Made-for-TV Colonialism

The Computer of the Sahara: The story of France's Romantic, Bold, Frequently Foolhardy Attempt in the Late Nineteenth Century to Explore and Dominate the World's Greatest Desert.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN eighth grade social studies and adulthood, America grew to like history. Not the textbook kind or the obscure Robinson Hall kind, but the kind that makes a good TV miniseries. As Barbara Tuchman '33. Gore Vidal and James Michener all know, when the truth is written well, it can be more fun--if not stranger--than fiction.

And because it doesn't have the unpleasant personal connotations of Nazi Germany or Vietnams, colonialism offers some of the most exciting pop history. The characters are far enough away that we can empathize with either side; we can root for the Englishman in Lawrence of Arabia, the native in Gandhi.

But in Douglas Porch's The Conquest of the Sahara, it's not so easy. While the story is told from the perspective of the colonial-French, their swath of death and mutilation across "the world's greatest desert" hardly makes them lovable. On the other hand, their opponents, the Tuareg desert tribesmen and their sometime allies the Chaamba Arabs, are at least as treacherous as the French. No one likes a story without sympathetic characters, and the only ones in Conquest of the Sahara are the nameless Arab and Black peasants and slaves who are robbed, raped, and murdered by both sides.

Porch's book centers on the colonial factions in late 19th century France, who, in a race with England, wanted to unite French holdings in the northern, central and western parts of Africa by winning the desert and building a trans-Saharan railroad. The French Army of Africa, a military back water filled with officers either boldly ambitious or lazily complacent--but incompetent either way--was eager for a new opportunity to win glory.

But the government was wrapped between its dreams of seeing the tricouleur across half of Africa and the stark realization that the Sahara was a wasteland universally considered worthless. As a result, it allocated men and money only in drips and sports. Its hesitation meant the conquests of the Sahara was not one great adventure, but a series of expeditions of varying brutality and success that established a string of forts through the middle of the desert.

LIKE THE ACTUAL conquest of the Sahara, The Conquest of the Sahara is a series of anecdotes tied around the theme of France and the desert. After reading about three or four expeditions, though, it gradually appears that they are all the same one. To wit: incompetent French officer A is appointed via government connections to lead expedition across the Sahara to Point B. He is given C Francs and D assistants, collects E colonial troops in French Algeria, and, most importantly, F camels. Along the journey treacherous native guides mislead the party, and contacts with the mysterious Tuareg people increase. After G weeks of near-starvation, the raiders appear and massacre the expedition.

Next!

Even if you are into this sort of Kiplingish stuff, it could get tedious it told poorly. Fortunately, Porch expertly recreates what it was like to be there, describing, for example, "large hills of rubbish that were constantly churned and sifted by packs of stray dogs and near-naked children."

But unfortunately, we learn nothing about the natives and little about who the Frenchmen are aside from their careers or significant personal events. This is excusable in real history when evidence lacks, but a good pop historian should always ascribe possible motivations to his characters, drawn form the genre's sister-science, pop psychology.

Porch is a professor at a The Citadel, the famous South Carolina military college, and his occasional digressions on tactics can get boring for those who aren't hardcore war nuts. Another annoying Porch tendency is to criticize the actors for making mistakes. "Any man with a sense of self-preservation would have executed an about-face and turned home," he chidingly writes of Paul Flatters, who led the first and second expeditions. As it happens, Flatters is cut down by the Tuareg four pages later. Porch knew it would happen the reader whew it would happen-the chapter is, duh, called "The Massacre" -but how could Flatters have known it without Porch's convenient historical hindsight? Still Porch's wry and occasionally snide writing makes for good reading and that' more important than scholarly reserve in pop history.

Today's Fresh troops are again in Chad a baked-dry place they might never have had to visit if not for some officer's dream of that now empty would "glory" in a distant land. The Conquest of the Sahura, besides just recounting adventures that really happened and the exotic world where they took place, offers insights into the spirit that inspired colonialism and hint of how these long-ago events influenced the intervening years.

And perhaps more important for contemporary America, it could make a hell of a miniseries.