Desert Divers by Sven Lindqvist Read Free Book Online Page B

judge a victory of this kind.’
    Nor did he try. He deleted the passage. He blamed the silence in Laghouat on the climate. It became romanticism.
44
    The survivors of the massacre had fled south. Some returned and were then directed to inferior neighbourhoods, all their possessions confiscated, and the entire booty of mats, weapons,jewellery and clothes removed. ‘All the houses from the poorest to the wealthiest are empty,’ Fromentin writes.
    Under such circumstances, it was not easy to exercise the traditional Arab hospitality towards a travelling Frenchman. All the prerequisites were lacking.
    Fromentin touches on the truth when he says that two societies confront each other in Laghouat: ‘One has power and words. The other is a master of silence.’
    Rhetorical phrasing. The lieutenant expresses himself more clearly:
    It is impossible to know how long the desire for revenge will live on,
he says
. I could swear that when the day of reckoning eventually comes, it would give them great pleasure to fill my belly with small stones or flay me alive to make a drum out of my skin.
    At night the silence is broken by the howls of dogs who had fled the massacre to a rock outside the town. It proved impossible either to get them to return or to drive them away. As long as they had plenty of food on the battlefield or in the burial places, all was calm. But then the dogs turned more and more wild and began to attack passers-by like wolves.
    Today, in the chapel dedicated to Sidi el-Hadj Aissa, there are the following words:
Death is the door through which we all have to go
.
    True. But those faced with imperialism often had to go through it somewhat in advance.
    Fromentin in 1841. (
Daguerreotype by L.A. Bisson
fils.
Private collection, descendants of Eugène Fromentin
)

    Eugène Fromentin,
Self-portrait
, early 1840s. (
Private collection, descendants of Eugène Fromentin
)

45
    After the conquest of Laghouat, the French threw corpses down the wells to punish the town.
    They had never even considered remaining there themselves. No one had dreamt a garrison would be placed so far south.
    But General Pelissier decided to keep Laghouat. The French became prisoners of the town.
    They were to live there. They had to have water.
    To clean the wells, well-workers were conscripted from other oases. They belonged to the lowest stratum of the desert’s black proletariat. Only slave workers could be forced down into wells turned into graves.
    Down there, the dead bodies had swollen with the gases of decay and were pressed against the well walls. The corpses were so firmly wedged in, they had to be levered apart.
    Their flesh had begun to dissolve, the bodies disintegrating. The poisoned water became a mess of remains of corpses into which the well-divers were forced deeper and deeper.
    The water-table in the northern part of the town was six metres below the surface, in the southern part twelve metres. The largest of the wells contained 256 corpses, not counting the bodies of animals.
    This was something no one wanted made public. But nor did anyone try to hide it.
    That year, in 1853, modern racism was born with de Gobineau’s
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
. Also in the bookshops was Herbert Spencer’s
Social Statics
in which social Darwinism was launched, some years before Darwin produced biological Darwinism.
    The French officers in North Africa could scarcely haveknown about that. But they were children of their age. Some thought it, others did it.
    And it was not the first time, far from it. The history of imperialism is a well full of corpses.
    In Laghouat, the wells were confiscated and for the rest of the century remained under military administration. In the future, they would be cleaned out by the same black well-divers and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

To Ain Sefra
46
    I drive westwards from Laghouat. The road follows the Atlas Mountains: empty grandstands facing the endless football