particularly in the Sahara, there are practically no signs of the presence of oil,’ said Gulf’s senior geologist in 1949. Seven years later, oil was gushing from a depth of 3,329 metres in Hassi Messaoud. Since then, the poverty-stricken Sahara has supported Algeria.
The road to Hassi Messaoud is lined with bits of black rubber, the corpses of giant tyres that once bore steel pipes, enormous caterpillar track front-loaders, and bulldozers.
Nearer the oil fields, the road crosses a marshalling yard of black oil pipes half buried in the yellow sand. The actual production area can be made out at a great distance, from the light of vast torches and the smoke rising over the horizon – they are burning off the gas, the pressure of which forces the oil up to the surface.
It is a perverse sight; hot flames against an already overheated sky, brilliant beneath a sun already providing more than enough light.
The town has a small square, with a few quick-growing trees and some concrete benches. The cool winter wind smells of sulphur.
Under a shared metal roof is a row of shop-huts, a small café where they sell a thin brown coffee-like drink and ochre-coloured lemonade, and a little post office where everyone ahead of me is surprised and embarrassed when I take my place at the end of the queue. They solve the problem by leaving. Soon I am at the head of the queue because I am the only one left.
The bookshop is advertising Rabia Ziana’s new novel,
The Impossible Happiness
– an appropriate read for a night at the Hotel C.A.S.H. in Hassi Messaoud.
83
I crawl through the barbed-wire fence into a house which is at the same time half finished and an abandoned ruin. The barbs catch me. It’s no use closing my eyes. It’s no use covering my eyes. The light penetrates everywhere and so do the barbs.
Then a desert dune drifts in and covers the barbed wire. My lacerated eye sockets fill with flying soft warm sand. It is very pleasant. I was already blind. Now at last I can enjoy it.
84
André Gide went to North Africa for the first time in 1893. Twelve years earlier, the French had occupied Tunisia. Gide travels in Tunisia without mentioning the occupation. The conquest of Algerian Sahara is at its height. Gide does not mention it. In the occupied oases, military commanders rule like absolute monarchs and the Arab population is kept down with an iron hand. Gide sees nothing.
Others saw. Isabelle Eberhardt saw.
She was in North Africa while Gide was writing
The Immoralist
. She shows in her stories how France takes land from Arab small farmers, forcing them to work for the new French owners – who can’t understand why their farm workers go around with such sly, sullen expressions.
She sees how those who object are taken away in chains to the prison in Tadmit. The guards force them to walk barefoot on the ridge of sharp stones formed between the wheeltracks on the road. ‘With no verdict from the courts, punished by French administrators or local collaborators, with no chance of appeal, they are sent away to years of lonely suffering, with no hope of mercy.’
For Isabelle, like Gide, North Africa is primarily an erotic experience. When she falls in love with a young Tunisian, she leaves everything and goes with him, although he is a tax collector for the French. But her love affair does not stop her from seeing and reacting:
Everywhere among these poor, dark and recalcitrant tribes, we are given a hostile reception,
she writes
. Si Larb’s good heart bleeds for them, and what we are doing – he out of duty, I out of curiosity – makes us ashamed as if we had committed an outrage.
Gide at Biskra, 1893. (
Collection Roger-Viollet, Paris
)
There is no feeling in Gide that the conquest is an outrage. That doesn’t come until the Congo books in the late 1920s. By then Joseph Conrad had taught him to see it.
Conrad and Gide were both in Africa in the early 1890s. Conrad was writing
Heart of Darkness
while Gide was
The road to Hassi Messaoud is lined with bits of black rubber, the corpses of giant tyres that once bore steel pipes, enormous caterpillar track front-loaders, and bulldozers.
Nearer the oil fields, the road crosses a marshalling yard of black oil pipes half buried in the yellow sand. The actual production area can be made out at a great distance, from the light of vast torches and the smoke rising over the horizon – they are burning off the gas, the pressure of which forces the oil up to the surface.
It is a perverse sight; hot flames against an already overheated sky, brilliant beneath a sun already providing more than enough light.
The town has a small square, with a few quick-growing trees and some concrete benches. The cool winter wind smells of sulphur.
Under a shared metal roof is a row of shop-huts, a small café where they sell a thin brown coffee-like drink and ochre-coloured lemonade, and a little post office where everyone ahead of me is surprised and embarrassed when I take my place at the end of the queue. They solve the problem by leaving. Soon I am at the head of the queue because I am the only one left.
The bookshop is advertising Rabia Ziana’s new novel,
The Impossible Happiness
– an appropriate read for a night at the Hotel C.A.S.H. in Hassi Messaoud.
83
I crawl through the barbed-wire fence into a house which is at the same time half finished and an abandoned ruin. The barbs catch me. It’s no use closing my eyes. It’s no use covering my eyes. The light penetrates everywhere and so do the barbs.
Then a desert dune drifts in and covers the barbed wire. My lacerated eye sockets fill with flying soft warm sand. It is very pleasant. I was already blind. Now at last I can enjoy it.
84
André Gide went to North Africa for the first time in 1893. Twelve years earlier, the French had occupied Tunisia. Gide travels in Tunisia without mentioning the occupation. The conquest of Algerian Sahara is at its height. Gide does not mention it. In the occupied oases, military commanders rule like absolute monarchs and the Arab population is kept down with an iron hand. Gide sees nothing.
Others saw. Isabelle Eberhardt saw.
She was in North Africa while Gide was writing
The Immoralist
. She shows in her stories how France takes land from Arab small farmers, forcing them to work for the new French owners – who can’t understand why their farm workers go around with such sly, sullen expressions.
She sees how those who object are taken away in chains to the prison in Tadmit. The guards force them to walk barefoot on the ridge of sharp stones formed between the wheeltracks on the road. ‘With no verdict from the courts, punished by French administrators or local collaborators, with no chance of appeal, they are sent away to years of lonely suffering, with no hope of mercy.’
For Isabelle, like Gide, North Africa is primarily an erotic experience. When she falls in love with a young Tunisian, she leaves everything and goes with him, although he is a tax collector for the French. But her love affair does not stop her from seeing and reacting:
Everywhere among these poor, dark and recalcitrant tribes, we are given a hostile reception,
she writes
. Si Larb’s good heart bleeds for them, and what we are doing – he out of duty, I out of curiosity – makes us ashamed as if we had committed an outrage.
Gide at Biskra, 1893. (
Collection Roger-Viollet, Paris
)
There is no feeling in Gide that the conquest is an outrage. That doesn’t come until the Congo books in the late 1920s. By then Joseph Conrad had taught him to see it.
Conrad and Gide were both in Africa in the early 1890s. Conrad was writing
Heart of Darkness
while Gide was
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