauritanie-Adrar (1945: 56). Dr Boyé, Gouraud’s and Gaden’s comrade from Saint Cyr and then the Samory campaign, heard of the news of Mangin’s death in October while he was stationed in Indochina. He followed up this news by sending his friends an ornamented box each to replace the mustard tins they had used to store their tobacco. Boyé later reached the rank of General in the French army.

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charged too with organising supply columns from St Louis and from north- west Soudan to maintain the military machine as it moved towards Adrar. Gouraud stayed in Boutilimit for five days at the start of his mission to discuss the situation in Mauritania with Sidiyya and the main chiefs from the Trarza area. Gouraud found the Shaykh to be an intelligent and learned man, interested particularly in Islamic issues and geography. Jean-Baptiste Théveniault, the post’s commandant until 1907, also worked alongside Sidiyya, and he left us the following description of the man:2 [He] is a completely different type of human being from the marabouts that I have seen up until now. He is strikingly different from the fat materialistic man who is Shaikh Sa’d Buh. I had my proof right away. He launched into a scientific conversation with the Capitaine du génie Gérard who gave him some instruction in astronomy and physics […]. He shows that he understands […]. Even in Europe, he would appear somewhat sophisticated, well- spoken, cool and calm. He is a school-master, a moral authority, an Arab scholar of the olden days, a marabout for the Whites.3 The lack of correspondence from Gaden during this period means that we do not know what his initial impressions of the man were; but given his good relations with Muslim intellectuals from earlier postings, there is every likelihood that he would have had a respectful and ever deepening relationship with him from the start.4 While Gaden would have appreciated what the role of Resident to such a grand figure on the Mauritanian stage would offer him, he would also have gained pleasure from the fact that he was posted only 100 or so kilometres north of the Senegal valley. This was the homeland of the Futanke or Toucouleur, whose language Gaden spoke, and whose history, culture and language were increasingly

2 Captain Théveniault was the target of a malicious press campaign in France after having completed the ‘junction’ of the territories of the Soudan and Algeria when he met up with Commandant (and future General) Laperrine, who had travelled south from North Africa to their rendezvous point in the Sahara desert. The captain had journeyed up from Timbuktu. Neither man got on with the other, and accusations were made of brutality against local soldiers. The young Théveniault was innocent in the eyes of his superior officers, although Laperrine’s role in the affair was not inspected closely. Seventy-five years after the incident, the story was told in a novel and then a film entitled Fort-Saganne, although the figure of Théveniault is transformed into a diabolical character, the worst sort of colonial officer. See the long biographical note by Jean d’Arbaumont, who tries to rehabilitate the captain’s reputation, in Hommes et Destins, tome VIII. 3 Quoted in Robinson 1999. 4 We must presume that Gaden was writing to Gouraud during time, since Gouraud’s letters to Gaden run from April 1908 to 1910, with the last letter of the period written in April 1911. Under the conditions of war in Mauritania, Gouraud could well have lost Gaden’s correspondence; by 1910 Gouraud had left the north and was heading back to France.

298 chapter six the subjects of his research. The remnants of Al Hajj Umar Tal’s followers from the Senegal valley, about whom Gaden wrote, had turned up in Chad at the end of his posting in Fort Lamy.5 Umar himself and many of these disciples had come originally from settlements along the valley of the Senegal; and now Gaden was close to their cultural and historical heart- land. In his role as commandant of the cercle his duties would take him south close to the north bank of the river; and in his capacity as the organiser of convoys to Gouraud’s troops, he had contact with the authorities from the north-west of the Soudan. This connection with the Peul or Pulaar- speaking peoples of northern Senegal was to provide him with a source of material for his publications over the next 30 years of his life. It also completed the circle of a Futanke thread that Gaden had been following ever since his first posting in Bandiagara in 1894, through Zinder and into Chad in the 1900s. By early July 1908, Gouraud, now promoted to the rank of colonel and sporting five gold stripes on his uniform, started to advise Gaden on the tasks he required of him. Establishing sufficient numbers of camels for convoys and for the camel corps at Boutilimit was an immediate priority. Gaden had recently been in hospital with an unknown medical condition, and Gouraud suggested that regular exercise using horses and training on camel-back would enable him to regain his fitness. Gaden’s role was also to put an end to the ‘eternal pillaging and the payment of dues’ among the Moors along the north bank of the river; neither of these activities did much for the dignity of French authority, Gouraud thought. The peaceful penetration of the area would be supported by Sidiyya and Saad Buh particularly, and the best intelligence agent by far would be Sidiyya. There was a concern that Saad Buh might feel marginalised given that Gaden was Resident to Sidiyya in Boutilimit, and it was suggested that he write to the Shaykh to announce his arrival at the post, to smooth over the delicate situation and to ‘shower him in flowers’. The theme of all correspondence to the two Shaykhs was however clear: ‘promises and discreet threats. […] Goal: to slow up the movement of offensive raiding parties’ (HJEG-JHG, 7.7.08). Sidiyya was keen to see the French march north, and the delays in organising the mission were explained to the Shaykh; ‘he is intelligent enough to understand our setback’ (HJEG-JHG, 3.7.08). Sidiyya reassured Gouraud and Gaden that many people in the Adrar were willing to take up the French cause and that the mission would be very easy. Gouraud was not

5 See ‘Note sur les Toucouleurs recemment arrivés à Fort Lamy (Tchad), CAOM 15 APC 4, and also lodged in Université de Dakar, IFAN.

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however too sure of the numbers of troops required to complete the campaign successfully, perhaps three columns of 200 men in each; nor was he certain of the numbers of men who might be ranged against him. It was Gaden’s task to tease out some of these details from his network of contacts. Gaden was also asked to draw up an inventory of the holdings of Sidiyya’s library in Boutilimit and to search for a copy of the Shaykh’s 1903 fatwa, which appeared to be missing from the archives in St Louis. Gouraud reassured Gaden about his position in the scheme of things: ‘I see your place at the moment in Boutilimit is to exercise discretion over the meharistes … and [to ensure] that the lieutenants … do not lack experience and authority. Your presence is also necessary to watch over and not let slip the security of the camel pastures. […] Beware as well that the schedule for pasturing does not leave [the herds] for too long in the same areas to the detriment of the camels’ health’ (HJEG-JHG, 7.7.08). Gouraud was sufficiently concerned about Gaden’s health to send a young doctor to Boutlimit to give advice over a regime of exercise and rest needed to get him back on his feet. Sidiyya also appreciated Gouraud’s gesture of posting a medic to the town. Gaden requested in addition to the medic an orderly to assist him, a man called Diawara, but Gouraud explained that as an officer seconded to the mission [hors de cadre] Gaden was not officially entitled to one; he suggested, however, ‘you will take him into your service, without official papers’ (HJEG-JHG, 7.7.08). Gouraud could be flexible in some things but not in others. But by the end of the month a mild censure came from Gouraud regarding the capture of a group of dissident armed Moors who had attacked local inhabitants who had submitted to the French. Gaden had sent a telegraph message to inform St Louis of the news, and Gouraud responded tetchily: ‘Why the devil make prisoners of such obvious brigands instead of killing them?’ Gouraud consulted the Governor General over the question of the level of punishment that might be merited in cases of attacks on villagers, and the latter responded saying that as officers they were held by formal military decrees. These decrees were to prevent ‘disproportionate action’. He went on to point out, however, that brigands would not give up without a fight, and that they would often meet their deaths in combat. This was tantamount to giving a carte blanche over the arrest and punishment of dissidents held after an engagement; they could be deemed to have met their death ‘in combat’ (HJEG-JHG, 22.7.08).6

6 Gouraud repeated this message to Gaden two weeks later: ‘It is best that all these rebels meet their death in combat’ (HJEG-JHG, 8.9.08).

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Gaden also informed Gouraud in July that all was not well at the post of Akjoujt, where the late Captain Repoux had been posted. Scurvy had broken out and two old friends from the Chad mission in particular, Dr Couvy and Captain Bablon, were suffering. Gouraud wrote to Gaden: ‘I know nothing at all about what this scurvy is. I thought one caught it at the North Pole, but in the Sahara?’ (HJEG-JHG, 22.7.08). A convoy of fresh food supplies was organised at the double and sent north, but it was attacked by dissident Moors and had to limp its way from one place to another in search of water, for the wells had been filled in by their adversaries. Eleven men were lost to thirst, a similar number disappeared into the desert and 38 camels collapsed and died. An emergency convoy headed by Commandant Frèrejean and comprising 300 camels was assembled some weeks later to relieve both groups of men – the convoy and the garrison now with suspected beriberi. To complicate matters, the stranded convoy was consuming the rations intended for the garrison, and conditions at the post were becoming critical. The two Henris were increasingly anxious about the condition of their two friends, Couvy and Bablon, but Frèrejean, an old Soudanese hand and experienced officer in Mauritania, won the day and the garrison was eventually relieved.7 The upshot of this debacle was that General Audéoud ordered a French withdrawal from the post, a move that if carried further over the whole of that region would signal a weakness and would give the enemy the boost they desired, Gouraud thought. At the same time as the decision to evacuate Akjoujt was made, Capt Bablon received a letter from Shaykh Hassana, the older brother of Ma el Ainin, who declared the Moor’s intentions to attack if a total withdrawal of French troops did not take place. Gouraud vehemently opposed any such initiative. To add to this Hassana issued a fatwa in 1908 that proclaimed a holy war against the French and indeed all those who had gone over to their cause, which would include Shaykh Sidiyya. By August, Gaden’s discontent with his posting to Boutilimit was obvious. He and Gouraud had already disagreed over a number of items of policy, and the words ‘I am not of your opinion’ started to appear with greater regularity in Gouraud’s correspondence to his friend. Gaden suggested that he should be allowed to leave his post to join the officer Aubert on a mission further north, but the idea was knocked back smartly by Gouraud. He explained: ‘In the troubled situation in Trarza, I have the impression that your presence is excessively useful at Boutilimit’

7 This officer’s experiences in Mauritania are the subject of a book by G. Désiré-Vuillemin entitled Commandant Frèrejean 1903–1911 (1995).

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(HJEG-JHG, 8.9.08). Perhaps Gouraud was trying to protect his friend, fearful that his physical condition would not be up to the rigours of a desert march or that he would be prey to attack; he had after all already lost Mangin and Repoux. In similar earlier postings, where he was confined to his station and taken up with provisioning men and organising convoys, Gaden had complained of being a ‘lowly housemaid’, of suffering from boredom and the monotony. A familiar pattern re-emerged. To add to Gaden’s sense of dejection, Gouraud then snapped that he could not understand why Gaden had allowed a patrol to go out, above all on horses that were exhausted, to engage a raiding party of Moors; and all this after a warning from Sidiyya. Gouraud was obviously displeased. Despite these tensions, they continued to exchange news about their respective families. When passing through St Louis, Gouraud acted as a conduit of news to Philippe, Gaden’s brother, who dined from time to time with the colonel. Up-dates on the state of Gaden’s health were passed back to France, and Philippe told Gouraud of family developments in Bordeaux. Gouraud did not find Gaden’s brother particularly stimulating company, ‘always a little sleepy’, and the two Henris often shared a joke at Philippe’s expense. Some time later when Gouraud left with his column for the north, Gaden would write letters to Gouraud’s mother to keep her abreast of progress and to reassure her with a steady supply of news. A feature of Gouraud’s correspondence to Gaden over the following few months was the decline in the number of passages with personal news, observations and descriptions that had been so much a part of his earlier letters. Instead they became curt and directive, containing orders, requests, suggestions and pointers; very little of a personal or inner life came out, apart from Gouraud’s continued badgerings that Gaden should give up smoking, not inhale and cure his cough.

The Conquest Begins

Authorisation to march on Adrar arrived on 15th September, and Gouraud planned to assemble a military column under the cover of secrecy in Tagant, far to the east of Boutilimit: 1,000 camels, over 500 riflemen, 60 Moor partisans along with Futanke recruits from the Senegal, and 200 men to accompany the convoy. Given the imminent military campaign, Gouraud mused over the irony of the official colonial title of the country: ‘The Civil Territory of Mauritania’. While excitement surrounding the mission was being gener- ated elsewhere, Gaden was charged with keeping Sidiyya reassured and

302 chapter six informed as much as possible, and with purchasing camels from the upper reaches of the river valley with an initial sum of 15,000 thalers. Frèrejean was to take a detachment of men through the west of the territory and would converge on the town of Atar, Gouraud’s goal in Adrar, where they would meet up with the main column. But Gouraud was not happy with the commander, who had a ‘muddled and furious head on him’ that was hard to endure. The talk was that Frèrejean’s mission would be terminated, but in the meantime he was left to secure an important leg of Gouraud’s military strategy. But as Gaden pointed out, Frèrejean had more sense when it came to executing missions than in planning them. Raiding by dissident Moors increased around Boutilimit towards the end of September, and some bands came as close as eight kilometres from the post. Gaden had his hands full in trying to deal with the immediate threats to the French position in Trarza, and in continually sending out parties of men to repair the telegraph wire that was repeatedly cut down to disrupt communications with St Louis. He also had to deal with Gouraud’s demands for supplies for the column that was to head north. Towards the end of November, Gouraud was on the move with his company. He regretted that he could not pass by Boutilimit to see Gaden or the Shaykh on his way to Tagant, but he had written to Sidiyya to reassure him of their support and had explained the reasons why it would not be possible for him to join the mission immediately. The Shaykh had been asked to supply a small number of partisans, perhaps 20 or 30, who should rendezvous with Gouraud at Aleg. A new arrival at Boutilimit seemed to put Gaden ill at ease. A young sub- officer named Robin had been sent by Gouraud, and the lad was the son of a Professor Robin, one of Gouraud’s late father’s medical colleagues and the teacher of his brother Xavier when he studied medicine in Paris. The son was described as ‘kind, intelligent, inexperienced’, and Gaden was told he would find him more agreeable than his present assistant. The lad would fare well under Gaden’s protective wing, and would gain valuable political experience being under his tutelage. Gaden was not best pleased, thinking that Robin had been sent to take over the functions of Resident in Boutilimit. Not only was Gaden a housemaid left high and dry in the town, but now he was expected to be a nursemaid too. Gouraud had to appease his friend’s hurt feelings: ‘It is not as a new resident that I send him to you, it is as an adjutant whom you will employ as you see fit. […] There is only one commandant of the cercle and of the post, and that is you. You should avail yourself of your subordinates as you think, my old companion, from the bottom of my heart.’ He signed off his letter with a farewell: ‘Adieu vieil ami,

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I could not have hoped more to see you here, [but] you know full well all the reasons that keep you in Boutilimit. […] to leave your hands free in the knowledge that you will do well’ (HJEG-JHG, 21.11.08). Gouraud had calculated prior to setting out on his mission of conquest that the campaign so far had involved 125 engagements with raiding groups from March to December, and had cost the lives of three officers, five sub- officers and 134 riflemen. Every one of the company of men burned with feelings of revenge for the death of Mangin, he reported. Gouraud’s column went north and pressed on to Atar, the seat of Moorish dissidence in Adrar. He took the town in early January 1909 despite having received a letter en route from the djemmaa or council of elders offering their submission. He wanted to capture the town in a triumphal fashion through military combat if necessary; but in the end a crowning entry into Atar and a show of military might was all that was required to assert their presence in the town, which was not sacked despite the appetite for it amongst most of the troops. An aman, an act of surrender and pledge, was exacted from the town of 15 tonnes of dates to be delivered immediately and four notable persons were taken hostage in the interim. Shaykh Hassana fled north into southern Morocco with a good number of his talibes or disciples, and he went there to seek further support and reinforcements from the Sultan. Gouraud addressed a gathering of the ranks of the notables of the town with the following words: Now, may the Muslims hear me! I am a sincere man who makes every effort to be just. I have not come to turn the country upside down nor to attack your religion, your women, your goods, your customs. The fact that a marabout universally venerated as Cheikh Sidya [sic] lives in good and excellent friendship with me, shows well that good Muslims can live in peace with the French. All those who have travelled a little know that.8 This proclamation appeared to have a good effect, for Gouraud received in the following days a number of submissions from leading factions of Moors. Furthermore, objects and arms belonging to earlier missions and to Mangin in particular were found when the town was searched. Gouraud felt justified in his campaign, and vengeance had been exacted for the death of his fellow officer and long-time companion, Mangin. While Gouraud was preparing for his victory in Adrar, it would seem that Gaden was involved in planning for his own sort of conquest in Boutilimit. We know from a letter written much later by Gaden to Gouraud that some

8 See Gouraud, 1945, chp 6, for these details.

304 chapter six time in 1908, he took into his care a young girl who had been abandoned by her mother, an ‘Algerian’. This girl, later the mother of a boy named Amadou Aïdara whom Gaden adopted in St Louis in the early 1920s, was called Aminata Cissé, a Soudanese name rather than a North African one.9 Perhaps Aminata was fathered by a Soudanese soldier who had been stationed at the post?10

In Strict Personal Confidence

Gouraud was surprised at the speed with which the leaders of many dissident factions of Moors flocked to offer up their submission to the French cause, and there was an ‘extraordinarily rapid flowering’ of expressions of loyalty to Shaykh Sidiyya. Each group in turn was given its ‘acte d’aman’ that stated the levels of surrender tax they would have to pay for their submission to be accepted in good faith. Gouraud was struck by how a number of chiefs approached him as though they had been friends of the French from the start, and their demeanours impressed him: ‘[Sidi] Horma and the other chiefs who came here seem to me to be personally well disposed because [they are] more intelligent than the others’, but he was suspicious of their motives. Gaden was asked to follow up on this character, Sidi Horma, and to enquire of Sidiyya about his view of the man (HJEG-JHG, 24.1.09). By the end of January, Gaden reported that he had assembled the provisions for the next convoy to be sent north to maintain the column in Adrar, and had managed to secure food stuffs and camels from the Soudan. One commodity especially in demand among the Moors was ‘guinea’ cloth, a dark blue fabric saturated with indigo dye and produced in the Soudan. It was indispensable not simply as an item of clothing, but it was used as a form of general currency to purchase much-needed mutton, for instance; or it was given as gifts to sweeten political relations. Gouraud also requested

9 Amadou Aïdara was born on 12th April 1920 according to the parish records in St Louis. 10 Another fact we know is that Gaden later took as his mousso a woman called Coumba Cissé, who reputedly came from Mauritania just north of Podor according to present-day informants in St Louis. She remained with him until his death in 1939. Was Coumba related in any way to Aminata, the mother of his future adopted son? Would that have been reason enough for him to take into his house an otherwise unrelated boy? We have no way of ascer- taining any of this, but the coincidence of the two family names of the women is suggestive. Nothing of Aminata and only scant details of life of Coumba are known to the elderly members of the St Louis community, who still retain a memory of the Gaden household from the 1920s and 1930s. We will meet Coumba and Amadou later in this story.

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in particular supplies of tobacco from Podor, around 50 kilogrammes in total for his men. A more serious problem confronted Gouraud following the capture of Atar, and this concerned who the new emir might be from a group of three possible candidates. Gouraud turned over in his mind the relative merits of each character: the present emir might do the job, since he had a very good reputation in the town but had after all been appointed by Ma el Ainin and had not yet submitted. The other candidates included the emir’s brother, who had been close to Hassana, Ma el Ainin’s elder brother, and the latter had supported his rival claim to power over the present emir; finally the young man Sidi Ahmed, the son of the ex-emir, whom Gouraud had brought to the town with a view to installing him as ruler. Over one month later, Gouraud could still not decide who it should be. He asked Gaden for his advice, and requested that he consult Sidiyya too. Gouraud pointed out to Gaden, ‘in strict personal confidence’, that the government did not want a long-term occupation of Adrar but only one of limited duration. The Shaykh was not to be told of this: you must ‘affirm energetically even to the Shaykh that we stay on’, Gouraud urged Gaden (HJEG-JHG, 9.2.09). Despite Gouraud’s claims that their stay would be temporary, work started on making the town of Atar more secure with the construction of a solid entrance-way in stone, which would also be a symbol of the French presence in the area. Gouraud considered how best to implement government policy in the Adrar. He did not know what was happening in Paris, but he did understand Ponty’s preferred policy of ‘association’, a strategy by which: the occupation of your troops alone will produce effects over time, allowing for the suitable instruction of the existing chiefs or even others who are respected, but whose interests will be linked to ours “in aiming towards” the establishment of a protectorate system which should permit us in the not too distance future to maintain order by the chiefs, supported or recalled to their duties through tours of duty by a police force, without the constraints of maintaining large garrisons to whom supplies of provisions are so difficult and above all onerous. (Ponty quoted in HJEG-JHG, 9.2.09) Thus, while the evacuation of the French troops from Adrar was not imminent, it was especially important to secure the nomination of a suitable candidate as emir, a person who could be trusted to carry through colonial policy in the area. Communications between Adrar and Boutilimit, and from there to St Louis and Dakar, were a cause for concern. Gouraud advised Gaden to keep his telegraph messages to St Louis short and to the point. Gaden

306 chapter six also annoyed Gouraud by the manner in which earlier correspondence was referred to. Gouraud complained: ‘Don’t say to me “I have received your letter”, but “your letter of …”’; Gaden’s commanding officer demanded more precision from him. Another issue troubling them was the vulnerability of couriers transporting messages up and down the line, and a number had been stripped of the mail or even killed en route. Gouraud and Gaden devised a scheme whereby letters were written on exceptionally thin paper and folded up many times into a small compact bundle, which was then placed into a leather pouch similar in appearance to the talismans and amulets containing Qur’anic script worn by the local population. They were then placed by the courier around the neck or arm in imitation of the way talismans were worn, and those who found them would hesitate to open them for fear that they might contain the powerful magical words of a genuine amulet (HJEG-JHG, 7.7.09). Respect for their adversaries grew over time, and Gouraud also pointed to the qualities of the Moors serving with the French military over the Soudanese troops. In a typically colonial generalisation he claimed: ‘The Moors show … that they are more intelligent than the Soudanese either as adversaries or as friends’ (HJEG-JHG, 26.2.09). There was a romantic view of the Moors, and even more so of the Tuareg, as noble desert nomads; and this perception had already taken hold in France. Gouraud did not simply admire them as one fellow warrior might respect another, but he was taken in by the image they cast of complete and self-sufficient individuals who waged a battle against their environment: ‘The most independent man in the world was perhaps a young Moor with a good camel, a sack full of dates, a waterproof goat skin, [and] a carbine and cartridges stolen from the French.’11 One might speculate that given different circumstances, Gouraud might well have seen himself cast in this role of the solitary, cunning warrior who needed nothing more than what he could carry with him.

Bablon is No More

Casualties continued to mount up on the French side, while uncounted fatalities grew among the Moors who resisted the colonial intruders. At the end of February 1909, the mother of a young adjutant named Berrand wrote to Gouraud asking for her son’s body to be buried near to St Louis so that she could visit the grave and perhaps even transfer the remains back to

11 Gouraud, 1945: 68.

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France at some future point. The mother had just received the official news of the loss of her son in Trarza, but Gouraud explained to Gaden that he had no details relating to the death. ‘Have you found his body?’ he enquired of Gaden. According to the reports from the first search party nothing had been found, and other groups went out urgently to look for traces of the bloody encounter. Gouraud promised a 200 franc reward to the person who returned to Boutilimit with the corpse, and thought it impossible that the men who accompanied the youth would not know of his whereabouts. ‘Be it only a few bones, as with our poor Millot [killed in Chad], his mother will not know about it [know any different], and it will be a great consolation to her’ (HJEG-JHG, 26.2.09). Worse news was to arrive when, on 23rd April, the death of Captain Bablon was announced. He had been on a reconnaissance mission east of Akjoujt to study the condition of water-holes and wells in preparation for a convoy of 400 camels when he was set upon by a band of Moors. Gouraud pointed his finger at the inadequacies of local recruits serving with the French, and he puzzled over how a detachment of troops could have been so easily attacked. This was now the third death of one of the members of the band of brothers that Gouraud had assembled: ‘…what a glorious death he met with, like Millot [in Chad], Mangin and Repoux. It is war but how cruel it is when it takes those that one loves. […] It pained me to learn of the death of brave Mangin, who was the first [sic] of us to disappear’ (HJEG- JHG, 29.4.09). Gaden was close to Bablon, for it was he who had written to Gaden about Mangin’s excesses during the Chad campaign, and Gaden had lent him his support over the case. The two Henris had managed to survive so far, but they must have wondered for how much longer their luck would run. Bablon had been involved in checking the route north for the passage of convoys up to Atar, and one particularly important party about to be sent out on that route included Shaykh Sidiyya. He and his entourage were to head into Adrar to meet with those chiefs who had recently come over to the French, and to persuade others to do likewise. Gouraud thought this to be an excellent idea from a political point of view, and no doubt Gaden himself itched to accompany the Shaykh on his journey north. But no, it was to be Aubert who would lead the party, leaving Gaden the Gallic cock to peck nervously in the sands of the Sahara desert. With so many groups of Moors proclaiming their submission to the French, the problem of how to treat the different political factions became acute. The issue revolved around not simply the Moors’ relations with the French, but also how the different groups of Moors got on amongst

308 chapter six themselves, and what to do with the weapons they held. Some officers would only accept a submission if the Moors surrendered all their arms, no matter what the provenance of these weapons. Others demanded only the return of those rifles, in particular rapid-fire weapons, which had been seized during engagements with French troops. That the Moors had access to modern guns through traders operating from Rio de Oro, Morocco and elsewhere only complicated matters still further. ‘This question of guns is embarrassing’, Gouraud noted. He was in favour of leaving the groups armed with rifles that did not rival the fire-power of the French; but to strip the factions of all weapons would be to leave those coming over to the French cause totally defenceless in the face of hostility from local rival groups. Moreover, those submitting to French authority could render a service to the colonialists by engaging with those Moors who still held out and resisted annexation of their territory. The hope that clerical factions would take up arms against the raiding warrior classes had proved ineffective in most cases; Gouraud wrote: ‘I admit to you that I am strongly disappointed by the modest use that the marabouts have made of all the guns we have given them’ (HJEG-JHG, 5.4.09). Controlling the political genie that emerged from the lamp of post-conquest Adrar was not going to be easy. The problem of establishing peace in any post-war situation is always an issue for an invading force, and the political implications of arming one particular group against another often has no clear line of resolution or necessary logic of progression. This tension in French policy surrounding the attempt to create a general peace through the mediation of armed partisan groups acting on the colonialists’ behalf laid the foundations for the unravelling of their policy some ten years or more later. Gaden would be at the heart of this dilemma in the future.

Send Us Therefore the Shaykh

Gaden wrote to Gouraud in mid-March to complain about his sense of isolation, disillusionment and frustration with his ‘internment at Boutilimit’. Gaden was sick to the back teeth with his command. This news annoyed Gouraud, who also chastised Gaden for continuing to smoke too much and aggravating his cough. Gouraud could not understand Gaden’s disquiet: I know well that there are reasons for keeping you at the post, but it seems you could pass the baton to Robin [Gaden’s assistant] or to Aubert, and make a tour of Mederdra [to the west] about which I have spoken to you. I believe that your health would be much better if you found some exercise, and from

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the point of view of the cercle, it is beyond doubt that a tour in what was called sometime ago Western Trarza would be highly useful. (HJEG-JHG, 5.4.09) Gaden was charged with the preparations for Sidiyya’s mission to the north and for assembling a convoy, of which he longed to be a part. It was thought better for Sidiyya to travel to Atar with a French column, for he would be more closely associated with the colonial mission than if he travelled alone: ‘he will have the air of being our creature’, Gouraud commented. Gouraud wondered about returning to the south himself, but decided that he would be of more use in Adrar in the company of the Shaykh than in Trarza. ‘I forego the cherished hope of going to shake your hand and chatting for a long time’, and Gouraud added: ‘Send us therefore the Shaykh’ (HJEG-JHG, 23.4.09). Gaden was advised not to let the Shaykh travel with too large an entourage unless they could bring with them sufficient provisions to keep themselves during their stay in Atar. Shaykh Sidiyya’s first trip to Adrar in June 1909 lent legitimacy to Gouraud’s conquest and provided a rallying point for Moors who had recently tendered their submissions. The Shaykh would also be useful in helping to decide who the next emir would be, for Gouraud had still not made up his mind.12 Sidiyya arrived with Lieutenant Aubert and received local notables in the hope of showing them how a Muslim could live under French rule. Sidiyya also wrote letters to different adversaries counselling peace and reassuring them that the Qur’an did not oblige them to fight an enemy that had proved its superiority, and guaranteed that their Muslim religion would be respected. The letters provoked a hostile response from several leaders including Shaykh Hassana, who was now stationed up in southern Morocco. The date palm harvest from June or July until August provided the desert nomads with a valuable source of food; it also provided the focus for a revived French strategy against the Moors. ‘To hold the palm groves was to hold the nomads’, Coppolani had said many years earlier, and Gouraud now adopted a similar policy.13 This was a tactic of squeezing the Moors into submission by controlling access to resources: dissidents were denied access; allies of the French had preferential treatment. Gouraud also

12 Gouraud explained later that the new emir was ‘supported by the authority of France and serving our cause’. He concluded: ‘This is how we imposed our will on the Moors and defeated their armed contingents. We arrived in force in the very heart of their country’ (see 1945: 135). 13 Gouraud, 1945: 193.

310 chapter six proclaimed his intention to overcome all armed rebels, to destroy or hunt them down, and to take their herds. This was the politics of the belly: starve them out and take the beasts that were necessary for their survival. However, Gouraud’s policy led to more violent encounters with the nomads desperate for pasture and food supplies, and Gaden started to feel the effects in Trarza. Levels of pillaging and raiding on soldiers guarding the summer pastures around Boutilimit grew. A few months prior to the Shaykh’s visit to Adrar, the situation in other parts of the region had become strained. Chief Sidi Horma wuld Ekhteria, the leader of one of the most active warrior groups in Adrar, had offered his submission to the French in February 1909 and then sought permission to visit Shaykh Sidiyya in Boutlimit. However, he had become stranded in Rhasseremt, the post near to where Bablon had been killed at the end of April, and the new commandant Frèrejean had not granted him permission to leave. Members of Sidi Horma’s faction had been maltreated by the riflemen stationed at the post, and the Moors now wished to move elsewhere. Gouraud puzzled over the commandant’s conduct and mused on the bizarre combination of ‘grand qualities and great defects’ Frèrejean possessed. Amidst these coming and goings, Gouraud also sent a man down from Adrar into Gaden’s care in Boutilimit. He was Mohammed Abdallah, ‘a rather interesting figure’, who was ‘no longer young’ but had asked some years earlier to attend the Franco-Arab school under the tutelage of one of Gaden’s friends, a M. Destaing. He has a very open mind to all things French or rather European, and is an educated friend. Naturally he is looking for a position. I think he would make a good tax collector or tutor in the Chamama [the area on the north bank of the Senegal], I recommend him to you. (HJEG-JHG, 1.5.09) This could well be the same person who later wrote letters to Gaden [who was addressed in transcription as ‘Komàdàg Gedú’] in Pulaar language but using Arabic script (known as ‘ajami’ text), and who signed himself off as in latinised script as ‘Ahmadou Abdoullahi’. He appears to have become a regular correspondent with Gaden and together with other local scholars began to make up a network of contacts that Gaden was starting to use for obtaining information about the Senegal River valley area.

The List Becomes Long

In the summer of 1909 further disquiet was being expressed in government circles about the role of the French troops in Adrar, and rumours were rife

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that Paris would order a military evacuation of the region. Gouraud blamed this situation specifically upon ‘articles in idiotic journals’. He viewed the continuing problems in the north of Mauritania as stemming from the actions of the Moroccans and, until that territory was dealt with, there would be no permanent solution. The southern reaches of Morocco were still a safehaven for Ma el Ainin and his talibe followers or talamides. Governor General Ponty argued for the continued presence of the troops in Adrar, and he won a stay of execution on the campaign. Gouraud’s eyes meanwhile were gazing north to the prospects that the Maghreb might hold for him after his present campaign came to an end. The Shaykh’s presence in Atar was having a marvellous effect and his letters were bringing more dissidents than could be imagined around to his point of view. Gouraud was having difficulties, however, with some of his correspondence for a gazelle he kept as a pet at the post – a less offensive animal than his leopard from Fort Lamy – had eaten a confidential letter from Gaden; the latter was asked to send a duplicate copy (HJEG-JHG, 27.6.09). As before, with an end in sight for his mission, Gouraud’s letters to Gaden became more directive, imperatives were the verbal form of choice, and they contained less personal narrative and little description of those places through which he had toured or of his observations on life around him. He would now frequently sign off his letters with a rapid-fire set of instructions to send him materials or dispatch parcels and letters on his behalf. Given what we know of Gaden’s response to earlier excesses of officialdom, it is likely that he would have found lackeying for Gouraud somewhat distasteful. News in July was mixed. Gouraud opened his mail in private on the 22nd to find a letter from Gaden written in Boutilimit one week earlier containing congratulations on the announcement of his friend’s decoration as a commander of the Légion d’Honneur. His adjutant Gerhardt and his secretary Chesnel, working in the next room, then came in beaming from ear to ear to show Gouraud the official notice in the Havas. Gouraud’s reaction, he reported, was one of complete surprise. But I will admit to you my old friend’, he explained to Gaden, ‘that I would have preferred to wait until it [the mission] be finished for me to be accorded this high reward. There are officers and sub-officers here who are owed as much as me, who are neither decorated nor medalled, all of whom will not be. (HJEG-JHG, 25.7.09) But less than one week later, Gouraud and Gaden’s sense of celebration was dulled by a report that came back from Teurchane, a ksar or fortified settlement around 40 kilometres north-east of Atar. It stated that the young

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Lieutenant Violet had been killed in a battle around the palm groves being guarded to prevent dissidents from harvesting the dates. As in all such losses, the situation in which a man fell was described in detail and the injuries sustained were given in full. Violet had been shot by a group of Moors probably hiding on the top of a rise above the palm grove. Gouraud continued: The bullet entered through his cheek, fractured his maxilla, cut the tongue and exited [the body] cutting the carotid artery. He was cut down. We brought him back that night to Atar and buried him this morning. My God! The list becomes long. (HJEG-JHG, 29.7.09) This was a glorious death for an officer, a relatively quick end by a single gunshot, and the gory detail of his injuries gives a testament to his fellows and comrades of the honourable way in which he fell. Gouraud recounted to himself the list of those close comrades now lost in this campaign: Repoux, Mangin, Bablon, and now Violet; ‘there you are, four brave lads among the brave.’ Gaden’s sense of the futility of the campaign was beginning to grow, and such a high death toll of elite officers, not to mention the partisans and local troops, was taken as evidence of the need to find alternative political strategies for the pacification of Mauritania. A new Commander of the Troops in West Africa had been appointed to replace General Audéoud, who had become ill at the end of 1908 and returned to France. This was General Caudrelier, a man known to both Gaden and Gouraud from the Samory campaign of 1898 when he had been a chef de bataillon. After arriving in Dakar, the new commander announced his intention in July to tour Adrar, and he began his ascent to Atar to inspect Gouraud’s mission. He arrived in early August and spent almost one month assessing the political and military situation of the Adrar. On his departure the General travelled south and passed through Boutilimit meeting up with Gaden on 16th September. Gouraud wrote to his friend: ‘I believe that he has seen the situation very clearly and that henceforth we will have in Dakar an advocate with the voice of authority’ (HJEG-JHG, 29.8.09). Shaykh Sidiyya was still in Atar surrounded by admirers and disciples, and he seemed reluctant to return south. Sidiyya got on well with the new General and the Shaykh thought him much more intelligent than his predecessor, Audéoud.

See Things as They Are and Not How One Might Wish Them to Be

The correspondence between Gaden and Gouraud had slackened off over the previous weeks, perhaps an indication of the growing distance between

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the two men. Gouraud commented on this point at the end of August 1909, when he mentioned he had received no news from Gaden for over a fortnight. Indeed, Gaden wrote to Auguste Terrier a little earlier to give vent to his feelings: It would probably have been much better not to follow Coppolani into Mauritania. But it is done. We are rather disturbed about the future. Our occupation weighs on the cercles of the south [where he was stationed], so much more heavily for there is a large column to feed in the north. […] Boutilimit, the second major supply staging area, is the most thankless post that I have ever commanded. If only I’d known! (JHG-AT, 9.8.09) But Gouraud came up with a suggestion for Gaden, now feeling like something of a glorified quartermaster isolated from the action and over recent months deprived of the company of Shaykh Sidiyya. Chef de bataillon Patey, head of the government’s Political Bureau, had written to Gouraud about a replacement for an administrator named Adam, and Gouraud saw an opening for his friend. Gouraud sent Gaden a copy of his response to Patey in which he indicated his friend might be interested in taking up the position. He laid out his case:

You have had enough of Trarza. St Louis is not a disagreeable place to live. You have your brother there. Patey is a charming man. In your interests, you can only gain by acquiring a more expansive service, giving you contact with many more things, than the command of a cercle which no longer holds any secrets for you. Now, the ball is in your court, telegraph Patey in any case. (HJEG-JHG, 30.8.09) What must have made Gaden green with envy is what Gouraud then went on to outline as his immediate plans for a spot of action – a raid on the talamides (followers of a faction of Moors):

I propose to take the command of a rezzi [an attack] … on 3rd September probably. The raiding party is large, 200 Senegalese and Toucouleurs, 200 partisans, 30 or so men from all the posts in Adrar…. I will take supplies for 20 days because if the enemy cannot be engaged, we must stay around for eight days or so to force them either to submit or to chase them across the northern deserts, which will cost them dearly. (HJEG-JHG, 30.8.09) Gouraud signed off by adding a request for more envelopes and to telegraph the post at Podor on his behalf. More menial housemaid work for Gaden. In his silent retreat of Boutilimit, Gaden had obviously been mulling over the political and military situation in Adrar. He had already expressed his opinions to Terrier, but now he let go a broad-side on Gouraud’s policy so far, especially in relation to the use of partisans as a military arm of

314 chapter six annexation. There was a contradiction, he argued, in the policy of arming warrior groups to continue raiding their enemies when part of the justification for French annexation of the region was pacification of the warring factions. Gouraud advised him that he ‘should see things as they are and not how one might wish them to be’. He went on: I am not of your opinion when you say that it would have been better not to go to Adrar. You seem to forget last year; and then as regards the nomads, they never achieved anything other than raiding [their enemies]. Take account of the courage that our tribes in the south took in fighting under our command against all the famous raiding warrior factions. Gouraud added a postscript that the participation of warriors from Adrar was particularly important since their action helped produce a buffer zone that would increase the tranquillity in the south’ (HJEG-JHG, 31.8.09). The precise role that these northern warrior factions were to play in the future politics and security of Mauritania would come back to haunt the administration over the next 20 years. By September, Gaden was stationed in St Louis where he temporarily took over Adam’s functions in the administration of Mauritanian affairs. Correspondence between Gaden and Gouraud was sparse during this period, and Gouraud did not write again to his friend until the beginning of October, when he requested: ‘You should write to me a post-dated letter explaining to me your departure for St Louis, which I have not received or which must be lost.’ He added: ‘You should have received now a letter in which I advised you to ask Patey for the position of adjutant. There you are, all set up. It would be in any case a great service [for you] to give to Mauritania…’ (HJEG-JHG, 2.10.09). Gaden had already taken up post, and he now lodged in rooms attached to the Hôtel de la Mauritanie, the seat of administration of the territory, on Avenue Dodds in N’Dar Tout, a quarter of the town situated on a spit of land connected to Mauritania some three kilometres up the road. Here, Gaden found ‘the glasses and cups’ that Gouraud and his lady friend Gaby had brought and left as a memento of happier times. Gouraud’s tour of duty was coming to an end, and he admitted that he would not leave Adrar without emotion. (See plate 11, Hôtel de la Mauritanie.)

Pacification is Complete

Shaykh Sidiyya took one last trip up to Atar prior to Gouraud’s departure from the region, and his role this time was to lead the great prayers that

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Plate 11. ‘Hôtel de la Mauritanie’, Avenue Dodds, St Louis (n.d.) (with kind permission of CAOM, digital image DAFANCAOM01_30FI).

mark the end of Ramadan, the Muslim fast. In previous years it had been Shaykh Hassana, Ma el Ainin’s brother who had taken this role, but it was considered by the French to be a religious function that would carry huge political symbolism if Sidiyya were present at the end of the fast and to be seen in the place once occupied by the enemy. The ceremony took place on 15th October, and by the 17th Sidiyya was on his way south again; Gouraud was content with the spectacle that sealed his mission in Adrar. He proclaimed triumphantly that the submission of dissidents groups in the area was wholly successful (with one exception), that ‘occupation of Adrar is an inevitable necessity for the security of Mauritania’, and that ‘pacification is complete’.14 Gouraud himself left Atar on 27th October and headed for Chinguetti on his eventual descent via the Tagant, in the hope of being in St Louis for December. ‘Everything is order in Atar’, he observed as he took to the road. Gouraud hoped that soon it would be possible for trade caravans organised by Moor merchants to reach Adrar and to travel

14 Gouraud, 1945: 258–261.

316 chapter six accompanied only by an escort of partisans. This would relieve the French garrison and could eventually lead to a reduction in their numbers. In October, one of Gaden’s local informants at Boutilimit, a man named Shaykh Ben Dadah, wrote to him in St Louis to report that his deputy Robin ‘ruled with patience and justice’, that ‘the country was in good order’ and ‘everyone was satisfied’; nonetheless, the Shaykh missed Gaden’s presence at the post.15 Gaden was recalled briefly to Boutilimit to conduct negotiations with a faction of Moors, led by wuld Deid, who had made overtures to present his submission to the post. Gouraud had suspected this faction of being responsible for the death of Captain Repoux some 18 months earlier. Gaden managed to agree the terms of their surrender by 17th December. Boutilimit was now ready to be handed over to Gouraud’s adjutant, Captain Gerhardt as commandant of the cercle. Gouraud’s last two letters to Gaden from Adrar contain some of the old style from earlier correspondence. Here, but only briefly, are there passages for Gaden’s benefit that describe the towns and countryside through which he passed, and he even referred to mountainous regions that ‘would please the old Pyrenean that you are’ (HJEG-JHG, 8.11.09). He would still occasionally ask Gaden for advice on policy, but these instances are fewer than before; only in his last letter does he invite Gaden to venture an opinion, which up until then so often went in opposite direction to his own: ‘I rely on you to tell me in all conscience if Nouakchott [the future capital of Mauritania] should be maintained or not?’ (HJEG-JHG, 28.12.09). The relationship between the two Henris was now becoming more distant and their life trajectories would take them in different directions once this present tour of duty was finished. Gouraud eventually arrived back in St Louis after his slow journey south, and met up with friends and colleagues in the town, in particular Mgr Jalabert, who kept watch over the lamp given by Gouraud’s mother and handed into the cleric’s care; it had burned in the sanctuary, we are told, during the whole of the son’s mission in Adrar, a fact of some importance for the seemingly pious colonel. Gaden travelled down from Boutilimit and then along the river to St Louis in mid-January, and brought with him maps and notes on the Adrar column for Gouraud’s report on the campaign.

15 See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC 7, item 115. The letter is dated in the Islamic calendar as ‘Shawwal, 1327’, which translates as October 1909. Shaykh Dadah updated Gaden on the political situation, the movements and alliances among different factions of Moors, and added that Ma el Ainin had fled north to Tiznit in Morocco, along with a number of groups from Brakna.

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A final dinner was thrown for the departing commissaire général on 24th January. To honour Gouraud’s last days in the town Patey, Gaden, Gerhardt, Couvy and Psichari (grandson of the author Ernest Renan, and a man of literary talent himself) were summoned to toast the military hero. Even Justin Devès, the mayor of St Louis, gave a speech welcoming the French success in Adrar; and this only months after his opposition to the occupation of the region.16

The Arms of Your Mousso Around Your Neck

Gouraud’s last letter to Gaden from West Africa was dated 8th February 1910, two days before he embarked on a steamer that took him away from the French territory that had helped form him as a young man and junior officer. He was now 42 years old, some ten months younger than Gaden who had turned 43 in January of that year. Gaden had elected to stay on in St Louis for an extra year to work under Gouraud’s replacement, Lieutenant- Colonel Patey, to administer Mauritanian affairs. Gouraud returned to France via North Africa, visiting Algeria and Morocco, where he met up with Gaden’s old friend Flye Sainte-Marie who was the commandant at a military post in the Maghreb. North Africa was to be Gouraud’s future destination, and his search for a solution to the problems in Morocco would serve the cause of the pacification of the north-west corner of the continent. The two Henris were not to serve alongside each other again, and this departure represented a ‘bifurcation’ in life courses of the two men. But before he set foot on the homeward-bound vessel, Gouraud gave Gaden one last piece of advice about his friend’s ideas to change career, namely to transfer to the cadres of the colonial administration: This letter will find you alone in St Louis. You are going to have an interesting six weeks to two months and [it will be] even more so later when Patey goes into Adrar. These operations will mean a lot more to you as an area

16 Official reports and communiqués were quick to note the beneficial results of Gouraud’s mission. The 1909 Rapport Politique states that the favourable position ‘is attributable to the success of our troops and their presence in the Adrar which has ruined for some time the hopes of the dissidents. Our vigilance must remain complete…’. However, the ‘Note sur la politique générale’ of the same year observes that ‘action civilisatrice’ would be needed to accomplish a change in the mentality of the Moors. Further proof of the success of the French mission, and a justification to Paris for the campaign, came in the Rapport Politique of 1910: tax receipts for Mauritania over the five-year period had increased more than four- fold from over 220,000 frs in 1905 to over 900,000 frs in 1910. (See ‘Mauritanie, Rapports Politiques 1908–1927’, ANS.)

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commandant on your next tour. It will be necessary [therefore] to reflect well before transferring into the administration. (HJEG-JHG, 8.2.10) Gouraud was concerned that Gaden might regret a decision to take a step out of the military and into the world of civil administration, and miss the opportunity of another command under Patey. On the eve of his departure from Dakar, Gouraud chanced upon an old colleague who reminded him of sweeter times in the past. Memories flooded back of Gaby ‘arriving so young, so fragrant, so charming to dine in a small room’ at a villa in Dakar many years ago. Gouraud’s melancholy increased as he steamed towards Tenerife, from where he wrote to Gaden: Do you remember that we made this walk [around a lagoon] to relax here in March 1904 …. Six years! That marks our age. I will not send a postcard to Gaby this time! I have not had any news since her last letter in July. Thom [his friend] has not seen her. He thinks she is in Indochina. And now he reported the news he had dreaded for so long, news related to him by his friend Thom who had last talked to Gaby over one year ago: … she said to him [Thom] that her husband was strongly in favour of returning there [Indochina]. He [the husband] came back when he married her. She never said anything to me about it in her letter. Poor delicious child, in her last letter [that] was as sad as the previous ones … a photo so different from Gaby of 1900 and 1903. No doubt reason, the cold reason without heart, said that this would not last, but how sad! (HJEG-JHG, 13.2.10) Gouraud was heart-broken at this news of Gaby’s marriage, and he had seemed to maintain his faith that despite the distance between the two lovers and the many years of separation, it would somehow not affect their relationship. Such innocence and naivety is touching in a hardened military figure; and it seems that Gouraud never found another to replace Gaby as the object of his deep affections. Once Gaden was established in St Louis it seems that, by contrast to Gouraud, he was not alone anymore. He had set up home on the maritime shore of N’Dar Tout opposite the Hôtel de la Mauritanie that housed the administrative cadres for the territory. Gouraud had already advised him to sleep in the sun in his seaside villa in order to cure his persistent cough. But while he might have lost some of his cats, he was joined by his mousso, presumably Coumba Cissé. Gouraud wrote: I am not happy to hear of the death of your cats. That shows that the house is still cold and more humid than might be believed. Be careful, only fall asleep with the arms of your mousso around your neck, and if you start to cough even more, do not hesitate to move house. (HJEG-JHG, 13.2.09)

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Gouraud signed off on a rather penny-pinching note and said that he was sending what remained of his Senegalese postage stamps, and that he would be obliged to Gaden to send him two thalers 30 for the new ones from Mauritania: ‘You know how grasping I am.’

Personal Relations: Neither Father, nor Uncle

During Gaden’s posting to Boutilimit, he had begun to create a new network of relationships that was useful not only for the purposes of gathering military and political intelligence, but that also gave him access to knowledge about historical, cultural and linguistic matters in the region. Shaykh Ben Dadah, who wrote to him at St Louis during his absence from the post, was one influential figure, as was of course Shaykh Sidiyya himself. But Gaden cultivated other relationships with younger scholars, particularly those from Franco-Arabe schools called ‘medersas’ where students received an education in both French and Arabic, and in secular and theological subjects. By now Gaden was something of an expert in the language of Fulbe pastoralists and the Futanke or Toucouleur from the Senegal River valley.17 Gaden had already written a study of the dialect of ‘Foul’ spoken by Fulbe herders in Baghirmi, and this was published in 1908 prior to him leaving France for Mauritania. Gaden now received letters written to him in Pulaar but which used Arabic script, a kind of text that is known as ajami. Ahmadou Abdoullahi, the pupil from the medersa in Adrar who was sent south by Gouraud into Gaden’s care, wrote a number of ajami letters to his guardian commandant at Boutilimit. Another student from the medersa at Mederdra, southwest of Boutilimit, who wrote frequently to Gaden, either in ajami or in French, was Mahmoudou Alfa, whose extant correspondence covers a period from 1910 to 1911.18 In these letters Gaden is often addressed either rather formally by his correspondents who refer to his official colonial or military position (‘commandant’ etc) or by the more intimate formulation of ‘my very dear father’. The letters are intercalated with Gaden’s miniscule and neat hand that transliterates the Arabic characters

17 These related languages were given many different names by the colonialists: Foul, Peul and Pulaar by the French; Fulani, as adopted by the British. Related dialects of this language are spoken from the Senegal valley in the west to Chad in the east, where the pastoralists can be found to this day grazing their cattle. For ease of understanding, I will simply refer to this language as ‘Pulaar’ throughout the rest of the text. 18 These and Ahmadou Abdoullahi’s letters are kept in the Fonds Gaden, IFAN (now renamed IFCAD), University of Dakar, cahier no. 78.

320 chapter six into Latin script. He developed his own system of transliteration that attempted to capture the variety of unique sounds in Pulaar that could not be rendered sufficiently accurately either by Arabic characters or by standard French orthography. These letters sometimes contain a fairytale, myth or story in Pulaar, sometimes notes on vocabulary or usage of words in Pulaar, and sometimes requests of a much more personal nature from the correspondent. For instance, on 29th March 1910, Mahmoudou Alfa wrote to Gaden to report that he had arrived safely and in good health in Louga, a town in northern Senegal, and pointed out to him that he was there with ‘neither a father, nor uncle, nor mother, nor anyone who could help him’. It seems that he had just taken up a new job, perhaps as a teacher, but was obviously not satisfied with his prospects, for he asked Gaden to help him find a position better than his present one. Here, as elsewhere, Gaden was seen as a quasi-paternal figure whose responsibility it was to help younger people who came into his orbit to find employment or other benefits that might assist them in life. One other significant character in Gaden’s burgeoning network of contacts was Abdoulaye Kane from the ‘Middle Valley’ along the Senegal River. This area, also known as Fouta Toro, stretched from Dagana in the west to beyond Matam in the east, a narrow band of land running along the river, which was the focus of an Islamic regime established by the Futanke or Toucouleur in the 1770s. Abdoulaye Kane was the chef supérieure, a colonial appointment, of one of the central provinces of the Middle Valley, and had been until his retirement a principal interpreter for the French administration. Kane, who belonged to a long-established and high-ranking Toucouleur family, collected data on the area and sent it to St Louis in 1909 for Gaden to pick up. This material formed the basis of a publication by Gaden on the land tenure system of Fouta Toro that was published in 1911.

A Savage by the Sea

Gouraud did not write to Gaden for over five months after his return to France. On 23rd July 1910, Gouraud apologised for his silence, and offered ‘no excuses’ but only ‘explanations’: his life in Paris was a whirlwind of visits, dinners, conversations and the correction of proofs for his publications. Gerhardt, Couvy and Ponty had all been treated in the same way by a similar lack of correspondence; Gaden was not being singled out for special neglect. He recounted to his friend the details of his trip home through North Africa and reported that he saw a good deal of Auguste Terrier,

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who was now his neighbour in Paris. Gouraud sent back Gaden’s notes written in 1906 on the migration of the Toucouleur or Futanke followers of Shaykh Amadou, but was puzzled by his letter of 5th April on this subject and on the role of France as a ‘Muslim power’; Gouraud asked for further clarification.19 He had also sent out books that Gaden wished to give to Mohammed wuld Abbot, one of the dissident leaders in the Adrar who had submitted to Gouraud in July 1909, and with whom Gaden had struck up a relationship. The evacuation of the French troops from Adrar was still being spoken about in Paris, and Gouraud was now of the opinion that ‘unpro- ductive territories [such as Adrar] be occupied at the minimum expense possible’. Gaden had written to Gouraud and to Gouraud’s mother describing his life in St Louis, which his friend could now envision along with his new cats. Gouraud wrote: ‘… you live like a savage by the sea among your cats. […] You will succeed in finding again Tchekna in St Louis’ (HJEG-JHG, 23.7.10). This reference to Gaden’s last posting alludes to the domestic con- tentment he found not only living like a ‘gentleman farmer’ surrounded by his cats and a menagerie, but also being accompanied by a mousso, Niorga, who turned out to be a professor in the language of Baghirmi. Was Coumba Cissé playing a similar role for Gaden in St Louis regarding his work on Pulaar, a language which she herself spoke? She was certainly later acknowledged as a source of ethnographic information on the Toucouleur on the Senegal River valley.20 Gouraud’s leave came to an end at the close of September 1910, but he managed a trip to Bordeaux to visit Gaden’s parents in the first part of the month. He dined with them on the 5th and reported that they were in good health and good spirits. The only issue that clouded the conversation was the situation of the brother Philippe, who apparently did not write to his parents from his posting with the Devès and Chaumet trading house in St Louis. Gouraud and Gaden’s father discussed the plans Philippe had for projects in America, which both men found absurd. Gaden had warned Gouraud of this, and the two friends were of the same opinion regarding feckless Philippe and his castles in the sky.

19 Gaden wrote two pieces on the Toucouleur migrants: the first describes the itinerary of the followers of the late Shaykh Amadou, who arrived in Chad at the end of his posting in Tchekna; the second, entitled ‘Note sur le groupe toucouleur de Médine (Hadjaz)’, focused on a group of Toucouleurs in Medina in the Middle East, dated 10th August 1906. It is this latter piece that Gouraud refers to here. Gaden was waiting on information about the pilgrimage to Mecca from a returning West African pilgrim before he could complete the text. See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC 4. 20 See Fonds Gaden, IFAN (now IFCAD), cahier no. 73, in which Gaden referred to Coumba as one of his informants on the subject of magic and the interpretation of dreams.

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Gaden maintained his correspondence with Auguste Terrier throughout his Mauritanian posting, and was glad to hear news of Terrier’s imminent arrival at St Louis. Terrier had sent him his new book on the history of French West Africa, written for the colonial exhibition in Brussels some time earlier. Gaden was keen to welcome Terrier to the town because there were many ‘interesting things to see’, and he put at his disposal a room at the Hôtel de la Mauritanie during Patey’s absence as well as the car attached to the mission. The relationship between these two men was now much more informal, and no longer did Gaden address his key Parisian political ally as ‘Mon cher Monsieur Terrier’ but by the familiar ‘Mon cher ami’, although he still used the honorific French form of ‘vous’ to refer to him (JHG-AT, 30.12.10).

A Most Elevated Collaborator

Gaden’s friend, fellow colonial officer and ethnographer, Maurice Delafosse had warned Gaden that a new decree from Paris had declared that only junior officers would be allowed to transfer to the civil service, and a deadline of May had been set for applications. By May 1911, Gaden was lobbying Terrier to help ease the passage of his formal transfer to the colonial administrative service, and he pressed upon him the urgency of the matter. Writing on 17th May, Gaden was anxious that his request may have missed the closing date, and he asked Terrier to do all in his power to speed through the formal process of transfer before it became an impossibility. Delafosse had reassured Gaden that everyone was well disposed towards him and that his nomination would go through without difficulty. However, Gaden fretted about his prospects. He also admitted to Terrier that Gouraud and he had gone their different ways, adding another uncertainty to his life: ‘And Gouraud? Untiring! When will I come across him again now that our careers have begun to separate?’ (JHG-AT, 17.5.11). Gaden wrote again to Terrier on 31st May, his concern becoming increasingly apparent since he had still heard no news of his transfer. The Governor General had sent off a letter to Paris requesting his demission from his military position, which had been conditionally accepted. ‘Colonel Patey, used to the official style, claims that this is a promise and that I can sleep peacefully. I hope that he is not mistaken’ (JHG-AT, 31.5.11). He continued to bombard with letters the Governor General and anyone else he thought could help him in his quest. In fact, Gaden had received a glowing recommendation from Colonel Patey in support of his transfer request, which had been submitted

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originally to the Governor General in Dakar on 2nd April 1911. A section of it reads thus: … he commanded the cercle of Trarza, a veritable political centre of the colony, in which he obtained sometimes unhoped-for results thanks to his character which imposed itself on the Moors […]. Rarely have the facts also fully justified the appreciations formulated about a man. Personally I find in him a collaborator in the most elevated sense of the word. […] The colonial administration can only increase itself by accepting today into its ranks this long- standing adept.21 Everyone assured him that with Patey’s and the Governor General’s support, Gaden’s transfer would be successful. Gouraud was lobbying too behind the scenes in Paris, talking to Terrier and Etienne, the metropolitan movers and shakers in colonialist circles. While Gaden fretted about his future career, he was also writing and publishing the results of his research in Mauritania and the Senegal Valley. He had already worked on a short note on the salt deposits in an area in Trarza known to the Moors as ‘Aoulil’ that stretched some 70 kilometres along the Atlantic coast to the south of Cap Blanc. This had been the focus of interest among Arab geographers from the Middle Ages.22 More important though was his research on the system of land tenure in the Middle Valley, work that was based on details provided by Abdoulaye Kane. Gaden sent this piece to the government offices in Dakar to have it cleared and authorised for publication. Delafosse had seen it and Patey was happy with it, but Gaden confided to Terrier that he hoped that Dakar would not modify his text. He had also been working on notebooks provided by the Senegalese colonial employee Yoro Dyâo, but this work as we shall see did not appear until much later; he had collaborated too with Delafosse on an article about religious beliefs in the western Soudan, particularly among the Fulbe (JHG-AT, 31.5.11).23 But it was the publication of his analysis of the Senegal River valley system of land tenure that raised hackles in some quarters. Dakar did not appear to have objected to what Gaden wrote or to have foreseen any problems with the piece, and it was duly published in Terrier’s journal Le Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique Française later in 1911. As he explained to

21 Gaden’s Dossier Personnel, 1 C 9, ANS. 22 See Gaden’s ‘Les Salines d’Aoulil’, Revue du Monde Musulman, Tome XII, 1910: 436–43. 23 See, M. Delafosse, avec la collaboration de Henri Gaden, ‘De quelques croyances du Soudan occidental et notamment des Peul ou Foulbé’, Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie, 1910: 99–102.

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Terrier, however, Gaden had anticipated problems with the piece since it would spell out in detail the system of land rights other than that put in place by the administration (JHG-AT, 31.5.11). Indeed, in September 1911 Gaden received a letter written on headed notepaper from the Ministry of Finance based in the Département de la Haute-Vienne from a signatory whose name is illegible. The writer complained of the insult Gaden had cast on the land tenure system in French West Africa and he was ‘on the point of declaring war against this despoilment’ and raged about the ‘immense danger that was this iniquitous system’. He went on to state that the precise information published was a serious contribution to knowledge and that it supplied with ammunition those who might be inclined to bring the matter into the full light of day. ‘In this regard, it is possibly an act of courage’, he claimed.24 A related piece by Lieutenant Cheruy on land rights on the north bank of the Senegal River received a worse review, and Gaden was given the backhanded compliment of not committing the same mistakes as his fellow author. Perhaps one of the passages in Gaden’s article that offended the unknown critic was the following: … among the Toucouleurs of the Senegal valley, an ensemble of customs was established which defined very clearly the land holdings and rights of each person, and which permitted the constitution of a land tenure system corre- sponding to a conception of property different from our own, but responding perfectly to the social organisation of Fouta and the native mentality.25 Two points may have struck the anonymous critic: first, that the Toucouleur had conceptions of property at variance with those in France, and this highlighted the gulf between the colonialist and the native which was presented without any further comment from Gaden; second, the system was a functional adaptation to conditions in the valley and to the native way of seeing things. The system that Gaden described involved an unequal distribution of rights among different sectors of the local population; but this did not concern Gaden, who thought it to be part of a well-balanced system. The system itself and Gaden’s lack of critical commentary on it must have jarred with the critic whose republican sensibilities would no

24 See Fonds Gaden, IFAN (IFCAD), Cahier no. 79, for a copy of this letter. 25 The full reference is: ‘Du régime des terres de la Vallée du Sénégal au Fouta antériere- ment à l’occupation française’, Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique Française, 1911: 246–250; the quotation is from p.249. Numerous versions of this text, some with slightly different titles, exist in the archives in Dakar and Aix-en-Provence, for it obviously went through many stages of development and refinement. A much longer version of the published article appeared some 24 years later in 1935, under the same title in the Bulletin du Comité d’Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l’AOF, Tome 18, 403–414.

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doubt have been offended.26 The implication of Gaden’s argument, which is conservative in essence, was that the French occupation could not improve this well-balanced system and might perhaps only change it for the worse: in other words, the land tenure system would no longer match perfectly the form of local social organisation. Just as Gouraud had accused Gaden of becoming a partisan for Sultan Gaourang some years earlier in Chad, so he might be seen to be an advocate for the native system and against interference from foreign, colonial ideas. The suggestion that the French had nothing to add to, and indeed might constitute a threat towards, the indigenous native system might be viewed as an attack on the civilizing mission of French colonialism.

A Parting of the Ways

Meanwhile, Gouraud had not written to Gaden for over seven months from the date of his last letter in September 1910, despite the fact that Gaden continued to send him news. Gouraud eventually wrote in April 1911: ‘If you recognise my writing you’re not going to believe it. Forgive me. I am not proud to have left it so long without news…’. He passed on snippets of what he had heard about Mauritania, about the deaths of notable Moors in raids, about Gerhardt, who was left in charge of Boutilimit and seemed, in Gouraud’s view at least, to be ‘a little too much Moor’ – that is, too native in his lifestyle – and he gossiped with his friend about Commandant Frèrejean’s latest ‘foolishness’. Gaden had hoped for a mention on the promotion roll that would announce his transfer to the administration, but Gouraud explained to him that at the last moment his name had been left off the list by Vidalon, a fellow Cyrard of the same promotion as Gaden and now in the Ministry of Colonies. The man had simply forgotten to add it. Gaden had every reason to hope that his name would be included in the next list (HJEG-JHG, 20.4.11). Gouraud was now following a course of study at the Centre des Hautes Études Militaires, and had been appointed to one of the regiments to be sent to Morocco. Concerned that he might lose the political influence and friendship of his old companion, Gaden feared that … we will not meet for some years. Also, I fervently want you to be a little less infrequent in your correspondence. I do not ask for more than a letter for

26 For details on this system of land tenure see Schmitz (1994) (‘Cités noires: les répub- liques villageoises du Fuuta Tooro (Vallée du Fleuve, Sénégal)’, Cahiers d’études africaines, XXXIV (1–3), 419–60); and Dilley, 2004: Chp 2.

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letter, and at our age friendship, which is something other than camaraderie, is rather rare, that one holds to relationships so as not to be too separated. Frèrejean was in St Louis for a few days, and Gaden could not help but comment on his latest antics: He is a phenomenon. When he does not have sufficient Moors around his office to make a cortege, he goes in search of them in the boutiques. He would make a marvellous electoral agent, if these lice-ridden folk voted. (JHG-HJEG, 3.5.11) Yet he also had great respect for the man: ‘since he knows the people, [and] the country, his opinions are interesting.’ Gaden left West Africa for France on 20th June 1911 at the end of his tour of duty, having still not heard about whether his resignation from military service had been accepted. He expected to learn his fate in July, when the next list of promotions would be announced. In the meantime he passed his time with Captain Gerhardt on the steamer that took them back to Marseilles, where it docked on the 24th. He planned to go to Bordeaux for a few days to see his family, and then journey up to Paris to see Gouraud’s mother and receive the latest news about his friend. From now on, the lives of the two Henris followed very different streams: Gaden’s in the relative backwaters of Senegal and St Louis; Gouraud’s through Morocco and into the mainstream of the French military and political establishment.

INTERLUDE: FURLOUGH IN FRANCE V

A few weeks after his return to France in June 1911, Gaden heard the news he had been waiting for: the acceptance of his resignation as an active military officer and his appointment to the position of Administrator of the Colonies, First Class, with an assignment to the Political Bureau of the Governor of Senegal in St Louis with effect from 1st September 1911.1 A little later he was placed in the service of the Commandant Supérieur of the West African Troops as a chef de bataillon de réserve.2 During his furlough, Gaden wrote from Bordeaux just after Christmas to the Governor General of French West Africa in Dakar and not only passed on his seasonal greetings but also expressed his gratitude for the efforts made on his behalf. He was preparing himself, he explained, to return to Senegal early in the New Year.3 There is no extant correspondence between the two Henris for many months; in Gaden’s case there are no letters to Gouraud from June 1911 until June 1912; in Gouraud’s case, none to his friend until 1st January 1912. On New Years Day, what remained of the Gouraud family sat around the table in their living room in Paris, and they talked of Gaden, of whom Gouraud’s mother was exceptionally fond. Gaden was in Bordeaux in rather cramped lodgings on the rue de Lerine, where he stayed on his own for the few months up to his departure for Senegal. The address at which he stayed was number 28, a property owned by a M. Rey, who it appears rented out rooms in his very modest two-storey town house in a lower middle-class area of Bordeaux.4 These lodgings contrasted greatly with the airy, open and grand apartment set among the opulent merchants’ houses in the Chartrons area of the city that he would have been used to as a child. His mother and father

1 The official date of his appointment was 12th July 1911, and he was nominated as a reserve officer on 29th April 1912. See Dossier Personnel, No. 7Ye 486, SHAT. 2 At around the same time as Gaden’s name appeared on the promotion roll in July, Samory Toure’s son, Sidiki, wrote to him from Conakry, where he had just started to work for the Devès and Chaumet trading house. Sidiki had heard the news of Gaden’s promotion from his brother Philippe, also working for the same company in St Louis, and he passed on his congratulations to him. Sidiki not only passed on Salome’s greetings to Gaden, but he also announced that he was waiting on permission from the Governor of the colony to be formally recognised as an employee of the trading company. This letter, dated 10th July 1911, is lodged in Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC 1 (14). 3 See the hand written-letter (JHG-GGAOF, 28.12.11) in Dossier Personnel, ANS. 4 Recensement démographique, La Gironde, 1911.

328 interlude: furlough in france v still lived in the city but were now housed in a smaller apartment than the one in which young Henri grew up. One week later, Gouraud met up in Paris with a group of officers from Mauritania, including Dr Couvy and Captain Camy, and they dined at a brasserie. This was where Gouraud and Gaby had spent many an evening together in happier days, and these memories weighed heavily upon him. Indeed Gouraud had met up with her in Paris on 5th January and they had talked for two hours, or at least she had chatted endlessly about the daughter to whom she had given birth back in September of the previous year. Gouraud just sat and watched as she spoke. She is still young looking and also pretty. And motherhood, as I had hoped, has lifted the veil of melancholy that covered her faced too often in 1907 and 1910. I took her back to St Lazare station as in the past. And in returning alone through a rainy Paris, I made my melancholy way home as you can imagine. […] I was happy to see her gaiety return; but on the other side of reason, my heart protested down below. (HJEG-JHG, 7.1.12) Gaden travelled up to Paris at the end of that month, and the two friends had a chance to renew their deep affection for each other by exchanging stories about their West African days and discussing matters of the heart. Gaden’s next letter to Gouraud that is to be found in the archives is dated 12th June 1912, from St Louis. By now Gouraud had taken up his posting in Morocco under the authority of General Lyautey, who had been appointed the Resident General of France to Morocco after the signing of the protectorate treaty at the end of March that year. Trouble had immediately blown up in the city of Fez against this accommodation with the French, and the Sultan had to leave the besieged city. He was only able to enter Rabat under an escort led personally by Gouraud. Lyautey sent in to Paris an immediate demand that Gouraud be promoted to the rank of Général de Brigade, and this was granted in haste by 4th June. Gouraud took command of the territory of Fez and of the French forces which were stationed there. Gaden congratulated him on achieving his two stars, and added: You are marked out by destiny and possess more baraka [the grace of Allah] than Ma el-Ainin [the Muslim rebel leader in northern Mauritania]. I hope that you push as high and as quick as possible and that you owe us even more success on other battle fields. (JHG-HJEG, 12.6.12)

CHAPTER SEVEN

PAPERWORK AND BULLETS: THE YEARS OF SCHOLARSHIP AND WAR, 1912–18

Gaden returned to St Louis on 7th March 1912 having spent less than a year in France. The precise details of his appointment were still to be finalised on his arrival, and Governor Ponty was keen to see him as the Head of the Political Bureau of Senegal, a position that had been promised to another candidate. Gaden felt little enthusiasm for the job, and he claimed that the bureau had been inactive for a long time. A series of delicate issues needed to be confronted, such as the rise of the Islamic Mouride (Murid) brotherhood under Shaykh Amadou Bamba and the situation in the Middle Valley of the Senegal. He would have preferred the command of a cercle in the Upper Senegal River region or even along the Niger, but he saw that Senegal would be his lot. He even criticised the Governor of Senegal, Henri Cor, for he ‘certainly knows nothing of the politics of the country’. He regretted the departure of Colonel Patey, with whom he had struck up a good relationship prior to leaving the Mauritania administration, and was not so enamoured of Colonel Mouret who had taken over as Commissaire of the territory. Captain Gerhardt was still posted in Mauritania and about to leave for Adrar, and Ruef, Gaden’s fellow officer from Saint Cyr and Chad, was in St Louis and on the point of returning to France. He had made use of Gaden’s match-making services when they were both posted in Tchekna; now Ruef was about to see service in Morocco under Gouraud’s command. Gouraud’s next letter was written on 9th April 1913, when he responded to Gaden’s remarks about Colonel Mouret chasing after women. His friend also thought of Gaden in his large dilapidated house by the sea in St Louis, and he signed off: ‘…do not be eaten up by the sea; a stroke for your cats. Hello to your mousso.’ A few days later, Gouraud heard of the news of Captain Gerhardt’s death, his old faithful adjutant who had seen many years’ service over a number of different postings with him. He had died of injuries sustained during a battle on 16th March in Mauritania. ‘All this is quite sad’, Gaden thought: If Gerhardt had received care on the spot rather than having to be lugged around on a camel as he had to be, perhaps the haemorrhage would not have

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spread and he could have been cured and saved. This hallowed Mauritania is not worth the expense. […] It is a first-rate wasps’ nest. (JHG-HJEG, 9.6.13) Gouraud was devastated by the news: ‘I knew no-one better during five years of close intimacy.’ And he reeled off the names of those comrades-in- arms he had lost in recent years: Gerhardt, Bablon, Mangin, Repoux, Riboul, Violet, not counting those he did not know personally. ‘Mauritania is cost- ing us dearly’ (HJEG-JHG, 12.4.13). These letters of April 1913 were the first Gouraud had written for about one year, and the death of Gerhardt was the reason why he took up his pen again. He demanded to know more details about the loss of his fellow officer: how, during a battle, a surprise, by day or night, did he survive for a long time? What suffering! He wanted to know too whether Gaden was still living in his villa by the beach in St Louis with his mousso and his cats, and mused that he would have a rich mine of archives to explore for his research. Gaden did have such a golden seam to mine and he was adding to it through his network of contacts and collaborators in the area. But two more deaths were to mark a transition in the lives of both men: Gouraud lost his brother Xavier after a long chronic illness that would respond neither to the gentle climes of Switzerland nor to the spiritual healing powers of Lourdes; Gaden’s father died on 29th October 1913 in his 74th year. Henri returned to Bordeaux for the funeral and he was joined there by three of his sisters who travelled from their respective convents and by his elder sister, Mine, who still lived in the city. His brother Philippe also returned from West Africa, where he met up with his mother and members of the extended Gaden family. The funeral guest list reads like a register of the established members of the Bordeaux elite and the city’s world of commerce and politics, and indeed beyond. It included the Klipsch family, the Reyhers (along with Paul, a professor at Nancy) the Meaudre de Lapouyades (among whom was Maurice, a barrister at the Court of Appeal), the Carlsbergs (one of whom was the Vice Consul of Russia), and members of the Devès family. One last letter prior to the outbreak of the First World War was written by Gaden to Gouraud on 13th April 1914. Gouraud had written earlier to Gaden to congratulate him on his promotion in February 1914 to the rank of Chief Administrator or Administrateur en chef de 2ième classe des colonies, and they discussed plans for Gouraud to visit West Africa later that year. ‘If you wait [much longer] to see the territory, I will be Governor General’, Gaden teased him. Gaden was working in rooms once occupied by Gouraud during his spell in Mauritania, but his friend would be hard pressed to recognise them now. They had been furnished by Governor Ponty for Commis saire Mouret in ‘fittings of virginal white which are surrounded by at least

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three looking-glasses in which I do not look at myself.’ He suggested that once Gouraud arrived in St Louis the two of them could travel together up to Boutilimit by car, as Gaden had done with the administrator, Carde, the year before. The colony was becoming motorised at last. Carde had flown up from Dakar to St Louis, arriving at 10 a.m., Gaden informed Gouraud. By 5 p.m. the same day Carde had reached Boutilimit by travelling along the right bank of the Senegal and then heading north into Trarza along a new track. Gaden passed on greetings from a number of Gouraud’s ex-assistants: Bou el Mogdad, the interpreter who still remained loyal, and Bayla Biran, whom Gaden had not seen since last November, but who was well. Biran, a man from the Senegal Valley, had been in command of a company of Toucouleur partisans under Bablon during the Adrar campaign. Raiding and attacks on French interests still occurred with too much regularity in Mauritania, but apart from these incidents, Gaden observed, life was perfectly tranquil. Indeed, Gaden counted on being in France for the summer (JHG-HJEG, 13.4.14). However, events were to overtake the plans hatched by the two Henris. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was to occur just over two months later at the end of June, and a general mobilisation in France would be announced at the beginning of August, when Gaden was officially mobilised on 2nd August 1914.

In the period between his return to West Africa and the outbreak of the Great War, Gaden dedicated himself to scholarship, in particular to his linguistic studies of Pulaar, the language of the people of the Senegal River Valley. He wrote to Auguste Terrier in August 1912, to say that he had been leading a monk’s existence since his arrival in St Louis: he left his office after a day’s work and plunged himself into his Pulaar in the evening. He had anticipated being posted to the Soudan and wanted to finish the manuscript before leaving; but all this haste had been for nought since he was no longer going there. Instead, he was being transferred to the Political Bureau of Senegal, a prospect that did not please him, but Governor Ponty wanted it (JHG-AT, 8.8.12). He later confided to Terrier his disapproval of the native policies being pursued in Senegal, stating: ‘I would not like to be a negro in Senegal!’ If anything, he would have preferred to have been ‘born in one of the four communes, for those there truly have an enviable situation … the blacks of the four communes are above the laws and regulations, and everyone gives way to them’. He was concerned with the way French policy discriminated in favour of parts of the population, specifically the ‘évolués’ or métis sector

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(in which he saw the hand of members of the Devès family stirring up discontent) over the ‘indigènes’, natives to whom the administration had not extended rights of citizenship. ‘I hope we do not create this foolishness [native policy]’, Gaden continued, ‘which will have the effect of digging a deep pit between us and the Muslims of the four communes who are very respectable…’ (JHG-AT, 20.9.13). While the politics of the colony were hotting up, with the Devèses in particular causing headaches for the administration, Gaden finalised his volume on the Pulaar language entitled Le Poular dialecte peul du Fouta sénégalais. It is a major study of one of the most important West African tongues, and the first volume in 1912 focused on morphology and the second, which appeared in 1914, is a Pulaar-French dictionary. It is for this work in particular that Gaden’s reputation was made as the leading Pulaar language expert.1 Gaden had now written works on a number of African languages, from his first article in 1908 on Foul or Pulaar as spoken in Chad, to his 147-page grammar in 1909 on Baguirmien, the main language in Tchekna, Chad. He had by now established a large library on African languages, which he had consulted extensively in writing the second volume of Le Poular.2 In addition to his writings on language, Gaden was involved in the publication of historical work based on legends, tales and manuscripts collected by Senegalese intellectuals. Two publications in particular during this period were collaborative projects, one with Yoro Dyâo, and the other with Maurice Delafosse and a Senegalese named Siré Abbâs Soh. Yoro Dyâo (1847–1919) was the son of an aristocrat from Walo, an ancient Wolof kingdom in the delta area of the Senegal River. He was part of the first year to graduate in 1860 from the Ecole des Otages, a school created by Governor Faidherbe in 1856, and was considered the strongest student of his year. His first article written in 1864 on the history of the King or Damel of Cayor was dedicated by Dyâo to his family’s mentor Louis Faidherbe. Dyâo and Gaden worked together on the texts that Dyâo provided on the

1 The British linguist F.W. Taylor later consulted Delafosse and Gaden prior to the publication of his own work on Fulani, a variant of Pulaar spoken in Nigeria. While Taylor was flattered by the kind things said about his volume, Gaden and Delafosse privately criticised it in their correspondence and cast doubt on its accuracy. See Fonds Maurice Delafosse, Bibliothèque du Musée de l’Homme, 2 AP8 C6, ‘Correspondence et documents divers’. 2 A loose-bound volume containing many of these articles on language from Gaden’s own collection is held in the IFAN library. The texts include, for example: ‘Negro Dialects of Africa’, by Leighton Wilson (1849), on ‘Berbères’ by Bassest (1892) and by the same author ‘Langue de la Guinée…’ (1913), ‘Arabic of Chari’ by Decorse (n.d.), and Bazin’s work on Bambara.

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history of the foundation of the Wolof Empire and its line of rulers, and it was published in 1912.3 Dyâo had, however, something of a chequered career as chef de canton and cercle, and was dismissed and reintegrated back into service on numerous occasions by the colonial administration. Leading an unsettled and disjointed life, Dyâo spent his time battling with competitors, playing out ancient family rivalries, and using dissimulation and naïve ruses against others. He finally lost his position as chef du cercle in 1914 after being accused of having his hand in the colonial coffers to enrich himself. He was, nonetheless, pensioned off with a respectable annual income, and he continued to compile additional cahiers or notebooks on other Wolof states, which were published posthumously on Gaden’s request.4 A series of letters between Dyâo and Gaden plots the breakdown of their relationship, which was close at one time. Gaden had been influential in helping Dyâo regain his position as chef du cercle, a favour for which the latter was extremely grateful. In highly mannered and over-blown French prose, Dyâo’s letters descend into pitiful pleading, self- righteous justifications (laced with quotations from La Fontaine) and then outright accusations (such as Gaden’s ‘defection’) once he realised his former mentor and protector could no longer intervene to help him. Gaden’s second collaborative project involved the French colonialist and ethnographer, Maurice Delafosse, and a local genealogist named Siré Abbâs Soh. Maurice Delafosse (1870–1926) embarked upon a career as an administrator and ethnologist in colonial service in the Ivory Coast in 1894, and he was still in post there during the time that Gaden took part in the Samory campaign in 1898–99. It is uncertain whether they ever met when Gaden was in Beyla and Delafosse in Baoulé land some 300 kilometres to the east. From 1901–03 Delafosse was involved in delimiting the frontier of the Ivory Coast, a task that was followed by postings that took him to Liberia and Soudan (Mali). In 1909, he then left West Africa to take up a position at the Ecole des Langues Orientales and also at the Ecole Coloniale in Paris, where he stayed until 1915. During the First World War he was appointed by his friend François-Joseph Clozel to a post in the Direction des Affairs Indigènes of the Government General of West Africa in Dakar, where he served for

3 See ‘Légendes et coutumes sénégalaises—Cahiers de Yoro Dyâo’. Publiées et commen- tées par Henri Gaden. Revue d’ethnographie et de sociologie, 1912, no. 3–4, 119–137 ; no. 5–8, 191–202. 4 See, for example, R. Rousseau, ‘Le Sénégal d’Autrefois. Etude sur le Oualo. Cahiers de Yoro Dyâo’, Bulletin du Comité d’Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l’Afrique Occidentale Française, 1929: 133–211.

334 chapter seven three years until February 1918.5 Gaden picked up his relationship with Delafosse during the Great War, when their close proximity meant they could meet regularly in each other’s houses – Delafosse’s in Dakar and Gaden’s in St Louis.6 Delafosse then returned to France and never went back to West Africa. In 1912 Delafosse published a major work on the Soudan entitled Haut-Sénégal-Niger, a vast survey of indigenous customs and practices that stretched to three volumes. The collaboration he struck up with Gaden involved a fruitful combination of his own expertise in Arabic and Gaden’s knowledge of Pulaar and the history and customs of the peoples of the Senegal River Valley. A young Senegalese man, Siré Abbâs Soh, from the river valley became known to Gaden through Abdoulaye Kane, a retired principal colonial interpreter from the same region. Kane wrote to Gaden in 1910 to tell his friend how he had consulted a local leader with the help of the young Soh, referred to as ‘Cire Abasse’, ‘who knows very well the history of Fouta and the names of its chiefs’.7 Soh was from a nearby village, and was of noble descent on both his father’s and mother’s sides. Over the course of 1911, Gaden gave Delafosse two manuscripts written in Arabic by Soh, who was renowned in the area as a genealogist of repute, celebrated for his knowledge of the history of the region and the families that came to settle there. Delafosse translated the two texts and Gaden supplied him, following discussions with Soh, with further complementary material, often more interesting than the texts themselves, and this information was presented as footnotes and an extended glossary in the published work.8 Commentaries were completed by Gaden with Soh’s assistance, and additional material collected by Gaden directly from local informants along the valley was included, along with a chronological table of events. This work was the nearest thing to a written history of Fouta Toro reconstructed from oral traditions and legends. The Chroniques describe, for instance, the diverse dynasties and political regimes in the valley, and Gaden’s appended material including a rendition of a myth of how the weaver clans acquired their

5 Clozel (1860–1918) was the Governor of the Soudan (1908–1915) and for a brief period Governor General of West Africa (1915–1917). 6 There is collection of Delafosse’s letters to Gaden from this period lodged in the archives of the Musée de Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. 7 See cahier 1, Fonds Gaden, IFAN (IFCAD), Dakar. 8 It appeared as M. Delafosse, avec la collaboration de Henri Gaden. Chroniques du Fouta sénégalais, traduites de deux manuscrits arabes inédits de Siré Abbâs Soh et accompagnées de notes et documents annexes et commentaires, glossaire et cartes. (Collection de la revue du monde musulman). Paris: E. Leroux, 1913. 328 p.

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patronyms (by cooking and eating a hyena), and a note on specialised blacksmiths clans. Prior to the outbreak of war, Gaden managed to finish two more pieces of research, both focused on the Toucouleur people of the Senegal Valley, and destined for publication in scholarly journals. One article appeared in 1912 on the significance of personal naming, and the other, a war song, was not published until 1916.9 By the end of this four-year period of research and publication, Gaden was responsible for producing almost 1,000 pages of printed text.

Swindling and Embezzlement

In St Louis, the activities of members of the Devès family, in particular François and Hyacinthe, were becoming increasingly troublesome for the administration. Gaden of course had distant family connections to the Devèses and, although he disapproved of the antics of the three Devès brothers – of whom Justin was youngest – he must have felt in an awkward position as an official in the colonial service that opposed much of what they stood for. While Gaden had been the commandant at Boutilimit from 1908, reports had arrived in St Louis of the way the Devèses agitated against colonial regulations on trading with the Moors. By 1909, Justin had been elected mayor of St Louis, only to be removed from office and then re- elected again some time later.10 The power and influence of this family in the civic affairs of St Louis was great, and they wielded political clout through their commercial relations in the river valley and in Mauritania. Gaden had warned St Louis of the increasing influence of the family, not always for the good in his eyes. For instance, François and Hyacinthe had argued strongly against the imposition of a new tax regime in Mauritania

9 See Gaden’s ‘Du nom chez les toucouleurs et les peuls islamisés du Fouta sénégalais’, Revue d’ethnographie et sociologie, 1912, no. 1–2, 50–56 ; and ‘Un chant de guerre toucouleur’, Annuaire et mémoires du Comité d’études historiques et scientifiques de l’Afrique Occidentale Française, 1916, tome 1, 349–351. (Reprinted in Revue des Officiers de Réserve, 2e année, no. 5, juillet, 1937: 7–11.) 10 After the death of Justin Devès in 1916, the townsfolk of St Louis petitioned for a monument to be erected to the late Mayor. The request caused much pen-twitching in St Louis and Dakar, for the colonials were concerned about honouring a man they thought unworthy of a memorial, and of providing a visible rallying point for the rising discontent in the town. In 1917, the colonial official Clozel eventually called a halt to the move by saying that while he would not want to be seen to be standing against the proposal, he would want to cast doubt on whether Justin’s private life and service to the colony justified the honour. He advised against it. See ANS 3 G 3–6 AS.

336 chapter seven which, they claimed, would ruin the town’s merchants. Some years later, Gaden, once back in office in Mauritania, tried to encourage subsistence agriculture and thus increase returns for Moorish cultivators. His complaint was that the bad influence and swindling of François Devès promised to undermine his efforts.11 But other clouds were gathering in 1913 in the form of tax inspection in St Louis led by M. Rheinhart of the Finance Office, who reported his find- ings in 1914. The inspector had turned up embezzlement of personal taxation over the years 1911–13 by M. Seye, a chef de la banlieue in St Louis. His report went to William Ponty, the Governor, who suggested that administrative negligence was at the root of the matter and that the affair be referred to the Ministry of Colonies. Gaden was now in deep trouble since the affair fell within his area of administration. He was asked to provide explanations to the Minister, who remained unconvinced by his story. It was claimed that Gaden had not put in place sufficiently robust measures for the control of the collection of taxes in the suburb. Three officials were found guilty of embezzlement and dismissed, one was considered negligent and refused promotion, and Gaden seems to have got off lightly with a telling off. While he was guilty of ‘not engaging with his administrative responsibilities’, the mitigating circumstances claimed at the time mentioned his ‘long and beautiful career’ as ‘an excellent servant’. Ponty noted, however, in Gaden’s personal bulletin of 1914 that while he was very much appreciated by his superiors (‘hard-working, devoted, conscientious, of very sound judgement’, and passed as ‘a specialist in Muslim affairs’), the only shadow on his record came under the heading ‘relations with subordinates’, where he was noted to be ‘a little weak’. The same comments were repeated by Governor Angoulvant in his 1916 bulletin.12

Action in the Casbah

Gaden was unwell during the hivernage of 1914, and he was diagnosed as having anaemia associated with recurring bouts of malaria (perhaps made worse by worries over the tax affair?). Medical staff in St Louis advised that it was necessary for him to return to France to recuperate and take sick leave of around three months.13 His medical note was signed 21st July 1914.

11 See G. Désiré-Vuillemin, 1962: 209–82. 12 See ANS 1 C 9 and Fonds Gaden, CAOM, EEII. 13 See Gaden’s Dossier Personnel, ANS.

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However, Gaden did not manage to return to France for a period of much needed convalescence, but was instead posted to Morocco at the head of a company of Senegalese troops to face the growing threat of German interference in the north African French Protectorate. Colonial rivalries between the French and Germans in Morocco stretched back to the early part of the 20th century when France was trying to establish its control in north-west Africa. But Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany had designs on it too; in 1905, he had visited Morocco and declared it independent of French control. By 1912 the French army had established a strong military presence in the Sultan’s seats of power in Rabat, Fez, Meknès and along the Atlantic coast, but on the outbreak of war they were concerned that Germany would supply arms to Moroccan and Mauritanian rebels, who could be used as agents to desta- bilise the region. Gaden and his 14th Battalion of Tirailleurs Sénégalais were sent north from St Louis to address this potential disruption. One of the first engagements between the French and German forces in West Africa was at the battle of Laï in Chad, when Kaiser Wilhelm’s men from Cameroon attacked and overran French positions in Central Africa on 21st August 1914. Laï was one of the posts situated in the territory of Chad over which Gaden had charge at the end of his posting to Tchekna in 1907, and while he was there he complained of their vulnerability if Germany turned bellicose. But now the more immediate threat to West Africa came from Morocco and its southern reaches, where the continued presence of dissident Moors and Moroccan factions could seriously undermine the French position. Gouraud had by now been recalled from Morocco to Europe to face German forces on France’s eastern front. On 29th June 1915 Gaden and his company approached the casbah of the Moroccan leader Caid Ali Ben Abdesselam. They crossed over rough ground dotted with vegetation that provided the men with cover. As they neared a wood close to the casbah, a group of Moroccan fighters hiding among the trees to defend the fortified settlement opened fire and Gaden was gravely wounded in the right shoulder. He was evacuated from the scene, known later as the battle of Ouerra, and taken to the French hospital at Casablanca. He had sustained a wound from a bullet into his right armpit and now suffered from neuritis which caused him pain in his right arm and hand. The lesions in the shoulder responded well to ‘electro-therapy’, but the functions of his right hand did not return and showed no improvement for over one month. Minister of Colonies Gaston Doumergue, who was an important fixer in earlier years for Gouraud and Gaden, read news of the announcement of Gaden’s injuries and in mid-July wrote to him at the hospital to congratulate him on his ‘brilliant conduct’ and referred to

338 chapter seven his ‘a glorious wound of war’.14 Gaden remained under medical care in Casablanca until October 1915 and, although he could not operate in a military capacity, he assisted on General Lyautey’s invitation in the command of a cercle on the outskirts of Fez from April of that year. Apart from the restricted movement of his right arm, Gaden was in reasonable health and was eager to perform some sort of useful service.

Two Left-Handers

The fate of the two Henris was curiously comparable in June 1915. Gouraud saw action in the Argonne area of eastern France and had been wounded in the right shoulder in January 1915. He had refused to be evacuated from the scene and stubbornly remained with his men. Later in January, after having recovered, Gouraud was given command of the First Colonial Army Corps and was posted to the Gallipoli peninsula in eastern Turkey. On 30th June 1915 in the Dardanelles, one day after Gaden was shot in his right shoulder during his Moroccan campaign, Gouraud was gravely injured in an explo- sion that broke both of his arms. He subsequently lost his right arm. Gouraud now had to learn to write with his left hand, and the orthography of his later letters obviously shows a marked difference. Gaden too wrote initially with his left hand until he had recovered sufficient control of his right, when he would alternative between one hand and the other as each tired in turn. It took until April 1917, almost two years after sustaining the wound, for Gouraud to comment that Gaden’s handwriting had returned to its old style. The orthography of these two men is a visible literary sign of the injuries they sustained in the Great War and of the adaptations they had to make in their subsequent lives. Gaden was awarded the Croix de Guerre and was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour for his war service on 4th July 1915. Gaden wrote to Gouraud from the hospital in Casablanca on 19th August 1915. He had heard news of Gouraud’s injuries from Lyautey and he had been moved by ‘quite strong emotions’. Now he learnt that his friend was back on a horse, only six weeks after losing his arm. Gaden described how he would regain little by little the lost motor control in his hand, but admitted he did not have much to complain about given Gouraud’s predicament. He added modestly: ‘a chef de bataillon being easy to replace, it is not the same with you [a General].’ Gaden’s company of soldiers was earmarked for

14 Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC 1 (1).

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action in the Dardanelles, but the situation in Morocco was still delicate, and his men, spared that ordeal in Turkey, were replaced by troops sent directly from West Africa. On 28th October, Gaden wrote to General Lyautey to request that he be discharged from his military duties in Morocco and allowed to return to West Africa, given the advice provided to him by the medical staff. He asked to be put at the disposition of the Minister of Colonies for a transfer to the ‘colony to which I belong as a civil functionary’, and where he could best use his aptitudes.15 At the beginning of November the senior medical officers in Casablanca, Major Spick and Dr Chevalier, signed certificates stating that Gaden was no longer fit for military service and that he would require some six to nine months to recover fully from his injuries. On 10th November, seven days after the medical note was issued, Lyautey wrote to the Ministry of War reluctantly supporting Gaden’s request. Lyautey explained that Gaden was a superior officer of the highest value and had given inestimable service to Morocco during his posting in North Africa. He went on: ‘I would have actively desired to attach him definitely to Morocco’ but his wound would not permit him to render active service. ‘He is attracted to French West Africa that he knows and loves.’16 Gaden left Morocco on Christmas Day 1915 for France, where he immediately took a steamer bound for West Africa and arrived there on 3rd January 1916. He was no doubt anxious to see again Coumba Cissé, his mousso, who must have fretted during the intervening eighteen months since the time of his departure at the start of the war. Gaden was probably concerned too to pick up the threads of his West African research that had been long neglected.

The Civilized Moor and the Barbaric French

Gaden was promoted to the position of Administrateur en chef de 1ère classe on his arrival in St Louis in early 1916 and was attached to the administrative service of the Civil Territory of Mauritania as an adjutant to the Commissaire, Lieutenant-Colonel Louis Obissier. Gaden had heard while in hospital in Casablanca that Obissier, suspected of having contracted tuberculosis, was due to return to France on sick leave. Gaden had thought him to be on the way out in 1915; but he had not yet departed this world.

15 See Gaden’s Dossier Personnel, CAOM, EEII 974. 16 See Gaden’s Dossier Personnel, ANS for Lyautey’s letter, and for a copy of Gaden’s request too.

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One of the first tasks for Gaden was to accompany Shaykh Sidiyya to Dakar, where the two men met up with Maurice Delafosse, who had started work as an official in the Direction des Affairs Indigènes of the Government General of West Africa. Gaden and Delafosse, known to each other through collaborations in publishing ethnological work on Senegal, now carved out a more intimate relationship face-to-face in West Africa. During a visit to their house, the Delafosse family were impressed by the imposing presence of the Shaykh, who struck them as a refined and distinguished figure. Sidiyya was glad to see Delafosse, who had married Octave Houdas’ daughter Alice. The Professor of Oriental Languages from Paris was known in the Maghreb as ‘Shaykh Houdas’, and Delafosse, who had been student of his, had become a privileged pupil by marrying the ‘Shaykh’s’ daughter—a matrimonial strategy well known in Mauritania between teacher and a distinguished disciple.17 Gaden returned some days later to St Louis and left the Sidiyya in Dakar. Gaden was not back long before he was asked to give advice, perhaps by Delafosse, on the situation in the Senegal River Valley; and he used all his experience and historical insight to give a penetrating analysis of the problem.18 The issue revolved around the movement of pastoralists and nomads as part of their customary pattern of seasonal migration across the Senegal River to benefit from pasture at different times of the year. Moors used to pass the dry season on the south bank of the river, and the wet season on the north bank where the rains provided fresh grazing for their animals in the more arid lands on the desert margins. But now under the colonial regime, the south bank of the river belonged to the territory of Senegal, and the right bank to Mauritania. Populations in each of these now separate territories had to register for tax purposes, and populations could not move freely from one territory to the other without permission from the colonial authorities. In addition, different taxation systems operated in each territory: a head tax in Senegal; in Mauritania, a tax known as zakkat, an Arabic word referring to an Islamic tithe, that was levied on wealth usually measured in the form of animals. It was fixed by the colonial authorities at 1/40th of the value of animals of all categories. These two different systems of taxation had their origins in Governor Ponty’s politique des races in which different conditions were imposed upon different ‘races’ or ethnic

17 See L. Delafosse, 1976: 318, 322, 364. 18 See Gaden’s letter of 19th March 1916 in 9 G 33 – 1916, ANS; it is addressed to ‘Mon cher ami’, probably referring to Maurice Delafosse, whom Gaden had visited some weeks earlier. Gaden also wrote to Terrier on the same topic at the same time; see Fonds Terrier, IdF.

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groups. The Moors were considered to be ‘white’ and Muslim and so merited an Islamic tax; the Senegalese were regarded as ‘black’ and those who were Muslims adhered to what the French called ‘Islam noir’, a ‘black’ version of the religion. A head tax was considered appropriate for these ‘races’ that were viewed by the colonials as being at a different stage of cultural ‘evolution’.19 Gaden fumed over the injustice and idiocy of this system which fractured the customary patterns of movement and trade among peoples on both sides of the frontier, and had led to strategies of tax avoidance by local groups. For instance, there had been an exodus of certain groups of Moors to the south bank to escape the exactions of local warrior groups and to move to a place in which they paid a head tax. These groups were wealthy in animals and would be liable for high zakkat taxes in Mauritania but had a relatively low human head count, a benefit in Senegal. Groups from the south bank, by contrast, with fewer animals per person would move north to take advantage of lower amounts of zakkat they would have to pay compared to the head tax in Senegal. Gaden drew a parallel with the situation of the Tuareg in Zinder, where he had organised a system of local taxation many years earlier. He concluded: ‘It is their system of tax that was civilized and ours barbaric’. It did not take Gaden long to stir up controversy and to come down on the side of the local populations against the intrigues of political schemers and the folly of the colonial incompetents. For Gaden saw in all of this a history of bungling by administrators and corruption by local politicians. In 1908, Joost Van Vollenhoven, then the Governor of Senegal at the age of only 28 years, had made a mistake in not even asking the opinion of the Mauritanian administration when the tax system was set up in Senegal. Gaden saw too the hand of the St Louis politician Justin Devès (part of the métis branch of the family established in the town), for he was in the pay of certain groups of the Moors and had tricked Van Vollenhoven into instigat- ing the system. Gaden detected as well the nefarious dealings of Jules Couchard, another St Louis political figure, who had been accused of swindling money for his electoral campaigns. Furthermore, Gaden took the view that the matter had been suppressed by Colonel Patey in 1908, the result of either ‘freemason camaraderie’ or of second thoughts by those involved in the local elections.

19 William Ponty died in 1915 and was replaced by François Joseph Clozel as Governor General of West Africa, who progressively abandoned his predecessor’s politique des races.

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In May 1916, Gaden scrawled in his new child-like hand the first letter from St Louis to Gouarud since his return. Obissier had refused to return to France and continued to work in the Hôtel de la Mauritanie; Gaden commented that his state deteriorated by the day, that he was merely skin and bones and he stooped more and more. Obissier had been proposed for a promotion to the rank of colonel, and Gaden asked if Gouraud could pull some strings for him. Obissier did not have much time to see out before his retirement, if he were ever to take it; but Gaden the cynic suggested that the promotion would be welcomed by his widow because of the extra pension she could gain! Gaden complained also to Terrier that Obissier’s afflictions, described in some detail as ‘a museum of horrors’, prevented him from working properly. Gaden, moreover, held a low opinion of the commissaire who knew ‘neither the country nor the people, and had no other policies than those of Austria.’ He added: ‘I speak as though I were in command.’20 The colonial authorities were now involved in recruiting men for the war effort in Europe and for public order duties in West Africa.21 A figure of 50,000 men had been set for conscription in the Soudan, and men were being ‘hunted’ in Senegal. Gaden was puzzled by this claim since he had set up a system of recruitment in 1913–14. Over 100 men had been supplied by Mauritania for the French army following a call that went out initially to ‘black Moors, captives and haratines’ or members of servile groups, and ‘everything went without difficulty’, Gaden remarked. The new ‘recruits’ were stationed either in St Louis, or in Thiaroye and Rufisque, two settlements outside Dakar where training camps had been set up. There had been many desertions and much disturbance.22 Shaykh Sidiyya was encouraged to appear in front of the conscripts and lavish encouragement on them; but the dominant sentiment among the crowds gathered to see the Shaykh was fear. The Shaykh offered up prayers for peace, and marabouts in Dakar and St Louis fabricated amulets to protect the wearer from having to go to war. They sold for five francs each in St Louis. Gaden feared that the men recruited from the four communes in Senegal (Dakar, Rufisque, St Louis and the island of Gorée) would not make very good soldiers (compared with the well-trained Senegalese riflemen) and a group of 3,000 had been assembled for an imminent dispatch to France. Talk among

20 JHG-AT, May 1915 Fonds Terrier, IdF. 21 See for further details Echenberg, 1991. 22 The camp at Thiaroye was to be the scene of a bloody massacre of Senegalese soldiers by the French towards the end of the Second World War, and was the subject of a film by Sembene Ousmane.

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them had been that they did not want to go to the butchery in Europe, that they would not leave, and that all the officers in charge would be killed before they had to embark.

Brother Philippe’s Crisis

In the same letter of May 1916 to Gouraud, Gaden described the situation in which his brother Philippe found himself. His proposed plans for America seemed to have come to nought, and now he had transferred to Algeria where he still worked in the Devès and Chaumet trading house; the possibility existed of making something for himself there, Gaden thought. Despite the fact that trade had decreased owing to the effects of the war in Europe, he was still provided with an honourable living. But the state of his health was the cause of some concern in the family and he had stubbornly refused to return to France for a holiday and period of recuperation. Philippe had been on the point of setting off for France when he resigned his position in St Louis and sought the appointment in Algeria. But Gaden was unsure whether his brother had not in fact been fired from his previous post. Philippe eventually returned to France, but rather than go to Bordeaux or to Arcachon (a town on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux where the Gaden family had a holiday home), he headed off to Paris. Having caused all sorts of distress to his mother by demanding a sum of a few hundred francs for the journey back to the Gironde, Philippe eventually turned up on the doorstep at Arcachon seemingly recovered and remorseful. Gaden then sketched out the family drama to Gouraud: If he concerned himself with getting better, even by searching for work, one could forgive his escapades, but he set himself up in Arcachon as master [of the household], made scenes, and demanded money for all sorts of purposes; in brief, rendered the lives of these poor women [his mother and sister Mine] unbearable. Finally, he decided that, not making much of a success in commerce, it was in politics that he would make his fortune. He must be a ‘Catholic deputy’ [of the National Assembly], and he needed 5,000 francs to do politics in Paris, where he could count on some string-pulling by “his relations”. My sister wrote to me that your mother and you [Gouraud] are among the first tier of “his relations”. Naturally my uncles to whom he addressed himself have not given him a farthing, but if he finds the money he will be able to go to Paris. If this happens, my mother will warn yours immediately. You should however forewarn your sister. I would be very sorry if your excellent mother is troubled by all this. […] my brother is either completely misguided or suffers from a sort of mental breakdown. May your mother’s door remain closed to him. (JHG-HJEG, ??.05.16)

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All of this preoccupied Gaden greatly, for the idea that his brother, for whom he never had a great deal of affection, might come between him and his close friend and family caused much anxiety. Gaden felt powerless given the distances involved and the irregularity and uncertainty of war- time mail deliveries. He complained of ‘this painful exile’ in West Africa, where news from Europe was sketchy and brief. To add to his woes, his arm and hand had only made insignificant progress recently. The situation with Philippe became worse still over the next few weeks, for the brother had become dangerous and threatening towards his mother and sister, who were both powerless against him. At Philippe’s request, the two women had left the house in Arcachon, and he wrote aggressive letters and telegrams to other members of the family. They decided that they would try to have him committed, but that would be a long and difficult process, Gaden admitted; but he feared that if his brother were not locked up he would be capable of causing some terrible incident. Gaden confided in Terrier that unfortunately he, Gaden, had ‘many family enemies’, and no doubt Philippe was one of them. Whether this enmity extended to his mother or perhaps even his late father, we cannot be sure; but it did not appear to include his sister Mine, who continued to write to him. His friend Gouraud had also been neglecting to write, and so Gaden’s sense of isolation and loneliness was compounded (JHG-AT, ??.05.16).

My Future is in West Africa

By the summer of 1916, Commissaire Obissier’s state of health had deteriorated further, and it was obvious that a solution to the administration of the Civil Territory of Mauritania needed to be found. Gaden had been working for Obissier as his adjutant since his return to West Africa at the start of the year, and he was an obvious candidate to replace the ailing lieutenant- colonel. A letter from the offices of the Governor General in Dakar went out to the Ministry of Colonies in Paris to request permission for the immediate appointment of Gaden as Obissier’s replacement, and that the new man be given the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel de Réserve on a temporary basis, since he was no longer an active serving officer but only on the reserve list. Gaden’s qualities were lauded in the dispatches that went out from Dakar to secure this promotion: he was a ‘specialist in Muslim matters’ who had a ‘perfect knowledge of the populations of the Moors and the Senegalese’. In November 1916, Gaden succeeded to the position once occupied by his friend Gouraud, who had been the Commissaire of the Government General in Mauritania from the end of 1907 until 1910. Obissier died later in 1916.

paperwork and bullets: the years of scholarship and war 345

Gouraud eventually wrote to Gaden at the start of 1917 from Rabat after a long period of silence. Gouraud had taken over as the Resident General in Morocco in December 1916 when Lyautey, who had occupied this role, was appointed as the Minister of War in Paris. Gouraud had returned to Africa, albeit the northern rather than sub-Saharan part. Gouraud was disappointed not to find Gaden in Morocco, given his earlier military service under General Lyautey at the outset of the war, and he speculated on the possibility of them serving together in the same territory. Gouraud congratulated him on the news of his appointment to the command of Mauritania and he imagined Gaden’s new life: … you are settled into my old Hôtel [the Governance] and you must have abandoned your house eaten up by the sea, and transferred your Peul mousso [Coumba Cissé] and your cats to the Governance. Gouraud also passed on the news of the death of his brother Pierre who was ‘killed gloriously on the Somme on 14th October…’. It is difficult to imagine what a glorious death on the Somme in 1916 might have looked like but Gouraud, forever the fervent patriot, possessed an imagination infused with the vainglory of war. With his two brothers now dead, Gouraud was the only surviving male sibling and, along with his sister, took on responsibility for the four children from the two families that had become fatherless (HJEG-JHG, 14.1.17). This letter from Gouraud prompted a short flurry of correspondence between the two men over the following few months, but this temporary convergence in their epistolary paths was not to last long. Gaden was pleased to see a military man and not a politician take over from Lyautey in Morocco. He now had regrets that he had not stayed on in Morocco, and especially so since he had not cast off completely his military mantle. But Morocco was realistically no longer part of his plans and he stated boldly to his friend: ‘… my future is in French West Africa’. He had spent approximately 15 years out of the last 22 since his first posting to Bandiagara in 1894 in various territories in West Africa. Now set up in St Louis with Coumba in his new household, and committed to his scholarly work on the Senegal River valley, he had no reason to seek a life elsewhere. However, the immediate interests of the two men coincided over political and military concerns about French possessions in this north-western corner of Africa. Gouraud looked south from Rabat, and Gaden’s perspective was to the north from St Louis. One of the sons of Ma el Ainin, called El Hiba, was threatening to march south into Mauritania from Marrakesh, where he was holed up in the Pasha’s palace. El Hiba was suspected of taking money and arms from Germany and Turkey with a view to destabilising the French

346 chapter seven territories in the Maghreb and to further his own cause of resistance to French annexation. Ma el Ainin had died in October 1910, and his eldest son El Hiba had been proclaimed Sultan after the announcement of his father’s death. He had become the new menace in the north from the French point of view.23 In addition, one of the sons of Saad Buh, who had earlier been instrumental in lending legitimacy to French authority in Mauritania, now stated his ambition to create a state free of European influence. Gaden was not happy, moreover, with colonial policy in Adrar, where dissident groups were no longer allowed to move around the region. They had fled and so contact with these factions had now been broken; the result was that the French knew nothing about what was happening. Gaden’s policy would have been to maintain communications with all groups of Moors, whether supportive of the French cause or not (JHG-HJEG, 15.2.17).

Adieu, Mon Général

In early 1917, the French Bishop Hyacinthe Jalabert, head of the Catholic Church in Senegal, went on a tour of the posts in Mauritania and the Senegal Valley. Gaden organised the itinerary, gave Jalabert costings for the journey, and supplied him with valuable information on the region, the people and some of the local dignitaries. Jalabert met up with Shaykh Sidiyya, and the two men struck a harmonious chord together; Jalabert was particularly flattered by the efforts of Sidiyya’s son, Ahmed, who organised an escort and supplied camels for the bishop’s travels throughout Trarza and Brakna. Jalabert received a warm welcome in Boutilimit, and Shaykh Sidiyya was profoundly touched by the visit. The two men of God found common cause and a relationship of mutual respect developed between them. Part of Jalabert’s mission too was to care for the pastoral needs of the French troops, ‘the brave children of France’, stationed at the Mauritanian outposts.24 Meanwhile, Gouraud wanted news of his friends and old acquaintances from Mauritania, and sent from Morocco a seven-volume work for Shaykh Sidiyya; Gaden was to pass this gift on to Gouraud’s ex-collaborator. But Gouraud was out of touch with developments in West Africa and no longer knew, for example, who the Governor of Senegal was. Gaden’s friend Flye

23 See Masson, 1997. 24 See Jalabert’s correspondence with Gaden in Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC 1 (13). The bishop made a second tour of the region in 1918.

paperwork and bullets: the years of scholarship and war 347

Sainte Marie had just left North Africa, Gouraud reported, after seven years in colonial service and was heading for the front in Europe. The colonies must have appeared to be safe-havens where military personnel were sheltered from the slaughter that was being played out in various theatres around France and elsewhere on the continent. The offices of government in St Louis and Dakar were now reduced to a skeleton staff, and fewer men were stationed in outposts throughout the region. Gaden complained that the younger and inexperienced men who were left to run cercles and posts had neither the authority to command nor the ability to administer the people in their charge. Gaden was consequently overworked. A new Governor General replaced François Clozel in 1917, and this was Joost Van Vollenhoven, the former Governor of Senegal for a brief period, whom Gaden had criticised over the differing tax regimes in Senegal and Mauritania. Gaden now welcomed the new appointment of a ‘highly intelligent man’ who showed much personal sympathy and a good deal of confidence in his new role.25 One appointment that revolted Gaden was Lenfant’s nomination to the command of the territory of Chad. Lenfant had been the skipper of a river boat that plied the Chari River during his posting there, and Gaden had always found him to be a ‘bluffer’ whose sense of self-importance was greater than the scale of his achievements. Gaden did not always find it easy to erase past memories: ‘This is a scandal and a great imprudence’, he stated to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 26.11.17). Gouraud did not remain long in Morocco, for Lyautey returned to his post of Resident after a brief spell at the Ministry of War; Gouraud then headed back to Europe where he conducted a brilliant campaign during the battle of the Marne in 1918. After the armistice in November 1918, Gouraud marched through Alsace and on to Strasbourg, where he was welcomed, he reported, with warmth and enthusiasm from the local populations. Gouraud praised Gaden’s efforts in Mauritania during the war, and General Lyautey showered honour on the two of them for maintaining stability in the region over the long years of conflict (HJEG-JHG, 20.12.18). But the end of 1918 brought sadness to them both. The shadow of Gouraud’s mother’s death hung over him as he marched into eastern France, and Gaden announced the deaths first of his mother in September, and then those of his sister Germaine and his brother Philippe. The latter had over the course of the previous year stripped bare the villa in Arcachon, sold the contents and then had disappeared to Paris, where no-one knew his address

25 Van Vollenhoven did not remain long in post and returned to France to fight at the end of the war. He was killed in France in July 1918.

348 chapter seven or how he survived. It now turned out that Philippe had signed up for a French artillery regiment but before he had seen any action he contracted Spanish flu and died in hospital in Le Havre. ‘It is an honourable end after all his behaviour, and it was to be feared that it might have ended otherwise.’ But beyond these particular dark clouds of domestic sorrow, the joy felt at the end of the war overwhelmed even Gaden, not normally given to excesses of feeling or patriotic fervour: At no moment in its history has France shone with a glory as noble or as pure, [and] our dead have not sacrificed themselves in vain. The Bosch must now make reparations and atone, and we should remain united as we have been during the Great War. (JHG-HJEG, 19.12.18) The humiliation of 1870 and the Franco-Prussian war had been erased, and the French nation could be proud again of its renewed place as a global military power. Gaden praised his friend, and lauded his prominent role in the war effort and his brilliant successes on the battlefields of Europe. Gaden hoped that all this would bring Gouraud further promotion and public recognition. Gaden, conscious of his friend’s new-found fame as a war hero, was slightly uncertain as to how this new status might affect their relationship; indeed, in his letter of December he addressed him as ‘Mon Général’, and signed off in a similar fashion: ‘Adieu, mon Général’. Gouraud remained in Strasbourg for the best part of 1919, and then in October he was sent to Syria and appointed as France’s High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Levant. Gouraud’s career was taking off on a steep trajectory; Gaden meanwhile remained in St Louis, a backwater of the French Empire where he seemed content to continue his scholarship and his command of Mauritania.

CHAPTER EIGHT

GOVERNOR, SAVANT, ADOPTED SON: ST LOUIS, 1919–1927

From the Native Point of View

In December 1918, Gaden brought Gouraud up to date with the latest developments in Mauritania. The Moors in general, Gaden reported, seemed loyal to the French and an emirate in Tagant had been established where an Emir, named Abdur Rahman, loyal to the colonial cause had been installed. The result was complete security and an end to brigandage in the area, he stated (JHG-HJEG, 19.12.18). Shaykh Sidiyya and his family had fallen on hard times since the religious leader had not felt it proper to conduct a customary tour of the territory to see his disciples and followers to collect their offerings (ziarra) during the war. The Shaykh considered that this would have been an abuse of his talibes; but by the end of 1918, his son and nephew were forced to start on a tour of collection in the country to relieve the family’s predicament. Gaden reported too that Saad Buh was dead and his sons remained united, committed to their late father’s policy of cooperation with the colonialists; later many of them came to address Gaden as ‘father’ and treated him as a figure of authority (JHG-HJEG, 20.7.19). The only blemish on this picture was the position of the Emir of Adrar, Sidi Ahmed Ould Ahmed Ould Aida, the man Gouraud had set up in office after his conquest of the region. The Emir was brought to St Louis in the summer of 1918, since his ‘presence was becoming dangerous for our [French] authority’, as the official dispatch from the Governor General’s office in Dakar explained to the Minister of Colonies.1 In fact, the Emir was creating problems for the French in Adrar and among the ‘grand nomads’ of the north. The Emir’s links with the faction of the late Ma el Ainin was a concern to the French, and El Hiba’s forces were gaining strength and influence in the region. In addition, one specific group of Moors had suffered from armed raids, assassinations and brigandage, and they in turn had sought the assistance of factions not yet submitted to the French. These factions could have joined forces to move against the Emir and the colonialists. Furthermore, Gaden was unhappy with the calibre of officers he

1 See 9 G 35, ANS for the file on the Emir’s presence in St Louis.

350 chapter eight had under his command, and the situation in Adrar was a testament to their poor grasp of political relations. Gaden argued that to arrest and deport the Emir would have made ‘an unfavourable impression from the native point of view’, and so the commissaire summoned Sidi Ahmed to St Louis to defend himself against the accusations made by the oppressed group of Moors.2 This was a clever piece of diplomacy by Gaden, who needed to have the Emir removed from Adrar as soon as possible and at the same time give the impression to local Moors that the Emir had important business to discuss with the commissaire in his office in St Louis. By this ploy, Gaden saved faced for the Emir and stopped him turning dissident and making common cause with El Hiba’s men. The Emir was accompanied by a group of chiefs, but they were soon on their way back north to return for the date harvest. In effect, the Emir was now detained at Gaden’s pleasure, the danger was averted and no untoward political incident had occurred. Not contained in the official documentation on this incident were Gaden’s private thoughts about Commandant Modat in Atar, who had been operating as a quasi-prime minister to the Emir and had allowed the impoverishment of one group of Adrar Moors, who were the source of the complaint. Gaden also devised another scheme to deal with groups of Moors still resistant to French annexation of their territories. He tried to keep in contact with such groups so as to maintain his sources of intelligence and also to keep open the doors to negotiation. He had been working with the Ouled Khalil faction, trying to persuade them to come on board the colonial ship, but the task had not been easy. So Gaden decided to create a new category of native persons for dealing with such groups. Rather than their being considered simply as either ‘dissidents’ or ‘notables’, he referred to factions like these as ‘foreigner friends’ (étrangers amis) who were treated as being neither for nor against the French cause, but who could be brought within the colonial sphere of influence. These groups were at liberty to conduct their seasonal migrations and movements without interference and would pay only a light tax in camels to the authorities. Some had already taken up this option, and others appeared to be interested in this intermediate category of affiliation.3 While Gaden brought changes to the landscape of Mauritanian politics in the latter half of 1918, the French government was about to reorganise the civil territory. Gaden got wind from Delafosse at the end of 1918 that the

2 See Gaden’s letter dated 7th July 1918 to the Governor General, 9 G 35, ANS. 3 See Désiré-Vuillemin, 1962: 213 et passim.

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R . S E N E G A L

VILLAGE OF NDAR TOUTE Great Mosque Prison La Geôle Bridge

Hotel de la Mautritania Rue Flamand

Quai Roume Avenue Dodds Marché Rue de la Mosquée Rue Brière de l’Isle

A T L A N T I C O C E A N Geut Ndar Bridge Place Faidherbe Bridge Rex Cinema Faidherbe Rue de l’Eglise Governor’s Palace St Louis Cathedral

Artillerie

Hospital SOR Map 5. The Town of St Louis prior to World War II. War ofWorld St Louis prior to Town Map 5. The

Quai Henri Jay

Rue Carnot

Rue Blaise Dumont VILLAGE OF GUET NDAR

0 miles 0.25

BARBARY 0 kilometres 0.5

T O N G U E O F

352 chapter eight ministry wanted to keep him as the head of Mauritania and that he might be appointed Governor of the territory without it becoming an autono- mous colony. He was naturally in favour of these suggestions, but it would mean he would have to forego his leave in France the following year. He had passed four consecutive hivernages in West Africa and had taken only 30 days holiday since 1912; he was due for a break. In 1895, five separate colonies had been established as part of the confederation of French West Africa under the Governorship General based in Dakar. These were Senegal, Soudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast and the Congo, and each had its own Governor. Under the new proposals, Mauritania was not to be given the same status as these colonies, but would become a Territoire en colonie (colonial territory) with its own Lieutenant Governor rather than a Commissioner, as the post had been designated up to this point; indeed, all the personnel to serve in the position of Commissioner had been active military officers of the rank of lieutenant colonel. The military preferred to see an active officer put in place as the new governor, since the conquest of Adrar had not brought peace and many military personnel were still posted in the territory. Gaden was no longer an active serving military officer, but was on the list of reserve officers. This gave his supporters a plank on which to build an argument for his permanent appointment as governor. It was argued that as a high ranking officer with an excellent service record he would be precisely the man for the job, for he understood the concerns of the military and yet had experience in civil administration. He was a perfect candidate who, it was claimed, met all the seemingly contradictory demands of the army and of civil administration. Gaden was nominated by the Governor General’s office for the post in April 1919 in a letter from Dakar to the Minister of Colonies, and was appointed following the announcement of his promotion in August of that year. He attained the grade of Governor of the Colonies, Third Class, and was given the permanent rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, since Mauritania counted as a battalion of at least six units, if all the military posts were taken into consideration. The letter stated that the relationship between the lieutenant governor and the military commanders needed to be specified precisely, for this was a special situation, and that no importune military action would be tolerated. The era of military operations in Mauritania was closed, it stated.4 And so, by decree, Mauritania became an independent colony on 4th December 1920, and Gaden was appointed its first Governor, a post that he was to hold until his retirement, due to take effect on 31st December 1926. (See plate 12.)

4 See Gaden’s Dossier Personnel, ANS.

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Dealing with Businessmen

Meanwhile, as the machinery of government in Paris was turning slowly to consider his appointment to the position of Governor of Mauritania, Gaden had been pursuing policies that were reaping remarkable results. In 1917 Taleb Khiar, the son of Ma el Ainin who lived beyond the pale of French rule in northern Mauritania, wrote to the French authorities to say that he was using his influence on members of his faction to bring about peaceful relations with the colonial powers. Taleb enumerated various conditions which he hoped would be met if his faction were to submit, and Gaden responded to this letter neither discouraging him nor luring him with sweeteners. Gaden was concerned about introducing ‘one of the enemy’ into the ranks of Moors supporting the French cause. There was a suspicion too that Taleb and his brothers were hedging their bets over the outcome of the war, and that they might have been equally inclined towards the Germans or Turks were things to go their way. Once it was clear that France was on the side of the victorious, Taleb approached the French again early

Plate 12. Henri Gaden as Governor of Mauritania (reproduced with kind permission of the Direction des Archives, Ministère des Affaires Etrangers, Paris).

354 chapter eight in 1919 and at the end of March presented himself at the post in Atar to offer his submission. Taleb addressed his letters of January and February to Gaden in the following terms: ‘Fulsome and perfumed greetings to the Chief, the good Administrator, the intelligent, the representative of the noble French people’.5 Taleb only agreed to travel to St Louis if he were accompanied by Shaykh Sidiyya, and in May the two men arrived in the town along with Mohammed Wuld Khalil. Taleb asked Sidiyya for one of his daughters in marriage, and this alliance cemented the relationship between the two Moors. Gaden and Taleb negotiated the terms of surrender and it was agreed that the palm groves in Adrar that had been confiscated from Ma el Ainin’s faction would be returned to him along with other goods. The acte d’aman (pledge of submission) included ten conditions that were signed by the two men and stated, among other points, that Taleb and family would live as marabouts and give up their weapons except for hunting rifles; that they be allowed without hindrance to collect offerings from his religious followers; to visit them for commerce and to travel in Mauritania and other colonies; and, on the express demand of Shaykh Sidiyya, that Taleb should be exempt from paying zakkat tax on all animals that belonged to him.6 The hope was that if light conditions were imposed upon Taleb and his immediate family, then his other brothers might follow suite. Gaden wrote to the governor that ‘the people of Adrar would appear to view Taleb Khiar’s submission with satisfaction and attach a real importance to it from the point of view of pacification’. Gaden then took Taleb to Dakar, where he met with the acting Governor General Angoulvant. Gaden remarked to Gouraud that Taleb gave the impression that he was not particularly preoccupied with religious questions when negotiating his submission but uniquely with his material interests. ‘If his brothers are like him we will be dealing with businessmen’, he added. This trait would have appealed to Gaden, the son of Bordeaux (JHG-HJEG, 20.7.19). (See plate 13 of Taleb Khiar taken in St Louis.) Gaden exchanged views with Gouraud about developments in France. He was not impressed by the new post-war government (‘a band of fools’), and he thought it was inadmissible that ‘this band [should] act to ruin such a hard-won victory’; the politics of Georges Clemenceau were not to Gaden’s liking. His sister Mine, now over 50 years old, had become attached to the Red Cross and had fallen in love and married an even older man, Amedée Balaresque, an administrator, in January 1919. Clare Devès was the witness

5 In 9 G 36–1919, ANS. 6 In 9 G 37–1920, ANS.

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Plate 13. Taleb Khiar (standing in the centre) with Emir Sidi Ahmed and Mohammed Wuld Khalil (seated) and attendants standing behind, most likely at the time of Khiar’s submission to the French in 1919 (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 2, item 30, no. 701, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive).

at their marriage. Up till then Mine had lived with her Aunt Lise (also a Devès), but after her marriage she left her in Arcachon to join her new husband. Gaden seemed a little disturbed by this news, for he suggested that Mine had ‘deliberately left’ his ageing aunt alone. ‘She is in love, that is uppermost’, he concluded. But the prospect of having as his only option staying with this elderly relative when back in France did not attract Gaden greatly. Gaden enquired whether Gouraud’s sister now lived in his apartment in Paris, for she was his only remaining sibling. Gouraud, it seems, never found another woman to fill the hole in his life left by his beloved Gaby. One last item of news Gaden reported was that Bayla Biram, the loyal Toucouleur who had seen action alongside Bablon with a group of partisans, had now returned to the Senegal Valley, where he took up his previous position as chef de canton. Biram had been put forward for a military decoration but was not successful; Gaden saw the machinations of the St Louis political elite working to prevent this, in particular the figure of Blaise Diagne, the first Senegalese deputy elected to the French National Assembly

356 chapter eight and nationalist politician.7 Gaden’s conclusion was: ‘I fear that this malfea- sant and abhorrent negro [Diagne] has worked against him [Biram]’. Bayla Biram was probably viewed as being too much of a colonial stooge to be granted special treatment by Diagne, the target of a poisonous racist outburst from Gaden.

Delayed Publications

The pace of Gaden’s research and publications slowed to a virtual stand- still while he was governor of the colony. However, he did have time to put the final touches to a piece of collaborative work that had been triggered by his experiences in Chad some 14 years earlier. When wandering through the area around Melfi and Moito on a tour of duty from the post at Tchekna in 1906, he had come across polished axe-heads, stone tools and human remains. The finds were confirmed to be Neolithic by his collab orator, Dr R. Verneau, Professor of Anthropology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and Conservateur du Musée d’Ethnographie. Together they wrote a scholarly article which was published in 1920.8 Gaden continued, however, to maintain and develop his contacts with local intellectuals, religious leaders and influential characters in the river valley. They supplied him with historical and ethnographic information, and from time-to-time texts of one sort or another that might be worthy of publication. One significant character that Gaden met most probably just after the end of the war was Shaykh Moussa (Muusa) Kamara. Kamara was a Muslim intellectual, literate in classical Arabic (and not just ajami), and an important religious leader who was born in a village close to the town of Matam at the eastern end of the middle river valley. A student and disciple of Saad Buh (1848–1917), the Mauritanian marabout, Kamara had a

7 Blaise Diagne (1872–1934) was first elected in 1914 and served until 1934 in the French parliament. An originaire of Gorée, educated partly in France under the patronage of Adolphe Crespin, a wealthy métis merchant from St Louis, he returned to Senegal to complete his education. Conscious of the distinctions amongst Senegalese between originaires from one of the four communes who were accorded rights as French citizens, and indigènes or sujets who were born outside of these enclaves, Diagne sought to establish rights of citizenship for all Senegalese soldiers irrespective of their legal status who fought for France during the Great War. His politics did not go down well in colonial circles. 8 See ‘Stations et sépultures néolithiques du territoire militaire du Tchad’, par H. Gaden (Gouverneur des Colonies, Lieutenant-Gouverneur de la Mauritanie) et le Dr R. Verneau (Professeur d’Anthropologie au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Conservateur du Musée d’Ethnographie), L’Anthropologie, 1920, tome XXX, 513–543.

governor, savant, adopted son: st louis, 1919–1927 357

reputation as a scholar and man of God throughout the valley and beyond, and he came to the attention of the French authorities in the second decade of the century. A close contemporary of Gaden, Kamara was born in 1864 (he died in 1945), three years before his colonial counterpart and he lived for six more years after Gaden’s death. The Shaykh was the author of a number of manuscripts that detailed the history of the Senegal Valley region during the period of the establishment of its political regime at the end of the 18th century. The exact circumstances of how and why Kamara was prompted to write his histories are unclear, but it seems that he started to write Zuhûr al-Basâtîn or ‘History of Black Muslims’ around 1920, and in his words ‘it was M. Gaden, erstwhile Governor of Mauritania, who had recommended me to do this work by drawing my attention to it’. The manuscript was delivered to Gaden in 1924, and it was then sent to Maurice Delafosse who had promised to translate it. He started work on it but died in 1926 before he could complete the full text; and here the sorry story of Kamara’s plight begins. Kamara wrote the words quoted above about Gaden in a letter dated ‘Monday, 22 March 1937, Christian era’ to the Direction des Affairs Politiques et Administratives in Senegal; that is, some 13 years after he had given the manuscript to Gaden to be handed on to Delafosse. By 1937, it had still not been translated and published as promised. The trail of the manuscript is long and puzzling: first, the original manuscript could not be found among Delafosse’s possessions after his death in 1926, nor any of his translations of it, despite Gaden’s promptings to his family and executors; a second copy of the manuscript was made by Kamara, stretching to some 1,700 pages of hand-written text, and this was sent to Paris for translation. By the 1936, the text remained untranslated, and the attempt to have the work done by M. Benhamouda, a professor at the Sadiki College of Tunis, came to nought. Gaden had in the meantime secured from the budget of the West African Colonial Office 10,000 frs to pay for the translation, but this seems to have had little effect in getting the work done. A nominal sum of 500 frs was allocated to the Shaykh as a gesture, a ‘political gift’ for the work he had done in producing the history.9 The Shaykh’s dignified sorrow is captured in his 1937 letter, and his sense of puzzlement as to how and why the work had not then been finished. Kamara died in 1945 and never saw the completion of his principal project, the publication for which he had so fervently

9 See a letter from GGAOF to Ministre des Colonies, 8.12.36, CAOM 1AFFPOL 2802/7. See the same carton for Kamara’s 1937 letter.

358 chapter eight hoped. Almost 75 years after Kamara submitted his work to Gaden, the text finally appeared in French translation.10

Pandemonium Greets the Minister

At the start of 1920, Gaden sent his congratulations to Gouraud on his appointment the previous year to the post of High Commissioner of the French Republic to Syria and as Commander-in-Chief of Army of the Levant. Gaden was surprised that Gouraud accepted the posting to the Middle East since his position in the Alsace after the war meant that he could easily maintain contact with his remaining family in Paris.11 The situation in Mauritania was relatively peaceful, although a new set of difficulties had developed in the far north-western corner of the Maghreb, where the Spanish were in control of the area known as Rio de Oro, and German influence among dissident Moors continued to pose a threat for the French. Gaden had hoped to meet up with Gouraud in France during the leave that was due to him later in 1920, but his friend’s new posting meant that they probably would not get the chance to chew the fat together face to face. Gaden did return to France in September 1920 and spent some of his time holed up with his elderly aunt Lise in Arcachon. On 10th October 1921, the Minister of Colonies, M. Albert Sarraut, made a visit to St Louis, and at 5 p.m. he stepped off the train from Dakar onto the platform where a welcome party in formal dress stood in line. It included the Governors of Senegal and Mauritania, various administrators and military officers. Outside the train station a host of military units — spahis on horseback, meharistes on camels, and a group of 60 armed Moor warriors led by the Emir of Trarza, Ahmed Saloum III — waited for the minister to emerge. A horse-drawn carriage twitched nervously outside, the over- excited animals were strapped in harness and waiting to take the minister on to the isle of St Louis itself across the Faidherbe bridge. As the party walked out into the evening sunshine, pandemonium broke lose: a car backfired, the horses of the cavalrymen reared up, the camels were unsettled and made all manner of strangulated noises, and the cortege was

10 Appearing in 1998, the collective product of a team of researchers under the direction Jean Schmitz, the work is entitled Florilège au Jardin de l’histoire des noirs: l’aristocratie peule et la révolution des clercs musulmans (Vallée du Sénégal). 11 Gouraud became known in France as the ‘pacifier and organiser of Syria’ during his time there.

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severely disrupted. A car was then summoned instead to take the minister into town and the mass of riders followed as an unruly escort over the Faidherbe bridge and into the square at the centre of St Louis that bore the same name, Place Faidherbe. Gaden commented: ‘This barbarity provided a great and successful picturesque moment.’ The following day in the afternoon, after a presentation by the Governor of Senegal, it was the turn of the Governor of Mauritania to welcome the minister. The morning had witnessed a speech by Bouna Ndiaye, one of Gaden’s collaborators, the son of the king of Jolof, who ‘spoke French with the most perfect ease’.12 The afternoon provided another kind of entertain- ment. The company of Moors and meharistes, who had attended the reception party the previous day, were organised in ranks and faced a line of spahis. They had just performed a series of exercises for the assembled dignitaries and had filed down Avenue Dodds on N’Dar Tout towards to the Hôtel de la Mauritanie. Emir Ahmed Saloum’s men had been given blank cartridges to fire off during a salute to the minister, but once they used them all up they reverted to live ammunition. Bullets flew through the air, and Gaden later expressed his relief that there were no accidents. More parades took place with horsemen galloping up and down the Avenue, and then finally the cavalry lined themselves up behind a battery of drummers beating tamtams opposite the Hôtel; a huge racket ensued, according to Gaden. A number of notables were gathered to meet the minister and to be presented with various decorations and medals: Shaykh Sidiyya, Emir Saloum III, Ahmed Wuld Deid (the son of the late Emir of Trarza, killed in 1886), Sidati, the son of the late Saad Buh, and many others. Bayla Biram was also presented with a rosette, and the Emir was awarded the Cross of the Legion d’Honneur, the first Moor ever to receive such an honour. He struck an imposing figure amongst the European military officers and dignitaries with his long straggling hair, his almost ‘biblical profile’, and he walked with a majestic carriage and noble bearing worthy of any ruler. He was honoured for the role he had played during the Great War, for he had remained loyal throughout and had commanded his partisans with pride. The day’s events were rounded off by a dinner at the Hôtel de la Mauritanie, which was hardly large enough to accommodate the party of guests that included the Governor General from Dakar. They dined in the vestibule, for the dining room was too small, and ‘it was only a scant affair

12 See newspaper article entitled ‘M. Albert Sarraut in Saint Louis’ in the Paris-Dakar 1921, in 15 APC/2, CAOM.

360 chapter eight due to the poverty of means’ suffered by all officials in the post-war period. Gaden told Gouraud that the visit was likely to feature in the newspapers and photographs of his old friend’s former residence would be published: ‘You will see there the small Hôtel. Nothing has changed, except that the billiard room is no more.’ Gouraud had indeed heard of the announcement of the ministerial visit on the radio, and he had imagined the scenes as they were being reported to him. Gaden added a final note on the stable situation in Mauritania, and on the many changes he had made to the territory. What was important, he remarked, for the Muslim populations was the following: ‘a strong command that knows how to obey, which assures justice and prevents the exactions of intermediaries. If along with this, the authorities respect their religion and customs, they [the Moors] will be pleased (JHG-HJEG, 20.11.21).

The French, the Mother of All People

It took Gouraud three months to reply to Gaden’s letter of November 1921. He was back in Paris and taken up with his usual hectic round of visits and dinner parties, but he found a moment to put pen to paper. He was pleased to see the official recognition given at the visit of the minister to his old friends from Mauritania, in particular Ahmed Wuld Deid and Bayla Biram. ‘The attitude [and] the devotedness of the Moors during the war … are the best justification of our expedition 13 years ago’, he remarked in reference to the Adrar campaign. Gouraud was also busy sorting out a selection of his photographs of Mauritania for the National Colonial Exhibition to be held from April to November of 1922, and this task made him think of his old friends from St Louis (HJEG-JHG, 5.2.22). A delegation of representatives from Mauritania was sent to Marseille as part of the exhibition, and Gaden had selected a few favoured individuals for the trip, all expenses paid for by the French. There were various palaces at the exhibition for people and events from each of the French colonies around the globe, and one was dedicated to West Africa. Three of Gaden’s close friends and collaborators travelled to Europe to take part in it and to visit some of the sites France had to offer. The colonial interpreter Bou el Mogdad II, the ex-soldier and canton chief Bayla Biram, and Cheikhouna Wuld Dadah, the ex-son-in-law of Shaykh Sidiyya (and possibly a relative of Shaykh Dadah from Boutilimit) were part of the party. They travelled down to Dakar in early July 1922 to meet up with delegates from other parts of West Africa. A steamer named Tchad then took them to Bordeaux, from

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where they journeyed by train to Marseille. Cheikhouna wrote two very long letters to Gaden during his visit to France and they reveal the experiences and impressions of a group of African men encountering European life for the first time. Cheikhouna was taken particularly by the ‘faces full of expression and of pleasure and good humour’ of the officials in Dakar and then of those who met them with a warm welcome when they disembarked in Bordeaux. This was probably in stark contrast to their previous cooler experiences of relations over many years with colonial officers in West Africa. The luxuries they tasted and opulence they enjoyed during their voyage left vivid impressions: Each one of us is in a cabin the likes of which cannot be found from the point of view of its beauty. It contained everything that one might need, and situated next to each cabin was a bathroom provided with fresh water and warm water and clean towels. When one needed something one rang a bell suspended [in the cabin] and a boy brought us whatever we wanted in a flash. […] Whoever wanted to could go out to pray or take the air, for it is a vast place, pleasant and agreeable which is washed every moment from morning, midday and evening.13 Their meals were varied and the menu long so that ‘each one eats what he wants’. Governor General Merlin was in France and accompanied the guests at various points on the trip. When they were in Marseille he gave an address, the theme of which was that ‘the intelligent increase intelligence, and the negligent awaken their negligence’. Cheikhouna recounted Merlin’s words: … the French are the mother of all people above all of those who practise the Muslim religion for they treat the people with a compassion similar to that of a mother and her child, occupying herself with the interests of her child. Whoever understands should know that he is obliged to have a love for the French just as a child ought to have for his mother and to obey them as servants might obey their master. This type of colonial discourse struck all the condescending and infantilis- ing notes that could be imagined: Africans were child-like and needed the protection of an adult; they should show gratitude towards the French who should be treated like their masters. Cheikhouna refrained from providing any commentary on this address. He was in a difficult position, for while he and his fellows may have been humiliated by Merlin’s words, they were

13 See Fonds Gaden, IFAN (IFCAD), cahier 79. The letters are dated 8th and 26th July 1922.

362 chapter eight being overwhelmed by the generosity and seemingly genuine friendship the officials were extending to them. Their trip included visits to numerous factories: those extracting oil from groundnuts produced in Senegal; others making soap, syrup and sweet goods, bricks, chocolate and much more. They saw shops ‘which contain everything one could want’, and then they went down to the port and saw sights for which they had no words to name: We saw an edifice which transports men and animals in the air and which find themselves suspended over the sea by ropes which are themselves in the air. Cheikhouna’s second letter described their voyage up to Paris, where they saw Napoleon’s tomb and those of French war heroes, went on a tour of Versailles, and met Marechal Foch and the Minister of War Maginot. At a military parade at Longchamps they saw thirty French generals including Charles Mangin (the late Georges’ elder brother) and Patey, both of whom had served in West Africa. They watched the file-past of military vehicles, bicycles, planes, carrier pigeons, machine guns and so much more. ‘All this is a terrible danger’, Cheikhouna noted. The two sites that impressed them the most were the Palace at Versailles and the battlefields of Verdun. At the palace, they passed from room to room and saw things even more beautiful than the last they had just witnessed. And the memory of these previous objects was swept from their minds by the ever-increasing splendour of what they saw. On the 23rd July, a tour of Verdun was organised and they saw the places associated with Gouraud and his military campaign. We saw the traces of war, numerous tombs, villages destroyed, mountains shattered, trees dried out, which proves that the thing was terrible although we visited only one battle field. They were deeply moved by these sights and particularly by the place where the village of Fleury once stood, for the war had left not one stone standing. Apart from these places of obvious interest to any foreign visitor, what Cheikhouna remarked upon frequently was the attitude and demeanour of the French people: ‘large populations with a gentle and respectful character and completely at peace.’ The gratitude that Cheikhouna expressed to Gaden for selecting him and his companions for the trip came out in his excessive forms of address: on 8th July, ‘This is an adieu to Monsieur the generous, the intelligent chief, the just Gouverneur Gaden. Greetings worthy of your rank’; on 26th July, ‘To the chief who governs with justice, equity, correctness, science, intelligence, courtesy, indulgence, patience and bravery. Le Gouverneur Gaden.

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Greetings worthy of your high rank’. This last salutation written on the boat as they returned to West Africa via a short stay in Morocco no doubt captured the way in which he had been totally overwhelmed by the experiences of the previous few weeks during a whistle-stop tour of the ‘mother country’.

Your African Devotee

Forms of address were now an issue between Gaden and Gouraud. Gaden continued to show Gouraud a degree of respect since his elevation to high office by his use of more formal styles in his letters. He would open his correspondence now with the words: ‘Mon Général, vieil ami’; Gouraud used the formula he had always employed: ‘Mon vieil/cher ami’. This was a sign of the increasing bifurcation in the careers of the two men and the difference between their relative statuses. It was also a symptom of the increasingly irregular correspondence and distance between the two old friends. Gaden had begun a programme of agricultural training and development in Trarza, Brakna and Tagant, especially in the latter province where local people were tending closely to their palm groves and had ‘taken to cultivation with a veritable passion’. Dams were being constructed in stone to prevent them being washed away during flash floods, and these would provide water for irrigation. The official production figures revealed the results of these changes, for Tagant now produced between 1,500 and 9,000 tonnes of millet per year. The plough was introduced in Trarza to increase agricultural output, but this new technology did not go down well with the ‘captive’ or servile ranks of society who were reluctant to work with it. Bayla Biram was involved in similar types of scheme in his canton in the Senegal River valley, and Gaden had sent him a young agricultural engineer to encourage greater production and the introduction of new tools and methods of cultivation. He remarked to Gouraud: ‘I am doing my utmost to permit the natives to live in peace in their country. The Moors are worth more than their reputation.’ The long-standing tensions and animosity between the Emir of Trarza, Ahmen Saloum III, and Ahmed wuld Deid, who had earlier been made by the French a chef militaire in the region around Boutilimit – part of the Emir’s territory – had now subsided; in fact, they were reconciled and this new relationship was sealed by the marriage of Deid to one of the Emir’s daughters some time later. In an increasingly rare passage of correspondence, Gaden described his domestic circumstances to his friend, whose last letter had found him no longer living in the official residence allocated to the Governor of

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Mauritania, but in his old villa by the sea. His cats had died of old age one after the other, and he was angry with his last ‘professor of Pulaar’ with whom he worked on his linguistic studies, and he had yet to replace him. His change in domicile was linked no doubt to a new addition to the Gaden household, a two-and-a-half year old boy called Amadou Aïdara whom he had been taken into his care. He was a new companion for Gaden who was brought in to his rooms after his meals, often taken alone. Many years earlier, the boy’s mother had been abandoned by an ‘Algerian woman’ in 1908 at Boutilimit, and Gaden had collected up the young girl almost dead with hunger and brought her up. The girl, named ‘Aminata Cissé’, had later given birth on 12th April 1920 to Amadou who was fathered by a Moor named ‘Aïssé Aïdara’.14 The young child was brought three times a day to take his meals with Gaden after which he played for a short while and was then taken away to leave Gaden to his work. Gaden explained that: he is surprisingly alert and an extreme trouble-maker because it appears that his mother ate a lot of chicken when she was pregnant. Everyone knows that a chicken is only calm when it sleeps. (JHG-HJEG, 19.11.22) Gaden was probably the last of the French Governors in St Louis to live in an official residence with a mousso. Before him was the well-known case of the then Chef de Bataillon Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal from 1854– 1861, and then again from 1863–1865.15 He lived in the governor’s palace with his mousso by a country marriage not recognised by Napoleonic law, and his companion received the honour and status due to the spouse of a governor. The couple had a number of children. By the 1920s, however, St Louis society had changed quite markedly and, with improvements in health and hygiene, medicine and sanitation, more European wives could now accompany their husbands to overseas postings to West Africa, and

14 See the entry for Amadou Aïdara’s baptism in Le Registre de Baptême, 1908–30, No. 16. Cathedral, St Louis in 1930. 15 Louis Léon César Faidherbe, born 1818 in Lille, received a military education at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, served in Algeria and the French West Indies before being transferred to Senegal. He pacified the territory and was the architect of the colony of Senegal. Faidherbe established the first Ecole des Otages to educate the sons of chiefs and notables in French language and culture. He was instrumental too in developing France’s scientific study of its African colonies and produced a number of scholarly works in linguistics and anthropology. As a colonial administrator-scholar, he set a precedent that men like Maurice Delafosse and Henri Gaden followed in many ways. At the rank of general, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the North during the Franco-Prussian wars of 1870, was then a senator in the French parliament and opposed the Boulangist movement. He died in Paris in 1889. For further details on Faidherbe see: Gann and Duignan (eds), 1978; Cohen, 1971.

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Senegal in particular; by the middle of the decade there was estimated to be a total of nearly 1,500 European women in the four communes.16 The presence of women encouraged a more domestic and bourgeois atmosphere in the town, and the previous lifestyle of a solitary and supposedly celibate existence in a society made up mostly of white men was on the decline. The colonial authorities recognised the potential disruption that the women’s presence might bring to the life of the colonies, and hand- books were issued to recommend suitable activities for colonial ladies. To stave off the threat of inactivity, boredom, depression and disturbance to their husbands’ work routines, ladies were advised to take up social work, care of African children and the poor, or studies of local flora and fauna. A range of social engagements was organised, particularly during the dry season months, and included in the schedule were balls at the Governor’s palace, Sunday band concerts, theatre and operatic productions. The social occasions were extremely formal and evening dress was the only accepted dress code at many of them. As Cruise O’Brien explains, ‘social pettiness and a taste for exaggerated formality’ were on the increase. The old métis families of St Louis scorned the new European social arrivistes for their ‘materialistic attitudes, their base instincts to make money in the colony’. White society became increasingly insulated from the majority African population and the town’s métis community, and liaisons between European men and African women were becoming a source of social embarrassment in the new moral atmosphere. Given Gaden’s condemnations of bourgeois lifestyles when he was a young officer stationed at Tarbes in south-western France, this old ‘broussard’ who had spent much of his life living in the bush and at isolated French outposts in West Africa would no doubt not have welcomed the changes. He was living with an African woman and a half-Moor half-Sene- galese child, maintained his contacts with Futanke and Moor collaborators, spoke Pulaar in his household to Coumba, and entertained large parties of Africans of all hues at the Hôtel de la Mauritanie. His social circle involved both European figures in the community; but also and more significantly he had many close relationships with important métis families from the town. Perhaps his move from the official residence to his villa by the sea might have been stimulated not just by the need for greater privacy in bringing up a young child but also a means to distance himself from an increasingly oppressive Europeanised society that exhibited all the kinds of

16 See Rita Cruise O’Brien, 1972.

366 chapter eight prejudice and pettiness from which he had try to flee as a young man from Bordeaux. He signed off his letter of November 1922 to Gouraud with the words: ‘An affectionate embrace from your African devotee.’ What more succinct way to express his sense of social estrangement and newly found focus of belonging beyond the constraints of French bourgeois society?

Rumours of Retirement

By 1923, Gouraud was travelling the world and was about to set out for a trip to America. At the beginning of September, he was appointed as Military Governor of Paris, and his rise in status to the position of the French establishment figure was secured. Gaden meanwhile kept him abreast of developments in Mauritania, where the political situation had worsened. It felt to Gaden as though it were a return to 1908, for a raiding party of Moors had attacked a detachment of French troops, which had cost the lives of a lieutenant, a corporal and 27 riflemen. A counterattack was launched but so far to little effect in dealing a blow to the dissident group. Morocco was ‘the factory of guns and munitions’ for the insurgents, and no solution to the problem of the north-western Maghreb had yet been found. Gaden had counted on returning to France that year, for he had not had passed a summer in France since 1911; but he now considered the following year to offer a better prospect of furlough, ‘by the grace of Allah’, a phrase he now dotted throughout his letters. Governor Merlin had been appointed to a post in Indochina, and Gaden had not been too concerned to see him leave West Africa, but he delayed his leave until a replacement was in post. The Governor General had started to mistake Gaden for a fellow officer called Gadel, who had served in Zinder after him, and Gaden detected that Merlin had cooled and was distant in his relations with him. He was very satisfied to hear of Merlin’s replacement, a man named Jules Carde, with whom Gaden was certain he would have a better relationship. Carde had been General Secretary to Van Vollenhoven when he was Governor General in Dakar, and so Gaden knew the man. He was sure he would gain Carde’s confidence and be able to persuade him to increase the budget for Mauritania. The Mauritanian mission had purchased a number of motorised vehicles to speed communications between posts dotted across the territory, and Gaden planned to acquire two more Renault 10cv vans to add to the fleet that included a cross-country vehicle and an old Ford van. These were used to relieve the camel trains in a shuttle service between posts. As a sign of the respect and prestige the local community had for Gaden, he reported

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that while the Moors inspired a certain fear in the hearts of administrators in Dakar, Gaden himself was attributed with having special gris-gris or amulets to maintain them in peace.17 Over the coming years he would perhaps need gris-gris to defend himself against his fellow administrators. Gouraud congratulated Gaden in March 1924 on his appointment to the rank of Lieutenant Governor Second Class, a promotion by one class. He added that he did not despair in the hope of seeing him made Governor General one day, when Gouraud could be invited to visit the territory and rediscover the memories of his youth (HJEG-JHG, 8.3.24). But just before he departed for his leave in France in September, Gaden wrote to Gouraud about what his future plans might be. He hoped to meet Carde in Paris the following month, although that was not what was consuming his thoughts. An administrator had asked Gouraud for help to be nominated for Gaden’s position as governor to head up the Mauritanian mission. Gaden felt it necessary to pass on to Gouraud the news that he had no intention of either taking retirement or of transferring to a different colony; the man was obviously ill-informed. ‘I am engrossed in Mauritania more solidly than ever. This brave [officer] whom I had the pleasure of seeing in Dakar, at the precise moment he was bound for Gabon, can therefore go and look elsewhere.’ Gaden had another three years left before he was due to retire and he meant to see out his time, if for no other reason than to gain his maximum pension before he turned 60 years old. The rumours of my imminent retirement have however circulated among some colonial families and in the offices of the ministry, so much so that I had to write to Glitz, the Head of Personnel, in order to deny them. I am going to come home for a few months on the Baoulé, leaving Dakar between 10th and 15th August. (JHG-HJEG, 1.8.24) By taking this cargo boat, he would have the chance to visit Port Etienne, situated on the frontier with the Spanish territory of Rio de Oro to see the post that had recently been attacked by Moors and to review the medical situation of the garrison stationed there since an outbreak of the plague.

17 A starched detachable cuff from a European shirt is to be found in the Fonds Gaden in CAOM, and on it is written in Arabic script a talisman to protect the wearer against penetration from metal in the form of knives and bullets. From the look of the item it would seem that it had been worn quite a lot, for it is marked by dirt stains. These could however have been made before the cuff was inscribed by a local marabout. It is difficult to date this talisman. See Fonds Gaden 15 APC 7, a file entitled ‘Etudes et Travaux’ and the item numbered 117. The material adjacent to this item does not give any indication of its provenance, for there are letters from Zinder, Boutilimit, Chad and Siguiri placed either side of it.

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The attack had not been made public, but Gouraud was informed that it had been ‘brilliantly repulsed’. Gaden did not manage to leave Dakar until 21st August, and turned up at Arcachon where his ageing aunt Lise lived. She had now been joined by Mine and her elderly husband, so Gaden had company to endure for the period of his furlough. He hoped for relief by visiting Gouraud in Paris during his stay. By the New Year, Gaden was feeling particularly low, imprisoned in what he called ‘the necropolis of Arcachon’, and he felt excessively alone despite the presence of three family members. He would leave there without regret but sufficiently well-rested to take up his post again with renewed vigour. He was still filled with confidence about his destiny within the administration, but hoped to God that the problems he had already encountered would not worsen. With the passing the years, Gaden was becoming increasingly sentimental and nostalgic, a change from the young officer that used to have a cutting wit, sharp tongue and disdain for any show of emotion: Where is the time when we used to chat in Paris, in the rue du Bac, or in some restaurant between two campaigns in Africa! […] I remain attached to my task although I still shudder every time that events – your letter, a conversation with Terrier, a dinner with the General … – revive in me a nostalgia for the country of sun and true action. (JHG-HJEG, 4.1.25) Gaden’s return to Africa, the land of sun and action, brought him some peace of mind and tranquillity, which he had not felt in France. The rumours of his retirement still circulated in Dakar, to the extent that an official, Claquenier, in the General Treasury and an old friend of Gaden’s, had written to him to say that a sound source had informed him that Gaden was under threat from being put into imminent retirement. This measure, he assured him, had not been proposed by the Governor General, but Gaden suspected that Carde was probably the source of the information and that he had probably done nothing to defend him. Claquenier advised Gaden that the threat was serious and that he would do well to concern himself with the rumours if he wanted to stop them circulating. But Gaden was in the dark: I do not know at all if it is matter of another candidate who is driven [to replace me] or if I am held responsible for the raids that have occurred in the last two years. I have not asked for retirement and I will not ask for it. (JHG-HJEG, 29.9.25) Gaden began his counter-attack by writing to his friend Maurice Delafosse, to Bonamy, the Head of the Muslim Affairs Service, to the Minister of Colonies, and to his permanent secretary. His wit had still not deserted him:

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If you see one fine day in l’Officiel that I have taken my officer’s retirement, do not believe that I have committed some ignominy; I will have been quite simply strangled in a corridor like a vizier in One Thousand and One Nights. One disconcerting fact Gaden had to face was that he was losing his Mauritanian allies, those who had helped him initially secure peace in the country. Mohammed wuld Khalil, who had joined Taleb Khiar in St Louis when the son of Ma el Ainin had offered his submission, died in the autumn of 1925, and he was just one amongst a number of others collaborators who had passed away. Khalil symbolised for Gaden the stability that he and Gouraud helped secure, and his death ‘will have great repercussions for the Sahara.’ By now too, Shaykh Sidiyya was an elderly man and did not move much from his camp of over 100 tents at Boutilimit. Gaden’s network of local political contacts was shrinking, and he now looked towards Gouraud for support. ‘I would be very grateful if you could do something for me. […] I have done nothing unworthy.’ Gouraud reassured Gaden that he should continue his good work in Mauritania. Meanwhile, Gouraud had done some networking in Paris to see if he could find out more about all the rumours circulating in colonial circles. On the morning of 8th October he attended a ceremony at the monument for the dead in the Indochina campaign and there he met up with a number of key political figures. In particular, he came across Camille Guy, the one- time Governor of Senegal from 1902–03 who was on good terms with both Henris, and who maintained close relations with the Ministry of Colonies. Gouraud spoke to him of Gaden’s problems and Guy appeared to be surprised by the news of moves to oust Gaden, knowing full well the contributions he had made to the colony. Guy promised to make further enquires in the offices of the Minister of Colonies, now occupied by André Hesse. A little later Gouraud ran in to Bonamy, the Head of the Muslim Affairs Service, who responded in a similar fashion to Guy: Gaden had long service in Mauritania, was an important figure who would be difficult to replace, whose actions in southern Morocco were exemplary, and whose knowledge of the Moors was second to none. ‘My advice’, said Gouraud, ‘is that there are no grounds for your worries.’ These rumours, Bonamy told him, came from some young administrators always eager to see the retirement of a long-standing governor. Indeed perhaps there were young military officers too who would have liked to go on sorties in Mauritania, but the threat that they might trigger engagements with protected groups of Moors could lead to a disruption of delicate relations. The idea of young officers going off on their own brought back memories for Gouraud of the death of Gerhardt some years earlier who had been killed in such a skirmish. If there were a criticism at all it was that Gaden travelled very little in the territory as part

370 chapter eight of his duties; but, as Gouraud pointed out, Gaden did not need to since the Moors flocked to see him in St Louis. Gouraud again advised Gaden: ‘conduct a few tours this winter to prove to everyone that you are still capable of physical activity’ (HJEG-JHG, 8.10.25).

Politics of the Sugar Loaf

Camille Guy made discreet enquiries in the Ministry of Colonies and passed on to Gouraud that Gaden had ‘nothing to fear at least for the moment’; Guy had also been officially advised that Gaden could be reassured of this view. He added in his letter to Gouraud, under the heading of strictly confidential, that he had learnt of one reproach of Gaden’s work, despite all the praise that was showered upon him. It was this: ‘he only pursues a very personal policy which does not always mesh with that of the Governor General.’18 Gouraud informed Gaden of this criticism, and used Guy’s exact formulation in his letter of 21st October. ‘I don’t really see what this means’, Gouraud admitted, ‘but overall it is perfectly reassuring.’ Gouraud put a second note in the post on the same day after attending a conference at the Sorbonne where he met Minister André Hesse and Joseph de Fourgeres, the Governor of the Soudan. Both expressed the view that there was no basis for the fears about Gaden’s imminent retirement (HJEG-JHG, 21.10.25). The attempts of thrusting young men eager to clear out what they might have considered to be dead wood to make space for their own ambitions and promotions could well have been one major factor in the circulation of rumours about Gaden’s imminent retirement. Another possible cause of the disquiet among younger staff posted to Dakar and St Louis could have been Gaden’s personal lifestyle. This may have been part of the ‘personal politics’ that his critics referred to. The fact that Gaden was living with a Senegalese, Pulaar-speaking woman, who up until recently had been accommodated in the official residence of the Governor of Mauritania, could not have endeared him to the new European arrivals in the town, many of whom were now accompanied by their French wives. Gaden had always derived pleasure in his attempts to ‘épater la bourgeoisie’, especially in his younger days when writing to his parents about how he had to leave behind his metropolitan values before travelling into the bush. But Gaden was now older and perhaps less prone to self-conscious outbursts of youthful rebellion; nonetheless, the lifestyle he had chosen for himself was

18 Letter of 15.10.25 from Guy to Gouraud in Fonds Gouraud, MAEE.

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something of an anachronism in the town of St Louis now transformed by the values and petty morality of French housewives into a censorious self-regarding community and white European enclave. Gaden breached too many symbolic boundaries. Gaden’s personal style of conducting politics was very particular, especially so in the way in which he created close personal links with key political, religious and cultural figures in the territories over which he had responsibility. This policy developed progressively over the course of his career in each of his postings in West Africa, and it now reached its fullest expression in Mauritania during his time as governor. The policy was known as ‘apprivoisement’, a strategy of ‘taming’ or ‘domestication’, as the French term implies, and was a process conducted through the exchange of gifts, knowledge and cultural understanding. This was a cultural adaptation of a notion of commercial relations he learnt from his Bordeaux merchant forebears and transposed on to African soil. Free trade was for him the means by which mercantile interests could create the conditions for mutu- ally beneficial social relationships; here in West Africa the exchange of books, cultural knowledge and religious insights and so on became the medium of trade between Henri, the son of Bordeaux, and the political and religious leaders with whom he engaged. This policy also became known as the ‘politics of the sugar loaf’ (pain de sucre) probably in reference to an item that was frequently included in local exchanges between Gaden and his collaborators. A letter, for instance, from Chettima Ahmed Kiari written in 1904 from Zinder explained that the correspondent was sending Gaden two sugar loaves and some cloth as an expression of thanks for the scientific dictionary and Islamic theological text that Gaden had sent him.19 This policy had reaped dividends in Mauritania, where Gaden was revered as a man of learning, justice and honesty, and of immense cultural stature amongst the Moors. He had been adopted as a brother, as a father, as a savant whose knowledge of the local people not only impressed his colonial colleagues, but also the people he administered in his professional capacity as governor. It was a kind of anthropological relationship with the native other that had been forged over his years of learning and experience in West Africa. Some time later, in 1926, a French journalist witnessed the kind of close cultural intimacy Gaden used as part of his personal political strategy. In a newspaper column entitled ‘Silhouettes coloniales’, in Le Midi Colonial et Maritime of 16th December, a description of how Gaden

19 See the letter of 28.9.04 from Chettima Ahmed Kiari ben el Imam Mohammed el Berkoui, Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC 7.

372 chapter eight operated gives insight into his style, level of cultural understanding and modes of thought and the forms of discourse he had developed. On the Avenue Dodds, bordered by coconut palms planted in front of the old but spacious houses, the bottom floors of which were taken up by boutiques, stood the Hôtel de la Mauritanie. In this modest building on the spit of land known as N’Dar Tout, Gaden conducted his business governing Mauritania and was not content to leave the work of the mission to others but personally conducted an important part of the administration. As described above, the journalist reported: From all points in Mauritania, from the near Trarza to the distant Adrar, they come on camels to submit their grievances or proclaim their vows to the great chief of St Louis, whom they all venerate for his uprightness and equity… . The prestige of M. le Gouveneur Gaden over the Maures and Toucouleurs is considerable.20 He went on to observe the Moors who came to visit: … their faces thin and arrogant, coloured blue by their veils which cover them from head to foot, have fine and clear features like the line of the horizon. […] Seated on their heels, in line, in front of the Residence, in the corridor, in the interior courtyard (to the great despair of the chef de cabinet), they wait patiently for their turn, fingering their rosaries, the mark of Allah. The journalist also witnessed Gaden’s dealings with those who came to see him. Gaden would often call up his petitioners and collaborators to deal with them directly and to conduct his business with them through a particular style of dialogue that was personal to him alone. None of his colleagues could pursue such a strategy. His thought rests in turn on each of the aspects of the problem [at hand], returning to one and then passing to another, following an order that those of his listeners not familiar with his process of exposition do not see immediately, but who end up enlightened [by the mode of discourse]. One grasps the idea simultaneously in all its aspects, and [it is as though] one rolls between one’s fingers a prism with multiple faces. The method by which Gaden thought about and discussed relevant business with those he administered seemed perfectly in tune with the ways of thinking and forms of verbal debate used by the Moors themselves. This personal style of government made him at once indispensable in the eyes of the administration for the benefits it produced, but at the same time it

20 See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC (1) 2, ‘Coupures de Presse’, from where all of these quotations are taken.

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posed a threat to more conventional forms of governmental procedure that were more in tune with the thinking of most conventional French colonial administrators. If Gaden had gone native in his domestic home life, then his mind too seemed to have been colonised by an alien way of thought so distant from the conventions of his younger colleagues and those who were holed up in offices in the bowels of the governance.

The Conquest of the Western Sahara

Despite the reassurances given to him by his close friends and colleagues, Gaden was not content. He had heard on the grapevine in Dakar that three other governors were being lined up for early retirement, that a potential candidate for his own post had been pressing for the appointment but that Governor Carde wished to retain Gaden. Gaden was not going to be pushed out before he had notched up sufficient years to be able to draw the maximum pension; that would not be until January 1927. The financial crisis in France after the Great War was taking its toll on the middle classes who faced economic insecurities and rising tax bills under both the conservative regime of 1920 and the more radical one under the leadership of Edouard Herriot. This radical socialist was not to Gaden’s liking, whom he accused of spreading misery to all. Gaden needed to save all he could to provide for himself in old age, and a group of young administrators was not going to push him out of office. He questioned: ‘Will it be necessary for me to become a maidservant in my retirement?’ ‘You see what jiggery-pokery the Ministry of Colonies gets up to,’ he wrote to Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 26.10.25). He did not take kindly to Gouraud’s advice about making a few tours of the territory; and he reeled off a list of trips conducted over the last few years. He had journeyed over long stages on horseback without any fatigue, passed exquisite nights under the stars and taken very great joy in experi- encing again the sights and sounds of the bush; he had been twice to Boutilimit recently, had visited Morocco for a conference on political affairs in the Maghreb, and had seen a qadi who lived at the foot of the Atlas Mountains too. He planned to motorise further the communications in Mauritania, to develop a proposed air service between St Louis and Atar…. Gaden’s pen ran away with him, and he asked finally for Gouraud’s indulgence of his ramblings. In the autumn of 1925 Gaden seemed to be more at ease over the security of his position in Mauritania. Carde had written to the minister in Paris that

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Gaden’s early retirement would be ‘an iniquity and a useless cruelty’. Gaden had been assured too by the government treasury offices in Dakar that taking his pension before he was 60 years old would not be possible. He was now becalmed by this news. He had staunchly defended his record and the achievements of his style of ‘personal politics’ over the previous nine years or more, a period that had seen five different Governor Generals and three different temporary replacements to the position. With so many changes of personnel, what was Gaden expected to do in relation to the policies he pursued in his territory? He had charted his own unwavering course among all the movements in officialdom in the government general. The Governor General’s office was, however, taking a close look at what Gaden had achieved in Mauritania and what the future direction for the territory might be. Gaden objected very strongly to a letter he had received from Carde back in April that declared his policies to be ‘clearly bankrupt’. A change in political direction was emerging in Dakar in response to the increasingly tense situation in Mauritania. What was required according to this new initiative was that ‘all necessary instructions be followed with respect to the nomads who refuse to recognise our authority, where the most elementary directness in attitude is lacking, [for] a firm policy and a need for revision will bring back calm to a region so troubled over the last two years.’ ‘This was’, Gaden retorted, ‘neither more nor less an invitation to conquer the western Sahara, Rio de Oro included, up to southern Morocco.’ Carde, he thought, had been won over by his own military bureau, and the proposals were ‘unjustified, absurd and culpable’, since they had insufficient military resources to succeed in such an enterprise (JHG-HJEG, 13.11.25). He explained to Terrier what he meant by these terms: absurd, because it would increase the number of enemies before a preliminary growth in forces could be achieved; culpable, because Mauritania was the buffer zone for Senegal that peacefully cultivated peanuts; unjustified, because of the cost in human lives and resources (JHG-AT, 11.25). He intended to carry on as before until January 1927; he was in perfect health and wished to continue for as long as possible. He was not down in the dumps and would remain in harness until the bitter end. Over a number of years, Gaden encouraged the introduction of motor vehicles equipped with hard rubber tyres rather than inflatable ones for the cross-country journeys to the outposts in Adrar. This was a great success. He also took a keen interest in the development of aerial links between St Louis and stations further north in Mauritania, and indeed with Casablanca and Dakar. This service had begun on an experimental basis in

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the early 1920s, and Gaden was eager to trumpet its successes, as well as try to address some of the problems the pilots faced. In 1923 he wrote to both Terrier and his sister Mine outlining the service that carried mail as well as passengers between Dakar and Casablanca, with refuelling stop-overs in Port Etienne and in the Spanish territory of Rio de Oro. Latécoère, an aviation company, ran the service, and the route from Toulouse via Casablanca to Dakar was later made famous by Antoine de Saint Exupéry who flew it from 1926.21 The St Louis-Atar trip took just four hours and 35 minutes, flying via Nouakchott and Inchiri, and Moors were willing passengers on the service. Early trials of the route from Casablanca to St Louis and Dakar took three days with three re-fuelling stops on the way. Despite the large steps forward air transport had taken, the flights were not without their problems for the engines were prone to failure, radiators over-heated in the excessively hot air above the desert, and weather conditions created severe difficulties for the pilots on occasion. The planes followed the line of the Atlantic coast from St Louis, an area notorious for low cloud and sea mists at certain times of year. Pilots became disoriented and had to put down whenever conditions prevented further progress; and they never knew in what territory they might have to make a forced landing. Vast tracts of the region were still under the control of dissident Moors, and if the planes were not apprehended by them, then the desert conditions alone could take their toll on the lives of pilots and engineers. On the other hand, the aviation service promised huge gains for communication, passenger and mail services between France’s north-west African possessions and on to the mother country; but the dangers involved were yet to be fully assessed (JHG-AT, 2.5.23 and JHG-Mine 8.5.23). It would appear that Mine travelled to West Africa at least twice, and the first time she visited Gaden was one September of, most probably, 1923 after he had become Governor of Mauritania. She was taken on a tour of the territory and took a series of photographs (some of which are dated 1923) of development projects that Gaden had encouraged in different regions, such as cultivating wheat and oats in Atar, establishing gardens and sinking wells in Moudjéria, or of a sight-seeing visit to Tagant, ‘the most beautiful region of Mauritania’. Mine produced a small homemade booklet entitled

21 Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupéry, the son of a viscount, born in 1900, disappeared on a flying mission in July 1944. He was a writer and poet as well as an avia- tor, and is well remembered for his book The Little Prince, under its English title. He was one of the pilots who experienced ‘the scorching solitude of the desert’ after having to make a forced landing on the north-west African coast.

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‘Colonie de la Mauritanie: Quelques Documents’ in which she mounted the photographs and added short pieces of text.22 Gaden sent Mine details of the fledgling air service run by the Latécoère airline in May 1923, perhaps in anticipation of her trip later that year.

Strangled in the Corridor

As the fateful date of retirement approached, Gaden busied himself preparing two new research projects. One was to be a publication of proverbs and maxims that he had been collecting for many years among the Toucouleur or Haalpuulaaren of the Senegal River basin, and the other was to be a translation of a qacida or praise-poem of almost 1,190 verses written in honour of Al Hajj Umar Tall by one of his disciples and right- hand man Mohammadou Aliou Tyam, both of whom had been born in the river valley.23 Gaden received the first manuscript copy of the text around 1920 from the qadi Ahmadou Mokhtar Sakho of the village of Boghé in the river valley; but this project would not take off until after his retirement. No matter when the guillotine might fall on his career, Gaden would be well occupied in his spare time. Gaden saw the blade of the guillotine descend in mid November 1926 when he received his copy of the Havas in which he read: After an agreement with Governor General Carde, the decree of 9th November accepts the retirement of Gaden dated from 31st December 1926, and to be replaced by Fournier … we wish to express thanks to Gaden from the

22 See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC/2, item 149. 23 Mohammadou Aliou Tyam (or Caam in contemporary orthography) wrote a form of Arabic praise-poem, a qacida, but written in ajami – in Pulaar but using Arabic script. He chose this form as a means to disseminate knowledge about the great Muslim warlord and religious leader, Al Hajj Umar Tall, among the non-literate, Pulaar-speaking population, who learnt it by heart through songs sung by the blind, beggars and the poor. It was not therefore confined exclusively to the small Arabic-speaking elite. Tyam, born around 1830 in Aéré in Lao Province close to the town of Podor, left Fouta Toro to join Umar Tal’s mission as a disciple around 1846. He followed Tall for ten years, travelling from the Senegal to the Niger, through countries that were being brought under the yolk of Tall’s version of Islam. He describes himself modestly at the end of the poem as just ‘one of the bristles in the brush’ with which Umar swept through West Africa. He took part in many of Tall’s military campaigns, and eventually ended up after the Shaykh’s death with Tal’s son Ahmadou in Ségou-Sikoro, where he began composing his qacida. He finished the work in 1890 when he was 60 years old, and returned to end his days in his natal village in Senegal, where having lost his sight he died in 1911. See Robinson, 1985; and Dilley, 2004: 101–110.

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Department for a long and distinguished service rendered to the colonial cause. (JHG-HJEG, 14.11.26) The date announced was nearly one month before his 60th birthday, and Gaden suffered the indignity of receiving the ministerial telegram one day after seeing the announcement in the newspaper. I had no warning. The surprise was complete. Thus the caliphs of yesteryear have done away with a vizier who no longer pleased by strangling him at the turn in the corridor. I am profoundly hurt by this process. Gaden had seen Carde just a few days before but had been given no indication of this bombshell. He thought the choice of Albéric Auguste Fournier to be good one, but he was on leave and Dakar had heard no news from him. Gaden was concerned that the sudden announcement of his retirement would have a detrimental effect on relations with the Ma el Ainin faction, and he hoped he would have time to pass the baton on to the new man. His one criticism of Fournier was that while he might have been fine chap, he knew neither the Moors nor Mauritania, and ‘Mauritania is not like other colonies’. Gaden mused over possibilities for his future, and wondered whether an early move into the rubber or groundnut trade, as others had done, might yet reap some profit. He planned to be back in France later in the winter but without great anticipation since his aunt’s house at Arcachon was still occupied by his sister and husband. The political situation in France did not please him either: ‘With a government which will be no doubt prisoner to the socialists and trembling before the communists, this promises months of poisoned propaganda and pacifist intrigues’ (JHG-AT, ??.11.25). Gaden signed off his letter to Gouraud in mid-November by expressing his deep indignation at being treated so shoddily. Gouraud responded generously in the face of his friend’s outburst with a sense of sorrow and incomprehension at Gaden’s indignation. He wrote: ‘this year, the hour of retirement sounds for you as for many officers or functionaries; this for most at least is a melancholic hour, sad even, but it is not, it seems to me, a surprise that you should be indignant about.’ What he thought was much more serious was what his life would have in store from then on. He understood that the tranquillity of Arcachon did not seduce him, but Gouraud advised that Gaden must reflect on what his future might hold and adopt attitudes that would be beneficial in the long term. He looked forward to meeting up with his old companion from Africa in Paris, where they might contemplate together what the future might have in store for both of them. Gouraud urged him not to forget his old comrade (HJEG-JHG, 24.11.26). But

378 chapter eight old comrades were falling even if not forgotten: 1926 saw the death in France of Maurice Delafosse, Gaden’s collaborator in West African research; in West Africa Shaykh Sidiyya, the staunch supporter of French annexation in Mauritania, had died a couple of years earlier. Gaden found an opportunity to play one last roll of the dice in the game of retirement. He had now reconciled himself to the prospect of the end of his career and to being replaced by the ‘pupil Fournier’, but he still maintained that the administration’s shoddy treatment of him had already dam- aged relations in St Louis and beyond. Nonetheless, he had done his homework on a set of new decrees relating to when a period of retirement was deemed to have started; and he meant to show up the administration in all its incompetence. The new decrees stated that retirement was not considered to have begun until a pension booklet had been delivered to the individual concerned. Gaden continued to serve as Governor of Mauritania well past his official retirement date because his pension booklet had not arrived; and he recited this new decree back to the administration with great glee. He also argued that since he had taken partial unpaid leave during his furlough in 1925, he was entitled to a period of employment equivalent to those months he sacrificed. This was not an isolated case, and Carde wrote to the Finance Office at the Ministry of Colonies in Paris for urgent advice on their interpretation of their own laws that Gaden was quoting back to them. Carde counselled the ministry in the following terms: I have the honour of proposing to the Minister to be well advised to decide that M. Gaden will have the right to his salary of his grade with additions to count from 9th April 1927 until the day that his pension booklet is presented. The expense will be attributable to the general budget of French West Africa.24 While Gaden could not put off the inevitable passage of time, he must have gained immense satisfaction from this final ruse against the administrators he held in such utter contempt, a move that effectively extended his career until 18th September 1927, when his pension booklet finally found its way into his hands. He was then given the title Gouverneur Honoraire des Colonies.

24 See Carde’s letter of 9th April 1927 to the Ministry of Colonies, in Gaden’s Dossier Personnel, 1 C 9, ANS.

CHAPTER NINE

THE MONK OF ST LOUIS, 1927–1939

Close to Toucouleur Friends

Before he took the boat from West Africa to France for a period of furlough in 1927, Gaden had one final request for both Governor Carde and Gouraud. He wrote to Gouraud: ‘You know I am not in the habit of begging for recompense but I thought that a cravat [of a Commandeur of the Legion d’Honneur] could have been given before my departure [from office].’ He had approached Carde with the same proposal and had received a brush- off and an inadequate explanation: he could expect nothing from the ministry since all the honours had already been decided. Carde later showered him with praise and fobbed him off again with a promise that he would do everything that was possible to make a successful case to the Government Council. Gaden pointed out to Gouraud that the only two honours he had received so far were his cross of a Chevalier for the Samory campaign, and that of an Officier for his war wound in Morocco. ‘I will not have cost the ministry very dearly’, he pleaded. Gaden reassured Gouraud that contrary to what his friend might think, he had not stopped thinking about his future life in retirement and where he might spend his final years (JHG-HJEG, 26.10.26). By June 1927, Gaden was safely back in France, lodging in Bordeaux in another set of rented rooms, this time at 14 rue Lafaurrie de Monbaden. This house was much grander than the modest dwelling where he had stayed in rue de Lerme between 1911–12. Still standing today, it is a 19th- century five-storey building with a handsome facade in a road just off what is now the Place Clemenceau, a much more opulent and well-heeled part of the city than the location of his previous lodgings. It was then owned by Edouard Chenet and his wife Louise, and Gaden may have shared the building with, among others, the artists, Paul Cabanel, born in Oran, North Africa and Pierre Benoit born in Nantes, both of whom were resident in the house between 1926 and 1931.1 At some point in 1927, Gaden had dinner at René and Henriette Fourault’s apartment in Boulevard Wilson in Bordeaux,

1 See Recensements démographiques, La Gironde, 1926 and 1931. Archives de Bordeaux.

380 chapter nine where he left a military canteen containing personal effects and some sil- verware which was destined to be a gift to his god-daughter, Monique Fourault.2 His relationship with the Fouraults, as we shall see, poses some interesting questions about where a circle of secrecy was drawn among his relatives. Gaden wrote to Gouraud from the house in rue Lafaurrie just after his return from Paris, where he had not managed to meet up with his old friend. He had had a meeting in Paris with representatives from the company that ran the new fish processing business set up at Port Etienne on the coast in western Mauritania and an offer was made to him to join the company. He declined this opening for he considered the company to be too closely linked to another business that was involved in the exploitation of salt in the area. Perhaps he found this type of large-scale extractive industry around the ancient area of Aoulil where salt had been mined since the Middle Ages (a subject on which he had written in 1910) to be too offensive to his conservative sensibilities. After the meeting Gaden had not been able to wait any longer in Paris, and so headed back south without seeing Gouraud (JHG-HJEG, 23.6.27). Gouraud returned to his flat in Paris to find Gaden’s letter of 23rd June waiting for him. Gouraud reported that he had sent off a letter, along with accompanying documents of support, to the Ministry of War to propose Gaden for the cravat of a commandeur. He was in constant touch with the chef de cabinet at the ministry and would be able to keep a close watch on the progress of the proposal. He hoped too that they would have another chance to meet in Paris before Gaden left for Senegal but, as he explained, he was a busy man particularly over the summer, and some advance warning of a possible trip north to Paris would be advisable (HJEG- JHG, 24.6.27). On his return to Bordeaux, Gaden busied himself with his new project on Toucouleur proverbs and maxims, creating a file-card system to classify his material. He could not do a great deal of detailed work since his notes on the obscure senses and nuances of these sayings were in St Louis and, as he admitted ‘the way of thinking of these good people often takes detours so different from our own that one cannot follow it all alone.’ He was planning to go to Arcachon for a while to continue working on some of his file cards at his aunt’s. His project was progressing well, now comprising more than 1,100 file cards with various sayings and their translations. Gaden was,

2 See Fourault (2001: 184).

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however, back in Bordeaux in September to contribute a note on sorcery for a memorial collection to his late friend Maurice Delafosse that was being organised by Georges Hardy, who from 1926 had been the Director of the Ecole Coloniale in Paris, an institution at which Delafosse had taught anthropology.3 Gaden then planned to go back to St Louis to finish off his research work once his pension had been confirmed; he was annoyed that he had heard no news from his lawyer in Senegal about a house he was trying to buy in the town, and hoped that this would not cause a delay in the transfer of his household effects from the Hôtel de la Mauritanie. Gaden travelled to Paris in November to sort out his pension payments, and he was ready for a fight over the figures for the length of service the government offices had used to calculate what was owed to him. He was involved in a battle for information which the pensions office could easily give him if they so wished. Gaden had heard news from Mauritania, from where it was reported that his replacement Fournier had already had enough of the job and had put in for another governorship in West Africa. He heard rumours that René Chazal was in line to succeed in Mauritania.4 Gaden was not effusive: ‘… Chazal, one of the Carde’s captives, a good lad but whose single merit is to grow by a few centimetres without an accident the fingernail on his little finger – or indeed I should say digitus minimus – of his left hand. Poor Mauritanian!’ He wrote to Terrier around this time, stating that: Chazal knows absolutely nothing about Mauritania, nor about the Moors, nor about any other populations of this type. […] In brief, Chazal returned to St Louis to continue to conduct some tourism in other parts of Mauritania but left terror among the people of the north. … kicks up the backside are the gifts on the current fixed menu. […] And here is Mauritania well provided for: a good-for-nothing in St Louis and a criminal in Adrar. (JHG-AT, 2.5.28) Above all, Gaden looked forward to returning to St Louis to be close to ‘his Toucouleur friends’.

3 Gaden had published a joint article with Delafosse on religious beliefs in Western Soudan in 1910, and no doubt he thought this proposed topic to be close to his late friend’s interests. In the end, however, he offered a piece in the memorial volume on the rather technical linguistic subject of alternating initial consonants in a dialect of Peul or Pulaar from Fouta Jallon in Guinea. See ‘Les alternances de consonnes initiales du Fouldé, dialecte Peul du Fouta-Diallon’, Outre-Mer, 3e trim., 286–306, 1929. 4 René Hector Emile Chazal took over as the Governor of Mauritania in November 1929 and served until June 1931.

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Maxims and a Modest House

The cargo vessel The Mossi finally left France on 31st December 1927 carrying Gaden back to Dakar. The city had been hit by an outbreak of yellow fever, although the period of quarantine had just been lifted; nonetheless, Gaden took the precaution of having an inoculation against the mosquito- borne disease. He considered too the tasks that lay ahead: sorting out his new house and arranging for furniture to be made by local carpenters in St Louis. He could not envisage himself back at his research work until the first fortnight of February. In a letter to bid him farewell, Gouraud wished Gaden the best of luck with his house, his furniture and with his translation of proverbs; and he hoped Gaden would be back in France soon to see his friends. Gouraud confided in him: ‘I was happy when you were in Africa and I was there myself, but I admit that now I would prefer to see you come home like me to the metropole’ (HJEG-JHG, 29.12.27). These words were to play on Gaden’s mind for some time to come. By the middle of January, Gaden was back in St Louis, and he reported that although his house was completed, the joinery work was poorly done and he would have to wait until the end of the month before he could move in. Gaden’s intention was to return to France in the spring or summer of 1929, and then return to Senegal, taking occasional sojourns in France over the next few years. Gouraud responded by saying that he should not forget France where he would always find his old African companions. Gaden did not seem to be entirely persuaded by this argument. He learnt further news of developments in Mauritania, where Fournier was no longer the gover- nor; he had been replaced not by Chazal but by Alphonse Choteau. During the course of his career Choteau had been an accountant working in the finance offices in Dakar, and then worked as general secretary in the Ivory Coast. ‘He is not therefore prepared for Mauritania where I do not think he will remain for a long time’, Gaden opined. This was to be the case, for Chazal, ‘Carde’s captive’, took over as governor at the end of November 1929 (JHG-HJEG, 18.1.28). Gaden bought a house on the corner of rue Brière de L’Isle and rue Flamand on a site in the middle of the northern quarter of the island of St Louis and surrounded by similar buildings of European style. It was then a modest two-story dwelling with balconies on the upper floor that could be accessed from the upstairs rooms. (A third floor was added in the 1980s.) It was not particularly large or imposing but was comfortable; and his kitchen then measured only 1.4 metres square. The place was suitable and airy, and it would allow him the tranquillity he needed to complete his

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work. On particularly hot and humid days during the hivernage, he missed the space and through-breezes afforded by the Hôtel de la Mauritanie situated next to the water; but apart from that he seemed content. The house had, and still has, an area of open yard to the rear along the side that stretches down rue Flamand, and it is said by some locals that a Toucouleur healer used to live and operate a stall from there. Rue Brière de L’Isle is one of the main thoroughfares that connects the northerly tip of the island to the Place Faidherbe only a few hundred metres away. When he bought it in October 1927, Gaden’s house was recorded in the land register as having a boutique on the ground floor and, on the upper storey, three bedrooms, a lavatory, a kitchen and a sitting room. Its total floor space measured ‘8,081 centiares’ or about 80 square metres. A lean-to structure was situated in the back yard and it consisted of a large bedroom that was used to house the domestic staff. Gaden converted the boutique on the ground floor into bedrooms for Coumba Cissé (and later for a foster child), and added a second kitchen and lavatory. Gaden kept part of his menagerie downstairs, which at various points included young lions, leopards, antelopes, ostriches or whatever else he thought appropriate for a city dwelling. This was much like Tchekna, when he and Gouraud both kept leopards in their compounds, to deadly effect. Sheep were also tethered in the yard outside, and they were pampered, groomed and fed on left-over rice.5 Coumba was fond of tending sheep and had a reputation as an accomplished shepherdess. Her animals were the wonder of the town, and folk would flock to see the marvellously groomed and well-nourished beasts. Her praise-singers would sing not only of her beauty, elegance and grace, but also of how she looked after her sheep, how they were better fed and better educated than many humans in St Louis. From time to time a car would appear to take the sheep to areas of grazing outside the town, a fact that astonished the young Doudou Gaden. In the lean-to lived Gaden’s cook, Aminata Sal, and the housekeeper Aissatou Sal, along with Gaden’s boy. The upper storey of the house was the ‘European’ landing on which Gaden had his bedroom and a study, alongside Amadou Aïdara’s own room further down the corridor. Aminata and later Aissatou Sal would prepare Gaden’s French-style meals upstairs, and he and Amadou would eat sepa- rately, sometimes on the terrace. Coumba and the Senegalese house staff

5 Much of this detail about the Gaden household comes from ‘Doudou Gaden’ or Amadou Ali Diop, a boy who lived with Gaden and Coumba from around 1934 onwards. Other people from St Louis confirmed a good deal of what Doudou related in interviews. See also A. Pondopoulo (2002).

384 chapter nine would eat their own locally prepared food, which was cooked and taken downstairs. The household, although mixed in its composition, maintained in its spatial organisation a division between the colonised and coloniser: it was a metaphor in microcosm of the relations that obtained in wider society in the colony. While in other colonial settings the divisions between the different parties would have been much more extreme, Gaden nonetheless instituted a vertical distinction in his household between himself and others with a European storey and a native storey below. It was however radically different from other European houses in St Louis: Gaden, ‘married’ to a local woman, spoke Pulaar in the house with Coumba and the household staff. From his house Gaden was in ear-shot of the call to prayers from the two mosques situated in the neighbourhood, one of which – reputedly the oldest in the town – was dedicated to the Tijaniyya sect of Al Hajj Umar Tall, the great 19th-century Muslim political and religious leader whose life was recounted in the qacida or praise-poem Gaden was working on. He found the translation of the verses of this work initially less absorbing than his research on the Toucouleur proverbs, but as it progressed he became more and more taken by it. Gaden had received a copy of Tyam’s praise-poem and history of Al Hajj Umar Tall around 1920 from Ahmadou Mokhtar Sakho, the qadi of Boghé, a village in the Senegal River valley. He did not start work on it for a number of years, and renewed interest was triggered when he was lent a second, almost identical, copy of the text by his old friend, the religious leader Seydou Nourou Tall, grandson of Umar Tall, in 1930.6 Only a few months later, a third copy of the poem was provided by the qadi Sakho, and this stimulated Gaden into comparing the different versions. He derived a text of 1,189 verses, and began translating the ajami poem in earnest. He worked with Mahmoudou Bah, the son of the qadi at Kaédi, and Alfa Bokar, both from the region around the river valley. By July 1932, Gaden came across a Toucouleur griot or praise-singer renowned for his knowledge of the history of Umar Tall. This was Ousman Salif Koli, who had been taught his art by his father Salif, who in turn had been Umar’s griot and had accompanied him on all his campaigns. Ousman was a mine of all sorts of information which Gaden added in extensive footnotes and a glossary of terms and

6 Ismaïla M’Baye introduced Gaden to Seydou Nourou Tall. Seydou Nourou Tal or Tall was born around 1880 in Nioro, Mali, grandson of Al Hajj Umar, the famous 19th-century Muslim leader. Seydou, a ‘grand marabout’, was a key figure for the French colonialists. He died in Dakar in 1980. See Garcia, ‘Al-Hajj Seydou Nourou Tall’ (1997).

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concepts. Tyam’s poem was not the only qacida to have been written about Umar Tall, but it was over four times the length of the others, and it was unique not just in the number of verses but also in its historical value. It is highly unusual in that it is a rounded indigenous biography of Umar Tall, in which Tyam describes his military campaigns with precision, noting their stages and important dates; he details important moments in Tall’s religious life and education; at other times, it is a journal of a journey, that is, the journal of a simple talibé or disciple and foot soldier. Both pieces of research – Tyam’s qacida and the Toucouleur proverbs and maxims – required Gaden’s presence in St Louis in order to benefit from the knowledge of his local collaborators. His interest in the poem gathered momentum over the years, and by the time the griot Ousman Koli was involved, Gaden was hooked. Besides these local contacts, Moors were regular visitors to his house and the old native colonial interpreter Bou el Mogdad II could often be seen there too. Gaden valued these relationships greatly and he guarded them preciously. These relationships drew him to West Africa, and the idea of giving them up to return to life in the metropo- lis was not attractive.

The Sugar Loaf Turns Bitter

On 4th July 1928, the Governor of Mauritania was advised that an aeroplane of the Compagnie Générale Aéropostale run by Latécoère airlines had crash-landed in poor visibility in the Spanish territory of Rio de Oro in Western Sahara on or around 30th June. The pilot Reine and his electrical engineer Serre were reported to have been led into the interior by a group of Moors, who refused all negotiations with either the Spanish authorities or French representatives. Thus began an episode that was to become the final nail in the coffin of the pacific and mediated policy of domestication that Gaden had tried to pursue in Mauritania over the course of his governorship. This was not the first time that a problem had affected one the aero- planes flying this route, and other pilots and passengers had been taken prisoner before. Indeed, poor Reine had come down some time earlier but negotiations for his release had been successful; another group was not so lucky when in 1927 a passenger was murdered, the pilot died of injuries sustained in the attack; only the native interpreter was spared. While incidents of this sort were therefore not unknown, what was different in this case was the fall-out from the affair.

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A mission was quickly dispatched by Dakar to the territory of Rio de Oro to liaise with the Spanish, and this included, in addition to the Frenchman Beyries who headed it up, the Emir of Trarza, two other Moors and the colonial interpreter Bou el Mogdad II. The captors, it turned out, were demanding the release of all Moorish and other prisoners (some now dead) held by the French. To make matters worse, Beyries of the French mission and his Spanish counterpart, Lt Colonel de la Pena, did not see eye-to-eye on strategy, and the latter refused to go into an area beyond Spanish control since he could not guarantee security. Beyries wanted direct contact with the representatives of the captors, who had now set a large ransom of many thousands of pesetas, hundreds of camels, guns and so on. De la Pena made a derisory offer of money in return for the airmen, and Beyries countered by claiming that he had no money and no authority to pay a ransom. The text of a poignant letter from Reine, thought to have been sent on 23rd July during his captivity, reads: We begin to lose hope, morale is rapidly going down, for many days we have nothing to eat; the camel’s milk does not go down well, water is rare as well as tea; with this diet, we will not be able to hold out for long, vermin gnaw away at us, the cold of the night, the heat of the day…. Give us news more often and send regularly something to eat… this is hell for us. (See footnote 7 below.) Another complication arose: it appeared that the original captors had traded the airmen with other groups of Moors, and subsequently the terms of release increased and the negotiations became more protracted. Eventually on 24th October 1928, almost four months after the plane had gone down, Reine and Serre were handed over to the French at Villa Cisneros, an unspecified ransom was paid, and prisoners were released. The story of the two men’s ordeal was published in the French press and was much debated in Dakar and Paris. At the height of the crisis, Governor Carde penned a 19-page document entitled ‘Note on the subject of the politics followed in Mauritania’, dated 20th September 1928.7 Correspondence had taken place between Gaden and Carde over the worsening situation in Mauritania, and Gaden had recognised three years earlier that attacks by Moors were becoming increasingly audacious, and had explained how local forces headed by leaders loyal to the French cause (such as the Emir of Trarza) were trying to tackle the disorder. This did not hold Carde back from sending off a broadside

7 This document, entitled in French ‘Note au sujet de la politique suivie en Mauritanie’, along with correspondence from Gaden and others (such as Reine’s letter written in captivity) can be found at CAOM I AFFPOL/1415/4 in Chemise 14, ‘Affaire Reine-Serre…’.

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targeting Gaden’s policy of domestication, or the ‘politics of the sugar loaf’. He quoted from a report by Commandant Gillier, one of the new breed of officer in Mauritania:8 ‘The policy of domesticating the grand nomads [Moors] has not brought the fruits that we were expecting. Should we be surprised? Certainly not, for only the opposite result would have been surprising.’ Gillier went on to explain how the Moors would present themselves at Adrar to submit to French rule, declare themselves in support of the French cause, and at the same time collect useful political information on the region. ‘These messengers of peace’, he continued, ‘after having drunk sweetly sugared tea, [and] eaten well-fattened mutton that as hosts we provide, leave [the town] only to raid a camel herd so as not to go back to their camps empty handed.’ Carde did not hold back in his condemnation. He reproached Gaden: he had shown himself ‘a little too liberal in the distribution of arms’; indeed, guns with serial numbers indicating that they had been issued in St Louis had been found among dissident groups. Carde criticised Gaden for not having shared all his views on the political situation with the new staff, and that he was known for a ‘certain tendency towards independence’. Gaden had been replaced by Fournier and then by Chazal, who were charged with pursing a very different kind of policy, and Carde tried to emphasise how the new officers had adopted ‘la mentalité Maure’, the outlook or way of thinking of the Moors, in their dealings with local groups. Carde then dedicated over five pages of his 19-page document to the Reine and Serre affair, even though he had no idea at that time how it would end. The damage, however, had already been done and the French administration had been shown up in an embarrassing way by the men’s capture and the Moors’ ransom demands. Carde concluded that the practice of Gaden’s policy had not just tied their hands but had bound their arms to their feet. And the Governor General turned over in his mind how it was possible for policy to depend on an aviation accident that took place one night in the fog… This was the nadir of French prestige and confidence in Mauritania; they had been humbled by a bunch of ‘grubby and unruly Moors’, and their pow- erlessness was apparent for all to see. Policy changed in Mauritania after this, and a much more aggressive, militaristic mission was started, finishing off what Gouraud had begun in 1908. And this resulted in the very thing that Gaden had been trying to prevent all along: the spilling of even more blood in the territory. It had already accounted for so many of his colleagues

8 See Gillier 1926, La Pénétration en Mauritanie for his account of the conquest and ‘definitive pacification’ of Mauritania.

388 chapter nine and comrades-in-arms; he could not bear the thought that it would be responsible for more lives, those of his Moorish friends and their relations and of his own fellow countrymen.9

By the Will of God

The correspondence between Gaden and Gouraud increased in frequency over the next few years. The two men, now advanced in years, reflected back upon their lives, on incidents they had experienced, on characters they had known and on the signs of the times. Indeed, as Gouraud started to prepare the material that would eventually become a series of memoirs published from 1939 onwards, he relied upon Gaden to provide details about the history of the places where they had been posted, the names of important figures, and for advice on linguistic matters and on the translation of local terms in various vernaculars. In November 1928, Gaden received news that his aunt Lise in Arcachon had died at the age of 83 years. She was the last of her generation and Gaden felt the loss deeply: she had been supportive of his parents and now of his sister Mine and Amedée Balaresque, her husband, and indeed of himself too. He would still retain a room at his sister’s place, but the departure of his aunt left a large hole in all their lives. His work, though, was progressing well and he had now filled more than 490 pages with the first draft of his work of Toucouleur proverbs, and he hoped to have the final manuscript ready by the following summer to take to his Paris-based publisher. Governor Choteau was coming to the end of his period of office in Mauritania and Chazal was now placed to take over, and these appointments signalled a new direction in political policy. In fact its effects were already starting to be felt, as Gaden reported to Gouraud: The result has been immediate, the nomads that I had succeeded at great difficulty in ‘domesticating’, with the exception of the wuld Khalil family, have left for the north claiming that everywhere we have hunted them with planes and banished them. […] The politics of coercion is also being applied to the tribes of the interior. I myself pursued coercion married to domestication, for in order to act upon people it is necessary to have them in your hand.

9 Not everyone in the new administration condemned Gaden’s approach. Dardenne, the military commander of Mauritania, added a comment to Gaden’s official service record in 1929: ‘A superior officer of high moral value who by his great culture, his perfect understanding of the native milieu has rendered the most significant service in his diverse military commands’. SHAT, Dossier Personnel No. 7Ye 486.

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While Gaden may have been right in his observations of the impact of the new policies on the Moors, he went on: It appears this has finally been understood for in September instructions were sent out to return to my policy. …all these problems are not to my taste’ (JHG-HJEH, 15.11.28). As for a return to his policy, it would appear that Gaden got that one seriously wrong! Gaden had earlier remarked that Gouraud, who was now travelling the world as an official representative of France, would evidently become ‘one of the personalities of France best placed to generate sympathies [in other countries] which will serve us well’. He immediately juxtaposed his friend’s prestigious international achievements with a description of his own hum- ble house in St Louis. It was quite obvious to both men that their ways in life had indeed ‘bifurcated’, and Gouraud made this explicit in August 1930: ‘you know that we have gone our separate ways, [but] I am still interested in everything that you do, in the hope that you will return to France one day soon’ (HJEG-JHG, 5.8.30). In late August, Gaden informed Gouraud that their old friend and acquaintance Alfred Fourneau had died, and he recounted the times they had spent together and the places where they had worked as colleagues. Fourneau had been at Say where he commanded a flotilla on the Niger, he had been in Bangui in the Congo and in Chad and later in Dakar after the war. ‘He is the first among us to disappear’, remarked Gaden. He continued to work on the 1,200 verses of the qacida or poem on the life of Al Hajj Umar, and reflected on what he had learnt about the great man’s life: ‘It is rather curious because it refers to the Umarian epoque viewed by a fanatic, but from a historical point of view it adds almost nothing to what Mage [a French colonial author] wrote.’ Gaden was in touch with the famous anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, President of the Institute of Ethnology in Paris,10 about the text and it appears that Lévy- Bruhl persuaded the governor in Senegal to provide Gaden with an assistant to help with the research: ‘a young Toucouleur, very kind but not very bright’ came for two hours per day to work alongside him. Gaden was also in close touch with Paul Rivet, the Director of the Musée de l’Homme, part of the National Natural History Museum in Paris, and Professor Gauthier,

10 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) was a French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist. He founded the Institut d’Ethnologie at the University of Paris, and he collaborated with Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of French sociology. Two of his books, How Natives Think and Primitive Mentality, had a huge impact in anthropology and beyond, but were controversial and much criticised. Related to Alfred Dreyfus, he was one of the first public figures to come out and support him.

390 chapter nine but he did not seem over anxious to become a member of these Parisian intellectual circles. He hoped to return, ‘by the will of God’, to France the following spring (JHG-HJEG, 25.8.30).

Rascals and Vagabonds

In one of the few remaining letters from Gaden to his sister Mine,11 he recounts in some detail the antics surrounding Amadou Aïdara’s baptism on 27th April 1930, when the boy was ten years old. He was then confirmed four months later on 31st August, and both ceremonies are recorded in the cathedral records in St Louis. In the week preceding the baptism, Gaden received oil from his sister for vespers on the day of the ceremony, and he took the ‘kid’ to his godfather, Michael André, ‘a very good mulatto’, employed at the Treasury, and then on to the boy’s godmother, Mademoiselle Victorina Dain, whose mother was an ‘old mulatress’, the widow of an administrative officer in the artillery who had died some 25 years earlier leaving three girls who had not married. They were all typists and lived with their mother. They were, Gaden pointed out to Mine, the most respectable and best sort of folk. Over the three days before the 27th, the ‘lad’ was with the Fathers morning and evening following a preparatory retreat for the communicants. Come Sunday morning, he was washed and scrubbed, and together the Gaden household set off to the cathedral at 8.20 a.m., for the baptism was to take place before Mass. The ‘lad’ was baptised under the name of Henri Michel Victor, and everything passed off well. There were ten communicants lined up in two columns, girls on one side and boys on the other. The church was full, and the ceremony was very fine, with a short and heart-felt address to the children from Father Walther, the priest who officiated at the service.12 After Mass, his godmother looked after Amadou and she then led him to Vespers that evening. The parish record names Amadou’s parents as Aïssé Aïdara (a Moorish patronym) and Aminata Cissé, the woman whom Gaden had taken in and

11 I am grateful for Mme Conqueret-Guibourd in Bordeaux for allowing me access to these letters. 12 Some years later, Father Walther, the vicar of St Louis, officiated at a funeral service for six airmen – pilots and mechanics – killed in an accident when a fire broke out in Podor. Gaden respected him as a man of God but thought little of his powers of oratory: ‘[He was] the only one to say a few words [at the funeral], but truly this poor man, who is a saint, does not possess the eloquence of delivery. What he said came from the heart’ (JHG-HJEG, 24.10.37).

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cared for as a child while he was in Boutilimit. It is very possible that Aminata was related to his partner Coumba Cissé, but there is no collaborative evidence for this.13 The parish record is signed by all the parties involved – André, Dain, Gaden and the priest Walther – and Amadou also writes his Christian names perhaps for the first time. His hand does not seem well practised at the name ‘Michel’, for he makes a mistake and tries to overwrite it. He is now known in church circles as ‘Henri Michel Victor (Amadou) Aïdara’.14 A small certificate noting the baptism is contained in the materials deposited in the Fonds Gaden at IFAN in Dakar after Gaden’s death; and it is as though this was purposely left as the only fragment of his domestic arrangements to which future researchers would be allowed access. Other fragments, as we shall see, were well obscured from view, and some still remain incomplete today. On the Monday, Gaden gave a day off to Amadou – known affectionately as ‘Hamm’ (a combination of Henri and Amadou) – and promised him he could invite five friends to the house – ‘small Catholics, mulattos, blacks’ – whom he had got to know at the church. There was much ‘dissipation and excitement’, but ‘after all…’ Gaden added wearily. On Tuesday, the boy did not want to go to school, and Gaden had to lead him to the school gates. On Thursday, he did not return home until 7.00 p.m., and said that he had passed all the afternoon with the Fathers, and that he should go to Mass the following day at 7 a.m. under the pretext that the Father had assured him that those who attend church on the first Friday of every month would gain eternal life. This was all very edifying, commented Gaden, and he reported to Mine that the boy had promised to be at school at 8 a.m. following Mass. Gaden was leaving the house at 8.30 the next morning when he was met by a child sent by the headmaster of the school, who told him that Amadou had not been at school since Tuesday. Gaden went straight away to the Fathers and then to the school. Amadou had only been to the Fathers on Thursday for a short time. Indeed, Gaden learnt that he and his comrades at the church were nothing but ‘little rascals’ with whom nothing could be achieved, and they roamed around like ‘vagabonds’ in an unruly manner. Gaden blamed himself for not seeing any of this earlier, and on returning home for lunch after school the boy received a majesterial thrashing. Gaden concluded to Mine: ‘There you are, the effects of the first communion on

13 Amadou Ali Diop’s (or Doudou Gaden’s) mother was called Aminata Cissé, but the son knew of no relation between the two women. 14 See Registre de Baptême, 1908–30, No. 16. Cathedral, St Louis in which the baptism and confirmation are both recorded.

392 chapter nine the lad in St Louis. It was done much too early and the children are too young to understand anything.’ The upshot was that Amadou was put on a short lead at home, school and church, and at the first sign of any mischief the wrath of the colonel would be upon him. Gaden finished off his letter of 4th May 1930 to his sister with a description of the events during the town council elections, which the previous year ‘had so outrageously been manipulated by the party of Blase Diagne’. There was violence in the streets with men armed with clubs, bludgeons and hammers roaming around. Gaden explained that as a European he could venture out without risk, but it had been impossible to vote during the morning. By the afternoon, guards on horseback were out patrolling the town and a semblance of order was re-established. He spoke to Mine about his passion for his research and in particular his love of Toucouleur literature, proverbs and sayings; he was, he explained, the only person able to do this sort of research work. The language that Gaden used in his letters to his family was frequently much more racist and ‘colonial’ than when he was communicating with fellow administrators or local people. His use of ‘mulatto’ and similar words obviously spoke to his family in terms they understood, although he was at pains to emphasise the respectability of those he had chosen as godpar- ents. What is revealing in the vignette of Amadou’s baptism is the extent to which Gaden was part of the métis and native Senegalese network in the town. Amadou played with their children, and they were visitors to the house. A few years later, Gaden fostered a young boy Amadou Ali Diop, aka Doudou Gaden, a relative of his partner Coumba Cissé. We will learn more about him below, but his presence drew young Senegalese lads his own age to the house. Amadou Aïdara, however, stood out from the other boys in St Louis. He was indulged by Gaden, and the effect was not always positive as we will see below. A few years earlier, probably in 1928 or 1929 when Amadou was around nine years old by the look of him, he was given the treat of a life- time. Gaden’s sister Mine visited West Africa for a second time taking yet again the new aeroplane service. She took flights with the Lignes Africaines Latécoère Company across Mauritania to Agadir and then on to Casablanca. Amadou accompanied her on this trip from St Louis, he in one plane and she in another, and she took aerial photographs of the scenes they passed over and mid-air shots of the other plane in which Amadou or ‘Hamm’ was flying. On a photograph of Agadir she writes: ‘Debuin [the pilot] prepares to land shaving the rooftops’; and later on taking off from Casablanca and looking across at the accompanying plane: ‘We fly over a sheet of clouds.

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Hamm does not leave us’. They also circled over St Louis, taking a picture of the quartier of Hôtel de la Mauritanie, and later one of the Palais du Gouvernement, the Hôtel de Ville and the port in Dakar. On arrival in Casablanca, Mine had the photographs of the outward-bound trip developed at M. Flandrin’s photography studios at ‘128, rue de la Liberté, Casablanca (Maroc)’, and brought a copy of the prints back for her brother.15 This seems to have been a treat exclusively for Mine and Amadou. Gaden appears not to have gone on these sight-seeing visits and is pictured standing in an avuncular pose next to a plane in which a helmeted Amadou is strapped securely to his seat. (See plate 14.) This sort of expedition would certainly have marked Amadou out as special among his group of friends in St Louis, and would have lent ammunition to those who regarded the lad as being excessively pampered and spoilt.

Plate 14. Henri Gaden (standing) and Amadou Aïdara, the boy in the aeroplane, c. 1928–9 (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 2, item 35, no. 706, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive).

15 See Fonds Gaden, CAOM, 15 APC/2, Envelopes 2 & 4 for this collection of photographs.

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The Populations we Love

In 1931, Gaden’s book, a work of some 370 or more pages, on Toucouleur proverbs and maxims was published by the Institute of Ethnology in Paris. Gaden sent Gouraud a copy, a gesture that pleased his friend no end. This was a work of immense scholarship, the product of over 20 years research that stretched back to when Gaden transferred to the civil administration in St Louis. It presents not only Toucouleur proverbs, but provides fine linguistic glosses and notes on the Pulaar language, and extensive ethnographic explanations of customs and practices referred to in the sayings. He warmly acknowledged the help of others in compiling and translating this collection, and observed to Gouraud: ‘I owe this work to these good people, the authors, men like any other men …. I could only have done this work here and not in France’ (JHG-HJEG, 17.4.32). His long introduction to the book referred to his motivations behind the project: In employing the leisure of retirement in the presentation of these sayings, we have had above all the goal of making better known the populations that we love in order to appreciate their qualities, both as an officer in the colonial troops and as an administrator. (1931: vi) In the text itself, he handsomely recounted the assistance and collaboration he received from many people, amongst whom were: Ismaïla M’Baye, a one-time Adjutant of the Senegalese Riflemen, then Police Brigadier in St Louis 1928–9, who had studied Arabic before he entering the service;16 Djibril Lih, Principal Interpreter and a Toucouleur himself, who had been posted at Kaédi and had supplied text on funerals and marriages. He also referred to two informants who had supplied him with information on magic and the interpretation of dreams; these were ‘Mahmadou Ba’ and ‘Coumba Cissé’. Just like Niorga, his wife from the Chad days, his Toucouleur mousso Coumba was able to provide important cultural insights into her society. The revelation Gaden had all those years ago regarding the role of women in his life seems to have stayed with him, and his collaboration with Coumba in matters of research was important. Indeed, Gaden began to sound like a Toucouleur in his letters to Gouraud, which he would pepper with phrases in Pulaar, such as the stock response in the river valley when suggesting some future possibility or project: ‘So Allah dyabé’, If Allah

16 This was the same M’Baye who had brought ‘our old friend’ the marabout Seydou Nooro Tall and Gaden into contact some years earlier.

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wills’.17 Some years later Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, who had collaborated with Octave Houdas over the translation of Arabic manuscripts, described Gaden as ‘the most talented and the greatest expert in the Peuhl language (Pulaar) in the world’.18 The publication of Gaden’s collection of Toucouleur proverbs and maxims in 1931 cemented his place as the leading expert in their language (Pulaar) and culture.

A Grand Marabout

Gouraud was disappointed to learn that Gaden was not planning to return to France for the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, which turned out to be a great success in Gouraud’s view.19 Gouraud went along to the closing ceremony in November, for which a huge crowd gathered, and he was touched by the parade of spahis as they filed passed. Gouraud thought the light mist that had settled on the scene provided a perfect melancholy atmosphere for the occasion. Bou el Mogdad II again attended the event, and later dined with Gouraud in Paris at Les Invalides, when he presented to his old commanding officer a finely-worked leather gun holster from Tagant. Gouraud still lived with his sister in a shared apartment in Paris, and helped support the families of his two sisters-in-law, both of whom had many years earlier lost their husbands, Gouraud’s brothers. Auguste Terrier, the two Henris’ close political ally, was now in a poor state of health and with failing eyesight (HJEG-JHG, 13.1.32). To this news Gaden responded: ‘Here we are, therefore, the ancestors.’ But he still pushed on with his research and received in his small house in the northern quarter of St Louis a stream of Moors seeking his advice, just as he had when living at the Hôtel de la Mauritanie. He was not happy with current policies being pursued in the territory under Chazal, and he described the present impasse:

17 Under the modern system of orthography it would be rendered: ‘So Allah jaabe’. 18 See his letter to Gouraud, 6th January 1940, in the Fonds Gouraud, MAEE. 19 This was the ‘Exposition Coloniale Internationale’ held in Paris at the Bois de Vincennes from May until November 1931, and was called the most spectacular colonial extravaganza ever staged in the West. It included displays of indigenous arts and craftwork from the colonies, cultural performances such as a dance troop of bare-breasted young girls from Siguiri (where Gaden had been posted in 1898), and a group of Moor nomads on camel-back. A counter-exhibition was organised by the communists at around the same time and was entitled ‘The Truth on the Colonies’, and featured exposés on the brutality of colonial conquest and criticisms of forced labour regimes, like those uncovered in the Congo by de Brazza. See Morton, 2000, Hybrid Modernities.

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As I say to the Moors who come to see me, it is as though they come to consult a grand marabout. Poor Mauritanians. Chazal [now the Governor] never receives the Moors! It was, he said, to keep his prestige intact. I believe that if he had received any of them his prestige would not have lasted very long for he is incapable of speaking with them about their affairs, which he does not know. The contact between the head of the colony and the tribal chiefs and notables is completely lost. You know how indispensable this is in this country. (JHG-HJEG, 20.3.32) He went on to explain to Gouraud that as a result the Emir of Adrar, Sidi Ahmed, had fallen into ‘dissidence’ and had killed a French lieutenant and a sergeant, and that many factions had fled into the north; no political action was being used to try to attract them back, much to Gaden’s astonishment. In Senegal the situation was poor too, ‘completely corrupt and the native chiefs are exploited in indigenous style by the Diagnistes [followers of Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne] on the Colonial Council’. ‘The administration knows full well what is happening, but in its lethargy it does nothing.’ Gaden was pleased that his work distracted him from these goings-on in the colony, and from the dark clouds gathering in Europe, where there were ‘two sorts of Boches: the pure Boche: Hilter … the camouflaged Boche … the most dangerous because they delude…. We are now in a quite worrying position’ (JHG-HJEG, 20.3.32). In April 1932, the grand marabout Gaden was preparing to celebrate with his household in St Louis the Islamic festival of Tabaski, or id al-adha, when a ram is sacrificed in remembrance of Abraham and his son Ishmael. Gaden had bought a ram and the animal was kept, washed and groomed with pride until the day of the feast itself, when it was slaughtered to provide meat for his household, the local poor and his friends and neighbours. Gaden’s celebration of such an important Muslim festival would only have added to his status as a good Muslim in the eyes of the community.

Cravats and Qacidas

The reason for Gouraud’s disappointment at Gaden being unable to come to the Colonial Exposition became apparent to Gaden in mid June 1932. Gaden had belatedly received an official invitation from the Ministry of Colonies to be presented with the cravat of a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur during the Colonial Exposition. He was taken by complete surprise, and offended at the lateness of the invitation that arrived without any prior indication. Gaden’s estimation of the workings of the administration and government of the colonies was low at the best of times and this

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news did not improve that impression. However, he could rest assured that his name was in line for the honour he had requested some years earlier, whether the presentation would be made at a future exposition or elsewhere. Gouraud’s networking in Paris had brought about a result for his old friend, even if it had not quite worked out as planned. But Terrier, the presumed hand behind the initial idea, was not to see his protégé receive the honour, for Terrier died in June 1932. He had been a figure at the heart of the Comité de l’Afrique française, had encouraged Gaden’s research, and was a close friend of Gouraud’s in Paris. ‘He was a rock-solid friend. […] We arrive, alas, at an age of separations’, Gaden reflected (JHG-HJEG, 16.6.32). Gaden was planning to return to France in a couple of months’ time in the late summer of 1932, but his plans were put in jeopardy by some significant financial worries. His lawyer in St Louis had committed a number of acts of fraud and he was due to stand trial in October. The legal process against him, however, would not solve the immediate problems his defrauded clients faced. Gaden had just paid him 6,000 francs in attorney’s fees to claim his part of the inheritance left by his aunt Lise. There would probably be nothing left after this, so he thought it wise not to travel and to make a few economies instead. He might be able to afford to travel to France the following year, he mused, but not this one. His newly published book Proverbs had been well received in Paris, and he continued to add the finishing touches to his translation of the poem of Al Hajj Umar’s life: ‘it is not palpitating [work] but it is a very absorbing occupation and it is exactly what I need.’ He no longer saw Governor Chazal, ‘a benighted individual and as lazy as anything’; but he warmed to Chazal’s stand-in, Gabriel Descemet, whom he saw often and wished would be appointed as the official governor. Despite his financial concerns, Gaden did in the end take the boat heading for Bordeaux in August, and went to stay with his sister Mine and husband Amedée. On arriving in France, he read news of further setbacks in Mauritania, where a number of Moor factions had been involved in combat with French forces, at the cost of one officer and six sub-officers. Moreover, there was a new and ‘extremely dangerous agitator’ on the scene, Mohammed el Mamoun, who had for a good while worked against French interests in Morocco. In general, the Moors were facing difficult times, since the prices they received for their animals had fallen, and they were now having problems paying their taxes. A good deal of discontent was felt. Indeed, before he had left St Louis, Gaden received numerous visitors who complained bitterly about the situation; but he could do nothing to help them. The talk was still that there might be a return to Gaden’s old policies

398 chapter nine of ‘apprivoisement’, but it seemed that the days of material support, reci- procity and an entente cordiale between coloniser and colonised were long gone. The Emir of Trarza went to Dakar in July and talked frankly with Governor General Jules Brévie not only about the pitiful state of his own people but also about the general policy in the Sahara. This meeting followed the death of the Emir Sidi Ahmed of Adrar in March 1932, who had been subject to an arrest warrant. A detachment under the command of Lieutenant Mussat sent out to apprehend him was destroyed in an engagement with the Emir’s men. A second French force led by Captain Le Cocq then pursued the Emir’s party, and the ruler soon lay dead on the desert sands after a brief skirmish. Gouraud later wanted to hear from Gaden the whole story of what happened in Adrar and to the Emir. Once he was back in St Louis in early 1933, Gaden related to him what he had pieced together. Gaden’s conclusion was: ‘If the contact I took so much care to nurture had not been interrupted after me, the Emir would never have dreamed of becoming dissident … but the contact was completely lost.’ Gaden then admitted to Gouraud that he was never fully behind Gouraud’s own choice of Emir after the conquest in 1908 (JHG-HJEG, 1.2.33). One of the reasons for Gaden travelling to France was to deliver his manuscript of the qacida to his publisher, and he went to Paris at the end of October to hand it over to Paul Rivet.20 Gaden now regularly received the journal published by the Sociéte des Africanistes, and was pleased that Gouraud had urged him to take out a subscription: ‘The journal is much better than I had hoped. I have found there really quite interesting things and a remarkable bibliography.’ He also continued to receive news from Mauritania whilst in France, including a letter from Bou el Mogdad II that updated him on the deteriorating situation in the territory. He expected one also from the native interpreter stationed in Atar, who faithfully kept him abreast of developments in the French headquarters in Adrar. He suspected, however, that a cabinet noir operated to monitor all in-coming and out-going mail from West Africa, and even Gouraud’s correspondence to him was not immune to the censor’s beady eye, he concluded (JHG-HJEG, 21.10.32). Gaden embarked on Le Montesquieu, a cargo vessel belonging to the St Louis trading house of Maurel and Prom, bound for Dakar in the second

20 It was eventually published in 1935 by the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris under the title: La Vie d’El Hadj Omar. Qacida en Poular. Transcription, traduction, notes et glossaire par Henri Gaden, 289 pp.

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week of December. He was joined on the voyage by 24 other passengers, 20 of whom were the wives of company employees whose husbands worked in West Africa. ‘I regret perhaps that I am not 40 years younger. In any case, I will never have sailed in such a similar aviary’, he confessed to Gouraud on the eve of his departure. Gaden had managed to see his old friend before he left, and was happy to have renewed their long-standing relationship face to face. It was essential for him to be back in St Louis for Christmas, he argued, so as to resume his research by the New Year. He had since learnt more about the debacle over his nomination for decoration of commandeur of the Legion of Honour: Gaden had been proposed by his old friend Marcel Olivier, a one-time Governor of the Soudan and an acting Governor General of French West Africa. He also had the support of Maréchal Louis Lyautey, the sometime Resident in Morocco and Minister of War. It appeared that he had been the victim of ‘the shambles in which we find ourselves and in which government lethargy appears to have reduced us more than ever before.’ Chazal, who had been ill and hovered ‘between life and death for ten days’, had created a ‘bear-garden in the Ministry of Colonies’, and Gaden feared that the Government General in Dakar was in a similar state (JHG-HJEG, 4.12.32). On his arrival in Dakar and before he journeyed up to St Louis, Gaden went to Ngazobil, near to Joal Fadiout in central Senegal, where there was a Catholic mission run by Father Abiven, now 75 years of age, who had once been stationed in Kita in 1894 during Gaden’s very first posting to the Soudan. Gaden visited the mission in order to pick up Amadou Aïdara, his adopted son, who had been given over to the priest’s care in Gaden’s absence. Amadou was becoming increasingly disruptive at home during Gaden’s trips away from St Louis, and he thought it prudent to put the lad, who was now 13 years old, under the guardianship of the head of the mission run by the Pères du Saint Espirit originally from St Louis. Gaden was invited to return to visit another mission station on the isle of Poponguine further up the coast, where another old missionary contact worked with the Serer, the local people. So perhaps Amadou’s stay with the missionaries had not been too eventful or troublesome for the Fathers, Gaden mused. Mauritania was going from bad to worse. Gaden had hoped that Gabriel Descemet, the acting Governor, would take a more proactive role in the affairs of the Moors, given that he appeared to Gaden to understand more and more the complexities of the Sahara. A good harvest in Senegal meant that Moor camel caravans in the south and west had work transporting agricultural produce and were earning an income, and there was less discontent there. But he met up with Taleb Khiar, his old Moor friend who had

400 chapter nine come over to the French in 1919, along with his brother and one-time rebel Merebbi Rebbo (both sons of the late Ma el Ainin), and the two men expressed the view that the absence of contact between the French and the northern nomads was a grave error. Pillaging was rife in Brakna and many camels had been seized, and the attackers had resorted to their old tactic of cutting the telegraph wires between French posts. As a result of these renewed actions, all movement of French traffic and mail between outposts had ceased in some areas, and fortifications were being built around the post at Aleg. So while the economic fortunes of some Moors in Trarza might have improved, the upsurge of raiding in other parts meant that security was no longer assured and ‘a return to a military regime’ was highly likely, Gaden thought (JHG-HJEG, 19.1.33). A new military post was planned for Idjil, a place in the north of Mauritania some 300 kilometres march from Atar. Gaden had always opposed such an idea because of the problems of supplying such a northerly outpost, but the decision was now made by the Governor General. The post was later named ‘Fort Gouraud’, in memory of the commanding officer who had conquered the Adrar some 24 years earlier (HJEG-JHG, 20.6.33).

Mine and Money

Three letters dating from the late summer of 1933 from Gaden to his sister Mine have survived, and they describe among other things the financial difficulties both were facing. The promise of an inheritance following the death of their aunt Lise in 1928 had still not been realised, and now in June 1933 Mine’s husband, Amedée Balaresque, died, having been diagnosed with an abdominal tumour just two weeks earlier. Gaden wrote to her in August with the bossiness of an older brother and set out forcefully what her options were, in his view. There was debate over how much she should accept as a settlement from her late husband’s will, given that there appear to have been step-children from Amedée’s previous marriage. Gaden also anticipated the financial consequences of his own death: his pension would stop after he died and so his sister would be deprived of the money he sent her from time to time. He was proposing to dispatch 9,000 frs which, together with an additional 9,000 frs from the settlement over her husband’s estate, would allow her to remain at her present lodgings for a good while longer. Mine had suggested to him the idea of her finding work, but her brother’s response was simple: ‘… as what?’ He was not in favour of this; but they did discuss the possible sale or renting out of their aunt’s furniture

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as another means to provide an extra source of income. Not only were his sister’s and his own financial affairs a cause of concern, but he signed off his letter of 31st August with a gloomy assessment of the state of France: it was suffering from lethargy, and its landlords, civil servants and the retired would all have a disagreeable end to the year due to the financial difficulties that Gaden saw lying ahead. Gaden also corresponded with a ‘Marie Louise’, most likely Marie Louise née Reyher, later Fourault – the sister of Paul, a university lecturer at Nancy, and part of the network of kin in Bordeaux related to the Klipschs and Gadens. The Reyhers were close family, linked to Henri through his paternal grandmother (a Klipsch, whose sister married a Reyher) and through his mother (a Rousse, whose sister married into the family in the next generation). He sent Marie Louise money for his sister from time to time. Why he did not send it directly to her is not known; but in September 1933 he dispatched by boat rather than aeroplane (a more secure means of transport) a money order for 2,250 Frs. This sum was to tide Mine over, for he had heard from Marie Louise that none of their aunt’s inheritance had yet come through (JHG-Mine 4.9.33). The delay to the settlement of the will was dragging on interminably and causing Mine distress. The relationship between Gaden and Marie Louise Reyher/Fourault is puzzling, for not only did she keep him up to date on his sister’s financial situation and occasionally receive money orders for her sent from Senegal, but she also had authorisation to draw money from an account he held at the Crédit Lyonnais in Bordeaux. He advised his sister that if she had immediate money difficulties, she should contact Marie Louise who could gain access to this account. Her financial difficulties, he assured Mine, would remain between themselves. Why he kept a bank account to which Marie Louise had access but not his sister is indeed a conundrum. I would suggest that it was or had been connected with the maintenance of his two illegitimate children who, by the 1930s, would have been grown up. Was Marie Louise the contact point between Gaden and these two children, both of whom may well have been ostracised by the Gadens in Bordeaux? His sister Mine knew of Gaden’s ‘African adventures’, and it is possible that he organised his children’s affairs through her and intermediaries such as Marie Louise Fourault, a cousin on the Catholic side of Henri’s family. (Did she and her side of the family compare favourably with his possibly disapprov- ing and censorious Protestant relatives on his father’s side?) Gaden used to visit the Fouraults on his furloughs from France, as at the end of 1915 after being shot in Morocco, and in 1927, when he left his military canteen at

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René and Henriette Fourault’s apartment in Bordeaux. This was a relationship of some intimacy. One other child who was no secret to Mine, although he proved to be an occasional embarrassment, was Gaden’s adopted child, Amadou, whose development his aunt Mine in Bordeaux had followed in detail. During the hivernage of 1933 in Senegal there had been some violent thunderstorms, and a strike of lightening had recently hit a horseman 100 metres away from Gaden. Amadou was not very courageous, Gaden reported, and was terrorised at night in his small bedroom next to Gaden’s on the upstairs landing by the thunderstorms. Gaden preferred the hot wet season, for while the heat made working difficult it relieved him temporarily of his rheumatism. Amadou enjoyed other aspects of the hot summer, in particular bathing in the sea, which he did almost everyday despite the poor state of the beach. He had already got through one pair of swimming trunks and was on this second pair by June. He went every evening to the youth club, much to Gaden’s relief since it took the boy out of the house, where he was troublesome. He did not like reading much, and it was difficult to find things beyond fairy tales to tempt him. Gaden found one book that Amadou devoured and this was Sans Famille by Hector Malot. This 1878 novel tells the story of the travels of a young orphan, Rémi, who is sold to a street musician at the age of ten years. Amadou, also not living with his biological parents, perhaps identified with Rémi, and dreamed of escaping the conventions and idiosyncrasies of a European-dominated household, no matter how unusual Gaden’s must have been by the standards of the time. At the time of Gaden’s writing to Mine in 1933, Amadou was reading François le Champi, one of George Sand’s novels about an abandoned young boy who has a reputation for thieving and naughtiness and who lives with his mother.

Doudou Gaden’s Story21

In 1934 when he was about five years old, Amadou (or Doudou) Ali Diop came to live in Henri Gaden’s house. (See plate 15 of Amadou in 2004.) Gaden knew Amadou’s father’s, Bakary Diop, a trader in Dagana who was at the time starting to expand his trading business. He became increasingly

21 The details of this story were relayed to me by Amadou Ali Diop or ‘Doudou Gaden’ in interviews with him in Dakar in 2004, and in subsequent follow-up sessions conducted by Assane Lo on my behalf in 2007.

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Plate 15. Amadou Ali Diop, aka Doudou Gaden. Author’s own photograph taken in Dakar 2004.

occupied with commerce and decided to foster his son out to his relative, Coumba Cissé.22 Bakary’s father, named Coké Diop (Amadou’s grandfather), a nurse who worked in the hospital at Dagana, was Coumba Cissé’s elder brother. Coumba’s full name was Coumba Cissé Traoré, and she was Malian by origin. Her parents had settled in the Senegal River Valley when

22 The fostering of children with family or friends is not unusual in West Africa, and it is still done to further a child’s chances in life. Doudou’s mother was named Aminata Cissé, the

404 chapter nine she was a child, just before the turn of the century, and she had grown up there. She had met Gaden during Gouraud’s pacification of Mauritania, when he had been stationed in Boutilimit between 1908 and 1911. On settling in Senegal, the elder brother changed the family name for civil purposes to Diop, a more Senegalese and less Malian one. Doudou was brought up speaking Wolof, so when he moved into the Gaden household he found it difficult to follow conversations in Pulaar, which was spoken by everyone in the house. Doudou called Gaden ‘grandfather’; he was a rather distant and intimidating figure, although he could be very warm towards Doudou and the children of the neighbourhood. But they knew he had another side too, for when crossed he would be a stern, strict disciplinarian. Amadou Aïdara, fair-skinned by comparison with many others, favoured the company of métis children – the Guillaberts, Valentins and others – and he went around to Victorina Dain’s, his godmother’s, house a lot. He sang in the church choir, learnt to play the trumpet and played in the church orchestra; he always wore European rather than local dress such as a boubou or gown, and chai’a or baggy trousers. He was known locally and in the house as ‘Gaden bou ndaw’ or ‘little Gaden’ in Wolof. By now Aissatou Sal was Gaden’s cook, and she also acted as his recep- tionist. Visitors would report to her, and she would consult Gaden on whether they should be admitted or not. For instance, people often came by for small sums of money to tide them over, and Gaden used to allow Aissatou to give out a few coins to those in need. The only person who had direct access to Gaden was Bou el Mogdad II, a frequent visitor to the house, who worked with Gaden on translations. Army generals and other military figures would come from time to time to talk to Gaden, and his old Mauritanian contacts would seek a hearing with him too. Gaden socialised little, occasionally seeing those involved in the Cooperative such as Chapouty or Lagrange the merchant, and he had as many métis as French acquaintances. On Saturdays, Gaden and his family often went to follow the horse races and on Sundays they watched the regattas or pirogue races along the river, which Gaden enjoyed greatly. Coumba Cissé oversaw all of the household affairs with the help of her domestic staff. She rarely if ever had contact with any of her own wider family, and seemed to be estranged from them, which was not an unusual same name as Amadou Aïdara’s. Doudou thought that this was either a coincidence or that Gaden had inserted her name on the record of baptisms for the sake of convenience. Why the father’s real name and a false name for the mother would be inserted is puzzling.

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pattern in mixed households. She and Gaden had a ‘colonial marriage’ in which each partner kept his or her own religion; Coumba was a practising Muslim. The religious festivals of both faiths were celebrated: at Tabaski a ram was slaughtered in the house; at Korité (the fête that marks the end of the fast of Ramadan) new clothes were given to everyone; and presents were handed out at Christmas time. The children were, in Doudou’s memory, the first ones in St Louis to have bicycles, pedal cars, a rocking horse, rucksacks and all sorts of other toys. Gaden rarely went to church and, on those occasions that he did, Coumba sometimes accompanied him. Their relationship was warm but not particularly intimate: Doudou reports that she rarely went up to his room and he does not recall them sleeping together. Gaden’s relationship with Coumba seems not dissimilar to the one he had with Niorga in Tchekna, when he admitted to Gouraud in 1907 that he treated her ‘deliberately like a sister who is charged with housework’. He did however tend to Coumba’s wishes and took good care of her. Beautiful, tall and proud, she was approachable, had strength of character and much personal warmth.

Reunion at Atar

There is little remaining correspondence for 1934, but over the summer we know that Gaden wrote to Gouraud. One letter contains reflections on earlier times in West Africa, memories sparked by a photograph sent to Gaden that reminded him of his nickname from his Bandiagara days: ‘Lieutenant Dabo, “second meat commander”, charged with its morning distribution.’ In early 1935, Gouraud asked Gaden to do a favour for him with respect to Bayla Biram, the Toucouleur who had led a section of partisans with courage under Bablon’s command during the conquest of Adrar some 25 years before. Bayla’s brother, a school teacher, was in some difficulty with his employment, and Gouraud wanted Gaden to speak to the Governor of Senegal on his behalf to find the man a new position. The two Henris remained committed to those who had served them as comrades-in-arms and gestures such as these are a testament to that commitment, even if from another perspective such favours might look like nepotism. By now Gaden was the President of the Administrative Council of the Military Cooperative in St Louis, and a change in official regulations meant that this mutual aid association had either to be disbanded or reformed under a civil statute. The second option is what the Cooperative had decided on, and Gaden along with other reserve officers were charged with

406 chapter nine its transformation. The Cooperative regulated prices of some commodities for its members, and Gaden took it upon himself to prevent an immediate increase in prices if the association were to disappear. The St Louis Chamber of Commerce later declared war on the Cooperative for attempting to regu- late commodity prices; for the son of a mercantile capitalist, Gaden’s role in all of this is beautifully ironic. Gaden’s research work was taking its toll on his health, and his eyesight was weakening. He gave up studying at night by artificial light, a move that slowed his progress on a number of projects, the most important of which was the compilation of a new extended ‘Peul [Pulaar]-French’ dictionary. He now read only a little, worked in short bursts between meals, and went to bed at an early hour. But he felt the pressure of completing the project, a sense of obligation to what had become his life’s work: the study of the language of the Toucouleur. His monumental translation of the life of Al Hajj Umar was now published, and he sent Gouraud a copy of the finished book. His friend was submerged in reading the book and remarked: ‘I understand the interest you found in this large work, for the many pages that I have read … recall for me stories from the old Soudan; but what a burden this must have been for you’ (HJEG-JHG, 6.1.36). Gouraud had some good news to pass on to his friend. The new cathedral in Dakar had just been completed and it was to be consecrated in February 1936. Gouraud was invited by Monseigneur Jalabert’s successor to the Bishopric of Senegambia to attend the ceremony, and he was preparing to take a boat from Marseille for Senegal later that month. His intention was to visit St Louis after the official event, and Gaden was excited by the prospect of seeing Gouraud back in West Africa after so many years. Despite the fact that he had been back to Bamako and Segou in 1934 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the French conquest, Gouraud had not yet managed to look in on his old friend in St Louis. This was to be perhaps his last opportunity. Gaden informed him that the apartment of the chef du cabinet of the Senegal administration, above the Customs Office and facing the river, would be made available to him. It was very central and would be perfect for him, Gaden assured his friend. The military commandant would put at his service a personal retinue of orderlies, boys and other domestic staff, but he was advised to send detailed instructions specifying his requirements to the commanding officer. A formal dinner would be held on the evening of his arrival, and a planned trip by car up to Adrar was in the offing. Gaden was also pleased that the governance of Mauritania was in the hands, if only temporarily, of someone he respected: Jean-Baptiste Chazelas, ‘a man of remarkable intelligence and a perfect understanding of the

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country’. Chazelas, though, was not to take up the post permanently (JHG- HJEG, 29.1.36). Gouraud duly made his trip to Dakar, attended the consecration of the new cathedral, and made a nostalgic journey back up to the French post at Atar. This time, however, he travelled north by car rather than camel, taking him only two days, and he was accompanied by the acting Governor Chazelas and Colonel Aubert, who had been part of the 1909 mission. The gate of the old post was refitted with decorations in an attempt to reconstruct the triumphal scene captured on camera in 1909, and the group of returnees were again photographed in a similar pose with a cannon in the foreground. Gaden, who was not part of the original party, was included in the 1936 gathering, a figure second from the right in the image reproduced in Gouraud’s memoires.23 The burial site of Captain Repoux, one of Gouraud’s men who fell during the Adrar campaign, had still not been found, although Gaden reassured him that the search continued, even if the death had occurred over two decades earlier. The business of honouring the French dead still loomed large in the minds of these two friends. Gouraud must have passed by Gaden’s house during his stop-over in St Louis en route to Atar, for Doudou Gaden remembers a visit from the great general. He recalls distinctly the presence of this esteemed military figure, with one sleeve of his jacket hanging limply, where his amputated arm would once have been, and he was fascinated by this celebrated character and intimidated by his animated manner. Gouraud’s character was in stark contrast to the more introverted and scholarly Gaden, who stood hunched in the 1936 photograph taken in Atar. Gouraud is pictured as upright, haughty, erect and staring out at the world with a touch of arro- gance. Doudou was struck by the difference in demeanour of these two European ‘brothers’.24 In March 1936, the new Governor of Mauritania, Jules Marcel de Coppet, arrived in St Louis and immediately made an excellent impression on Gaden; he also struck a favourable image amongst the administration and the Moors themselves. He appeared to like the town, and his wife and family were content and in good health. This appointment was a change, in

23 See Gouraud (1945) illustrations between pages 208–09, where both images are to be found. 24 Doudou Gaden reports that none of Gaden’s family (Mine or his illegitimate children, of whom he had no knowledge) visited the house in St Louis during the period he lived with him, from about 1934 onwards.

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Gaden’s eyes, from his predecessors: ‘If Mauritania is to have finally a stable Governor, that will be very good’ (JHG-HJEG, 22.3.36).25 The question of the presentation of Gaden’s cravat as a commandeur of the Legion of Honour raised its head again. This issue had first been mooted by the late Auguste Terrier, who had proposed that ‘true colonials’ of long- standing personal service to the colonies should be decorated. It turned out that this decision had been overturned by the government minister Albert Sarraut,26 and Gaden, who claimed that he had never asked for support from politicians, felt he had been left hanging. Gouraud moved behind the scenes to have the award recognised and at one point was going to make the presentation himself. Chazelas and Gouraud put pressure on the Ministry of Colonies, now occupied by Marius Moutet, to act upon these earlier proposals, and Gouraud wrote to the minister twice in 1936 after his return from West Africa. The renewal of his close friendship with Gaden in St Louis, and his discussions with officials in Senegal, had triggered Gouraud’s determination to see his old comrade-in-arms decorated in a manner he thought appropriate. While the wheels of official recognition turned slowly, Gaden planned a return to France in the late summer of 1936. This was to be his last visit to the mother country. He was concerned about civil unrest and violence, strikes and industrial action that had broken out in France, all of which had contributed to bringing down two years earlier his old political ally and colonial party supporter Gaston Doumergue, then President of the Republic in 1934. Gaden thought that revolution was in the air, and feared for his sister in Bordeaux (JHG-HJEG, 26.6.36). The Minister of Colonies was insist- ing that Gaden’s cravat be presented to him in the Place Faidherbe in St Louis, but Gaden wished to receive the honour from Gouraud ‘without any ceremony’ during his trip to France. If it were not to happen during his French sojourn, then he would have to wait until December to receive his honour back in St Louis. ‘For the first time in my colonial life’, he admitted to Gouraud, ‘I have the sense of going on an adventure in making this return to France’ (JHG-HJEG, 6.8.36).

25 Marcel de Coppet (1881–1968) served for only a brief spell as Governor of Mauritania and quickly moved on to become the Governor General of West Africa until 1938. His colonial service included the Governorship of Dahomey (1933–34) and of Madagascar (1939–40). 26 Albert Sarraut (1872–1962) was born in Bordeaux and went on to become a minister (of the Colonies, of the Interior, of the Navy, etc) in numerous governments after the First World War. He was also the Governor General of Indochina for a period of time.

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He was back in France by late August, having taken again the cargo vessel Le Montesquieu run by Maurel and Prom, and lodged with his sister in a small apartment in the rue Calvé in Bordeaux. His sister lived frugally in rooms rented from a woman whose late husband had been in colonial service. The landlady passed the summers in the country and this allowed Gaden ‘in the name of colonial comradeship’ to find lodgings in her house with his sister (JHG-HJEG, 23.8.36). He learned on arrival that his cravat would almost certainly be presented in St Louis, even though he had requested that Gouraud be his official sponsor. It turned out that in fact Gouraud had turned down this role, and it was he who had suggested that Gaden receive it in St Louis amongst those people he knew and in a place where he had worked. Either General Villain or Governor de Coppet would present the honour. While Gaden found de Coppet to be a courteous man with very good relationships with everyone, he was nonetheless ‘a type of revolutionary in lace’ because of a series of labour laws he was trying to introduce in the colony. Gaden did not warm to this idea and would have preferred the previous Governor Jules Brévie if anyone was to perform the ceremony other than Gouraud. Brévie’s departure from his post was part of a new policy in administrative circles that aimed at giving personnel as wide an experience of the colonies as possible, rather than allowing them to specialise in one particular region. Both Henris agreed that this was a retrograde move by the ministry, for no-one would be able to build up the kind of in-depth knowledge of a place and its peoples that Gaden and Gouraud had done. The two men met up in mid-October in Paris, where Gaden stayed for a few days in his friend’s apartment in Les Invalides. During this last trip to France, Gaden met up one day for a dinner in Bordeaux with a number of family members. His paternal uncle’s grandchildren and their offspring attended the meal, which ‘was rather ceremo- nious’. This was the impression made on a young boy François Gaden, only nine years old, one of the great-grandchildren of Henri’s late uncle Herman. He sat at the table rather overawed by the occasion and by the colonel himself: ‘not particularly tall, of medium build, very correct bearing with an authoritative manner… he was respected, being regarded nevertheless as an exotic product’.27

27 Personal letter from M. François Gaden (born 1927), dated 15.10.2004, Beaumarchès.

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The Tearaway

Gaden’s return to St Louis in December 1936 must have stirred mixed emotions in him, for while he could look forward to receiving his Commandeur’s cravat in the New Year, there had been further trouble at home with his adopted son, Amadou Aïdara. Gaden explained to Gouraud that: ‘my young Moor has caused me much annoyance and got up to all sorts of idiocy during my absence.’ Gaden removed the lad from the local secondary school, the Ecole Blanchot and was steering him towards the Maritime College for Marine Mechanics in Dakar, but unfortunately the boy could not attend until he had taken an entrance examination in the summer. Gaden thought highly of the boy’s intelligence, for ‘the lad would get through the exams hands down’, as long as he retained what he had already learnt. ‘Everything will come good in the end’, he mused. But Gaden’s problems with the behaviour of Amadou did not go away. In May 1937, a shopkeeper in St Louis, wrote to Gaden to complain about the lad’s behaviour. He signed his name ‘Mouhamadoune Niang’, addressed the colonel as ‘Monsieur le Gouverneur en retraite Gadé’, and related the following story:

I inform you that one of your family, the young Gadé, came to see me in my boutique on 10 May towards 9 o’clock at night and asked me to give him a packet of Job cigarettes; at the moment when I gave him the packet, thinking he had the intention of buying it and looking for the means to pay, he took from his pocket a revolver filled with water and squirted it in my face saying ‘if you dare to come near me I will kill you.’ He had the packet for about an hour, and then returned it to me saying ‘give me five frs or the next time I see you there will be consequences.’ Having had trouble in my shop [before], I decided to close up and he treated me to much abuse …. He is one of your family, it is why I have said nothing to him, I do not want to fight with him. I ask you to hold him back if he comes near here again.

Amadou would have been 17 years old when this occurred, and it seems a particularly juvenile thing for him to have done at that age. There were, however, more serious incidents, if the reports of his contemporaries who were still alive in 2004 in St Louis are to be believed. His namesake, Amadou Haidara, two years his junior, was at the same secondary school, the Ecole Blanchot, as Amadou Gaden. Despite having been baptised Henri Michel Victor, Gaden’s adopted son was known as Amadou Aïdara at school, which caused confusion, amusement and annoyance for his virtually homonymic namesake. Haidara’s opinion of Amadou Gaden is not good, for he remembers him as ‘not serious, an impossible rebel who got involved in all sorts of

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stupidity, and chased after women’. He was ‘intelligent, gifted but not sen- sible’. There were other incidents with guns, but real ones: he is reported to have shot a friend accidently while out hunting birds; he is said to have been arrested and taken to a police cell for using a gun, but Gaden intervened and had the lad released. It would appear that these incidents occurred in the period after he had left school and was waiting to attend the Maritime College in Dakar. Stories of a more mythical nature circulate the town which suggest, for instance, that Amadou went to Algeria during the Second World War disguised as a Berber spy, was caught by the Germans and executed. However, it seems that after Amadou left St Louis in 1938, he was not seen again. What is also consistent are the stories recounted today by Amadou’s peers that tell of a child who was pampered, spoilt, reckless and indulged by the authorities.

A Great Person of Such Modesty

On 27th January 1937, General Villain presented Gaden with his cravat of a Commandeur de La Légion d’Honneur at the Place Faidherbe, at the foot of the statue of the first Governor of Senegal, and in front of the flag of the First Senegalese regiment, in St Louis. (See plate 16.) The general was met at the airfield where the plane bringing him from Dakar had landed. The ceremony began at 9.30 a.m. with a review of the garrison, the award of medals and honours and then a file-past. The weather was magnificent, the skies were blue, and a very large crowd gathered to witness the empire honouring its loyal servants. Gaden later lunched in the officers’ mess with the general and other military staff, and toasts were made in his honour; the usually but- toned up Gaden could not help but show some of the emotions that coursed through him. Gaden was moved especially by the thought of the general willingly taking on this task so soon after the loss of his wife, and he sent Gouraud a photograph of the event and the text of his speech, but requested that it should not leak out or find its way into the press. The ceremony took place just three days after his 70th birthday, which had been marked by a meal attended by 30 officers and colleagues from the Soudan; but the style of the celebration had not been as ‘broussard’ or ‘up-country’ as Gaden wanted. Gouraud, due to retire at the age of 70 in November of that year, replied to his friend that his heart was in St Louis for the presentation, which had taken place on the same spot where he had received his cravat many years earlier after the Adrar campaign in 1909 (HJEG-JHG, 16.2.37). In his toast, Villain spoke of the highest qualities of conscience, of character and of heart that Gaden had shown over the course of his career, and

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Plate 16. Henri Gaden in the dark suit and white pith helmet in the foreground about to receive the cravat of a Commandeur of the Legion of Honour, 27th January 1937 in the Place Faidherbe, St Louis (Fonds Gaden, CAOM 15 APC/2, envelope 3, item 54, no. 725, author’s photograph taken with permission of the archive). that far from taking personal pride in his own service, which was admired by every colonial officer, he had retained a simple and charming modesty and his fellows had a deferential affection for him. Despite Gaden’s opposition to the publication of Villain’s speech, it appeared later in the Revue des Officiers de Réserve (Sénégal-Mauritanie) alongside a rather gushing piece from a lieutenant de réserve, named Faess, who must have been swept away by the emotion of it all: ‘He is to his roots a good man, of legendary probity. His merry eyes are a pure and limpid blue like the sky of Senegal, and whose richness finds comparison in the clear indigo colour of the native cloth.’ There is no record of how Gaden reacted to these words, but there is no doubt that his razor-sharp wit would not have spared the unfortunate officer. Gouraud also contributed a short piece to the Revue on how he had nominated Gaden as his representative to Shaykh Sidiyya in Boutilimit; he wrote a letter to Villain as well thanking him for officiating at the presentation in his place and remarked: ‘You know that I had to insist that this great person of such modesty came out of his hole, but he was very moved and remains eternally grateful to you’ (HJEG-Villain, 17.2.37).28

28 Fonds Gouraud, MAEE.

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By now Gouraud must have realised that the chances of Gaden ever returning to France to live out what remained of his life in the metropole were non-existent. Contrary to the pattern established by the great majority of ex-colonial officers, Gaden remained oversees after retirement and was never to see France again. He continued work on his Pulaar dictionary, but progress was now slow due to his deteriorating eyesight. In October 1937, he took Amadou to Dakar and enrolled him on a course at the Marine Mechanics College, and while in Dakar Gaden took the opportunity to visit his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Dr Couvy, who remained the ‘perfect companion’. The ‘lad’ Amadou was now out of his hair, but there would be one more twist in the tale at the beginning of 1939. In November 1937, Gouraud’s official retirement celebrations took place in Paris, and the grandeur of the event stood in stark contrast to Gaden’s situation. On the 17th, Gaden thought of his friend in the capital surrounded by sparkling company and prestigious figures; but he himself did not now venture out much in the heat. He complained that he suffered when the door was closed and his room became hot, humid and stuffy; or that he suffered a shock to his system when he opened the door and windows and a cool current of air sent a shiver down his spine and gave him a chill. Gouraud had by now started to write his memoirs of the Soudan period, and he became increasingly reliant on Gaden to fill in details of the missions they had undertaken together: the names of African rulers, or some ethnographic fact about a local population or their customs. Gaden referred him to his late friend’s book, Delafosse’s history and ethnography of the Upper-Senegal-Niger region. But he cautioned him: ‘This is a work I would use with circumspection because it is riddled with errors.’29 Gaden’s recall of events, persons and so on was still razor-sharp, and he corrected his friend – never a scholar – on a number of points. Later, he supplied him with details as diverse as terms from native vocabularies and the level of rations for European officers during their Zinder and Chad days. Gaden had to remind Gouraud that he had written a monograph on Zinder in 1904 in which he could find the names of the Sultan of Zinder, of the Prime Minister and so on. He could not help himself recounting another story that fascinated him about eunuchs in Zinder and those who volunteered for the role. Gaden recalled how one man had asked to be made into a eunuch, but

29 In early 1939, Gaden received a published copy of Gouraud’s memoir Au Soudan, of which he commented: ‘You have made these old memories come alive again in a quite remarkable fashion. It is simple, it is lively; the old broussard that I am read in particular the account of the second campaign [against Samory] … with great joy’ (JHG-HJEG, 23.4.39).

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Gaden could give him no satisfaction, and so sent him to the Sultan. The volunteer ‘had an ugly appearance and the Sultan himself refused his candidature saying that a eunuch as ugly as he would surely make the women in the harem abort’. Both men indulged in reminiscing about their missions together, and the period in Chad was most fondly remembered: ‘… an epoch when France still believed in something and had not been abandoned to a bunch of utopianists’ – an ugly and sad spectacle (JHG-HJEG, 31.3.38). In his very last letter to Gouraud, Gaden complained that it was in Chad that he was made to feel like a simple housemaid, a general dogsbody, but it ‘left me with excellent memories, the best perhaps of my colonial career’ (JHG- HJEG 24.10.39). Gaden had hoped to return to France in the summer of 1939 to take up Gouraud’s invitation to stay in Paris, but the political situation in Europe was very worrying and then an event overtook him. Gaden had found Amadou Aïdara’s father, Aïssé, in Algeria (how we do not know) and he was due to travel to Casablanca in August to find his son, now a merchant sea- man. This man was ‘the father of the kid I brought up and for whom I was not able to do any good’, he wrote to Gouraud with heart-wrenching honesty (JHG-HJEG, 5.2.39). Gaden felt guilty that he had let Amadou work on steamers plying the routes of West Africa after completing his studies at Marine College, and that the father was going to search for his son ‘working on board a wreck on which I’d sent him’. Gaden made substantial contributions to Aïssé’s and then Amadou’s travelling expenses. The full extent of the damage to his pocket was realised in April, when he admitted to Gouraud that the whole affair left a hole of 18,000 frs in his budget. He also had major repair work to do on his house before the rains began in a few months’ time. In short, any idea of a trip to France was suspended. Amadou Aïdara, the boy from Mauritania whom Gaden thought could be educated and given prospects, went out of his life for the last time. The 18,000 frs was more than travelling expenses; it was his final legacy to Henri Michel Victor (Amadou) Aïdara.

A Life Hardly Worth Recounting

Although terribly tired and with ever failing eyesight, Gaden reported in late October and then again in November that he was still managing to work, and had done so despite the exceptional heat of the hivernage of 1939. His appetite and his spirits were good and he was sleeping soundly. And he reflected, in response to Gouraud’s announcement of his memoirs

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the previous year: ‘My life too is full but hardly worth recounting’ (JHG- HJEG, 31.3.38). His characteristic modesty belied the depth of his life experiences and the richness of his chosen vocation. By the start of December 1939, Gaden was bed-ridden and receiving treatment at home from his doctor, the médecin-colonel Fabre, the chief medical officer at the Colonial Hospital in St Louis. Jean Chapouty, the Director of the Cooperative Society visited twice a day to check on him and tend to his needs. At 8 p.m on Monday 11th December Gaden blacked out and Coumba went to alert Chapouty, who subsequently found him calm and lucid when he arrived at the house. Gaden explained to his friend that everyone in the house was frightened and feared the worst. Chapouty left at 10 p.m. under orders from Gaden, and returned with his wife at 10 minutes to midnight, having been summoned yet again. Gaden was in a coma when Chapouty arrived and at 5 minutes past midnight he died in his friend’s arms. The Chapoutys and Etienne Lagrange dressed the corpse and placed it back on the deathbed. It was later transported to the chapel at the hospital for a vigil. The funeral took place on Thursday 14th December. Gaden had been diagnosed but evidently not informed by his doctors that he had cancer of the liver and of the stomach. ‘He never suspected the gravity of his illness’, states the report on his last moments written by Captain Creste, a doctor at the Colonial Hospital. There is no record of his funeral at the cathedral or the église at Sor, for the Register of Deaths (Registre de Décès) 1939 is missing from the parish archives, although other documents and records of the event survive. Gaden never completed the manuscript of his Pulaar-French dictionary, which was eventually published posthumously in two volumes in 1969 and 1972, the product of work done by a team of researchers based at IFAN in Dakar on the copious piles of index cards he left in his study, a poorly furnished room ‘like the cell of a monk’.30 Gaden’s sister Mine struck up a correspondence with Gouraud after the funeral. She too had always wished that her brother might one day return to France to see out his final years. She was anxious too that Henri might not have had a Christian burial or seen a priest in his last moments. She was reassured some time later by M. Beyries, the Governor of Mauritania, that Gaden had received extreme unction from a priest before he died, although

30 See Dictionaire peul-français, fascicule 1. Catalogues et Documents no. 22. Dakar : Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire. 1969. 120p ; and Dictionaire peul-français, fascicule 2. Publication du fichier Gaden des manuscrits de l’IFAN enrichi par une des chercheurs du Fuuta-Tooro et du Fuuta-Djaloo. Dakar: Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire. 1972. 106p.

416 chapter nine there is no record of this fact in the account of his final moments as written by Capt Creste. (The military often stated what it thought the bereaved would want to hear about a dead relative.) This news filled her with gratitude. She was a good practising Catholic, unlike Henri, and she often worried about the state of his soul. She was forthright in her views on Christianity after the outbreak of war, and wrote to Gouraud: ‘It is our Christian civilization that is at stake, and France has never defended a more noble cause’. Gaden in his last letter to her was more prosaic and witty: ‘We are at an age when the last service that one can offer one’s country is to disappear so as to economise on the pension it provides us. But I have decided that I will make this economy as late as possible’ (quoted in Mine- HJEG 18.12.39).31 It would have pleased him to know that the costs of his funeral were borne by the office of the Governor of Mauritania. Gouraud and others figures in Paris were concerned that Gaden’s papers be collected and preserved, in particular the work-in-progress on his dictionary. Mine assured Gouraud that his books and manuscripts were locked in his study, and that the rooms and furniture on the first floor of the house had been ‘sealed’ in accordance with French law, and that Coumba (referred to by Chapouty in one of his letters as Gaden’s ‘native person’) had assumed the role of the ‘Guardian of the Seals’ and continued to live in the house. Mine was concerned about these arrangements and was anxious that Henri’s last will and testament be found in the offices of one of the many lawyers he had used in Bordeaux and St Louis so that his affairs could be sorted out quickly. Mine warmed to Gouraud’s memoirs, which she was reading, and in particular to one passage: ‘… honour and faith are the two great and holy motives that guide man’. ‘How true this is’, she stated, and continued: ‘Our dear Henri lacked faith, but it is a gift from God for which our gratitude can never be adequately expressed’ (Mine-HJEG 27.12.39). Coumba Cissé was around 50 years old when Gaden died in 1939. Devastated by his death, she, Doudou and Aissatou Sal moved out of the St Louis house and later took the river boat, the Bou el Mogdad, up to the town of Podor in Senegal, where they found lodgings – a rented house owned by a local teacher of Arabic, Cherif Aïdara, who had a large shop in the market. They had no prior connection with the town. Doudou Gaden continued to learn Arabic and the Koran under Cherif’s tuition, and finished his French schooling in the town. He later returned to St Louis to attend technical college. Doudou’s biological father, Bakary, moved to

31 Fonds Gouraud, MAEE.

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Podor during the war, fearful that St Louis would be bombed like Dakar. Coumba is said by Doudou to have been left 100,000 frs by Gaden, a sum that would have kept her easily for the rest of her days. She died in 1946 or 1947. Rumours circulate in St Louis that Coumba went ‘back to Mauritania whence she came’, that she married a chef de cercle or a qadi after Gaden’s death. Doudou Gaden’s story paints a different picture. One of Gaden’s cousins, Raoul de Lestapis,32 travelled to St Louis in the New Year to oversee the estate and the precious papers in the study. He ran into difficulties and could not manage to have the seals lifted; he was not able, therefore, to investigate what papers and other effects were left. By the end of February 1940, he had still not been able to untangle the web of legal red tape and he returned to France, leaving M. Roux, the agent at the trading house Devès and Chaumet in St Louis, to sort out Gaden’s affairs. Gouraud intervened around this time and wrote to M. Beyries, the Governor of Mauritania, to ask him to take all measures necessary to prevent Gaden’s work being lost.

Wild Oats and Offspring

The seals were never formally lifted from what remained of Gaden’s estate in St Louis. The Governor intervened to have Gaden’s scholarly papers and other works removed from his study, and these were lodged eventually at IFAN in Dakar.33 There remain to this day in his old house in St Louis on the first storey where his study once was, a cabinet which contains among other things a ceremonial colonial sabre and scabbard and a pith helmet. In 2004 when I visited the house, now occupied by a lawyer, M. Balacoune, who warmly invited me into his office, I was informed that the seals had still not been lifted and the objects could not be removed from the cabinets. This was the situation that Marc Fourault found when he travelled to St Louis in 1957–58 to investigate Gaden’s estate. He was informed that in order to recuperate these possessions it was necessary to have the consent of every one of Gaden’s children. We know of two of these children, the result of research I conducted in St Louis, but there may have been others too in West Africa.

32 He was related through marriage to the Devès family, who were in turn linked through the marriage of Paul to Aménaïde Gaden (Henri’s aunt) in the 1850s. 33 Some of Gaden’s personal correspondence, notes and drafts of work in progress and so on were deposited in the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France.

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Marc Fourault is related to Henri Gaden through the Reyhers and the Rousses (Henri’s mother), and his grandfather, also called Marc (1857–1910) was married to Marie Louise, the woman who had access to Henri’s bank account in Bordeaux. Marc Junior and his family had no idea that Gaden had had children with West African women until his aunt Claire (Bonnard née Fourault) told them in 1958 of the existence of ‘cousins’ in the south- west of France. Marc subsequently wrote a history of the Gaden family as part of a two-volume privately published edition entitled Nos familles bordelaises in 2001. In this book he alludes to Gaden’s offspring, ‘our distant cousins from Pau’, and repeats a theory also put forward by François Bonnard that: ‘… his [Gaden’s] children would have been registered with the state under the name Rigaden [a contraction of Henri and Gaden] in order for the name Gaden not to appear in relation to his family’ (196). He goes on to say that everyone in his family in Bordeaux kept his ‘African adventures’ well-guarded. As suggested above, the Fouraults (and their affines the Bonnards) were trusted guardians of Gaden’s intimate affairs.34 Marc observes that ‘he sowed his seed to the four winds’, and François comments: ‘After all, he was a colonel, a soldier, and not a pure spirit.’ In 2004, I interviewed members of the Gaden family who continue to live in Bordeaux – Henri’s paternal collateral relatives – and they had only the vaguest of ideas about his offspring, or perhaps little inclination to consider the question and discuss it. Some had heard talk of them, but none could help identify or locate them, or their descendants.35 In 2004, I identified Gaden’s old house on the corner of rue Flamand and rue Brière de L’Isle and went to the land registry office in Sor,

34 One fascinating fact is that the Fonds Gaden, offered to the Archives Municipales de Bordeaux, were bequeathed not by a Gaden but by M. and Mme Roger Guibourd. Guibourd had married Simone Fourault, daughter of Marie Louise, Gaden’s confidente and proxy for his bank account. And it was their daughter, Françoise Conqueret-Guibourd who in 2004 had been so helpful to me during my stay in Bordeaux: she had copied and lent me parts of Henri’s and Mine’s correspondence and showed me pictures from the family collection. How did she, and not a Gaden, have possession of such items, I wondered? Were these items and those bequeathed to the archives contained in the canteen left by Gaden at the Fourault apartment in Bordeaux in 1927? 35 A letter held in Gaden’s Dossier Personnel (no. 7Ye 486) in SHAT, Chateau de Vincennes, Paris is puzzling. Written by a Susan Gaden on 10th August 1963, from an address in Bordeaux, the letter seeks in rather unsophisticated prose to find official documentation about Henri Gaden for his ‘grand-nephews who live in Tahiti and Noumea’ (in New Caledonia). She stated that she had lost all references to him, and that he was her uncle (‘the brother of my father’). Intriguingly, Gaden did not have a brother who could have fathered her, unless Philippe, who died unmarried at the age of 34 in 1918, did so. There is no evidence, however, for this. Whatever one might make of this claimed kin tie, perhaps this letter was part of an attempt by some members of the family to make contact with their long-lost cousins.

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St Louis36 to examine what records might remain. In the Livre Foncier (No. 323) is an account of part of Henri’s last will and testament, and a description of how his property was to be divided. The entry, made on 12th September 1940 some nine months after his death, describes him as a ‘bachelor’ and states that the house, bought by him in 1927, was to go to ‘his two illegitimate children’, each of whom would receive one quarter of the property, and to Mine his sister, who would receive half. The children are named as: Henri Louis Gaden, a general clerk at the Post, Telegraph and Telephone Service, living in rue Lesbazeilles, Mont de Marsan, and married to Jeanne Gosedico (? illegible); Amélie Marie Gaden, without occupation, wife of Gaston Louis Espagne, an adjutant at Airbase 136 at Pau, living at Billère in the south-west of France. These terms were laid out in Gaden’s will, signed on 19th November 1927 in Bordeaux, and confirmed at a tribunal held in the city on 28th December 1939, a fortnight after his death. The theory that Gaden named his children ‘Rigaden’ to protect himself and his family does not hold in these two cases: both Henri Junior and Amélie took his surname, and both were recognised by him as his offspring, which was rarely the case with colonial officers. Henri Gouraud’s son ‘Paul’, for instance, who was left in West Africa was not recognised by his father and was not allowed to use his surname.37 Further research in genealogical records, in family archives or by means of personal communication has not provided any additional information on these children or their descendants.38 Until such information is made available, one can only speculate.

36 Known as ‘Le Service des Domaines et du Cadastre’. 37 On the plight and legal status of colonial métis children, both those who were recognised and those who were not, see Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie (2007). 38 Further future enquiries could be pursued with relatives such as Marc Fourault, the author of the family history, or Catherine Puget (née Gaden), an archivist in Britanny, or with Michel Espagne, the academic historian originally from Bordeaux who wrote a social history of the Gaden’s and the Klipschs, etc.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY