THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN”
Since the world began the arm of Italy has reached out into the
Mediterranean toward Africa, its finger pointing straight at Tripoli.
Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and
Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of
them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial
empire was the mirage which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples
from behind the golden haze which hangs over the African coast-line,
and in every case their African adventures ended in disappointment
and disaster. After an interim of centuries, in which the roads and
ramparts and reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval
pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden transports of a
regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys,
those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by
the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is
imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful predecessors, that
her commercial and political interests demand the extension of her
dominion across the Middle Sea.
Ever since the purple sails of Phœnicia first flaunted along its
coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one of invasion and
conquest. In the very dawn of history the galleys of Greece dropped
anchor off this shore, in the belief that it was the Garden of the
Hesperides, and the vestiges of their colony of Cyrenaica lure the
archæologists to-day. The Greeks, who, because of its three leagued
cities of Oëa, Sabrata, and Leptis, named their new possession
Tripolis, just as Decapolis signified the region of ten cities and
Pentapolis of five, retreated before Carthage's colonial expansion,
and the Carthaginians gave way in turn to the conquering Romans,
who included the captured territory within their province of Africa
and called it Regio Tripolitana—whence the name it bears to-day.
Christianity was scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of
fierce-faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their Germanic
forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the passes of the Pyrenees,
overran Spain, and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and
sword and torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before another
century had rolled around, however, Belisarius, the great captain of
Byzantium, had broken the Vandal power forever, and the troubled land
of Tripolitania once again came under the shadow of the cross. Then
the wave of Arab conquest came, rolling across North Africa, breaking
upon the coasts of Spain, and not subsiding until it reached the
marches of France, supplanting the feeble Christianity of the natives
of all this region with the vigorous and fanatical faith of Islam.
Though Ferdinand the Catholic, not content with expelling the Moors
from Spain, continued his crusade against the infidel by capturing
the Tripolitan capital, the Knights of Saint John, to whom he turned
the city over, surrendered to the beleaguering Turks just as the
sixteenth century had reached its turning-point, and Turkish it has
remained, at least in name, ever since.
We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to the fate and
fortunes of this much-harassed land, for our flag has fluttered from
its ramparts and the bayonets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of
our sailors have served to write some of the most stirring chapters
of its history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule become
that the beginning of the last century found Tripolitania little
more than a pirate stronghold, ruled by a pasha who had not only
successfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon,
every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the
Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance
by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand
dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its
maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum
and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace of its guns.
Standing forth in picturesque and striking relief from the tedium of
the four years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tripolitans
in 1803 of the frigate _Philadelphia_, which had run aground in the
harbour of Tripoli, and the enslavement of her crew; her subsequent
recapture and destruction by a handful of blue-jackets under the
intrepid Decatur; and the heroic march across the desert to Derna of
General William Eaton and his motley army.
Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the _General Armstrong_ at
Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national
history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the
reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy
all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of
fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited
at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient
expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified
coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With
a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought
the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab
mercenaries—less than five hundred men in all—he set out under the
blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs mutinied, his
food and water gave out, and his animals died from starvation and
exhaustion, Eaton pushed indomitably on, covering the six hundred
miles of burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, and
raising the American flag over its citadel—the first and only time it
has ever floated over a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.
A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from Florida to
Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in summer and as cold in
winter as that of New Mexico; a surface which varies between the
aridity of the Staked Plains and the fertility of the San Joaquin
Valley of California; so sparsely populated that its fanatic,
turbulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two inhabitants
to the square mile—that is Tripolitania. Bounded on the west by
Tunisia and the French and on the east by Egypt and the English,
the hinterland of the regency stretches into the Sahara as far as
the Tropic of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of coast-line set
squarely in the middle of the north African littoral; its capital
almost equidistant from the Straits, the Dardanelles, and the Suez
Canal; and half the great ports of the Mediterranean not twelve hours'
steam away, the strategical, political, and commercial position of
Tripolitania is one of great importance.
Tripolitania, as the regency should properly be called, or Libya, as
the Italians have classically renamed it, consists of four more or
less distinctly defined divisions: Tripoli, Fezzan, Benghazi, and the
Saharan oases. Under the Turkish régime the districts of Tripoli and
Fezzan have formed a vilayet under a _vali_, or governor-general;
Benghazi has been a separately administered province under a
_mutes-sarif_ directly responsible to Constantinople, while the
oases have not been governed at all. The district of Tripoli, which
occupies the entire northwestern portion of the regency, is for the
most part an interminable stony table-land, riverless, waterless, and
uninhabited save along the fertile coast. The stretches of yellow sand
which the traveller sees from the deck of his ship are not, as he
fondly imagines, the edge of the Sahara, but merely sand dunes blown
in by the sea, such as may be seen elsewhere on the Mediterranean
coast.
Sloping from these coastal sand dunes up to the barren interior
plateau is a zone, averaging perhaps five miles in width, of an
altogether remarkable fertility, for its deep ravines, filled with
considerable streams during the winter rains, continue to send down a
supply of subterranean water even during the dry season. By means of
countless wells, round and round which blindfolded donkeys and oxen
plod ceaselessly, the water is drawn up into reservoirs and conducted
thence to the fields. In this coast oasis it is harvest-time all the
year round, for, notwithstanding the primitive agricultural implements
of the natives and their crude system of irrigation, the soil is
amazingly productive. From April to June almonds, apricots, and corn
are gathered in; in July and August come the peaches; from July to
September is the vintage season, and the Tripolitan grapes vie with
those of Sicily; from July to September the black tents of the nomad
date and olive pickers dot the fields, though the yellow date of the
coast is not to be spoken of in the same breath with the luscious,
mahogany-coloured fruit of the interior oases; from November to April
the orange groves are ablaze with a fruit which rivals that of Jaffa;
the early spring sees the shipment of those “Malta potatoes” which
are quoted on the menus of every fashionable hostelry and restaurant
in Europe; while lemons are to be had for the picking at almost any
season of the year.
Southward into the Sahara from the southern borders of Tripoli
stretches the province of Fezzan, its inaccessibility, its prevalent
malaria, and its deadly heat having popularised it with Abdul-Hamid,
of unsavoury memory, as a place of exile for disgraced courtiers
and overpopular officials, presumably because of the exceeding
improbability of any of them ever coming back. Artesian wells and
scientific farming have proved in other and equally discouraging
quarters of Africa, however, that the words “desert” and “worthless”
are no longer synonymous, so there is no reason to believe that the
agricultural miracles which France has performed in Algeria and
Tunisia on the one hand, and England in Egypt and the Sudan on the
other, could not be successfully attempted by the Italians in Fezzan.
Arid and inhospitable as this region appears to-day, it should be
remembered that its Greek and Roman colonists boasted of it as “the
granary of Europe.” What has been done once may well be done again.
All that this soil needs, after its centuries of impoverishment and
neglect, is decent treatment, and any one who has seen those vineyards
on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky
hill-sides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that
every inch is tended with pathetic care, will predict a promising
agricultural future for an Italian Tripolitania. In its physical
aspects, northern Tripolitania resembles Europe much more than it does
Africa; its climate is no warmer than southern Italy in summer and
not nearly as unhealthy as the _Campagna Romana_; while its soil,
as I have already remarked, holds great possibilities for patient,
hardy, frugal, industrious agriculturists of the type of those twenty
thousand Sicilians who are forced by poverty to emigrate each year
to America or the Argentine. Keeping these facts in mind, one does
not have to seek far for the causes which underlay Italy's sudden
aggression.
[Illustration: SUNRISE ON THE GREAT SANDS.
For sheer majesty and grandeur, the only thing that is at all
comparable with a Saharan sunrise is daybreak in the Grand Cañon of
the Colorado.]
Reaching Egyptward in the form of a mighty fist is the peninsula
of Barka, the Cyrenaica of the ancients, officially known as the
Mutessariflik of Benghazi, its many natural advantages of climate,
soil, and vegetation making it the most favoured region in the
regency, if not, indeed, in all North Africa. While the climate and
vegetation of southern Tripoli and of Fezzan are distinctly Saharan,
the date-palm being the characteristic tree, Benghazi is just as
decidedly Mediterranean, its fertile, verdure-clad uplands being
covered with groves of oak, cypress, olive, fig, and pine. Though
well supplied with rain and, as I have said, extremely fertile, the
Benghazi province, once the richest of the Greek colonies, is now
but scantily populated. Scattered along its coasts are Benghazi,
the capital, with an inextricably mixed population and one of the
worst harbours in the world; Tobruk, which, because of its excellent
roadstead and its proximity to the Egyptian frontier and the Canal,
Germany has long had a covetous eye on; and the insignificant ports of
Derna and Khoms, the lawless highlands of the interior being occupied
by hordes of warlike and nomadic Arabs who acknowledge no authority
other than their tribal sheikhs.
South by east into the Libyan Desert straggle the Aujila and Kufra
chains of oases, marking the course of the historic caravan route
to Upper Egypt and presenting the aspect of a long, winding valley,
extending from the Benghazi plateau almost to the banks of the Nile.
Underground reservoirs lie so near the surface of the desert that all
of these sand-surrounded islands have water in abundance, that of Jof,
for example, supporting over a million date-palms and several thousand
people, together with their camels, horses, and goats.
Such, in brief, bold outline, are the more salient
characteristics—climatic, agricultural, and geographical—of the
region which Italy has seized. Everything considered, it was not
such a long look ahead that the Italian statesmen took when they
decided to play their cards for such a stake. Though neither soil
nor climate has changed since the days of Tripolitania's ancient
prosperity, centuries of wretched and corrupt Turkish rule, with
its system of absentee landlords and irresponsible officials, has
reduced the peasantry to the same state of dull and despairing apathy
in which the Egyptian _fellaheen_ were before the English came. If
Tripolitania is to be redeemed, and I firmly believe that it will be,
the work of regeneration cannot be done by government railways and
subsidised steam-ship lines and regiments of brass-bound officials,
but by patient, painstaking, plodding men with artesian-well drilling
machines and steam-ploughs and barrels of fertiliser. It may well
be, as the Italian expansionists enthusiastically declare, that
Tripolitania constitutes a “New Italy” lying at the very ports of old
Italy, but it is going to take many, many millions of lire and much
hard work to make it worth the having.
To those unaccustomed to the sights and sounds and smells of the East,
a visit to the town of Tripoli is more interesting than enjoyable.
Both its harbour and its hostelry are so incredibly bad that no
one ever visits them a second time if he can possibly help it. The
harbour of Jaffa, in Palestine, is a trifle worse, if anything, than
that of Tripoli; but the only hotel I know of which deserves to be
classed with the Albergo Minerva in Tripoli is the one next door to
the native jail in Aden. Picture a cluster of square, squat, stuccoed
houses, their tedious sky-lines broken by the minarets of mosques and
the flagstaffs of foreign consulates, facing on a crescent-shaped
bay. Under the sun of an African summer the white buildings of the
town blaze like the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at
white heat; the stretch of yellow beach which separates the harbour
from the town glows fiery as brass; while the waters of the bay look
exactly as though they had been blued in readiness for the family
washing. Within the crumbling ramparts of the town is a network of dim
alleys and byways, along which the yashmaked Moslem women flit like
ghosts, and vaulted, trellis-roofed bazaars where traders of two-score
nationalities haggle and gesticulate and doze and pray and chatter the
while they and their wares and the passing camels smell to heaven.
Scattered here and there among the shops are native bakeries, in the
reeking interiors of which, after your eyes become accustomed to the
darkness, you can discern patient camels plodding round and round and
round, grinding the grain in true Eastern fashion between the upper
and the nether millstones.
Follow the narrow Strada della Marina past the custom-house, where the
Italian sentry peers at you suspiciously from beneath the bunch of
cock's feathers which adorns his helmet; past the odorous fish-market
and so into the unpaved, unlighted, foul-smelling quarter of the
Jews, and your path will be blocked eventually by the sole remaining
relic of Tripoli's one-time greatness, the marble arch of triumph
erected by the Romans in the reign of Antoninus Pius, now half-buried
in débris, its chiselled boasts of victory mutilated, and its arches
ruthlessly plastered up, the shop of a dealer in dried fish. In that
defaced and degraded memorial is typified the latter-day history of
Tripolitania. Before the Italian occupation disrupted the commerce of
the country and isolated Tripoli from the interior, by long odds the
most interesting of the city's sights were the markets, which were
held upon the beach on the arrival of the trans-Saharan caravans, for
they afforded the foreigner fleeting but characteristic glimpses,
as though on a moving-picture screen, of those strange and savage
peoples—Berbers, Hausas, Tuaregs, Tubbas, and Wadaians—who are
retreating farther and farther into the recesses of the continent
before the white man's implacable advance.
All down the ages Tripoli has been the gateway through which weapons,
cutlery, and cotton have entered, and slaves, ostrich feathers, and
ivory have come out of inner Africa by plodding caravan. Since the
sons of Ham first found their way across the wilderness of Shur, this
region has been the terminus of three historic trade routes. The
first of these runs due south across the desert to Lake Tchad and the
great native states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, and Wadai; the second
follows a southwesterly course across the Sahara to the Great Bend of
the Niger and the storied city of Timbuktu; while the third, going
south by east, long carried British cottons and German jack-knives to
the natives of Darfur and the Sudan. Is it any wonder, then, that,
fired by the speeches of the expansionists in the Roman senate, all
Italy should dream of a day when the red-white-and-green banner should
float over this gateway to Africa and endless lines of dust-coloured
camels, laden with glass beads from Venice and cotton goods from
Milan, should go rolling southward to those countries which lie beyond
the great sands? But, lost in the fascination of their dream, the
Italians forgot one thing: modern commerce cannot go on the back of
a camel. No longer may Tripolitania be reckoned the front door, or
even the side door, to central Africa. As the result of French and
British encroachment and enterprise, not only has nearly all of the
Tripolitanian hinterland been absorbed by one or the other of these
powers, but, what is of far more commercial importance, they have
succeeded in diverting the large and important caravan trade of which
the Italians dreamed, and which for centuries has found its way to
the sea through Tripoli, to their own ports on the Nile, the Senegal,
and the Niger, leaving to _Tripolitania Italiana_ nothing but its
possibilities as an agricultural land.
The statesmen who planned, and the soldiers and sailors who executed,
the seizure of Tripolitania, were obeying a voice from the grave.
Though the overwhelming disaster to the Italians at Adowa in 1896,
when their army of invasion was wiped out by Menelik's Abyssinian
tribesmen, caused the political downfall of Crispi, the greatest
Italian of his time, his dream of Italian colonial expansion, like
John Brown's soul, went marching on. With the vision of a prophet
that great statesman saw that the day was not far distant when the
steady increase in Italy's population and production would compel her
to acquire a colonial market oversea. Crispi lies mouldering in his
grave, but the Italian Government, in pursuance of the policy which he
inaugurated, has been surreptitiously at work in Tripolitania these
dozen years or more.
Never has that forerunner to annexation known as “pacific penetration”
been more subtly or more systematically conducted. Even the Pope
lent the government's policy of African aggrandisement his sanction,
for is not the Moslem the hereditary foe of the church, and does not
the cross follow close in the wake of Christian bayonets? Italian
convents and monasteries dot the Tripolitanian littoral, while cowled
and sandalled missionaries from the innumerable Italian orders have
carried the gospel, and the propaganda of Italian annexation, to
the oppressed and poverty-stricken peasantry of the far interior.
Under the guise of scientists, Italian political and commercial
agents have been quietly investigating the problems and possibilities
of the regency from end to end, while the powerful Banco di Roma,
an institution backed with the funds of the Holy See, through its
branches in Tripoli and Benghazi, has been systematically buying up
arable farm-lands from the impoverished peasantry at a few lire the
hectare, which quadrupled in value with the landing of the first
Italian soldier.
Though prior to the war there were probably not two thousand
native-born Italians in the whole of Tripolitania, the numerous
Jews, in whose hands was practically the entire trade of the
country, were offered inducements of one kind and another to become
Italian subjects, Italy thus laying a foundation for her claims to
predominating interests in that region. On the pretext that the
Turkish authorities had tampered with the foreign mail-bags, Italy
demanded and obtained permission to establish her own post-offices
at the principal ports, so that for many years past the anomalous
spectacle has been presented, just as in other portions of the
Turkish Empire, of letters from a Turkish colony being franked with
surcharged Italian stamps. The most ingenious stroke, however, was
the establishment of numerous Italian schools—and very good schools
they are—where the young idea, whether Arab, Maltese, or Jew, has been
taught to shoot—along Italian lines.
To those really conversant with the situation, Italy's pretexts that
the activities of her subjects resident in Tripolitania had been
interfered with and their lives and interests seriously endangered
sound somewhat hollow. To tell the truth, Italians have had a freer
rein in the regency—and, incidentally, have caused more trouble—than
any other people. Italy's real reasons for the seizure of Tripolitania
were two, and only two: first, she wanted it; and second, she could
get it.
Now that she has Tripolitania in her grasp, however, her task is but
begun, for setting forward the hands of progress by occupation of
Moslem territory has ever been a perilous proceeding. Though France
shouldered the white man's burden in Algeria with alacrity, she paid
for the privilege with just forty years of fighting; it took England,
with all the resources of her colonial experience and her colonial
army, sixteen years to conquer the ill-armed Arabs of the Sudan, while
the desperate resistance of the Mad Mullah and his fanatic tribesmen
has compelled her practically to evacuate Somaliland; overthrown
ministries, depleted war-chests, and thousands of unmarked graves in
the hinterland bear witness to the deep solicitude displayed for the
cause of civilisation in Morocco by both France and Spain; Russia
spent a quarter of a century and the lives of ten thousand soldiers in
forcing her beneficent rule on the Moslems of Turkestan. Italy will
be more fortunate than her colonising neighbours, therefore, if she
emerges unscathed from her present Tripolitanian adventure, for every
page of the history of latter-day colonisation proves that seizure
of Moslem territory never ends with a naval demonstration, a landing
party, a staff with a descending and an ascending flag, and the flash
and thunder of a national salute.
When Italy pointed the noses of her transports Tripoliward she
committed the incredible blunder of underestimating for a second
time the resistance that she would encounter. She made just such a
mistake some years ago in Abyssinia, and the plain of Adowa is still
sprinkled with the bleaching bones of her annihilated army. The
Italian agents in Tripolitania had assured their government that,
as a result of Turkish oppression, corruption, and overtaxation,
the Turks were heartily disliked by the Tripolitanians—all of
which was perfectly true. But when they went on to say that the
Tripolitanians would welcome the expulsion of the Turks and the
substitution of an Italian régime, they overshot the mark. In other
words, the Tripolitanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the
Turks, who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by the
Italians, who are despised unbelievers. The Italians, having had no
previous experience with Moslem peoples, landed at Tripoli with every
expectation of being welcomed as saviours by the native population. It
is quite true that the natives gave the Italians an exceedingly warm
reception—with rifles and machine guns. Here, then, were some sixty
thousand Italian soldiers, who had anticipated about as much trouble
in taking Tripolitania as we should in taking Hayti, instead of being
permitted to play the jaunty and picturesque rôles of deliverers from
oppression, being forced to battle desperately for their lives against
the very people whom they had come to save and civilise. It was a
graphic instance of the workings of Mohammedanism. How Kitchener and
Cromer, those two grim men who have had more experience than any other
Europeans in fighting and governing Mohammedans, must have smiled to
themselves when they read the Italian statements that the taking of
Tripolitania meant only a campaign of a fortnight.
To comprehend thoroughly the peculiar situation in which Italy
finds herself, you should understand that the portly, sleepy-eyed,
good-natured old gentleman who theoretically rules Turkey under
the title of Mohammed V is, politically speaking, as much a dual
personality as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. As Sultan of Turkey, or, to give
him his proper title, Emperor of the Ottomans, he is the nominal ruler
of some twenty-four millions of divided, discontented, and disgruntled
Turkish subjects—Osmanlis, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, Circassians,
Bulgars, Greeks, Jews—and in that capacity plays no great part in
ordering the affairs of the world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan
of Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Commander of the
Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and as such is the spiritual and
temporal leader of the two hundred and twenty millions who compose the
Moslem world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two offices.
In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, therefore, Italy automatically
made war on the chief of all Mohammedans, thus shaking her fist in the
face not alone of a nation but of a religion—and the most militant and
fanatical of all religions at that. There is not a wearer of turban
or tarboosh between the Gold Coast and the China coast, be he Hausa,
Tuareg, Berber, Moor, Algerian, Tunisian, Tripolitanian, Egyptian,
Sudanese, Somali, Arab, Kurd, Turk, Circassian, Persian, Turkoman,
Afghan, Sikh, Indian, Malay, or Moro, who does not regard Italy's
aggression in Tripolitania as an affront to himself and to his faith.
Among all Moslems there is growing an ominous unrest, a fierce
consciousness that the lands which they have for centuries regarded as
their own are gradually slipping from them, and a decision that they
must fight or disappear. On the Barbary coast, the Nile, the Congo,
the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans and the tarbooshes
retreating before the white helmets' implacable advance, and now they
see even the Ottoman throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the
pressure. Hence there is not a Moslem in the world to-day who will
remain indifferent to any action which hints at the dismemberment of
Turkey, for he knows full well that the fate of the Ottoman Empire and
the political fortunes of Islam are inextricably interwoven.
That Italy can hold the Tripolitanian coast towns as long as her
ammunition, her patience, and her public purse hold out, no one
acquainted with the conditions of modern warfare will attempt to
deny. Unless, however, the militant section of Islam, of which this
region is the very focus, can be induced to acquiesce in an Italian
occupation, the life of an Italian soldier who ventures out of
range of his war-ships' guns will not be worth an hour's purchase.
Hordes of fanatical, desert-bred Arabs, inured to hardship, deadly
sun, scanty food, and dearth of water, mounted on swift camels and
as familiar with the trackless desert as the woodsman is with the
forest in which he works, ablaze with a religion which assures them
that the one _sure_ way to paradise is to die in battle with the
unbelievers, can harass the Italian army of occupation for years to
come by a guerilla warfare. Even though Turkey agrees to surrender
Tripolitania and to withdraw her garrisons from that province, Italy
will still have far from smooth sailing, for the simple reason that
she is not fighting Turks alone, but Moslems, and, as a result of her
ill-advised slaughter of the Arabs, she has made the Moslem population
of Tripolitania permanently hostile. Most significant of all, the Arab
resistance to an Italian advance into the interior of the country will
be directed, controlled, and financed by that sinister and mysterious
power known as the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh.
To American ears the word “Senussiyeh” doubtless conveys but little
meaning, but to the French _administrateurs_ in Algeria and Tunisia,
and to the officers of the Military Intelligence Department in Egypt
and the Sudan, it is a word of ominous import. Though the Brotherhood
of the Senussiyeh is, without much doubt, the most powerful
organisation of its kind in the world, so complete is the veil of
secrecy behind which it works that comparatively little is definitely
known as to its designs, ramifications, and resources. Briefly, it is
a secret Moslem society, organised about a century ago by an Algerian
dervish, Mohammed ben Ali ben Es Senussi, from whom it takes its
name; its object is the restoration of the Mohammedan religion to
its original purity, austerity, and political power, the first step
toward which is the expulsion of the Christian from Moslem lands; its
initiated members, scattered throughout the Mohammedan world, have
been variously estimated at from five to fifteen millions; the present
grand master of the order, Senussi Ahmed-el-Sherif, the third of the
succession, is admittedly a man of exceptional intelligence, resource,
and sagacity; his monastic court at Jof, in the oasis of Kufra, five
hundred miles, as the camel goes, south of Benghazi and about the same
distance from the Nile, is the capital of a power whose boundaries are
the boundaries of Islam.
It is no secret that the growing power of the Senussiyeh is causing
considerable concern to the military and political officials of those
European nations that have possessions in North Africa, for, in
addition to the three-hundred-odd _zawias_, or monasteries, scattered
along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, the long arm of
the order reaches down to the mysterious oases which dot the Great
Sahara, it embraces the strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it
controls the robber Tuaregs and the warlike natives who occupy the
regions adjacent to Lake Tchad, and is, as the French and British
have discovered, a power to be reckoned with in the protected states
of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, Bornu, and Wadai.
The organisation of the order is both strong and simple. The _khuan_,
or brothers, whose names are carefully recorded in the books of the
mother lodge at Jof, owe unquestioning obedience to the _mokaddem_,
or prefect, in charge of the district to which they belong. Each
_mokaddem_ has under his orders a corps of secret agents, known as
_wekils_, whose duty is to keep him constantly in touch with all that
is going on in his district and to communicate his instructions to
the brothers. On Grand Bairam—the Mohammedan Easter—the _mokaddems_
meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion the spiritual and political
condition of the order is discussed and its course of action decided
on for the ensuing year. Above the _mokaddems_, and acting as an
intermediary between them and the veiled and sacred person of
the Senussi himself, is a cabinet of viziers, who, by means of a
remarkable system of camel couriers, are enabled to keep constantly in
touch with all the districts of the order.
At Jof, from which no European investigator has ever returned, are
centred all the threads of this vast organism. There is kept the
war-chest of the order, constantly increased by large and small
contributions from true believers all over the world, for every member
of the Senussiyeh who has a total income of more than twenty dollars
a year must contribute two and one half per cent of it to the order
annually; there the Senussi has established depots of stores and war
material and factories for the manufacture, or rather the assembling,
of modern fire-arms; thither come to him from the obscure harbours
of the Tripolitanian coast cargoes of arms and ammunition; thither
flock pilgrims from North and West Africa, from the Niger and from the
Nile, to receive his orders and to seek his blessing; there is centred
one of the most remarkable secret-service systems in the world, its
agents not alone in every corner of the Mohammedan world, but likewise
keeping their fingers ever on the political pulse of Europe.
A place better fitted for its purpose than Jof it would be hard to
imagine. Here, surrounded by inhospitable desert, with wells a long
day's camel-ride apart, and the route known only to experienced and
loyal guides, the Senussi has been free to educate, drill, and arm
his disciples, to accumulate great stores of arms and ammunition, and
to push forward his propaganda of a regenerated and reinvigorated
Islam, without any possibility of interference from the Christian
nations. There seems to be but little doubt that factories have
been erected at Jof for the assembling of weapons of precision, the
materials for which have been systematically smuggled across the
Mediterranean from Greece and Turkey for years past. Strange as
it may sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled
engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans of the order
that it annually sends a number of Moslem youths to be educated in
the best technical schools of Europe. Upon completing their courses
of instruction they return to Jof, or other centres of Senussiyeh
activity, to place their trained services at the disposal of the
order, others being sent Europeward to be educated in their turn. The
Senussiyeh's military affairs are equally well organised, the Arabs,
than whom there is admittedly no finer fighting material in the world,
being instructed along European lines, modified for desert warfare,
by veteran drill-masters who have learned their trade in the native
armies of England and France. The nucleus of this mobile and highly
effective force is, so I am told by French officials in Africa, an
admirably mounted and equipped camel corps of five thousand men which
the Senussi keeps always on a war footing in the Kufra oases. These
facts in themselves prove definitely that it would be no sporadic
resistance, but a vast, organised movement, armed with improved
weapons, trained by men who learned their business under European
drill-masters, and directed by a high intelligence, with which Italy
would have to reckon should she attempt the hazardous experiment of an
advance in the real hinterland of Tripolitania.
Let me make it perfectly clear that the grand master of the Senussiyeh
is a man of altogether exceptional ability. Under his direction the
order has advanced with amazing strides, for he is a remarkable
organiser and administrator, two qualities rarely found among the
Arabs. The destruction of the Mahdi and of the Khalifa, and the more
recent dethronement of Abdul-Hamid, resulted in bringing a large
accession of force to his standard by the extinction of all religious
authority in Africa except his own. Though the Sultan of Turkey
is, as I have said, the titular head of the Moslem religion, and is
venerated as such wherever praying-rugs are spread, the chief of this
militant order is undoubtedly regarded by the average Mohammedan as
the most actively powerful figure, if not as the saviour, of Islam.
The first Senussi was powerful enough to excommunicate the Sultan
Abdul-Medjid from the order because of his intimacy with the European
powers; the father of the present Khedive of Egypt was accustomed to
address the second Senussi in such terms as a disciple would use to a
prophet, while Abbas Hilmi II, the reigning Khedive, a few years ago
journeyed across the Libyan desert to pay his respects to the present
head of the order.
Those who are in a position to know whereof they speak believe that
the Senussiyeh would actively oppose any attempt on the part of
the Italians to occupy the hinterland of Tripolitania, for it is
obvious that such an occupation would not alone bring the Christian
in dangerous proximity to the chief stronghold of the order, but it
would effectually cut off the supplies of arms and ammunition which
caravans in the pay of the Senussiyeh have regularly been transporting
to Jof from obscure ports on the Tripolitanian coast. It has been the
policy of the Senussiyeh, supported by the Turkish administration in
Tripolitania, to close the regions under its control to Christians,
so it is scarcely likely that it would do other than resist an
Italian penetration of the country, even in the face of a Turkish
evacuation. Though the order encouraged resistance to the French
advance in the Sudan, considering that the extension of the French
sphere of influence threatened its own prestige in those regions, it
has, as a rule, refrained from displaying antagonism toward the rulers
of the adjoining regions. Aside from proselytism, the Senussiyeh
has performed a great work in the Sahara in the colonisation and
cultivation of the oases, the encouragement of trade, the building of
rest-houses, the sinking of wells, and the protection of trans-Saharan
caravans.
Stripped of the glamour and exaggeration with which sensational
writers and superficial travellers have invested the subject, it is
apparent that the Senussi controls a very wide-spread and powerful
organisation—an organisation probably unique in the world. As a
fighting element his followers are undoubtedly far superior to the
wild and wretchedly armed tribesmen who charged the British squares so
valorously at Abu Klea and Omdurman and who wiped out an Italian army
in the Abyssinian hills. Their remarkable mobility, their wonderful
powers of endurance, their large supplies of the swift and hardy
racing-camel known as _hegin_, and their marvellous knowledge of this
great, inhospitable region, coupled with the fact that they can always
retreat to their bases in the desert, where civilised troops cannot
follow them, are all advantages of which the Senussi and his followers
are thoroughly aware.
Although the Senussi is, as I have shown, amply capable of causing
the Italians serious trouble, it is very unlikely that he will prove
actively hostile if they refrain from encroaching upon those remote
regions which he looks upon as his own. Italy will have her hands
full with the development of the coastal regions for many years to
come, so, if she is wise, she will leave the interior of the country
severely alone, recognise the religious authority of the Senussi, and,
if possible, effect some such working agreement with him as England
has done with an equally dangerous neighbour, the Amir of Afghanistan.
From the glimpses which I have given you of the inhospitable character
of Tripolitania and the still more inhospitable people who inhabit it,
it will be seen that Italy's task does not end with the ousting of the
Turk. She has set her hand to the plough, however, and started it upon
a long and arduous and very costly furrow, the end of which no man can
see. For a nation to have a colony, or colonies, wherein she can turn
loose the overflow of her population and still keep them under her
own flag, is an undeniable asset, particularly when the colony is as
accessible from the mother country as Libya[1] (for we must accustom
ourselves to the new name sooner or later) is from Italy. But if Italy
is to be a success as a colonising nation she must school herself to
do things differently in Tripolitania from what she has in her other
African dependencies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
[1] The Italians have given their new possession the historic name of
Libya.
First and foremost, she must pick the men who are to settle her new
colony as carefully as she picks the men for her _carabinieri_,
choosing them with a view to their intelligence, industry, energy, and
sobriety, for to flood Tripolitania with such a class of emigrants
as every vessel from Italy dumps on our hospitable shores is but to
invite disaster.
Secondly, she must impress on these colonists the imperative necessity
of keeping on friendly terms with the natives, who are, after all,
the real owners of the soil, and of obtaining their co-operation
in the development of the country. The Arab, remember, unlike the
negro, cannot be bullied and domineered with impunity, Germany's
African colonies providing significant examples of the failures which
invariably result from ill-treatment of the native population.
Thirdly, there must be no “absentee landlordism,” the future of
the colony largely depending, to my way of thinking, upon frugal,
hard-working peasant farmers, owning their own farms, whose prosperity
will thus be indissolubly linked with that of the colony.
Lastly, all local questions of administration should be taken entirely
out of the hands of Rome and left to “the man on the spot,” for
history is filled with the chronicles of promising colonies which
have been ship-wrecked on the rocks of a highly centralised form of
government.
If the Italians will take these things to heart, I believe that
their conquest of Tripolitania will prove, in the end, for the
country's own best good, contributing to its peace and to the welfare
of its inhabitants, native as well as foreign, and that it will
promote the opening up of the dark places to civilisation, if not
to Christianity—for the Moslem does not change his faith. When,
therefore, all is said and done, I cannot but feel that the cross of
the House of Savoy portends more good to Africa in general, and to
Tripolitania in particular, than would ever the star and crescent.