Like the rest of the country, the Libyan south – the Fazzān and Kufra – has been shaken by violent conflicts since 2011. These nominally pit ‘local’ Arabs against what even more careful international analysts describe as ‘sub-Saharan Tebu’:Footnote 1 mostly Libyan nationals whose first language is Tedaga or Dazaga and not Arabic, who are often of darker skin than their Arab neighbours, and who have strong linguistic, social, and family ties with the majority of Tubu who reside in northern Chad.Footnote 2 Tubu neighbourhoods in Kufra and Sabha were bombed; Tubu militias fought back, some say with the help of their Chadian ‘cousins’; northern militias intervened, leading to an overall death-toll of, by 2013, 500, with many more wounded.Footnote 3 By now, violent clashes have subsided, to leave room for sweltering tensions that dovetail with conflicts over the control of the lucrative transborder trade.Footnote 4 On the national level, these conflicts sparked various claims and counterclaims by Libyan politicians and the Chadian president Idriss Déby, accusing each other of sending ‘mercenaries’ to destabilise the neighbouring country, or of harbouring and training rebels.Footnote 5 These claims have been echoed locally, and Libyan websites enthusiastically show ‘proof’ that most Tubu fighting in southern Libya were ‘foreigners’, incidentally sparking further xenophobia in the region.Footnote 6 Meanwhile, large numbers of Chadian Tubu long resident in southern Libya thought it wise to ‘return’ to northern Chad, a country that many were thereby visiting for the first time. This led to tensions in northern Chad, where population figures in certain towns doubled, virtually over night.Footnote 7
The emphasis on local origin and the rejection of ‘foreigners’ that underpin these conflicts seem to be common throughout post-Qadhafi Libya.Footnote 8 In the south of the country, however, it makes even less sense than elsewhere. Like other Saharan regions, southern Libya and northern Chad have been historically marked by a high degree of regional connectivity. Most linguistic groups and even families have connections on both sides of what has become – with Libyan independence in 1951 and even more so with the Aouzou conflict in 1973–87 – an internationally contested border. There have always been Tubu-speakers in southern Libya; indeed, the ‘local’ Arabs in Kufra, the Zuwaya, who claim to be of northern Libyan origin, say that they conquered Kufra from its Tubu residents sometime between the seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 9 Conversely, the towns of northern Chad were largely constructed by Libyan settlers, many of whom still have family and own property south of the border. Distinctions between both, in many cases, are difficult to make, although people publicly insist on radical and obvious difference, and moral incompatibility.Footnote 10 This proximity and uncertainty exacerbates conflict rather than attenuating it, as it means that people are fighting over access to similar resources, in similar terms. As Christian Bromberger notes with regard to the Mediterranean, ‘it is not so much the differences as their loss that can arouse rivalry, even violence’.Footnote 11 This article aims to sketch several chapters in the last century of regional interactions, and the various conflicts and points of entanglement they have led to. It focuses primarily on Faya-Largeau, the main town in the Borkou – Ennedi – Tibesti (B. E. T., Chad's northernmost region, see Fig. 1). It suggests that the categories of analysis that are employed by (most) historians and political analysts mask this historical connectivity, and thereby make both historical and contemporary realities less intelligible. Although the article is organised chronologically, its aim is not so much to describe a sequence as to outline an underlying structural pattern to which layers of complexity were added over time.
Fig. 1. Borkou – Ennedi – Tibesti (B. E. T., Chad's northernmost region).
SAHARAN CONNECTIVITY
Saharan economies, both sedentary and nomadic, necessarily depend on exchange, outside connections and funds. Oases are rarely natural occurrences, but require a large amount of investment and labour, usually brought in from elsewhere; while pastoralists thrive on exchange with oasis dwellers and populations settled beyond the Sahara proper.Footnote 12 This leads to a high degree of regional interdependence, which has persisted throughout the Sahara despite the establishment of first imperial and then national boundaries: the Sahara is best thought of as constituted through overlapping areas of heightened exchange, of goods, people, and ideas, that are structurally comparable and mutually dependent on each other. More visible undertaking, such as, most famously, trans-Saharan trade, rely on this regional infrastructure, pulling it together when the occasion arises, but without fundamentally changing it.Footnote 13 Connections and mobility are thus prior to settlement; stability is exceptional, risk management and diversification are at the heart of local economies; and Saharan connectivity, on a regional rather than a trans-Saharan level, needs to be key to analyses.Footnote 14 As a result, political dominance is based on control over people rather than space; it tends to be decentralised, inherently mobile, and able to accommodate environmental and demographic instability.Footnote 15 Saharan kinship systems, meanwhile, can be read as expressions of the inherent tensions between a need for outside connections and the incorporation of outsiders, and a search for impossible moral containment and autonomy. Regional connectivity, in other words, might be necessary, but it is not always to everybody's liking; nor does it in any way imply equality or harmony.
The troubled history that links northern Chad and southern Libya is a case in point. The Tibesti mountains, the highest mountain range in the Sahara, traditionally allow for some goat-breeding and date-cultivation, but neither has ever produced enough to feed the local population: the region thus depends on regular exchange with either central Chad or southern Libya. Much of this exchange is mediated through property rights and kinship: in the colonial period, Teda from the Tibesti owned gardens in Murzuq, al-Qatrūn, and elsewhere in Fazzān, where they travelled each year for the date harvest and to sell pastoral produce, and where they often also had a second household.Footnote 16 Mobility, in any case, was key: ‘The Tubu Sahara is permanently crisscrossed by travellers who, on their own or in small groups of two or three, travel to faraway destinations whose attraction would not always justify, in our eyes, so much effort and so much risk.’Footnote 17 In the late nineteenth century, both Gustav Nachtigal and Gerhard Rohlfs comment on the presence of Tubu-speakers in Fazzān and Kufra.Footnote 18 According to Nachtigal, a third of the population of al-Qatrūn were then counted as Tubu, while the leading family in town (who claimed to be of Moroccan origin) systematically married women from the Tibesti, in order to be able to travel south unharmed.Footnote 19 In the 1920s, Rosita Forbes mentions four to five hundred Tubu living permanently in Kufra, although she implies that they used to be more numerous; she also notes that ‘weekly caravans’ linked Kufra to Tubu-speaking areas to the south.Footnote 20
In the Borkou, meanwhile, a low-lying area to the southeast of the Tibesti, date production is more abundant, while pastoral goods and cereals are traditionally imported from the south, in particular Kanem and Waddaï. Capot-Rey thus speaks of the ‘dualism’ of the Tibesti and Borkou, on the basis that the two regions rely on relatively independent economic circuits.Footnote 21 Nonetheless, in the Borkou, most manufactured goods still arrive from what is now Libya, and ties – often kinship ties – with the Tibesti and southern Libya are close. The importance of both the Tibesti and Borkou on a larger regional scale is perhaps best apprehended in political terms: while the Tibesti has long provided a haven to raiders and refugees of all kinds, the (relative) abundance of salt and date palms that thrive without the need for permanent irrigation have made the Borkou a central asset in the surrounding pastoral economies:Footnote 22
For both nomads and semi-nomads, the periodical return to the oasis is an essential element of their life-style. This is not only the result of the need to supplement their supplies, nor even to obtain goods to barter on the southern markets, but it expresses the sovereign right that pastoralists have long held over the palm-groves, and their continued claim to ownership.Footnote 23
During the date harvest, the population of the towns and villages of the Borkou thus triples or quadruples.
Although today, this ‘sovereignty’ is mostly exercised by Tubu-speakers,Footnote 24 when Nachtigal visited the Borkou in the late nineteenth century, most of its palm-groves were under the control of the Awlād Sulaymān, Arabic-speaking nomadic pastoralists who, although originally from the Hijāz (or so they claim) via Syrte in Libya, had settled since the mid-nineteenth century in Chad.Footnote 25 By then, the Awlād Sulaymān had exerted some kind of control over the Fazzān for almost two centuries.Footnote 26 Although their preferred pastures were in northern Kanem, they periodically visited the oases of the Borkou, for raids, and to collect ‘their’ share of the date harvest.Footnote 27 It is difficult to say with any certainty whether this situation was exceptional, both with regard to the intensity of raids and the presence of Fazzānī pastoralists in the area. Robert Capot-Rey notes that ‘northern Arabs’ had long established themselves through what is now Chad, at least along common caravan routes; their initial migration in the mid-nineteenth century, fleeing the Ottoman army, sparked a continuous trickle of migrants, Awlād Sulaymān, but also Mghārba and other Libyan pastoralists; for Cordell, ‘the migration of many Awlād Sulaymān to the Chad basin was in part a search for continuity’.Footnote 28 In any case, the inhabitants of the Borkou seem to have been happy to participate in Awlād Sulaymān raiding parties to the neighbouring Ennedi or on Tuareg salt caravans to the west.Footnote 29
The large number of kidnappings that Nachtigal mentions as characteristic of Awlād Sulaymān dominance resulted in a considerable intermingling of populations. As Dennis Cordell notes, Awlād Sulaymān society was based on the recruitment of outsiders, women, clients, slaves, and unredeemed young Arab prisoners, a fact that goes some way towards explaining their extraordinary ability to bounce back, even after devastating military defeats.Footnote 30 On the level of diplomacy, leading Awlād Sulaymān had intermarried with Tubu and Kanembu families even before they settled in northern Chad, if only to be able to move around the area freely.Footnote 31 A similar social plasticity can be observed among all the linguistic groups that inhabit the border area. ‘The Zuwaya’, writes John Davis, ‘do not constitute a permanently united group. They are rather a temporary assemblage of small sets that act together according to circumstance.’Footnote 32 The Tubu, meanwhile, live in ‘a fluid social mesh, without centre or periphery, in which each Tubu is placed at the centre of his or her own personal network’.Footnote 33 Bilaterally exogamous over at least four generations, Tubu forcibly marry out, and marital alliances with outsiders are as common as they can be prestigious. Several Tubu clans claim Arab or Tuareg descent; virtually all say that they are of outside origin.Footnote 34 In a similar vein, although the Zuwaya, like most Arabic-speakers in the area, formally emphasise endogamy, Davis notes the high degree of incorporation of strangers into their tribal schemes, which allows them to absorb all kinds of outsiders, and makes ‘Zuwayī identity’ a matter of appreciation and degree.Footnote 35
THE SANŪSIYYA
This history of longstanding connectivity, entangled settlement, kin structures, and property rights in the area was made particularly visible, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, by Sanūsī projects of regional expansion and agricultural colonisation. Based initially in Cyrenaica, the Sufi tarīqa moved its headquarters to Kufra in 1894 and then, in 1899, to Gouro in the Borkou. By late 1902, Sanūsī zawāyā had been opened in Aïn Galakka, Gouro, Yarda and Ounianga Kabir and Saghir.Footnote 36 Although in the Sahel, the Sanūsiyya has mainly been analysed for the pivotal role it played in trans-Saharan trade and anticolonial resistance, its primary focus in the Borkou seems to have been agricultural.Footnote 37 A 1907 French report notes that a large percentage of Sanūsī settlers were slaves, employed in agriculture, and that great effort was put into date cultivation and in particular into the gardens that surrounded the Sanūsī zawāyā. Agriculture also constituted the principal base of Sanūsī taxation, and largely determined the location of zawāyā. Footnote 38 As Jean-Louis Triaud observes, ‘there is an obvious consistency between the Sanūsī network and a map of the principal natural resources of the country’.Footnote 39 Agricultural produce grown in Sanūsī gardens was mostly destined for export to Gouro and Kufra, hence strengthening northbound regional connectivity, although the quantities produced never seem to have fulfilled Sanūsī expectations. At the height of Sanūsī influence in the area, Sanūsī settlers accounted for 1,000 of the estimated 20,000 inhabitants of the Borkou.Footnote 40
Alongside new settlers and new crops, the Sanūsiyya introduced a different way of conceptualising the world: a legal system, based on private property in land (which was necessary both to make endowments work, and to set up gardens), forms of labour exploitation, in particular slavery but also salaried agricultural labour, and a divergent hierarchy of values. As ‘heirs to an ideological model, that of the shurafā’ [descendants of the Prophet]’ shared throughout North Africa and the Sahara, or as imitators of Western Saharan ribāt (fortified religious lodges), the Sanūsiyya aimed to change local systems of production as much as local ways of life. Indeed, the two were inseparable:
In this area controlled by nomads, where agricultural labour was scorned as servile, the Sanūsiyya, acting as agricultural entrepreneurs, promoted a new system of values. In a society where only the old, the ill and the dependent used to have a fixed abode, they established sedentary communities, encouraged agriculture and fought against the nomadic practice of plundering. Only strangers, imbued with baraka [blessing] and under divine protection, could have introduced such factors of change to the social order, by making up with their own charisma for the inferiority associated with sedentary life and farming.Footnote 41
A similar ‘civilising mission’ and emphasis on agricultural colonialism also animated the Sanūsiyya in what is now southern Libya. It prompted them to resettle the oases of Kufra, which, by the early nineteenth century, had been abandoned by all permanent settlers, and to set up irrigated gardens, largely relying on slave labour.Footnote 42 This, then, is perhaps the most straightforward and best-documented example of saintly figures founding towns and agricultural settlement, a development that is observable throughout the Sahara.Footnote 43 Spiritual ambition and missionary endeavours often seem to have been at the heart of Saharan settlement, beyond considerations of local productivity. Meanwhile, individual zawāyā were viable because they combined all possible local and regional sources of income, and could make up for each other's losses.
We only have glimpses of the relations of the Sanūsiyya with the people in the Borkou, and these are filtered through French translations of Sanūsī perceptions. These are contradictory. On their arrival, Sanūsī representatives were offered gifts of water and palm-trees, and they established zawāyā on land that had been given to them voluntarily and publicly. Taxes were paid, both on local agricultural produce – dates and some cereals – and on livestock. Based on Sanūsī internal communications, Djian calculates that the three zawāyā in the Borkou – Aïn Galakka, Yarda and Faya – received 140 camel-loads of cereals, and four to five hundred loads of dates annually, in addition to their own production. Meanwhile, in Bedo, they received a quarter of salt extracted.Footnote 44 At the same time, Djian mentions a series of quarrels, brawls, and raids on Sanūsī caravans, clients, and slaves.Footnote 45 Similarly, Jean Ferrandi notes that during each of the many French raids on Faya, residents had been eager to point out to the French where Sanūsī stores were kept, while the Sanūsī suspected the people of Aïn Galakka of calling upon the Ottomans to reduce Sanūsī influence in the area.Footnote 46
If, then, we do not know to what degree the Sanūsī ‘civilising mission’ was a success locally, it was – at times grudgingly – recognised as such by the more perceptive of French colonial officers. Yet although, according to one French colonial officer at least, ‘the Sanūsiyya acted like a genuine state’ or even a ‘colonial state’, the Sanūsiyya seems to have had some success in northern Chad precisely because it did not act as a state in the European sense, aiming at full territorial sovereignty.Footnote 47 Rather, it attempted to control strategic points, by setting up trade relays and agricultural colonies with labour they had brought with them. In line with longstanding Saharan political traditions, their focus was on people rather than territory, arbitration rather than force, a reliance on gifts rather than taxes, and flexibility instead of centralised governance.Footnote 48 Indeed, as it emerges from Sanūsiyya correspondence, its internal administrative structure was rather loose, with different zawāyā vying for resources, and little influence over the nomadic dūr. Footnote 49 This was so because the Sanūsiyya, instead of superimposing an alien political construct on local resources that could not finance it, infiltrated existing patterns and structures, temporarily pulling them together into a larger whole. In the precolonial Borkou, such pre-existing political structures seem to have been limited in scope, reducing the Sanūsiyya's ability to co-opt these in the way they were able to do further north.Footnote 50 Hence, perhaps, the tarīqa's visible fragility (they were easily defeated by the French and ostensibly left few traces when they collapsed), coupled with an underlying long-term resistance (the patterns of ownership they established in Faya are still visible, as are the trade networks they co-opted and expanded).
Indeed, although, according to French accounts, the Sanūsiyya completely retreated from northern Chad after their military defeat in 1913, their influence was in fact more tenacious. The Sanūsiyya's commercial dominance in the area had largely been based on their ability to co-opt and protect Libyan traders who had long travelled through the region, such as the Mghārba, and to open up new routes for others, such as the Zuwaya. While the Sanūsī zawāyā were destroyed or occupied by the French army, these traders remained.Footnote 51 Indeed, as the French army faced problems of supplies for the newly established garrisons in northern Chad, they rapidly became indispensable to the French colonial project. The first caravan from Kufra arrived, with French blessing and a letter of recommendation from Muhammad al-‘Abdī, the leading Sanūsī shaykh in Kufra, in Faya in March 1914, barely three months after the French had taken the last Sanūsī zāwiya in Ounianga. Faced with the refusal by local pastoralists to supply pack animals to the French army, the French were obliged to deal with the ‘Sanūsī trader’ ‘Abd al-Rahmān Dallālī, based in Abéché, in order to obtain vital supplies.Footnote 52 Six months later, in July 1914, a group of ‘Tripoli merchants some of whom are [Sanūsī] ikhwān’ obtained from the French colonial authorities the establishment of a weekly market in Faya, so that they could trade in salt.Footnote 53 By 1919, French collaboration with Sanūsī traders was such that the commanding officer of the B. E. T. suggested that all army supplies should be brought up either through Abéché, or from Egypt via Kufra, rather than from the French colonial capital Fort Lamy.Footnote 54 If the more visible trans-Saharan caravans have thus been interrupted by the French military conquest, regional trade in staples and some imported goods continued, and was spurred rather than hindered by the presence of a sizeable French army contingent in the area.
THE ENEMY WHO CAME ON FOOT
Barely ten years later, these ties became even more visible, as refugees from the brutal Italian ‘pacification’ of southern Libya (1928–34) started to arrive in large numbers in what had in the meantime become northern Chad. In autumn 1928, the French colonial archives mention the arrival of a group of ‘Fezzanais’: 19 traders from Kufra, who had come to Faya to seek shelter for themselves and their families. In the first quarter of 1929, the French counted 150 arrivals from Kufra – presumably Muhammad al-‘Abdī and his retinue – and 1,185 from the coast near Syrte.Footnote 55 Later the same year reports mention another 300 tents or 1,411 people, with 290 sheep and 3,132 camels.Footnote 56 Numbers further increased with the Italian conquest of the Sanūsī headquarters in al-Tāj in Kufra on 24 January 1931, leading to the arrival of 400 refugees in Ounianga in early 1931. Their flight was marked by considerable hardship:
These refugees … were in a state of total destitution. Machine-gunned by Italian planes after their flight from Kufra, robbed by the Gongoi gang, they had also lost a quarter of their number in the Erdi, and the itinerary they had followed was marked by the dead bodies of those who had died of thirst.Footnote 57
More generally, for most of these refugees, travel south was difficult, and the French colonial archives note several incidences in which refugees were robbed and killed by local pastoralist groups – unless they could pay, dearly, for safe passage and guidance.Footnote 58 Indeed, the phrase ‘the enemy who came on foot’ that is still used locally to refer to these arrivals in the 1930s and to one of the quarters they subsequently built in Faya, bears witness both to the familiarity with the newcomers and to the momentary reversal of status hierarchies it implied, as former raiders – or people assimilated to them – now arrived without their mounts, begging for shelter.
In October 1930, the French granted land to needy refugees by the abundant natural spring of Yen near Aïn Galakka – that is to say, and perhaps not coincidentally, near the ruins of the largest Sanūsī zāwiya in the Borkou and within the former sphere of influence of the Awlād Sulaymān.Footnote 59 As the French had paid no attention to the refugees’ background and agricultural experience, or indeed the availability of the necessary tools, this settlement at first did not hold its promise: the ‘natives’, as a 1930 report notes, ‘prefer to spend their time with palavers and quibbles instead of work, and this in an area where water is abundant and agriculture easy’.Footnote 60 Spontaneous agricultural settlement in Faya and Fada was more successful. A March 1931 report notes that:
these refugees seem to have adapted perfectly to Faya and Fada, where they can find wheat, which is their preferred food. They would regret leaving their families now, as their fields are already planted and their houses half-built.Footnote 61
Local memories clearly associate the arrival of these refugees with a renewal of agriculture, or rather the introduction of horticulture as practiced in the Libyan south. Many varieties of dates, wheat, and most fruit trees are said to have been introduced at this time from the north. In Faya, the best and most central gardens, with old date palms, are remembered as owned and planted by settlers from what is now Libya. In a sense, then, part of the Sanūsiyya's ‘civilising mission’ was fulfilled by a later wave of settlers, many if not most of whom were still connected to the order.
By October 1934, 3,000 refugees had settled in northern Chad, mostly in towns or large villages, where they probably constituted the majority of inhabitants.Footnote 62 Although some of these refugees were merely travelling through, on their way towards joining relatives who were already established as traders or pastoralists in Abéché and Kanem, most stayed in the north. Those who had enough livestock to live independently settled on pastures just south of Faya or further south in the Bahr al-Ghazāl and northern Kanem. Those who came empty-handed preferred to stay in Faya, in order to work as day labourers on date plantations and construction sites, or in retail trade.Footnote 63 Oral history in contemporary Faya mostly stresses the poverty of the new arrivals, crediting them with the invention of a whole range of servile occupations, from the fabrication of mud-bricks to salaried agricultural labour. This is generally explained with regards to the poverty that then reigned in the Fazzān and Kufra.Footnote 64 People there, so the story goes, needed meat so badly that their tongue would hang out of their mouth, swollen, and then when you gave them a piece of meat, they would chew it for a while and then take it out of their mouth to keep it in their pocket, and chew it again later. Fazzānī traders hence could make a lot of money by collecting old bones in Chad, and animal skins, and by selling them to their relatives back home, who would suck the skins and make soup with the bones – while in the Borkou, an area of relative abundance and precommercial naïvety, or so these stories imply, people threw these things away without second thoughts.Footnote 65 These stories somewhat obscure a situation that seems to have been marked by real socioeconomic differences, mostly between those settlers who had former ties with the area and had managed to bring livestock, and those who did not. By summer 1934, in any case, forty settlers had constructed mud-brick-houses in Faya, as a tangible proof of their wealth.Footnote 66 Apart from French military constructions and other buildings linked to the colonial conquest, these were the first permanent houses in Faya; and most of the current town centre was constructed in this way.
Stories of fortunes made from old bones – in addition to providing a commentary on Libya's current dominant economic position – might also serve to rationalise the rapid economic success experienced by some of the settlers. By 1934, the French were hiring camels from wealthy settlers who pastured their herds south of Faya, and whom the French increasingly judged to be ‘more perfectible than our natives’; and army supplies were largely in the hands of ‘Fazzānī’ traders until the 1950s, despite French attempts to foster local competition.Footnote 67 To this was added a growing market in local and regional trade:
Renting camels cheaply from the Tubu, Fazzānī traders incessantly organize convoys that, from Abéché, their main supply-centre, transport goods and objects of all kinds to [Faya-]Largeau and Zouar, but also to Murzuq and Sabha.Footnote 68
It is noteworthy here that Fazzānī traders had quickly branched out into (or revitalised) trade with central Chad, while maintaining at least some of their privileged connections with the Libyan south.
The war-years and the money pumped into the area with the Colonne Leclerc allowed these traders to invest in trucks – at a time when the French military administration was still on camelback.Footnote 69 From then on, the settlers almost exclusively appear in the archives as rapacious traders and usurers, exploiting local agriculturalists and herders. In 1948, Fazzānī traders were accused of stockpiling seeds; according to the French, they were the only people who paid taxes, as they were the only ones who had any money. French-appointed local chiefs handed over the taxes they had collected not to French officials, but to Fazzānī traders, who in turn lent them out against high interest rates.Footnote 70 In 1956, the then chef du district, Le Rouvreur, describes the ten richest Fazzānī traders in Faya as follows:
The best part of their income is not derived from retail, but rather from speculation on local dates and camels brought by their clients to pay their debts, also on millet that they stockpile as soon as it arrives from Waddaï and then sell bit by bit at a premium during food shortages, and on tea, sugar, cloth imported from Tunis and Tripoli by the TAT via Faya to Fort-Lamy and the southern markets … Every trader has a correspondent in each trading post between the Mediterranean and Chad and between Nigeria and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.Footnote 71
A few among these traders owned their own trucks, which they mainly used to trade with Fort Lamy; others exported dates bought cheaply at harvest time on planes, before prices in the capital went down with the new harvest. ‘The amount of wealth that is thus siphoned off by a thousand Libyans at the expense of 40,000 Tubu is incredible.’Footnote 72 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that despite Libyan and Chadian independence and subsequent attempts by the Libyan government to repatriate them, many Fazzānī traders stayed in the Borkou until the early 1970s.Footnote 73
Such success was only possible through lasting involvement in local and regional social networks. This was mostly done through marriage. While the French archives tend to stress the ‘intransigent racial prejudice’ that stopped ‘white’ Libyans from getting married locally, and claim that only the poor would get married to Tubu to avoid the more expensive bride-price that they would otherwise have to pay, local memories and indeed the presence of descendents of mixed unions paint a different picture, as do off-hand remarks in the French colonial archives.Footnote 74 Hence, in 1955, a note dealing with a homicide or rather the subsequent reconciliation describes the intervention of the victim's ‘maternal uncles’, Zaghawa from Waddaï, defending their own against ‘the Zuwaya’ in Faya.Footnote 75 Intra-Libyan conflicts thus involved their in-laws, and could easily oppose local groups against each other. The best known descendent of such a mixed marriage is certainly Ahmād Tuwār, whose father ‘Abd Allāh became in 1907 the Sanūsī khalīfa of the zāwiya at Aïn Galakka. ‘Abd Allāh married into a locally influential Kokorda family, before he was killed by the French in the Ennedi in 1913.Footnote 76 Forty years later, his son Ahmād's double attachment to both the Libyan settlers and a powerful fraction of Tubu was at the heart of his considerable fortune, as a date trader with privileged access to the rich palm grove at Kirdimi, one of the first locally to be able to invest in trucks.Footnote 77 Although the French colonial administration was rather unhappy about his continued contact with the Sanūsiyya, his multiple connections clearly underpinned his political success in the 1950s, as the first député elected in Faya.Footnote 78
WAR AND PEACE
The B. E. T. obtained full independence from France in 1964, and rebellion against the central government, mostly led by the Frolinat (Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad), broke out in the Tibesti two years later. With international involvement, this rebellion turned into civil war, fuelled by funds provided by Chad's neighbours with aspirations to regional control. Libya was one among them, and for long it was the most successful, at least in northern Chad. As a result, much of the war was fought in northern Chad with Libyan aid, and the Libyan armed forces occupied the B. E. T. for several years. There is no room here for a detailed history of this rebellion and the subsequent civil war (although much of it remains to be written).Footnote 79 I will thus content myself with various moments of confusion that indicate that beyond international diplomatic strategy, what was often at stake – and turned this war into a particularly bloody one – was not the intrinsic difference between Chadian locals and Libyan occupiers, but perhaps rather their excessive proximity.
By 1972, most of the B. E. T. was controlled by the Frolinat, part of which received Libyan aid by 1976. Two years later, the Libyan-sponsored branch of the Frolinat led by Goukouni Oueddeï took control over Faya and stayed there, with a few interruptions, until 1987.Footnote 80 Over the years, the number of Libyan soldiers present in the area increased gradually, until it seems justified, by 1983, to speak of military occupation.Footnote 81 Nominally, however, local Frolinat fighters remained in charge; and most of the ‘Libyan soldiers’ garrisoned in northern Chad were in fact non-Libyan mercenaries. Many of these had been recruited (by force or otherwise) among Chadian Tubu in southern Libya, where tensions between ‘Libyans’ and ‘Chadians’ (or rather, those resident in southern Libya who had the necessary paperwork to obtain food, and those who did not) led to several violent clashes throughout the 1980s.Footnote 82 Other Chadian Tubu joined the Libyan army in the Tibesti, as this was the only way to obtain basic supplies. According to one Chadian Tubu returning from southern Libya in 1986, and who had spent some time in the Libyan army camps in the Tibesti, ‘I did not see any soldier among them who looked like a Libyan. They are all Chadians forced to serve Libya.’Footnote 83
Libyan army bases in southern Libya, in particular the air base at Ma‘tan al-Sārah which was famously attacked and taken by the Chadian army in 1987, were also predominantly staffed by Chadian and Libyan Tubu; and this is indeed cited by some as a reason for their defeat, as the defending soldiers mistook the attacking Chadian army for reinforcements. Whether this is true or not, it clearly indicates a shared imagery of uncertain categories and fuzzy boundaries.
Tellingly, clashes with ‘Libyan’ soldiers recounted in the town archives of Faya speak not so much of hostility with a foreign occupying force, but rather of too much intimacy with unpleasant and belligerent in-laws: a grenade explodes during a party; grenades are thrown into individually targeted courtyards; conflicts break out over girls, children, and donkeys.Footnote 84 Even more frequent are accusations of theft and rape. If, in a few cases, there can be no doubt over the veracity and horror of these claims – as with the case of the rape and murder of a forty-year old woman near the military camp of Amoul as she was collecting firewood – they concern low-status women probably judged to be of little account by Chadians and Libyans alike, and it is indeed not clear which army the perpetrators belonged to.Footnote 85 Otherwise, according to local memories, many of these incidents resulted in lasting marriages, mostly with girls migrating to Libya (which of course does not make these incidents less violent, but indicates that they were carried out within rather than beyond the bounds of shared sociality).Footnote 86 In the end, the problem does not seem to be one of ‘foreign’ occupation, but rather of the presence of any kind of military in the area:
The people of Faya like those of any other country need to live in peace and dignity and honour. The people ask the Chadian and Libyan officers to master their soldiers’ bad behaviour so that they do not commit acts of barbarism and banditry. Many of such cases have been reported to the Popular Congress. They are: the theft of sheep, or of goats every day, the deliberate killing of donkeys, the devastation of gardens, rape of women, followed by murder. All of these factors are incompatible with the way of life of these people and sow the seeds of withdrawal and hatred in the heart of the Chadian people towards our armed forces.Footnote 87
As a side effect of the shifting nature of categories, suspicion of ‘traitors’ was always alive, although few accusations seem to have led to violent persecution.Footnote 88
Libyan involvement also created or reinforced local and regional distinctions and categories that dovetailed with Chadian political oppositions. This meant that what was on one level an international conflict was read on another as yet another chapter in local hostilities; while conversely local quarrels were inflated with international meaning and, more dangerously, funds and supplies. The most salient of these distinctions, and the one that is still instrumental in current conflicts in southern Libya, is that between ‘Tubu’ and ‘Arabs’. Roughly 10 per cent of Chad's contemporary population self-identify as Arabs; this is primarily a linguistic distinction, and one that is inherently flexible. During its involvement in the Chadian civil war, the Qadhafi government was often accused in Chad of furthering pan-Arab dreams, and of giving local Arabic-speaking groups and ‘politico-military tendencies’ preferential treatment and supplies – if only to better control their own Tubu minority in the Libyan south.Footnote 89 This at times created an ‘Arab solidarity’, both within Chad and across the Libya border, that had no historic precedent; and it fed into oppositions between particular Tubu-speaking and Arabic-speaking groups. The longstanding conflict between Dazagada from Faya with Arabic-speakers over pasture near Oum Chalouba was thus reinvented in struggles over the control of Faya, between branches of the Frolinat that all claimed support from Libya. These struggles culminated, in 1978, with the ‘Arab’ conquest of Faya, which lasted only a few hours but led to a high death toll, and in the (alleged) massacre of Tubu-speaking fighters by their Arabic-speaking colleagues and locally recruited auxiliaries of the Libyan army in Kalaït near Oum Chalouba in 1980.Footnote 90
Lest one should think that these are simple manifestations of ‘natural ethnic divisions’ or results of a clever ‘divide and rule’ strategy deployed by the Libyans in Chad with no connections to their own country, these categories could easily subdivide and had ramifications in Libya itself. Chadian refugees from Libya thus recount how, in the Libyan airbase of Ma‘tan al-Sārah, conflicts broke out between ‘black’ and ‘brown’ Arabs, some of whom were from Chad, but who also included Libyans on either side.Footnote 91 Lower-level categorisations also came to the fore in the struggles over Faya, where local divisions into ‘cantons’ (the term and administrative structure here is French) overlapped with (accusations of) partisanship, and were read, in local police records at least, as indicative of more less close proximity with the Libyan army or with the resolutely anti-Libyan FAN.Footnote 92 Conversely, war contributions – demanded of civilians in the Chadian side even after the war had ended, and names of whose contributors (and non-contributors) were read out on national and local radio – mostly seem to have been used to reinforce local conflicts over resources.Footnote 93
Economically, northern Chad was made wholly dependent on trade with Libya during the period of Libyan aid and then military occupation. By 1980, the Libyan dinar was used in Faya alongside the CFA franc; it gradually came to replace the former, despite official attempts to either fix its value or to ban it altogether.Footnote 94 After the war had ended, it took years and a considerable inflow of non-Libyan foreign aid to reverse this situation.Footnote 95 This forced exclusivity of economic ties with Libya led to much hardship on the ground: while economic ties between northern Chad and southern Libya have always been strong, they were not in themselves sufficient, as the Borkou produces – alongside camels for export to Libya – dates for exchange against cereals, which are grown in central Chad rather than further North. In other terms, its economic survival depends on regional connectivity stretching both north and south. In Faya, the 1980s were thus years of famine, and people attempted to leave the area as fast as they could – heading either north or south. The archives are replete with accounts of arrests of unsuccessful migrants, accounts that only leave us to guess at the number of those who made it. After the war, this tendency continued, despite attempts by the Chadian government to stop it, and periodic expulsions of Chadians from Libya. In June 1995 alone, 3,800 people officially left the Borkou towards Libya, and it is difficult to know how many went without telling anybody.Footnote 96 Overall, the war years seem to have strengthened regional ties rather than disrupted them, if only by supplying the necessary infrastructure, incentive and equipment for intensive small-scale transborder trade and migration.Footnote 97
LASTING ENTANGLEMENTS
This continued connectivity led to considerable entanglement on the ground, in particular with regards to property rights. As outlined above, most of the town of Faya and its surrounding gardens was constructed and planted by Libyan settlers in the 1930s. These Libyans had brought with them a legal corpus – the sharī‘a – that provided laws of ownership relying on written proof, and that had been, albeit grudgingly, recognised by the French colonial administration, a de facto recognition that was carried over into independent Chad. Under the various revolutionary regimes that governed Faya from the late 1970s onwards, however, all Libyan estates were expropriated (in the absence of their original owners) for many among them several times over.Footnote 98 Some of these expropriations indicate that even in the late 1980s, the category of ‘Libyan’ was not necessarily straightforward. Hence the following case (that incidentally concerned the stepson of Ahmād Tuwār's, Faya's first député who was mentioned above):
I am honoured to approach you very respectfully [with] my present declaration, to indicate that the man named Foto Morin is a métis [that is, son of a French father and a Tubu mother]. His mother is Chadian but she is married to a Libyan called Ahmād Tuwār. Foto Morin left Chad after Felix Maloum's attempt [to govern the country from 1975 to 1979] to go to Libya and stay with his mother, and he stayed in Libya for good like a Libyan. Now, I declare his goods that are in Faya, but his relatives who are here in Faya consider that his wealth belongs to them, and keep it until further notice.Footnote 99
To be ‘Libyan’ here seems to be the result of political allegiance and affinity rather than nationality or descent. Moreover, this example clearly indicates that struggles over ‘Libyan’ goods hid conflicts between locals with different and mutually exclusive claims to ownership. This also explains why in many cases expropriations remained ineffective, as occupants simply refused to leave.Footnote 100
Effective or not, certain expropriations were annulled by the prefect or other high-ranking officials in the 1990s, although it is difficult to know on what grounds. While the first restitutions underline that the former owners of the land were in fact Chadian, and hence had been illegally expropriated, later restitutions were made irrespective of the claimant's nationality. One of them mentions a presidential decree, another a correspondence with the Chadian Minister of the Interior, in a general context in which both Libya and Chad were striving to normalise their diplomatic relations.Footnote 101 But these interventions were case-specific, and not all Libyan houses were returned; there can be no doubt that the ability to put pressure both on local and national office-holders was crucial – an ability that is in itself indicative of ongoing transborder connections. A few of the beneficiaries of these restitutions sold their land immediately, and one at time wonders whether the buyers (often high-ranking state officials or local dignitaries) might not have had a hand in the restitution. But most did not sell, leaving their estate with their Chadian families and clients. Thus the following note, sent by the descendent of b. Awaysha, whose father had come to Faya with the Sanūsiyya, to his local representative in Faya in the 1990s:
I am writing to you to give you my news. I greet you and I greet all the family. Dear Mūsā I ask you to give the little house to Mme I. O. Enclosed the photocopy of the power of attorney and of my passport. And if somebody is renting the house, he will just have to move out quickly. I ask you to send me the money for the rent of the houses for the last years and also the money for the dates and the mangoes sold over the last years. You take ten percent and you send me the rest. By ‘Abd al-Wahhāb ‘Abd al-Hamīd b. Awaysha.Footnote 102
Recently, these questions have taken on a new urgency, as Faya is scheduled for refurbishment. Houses and gardens that will have to be knocked down qualify for (some degree) of compensation. This means that for once, ownership will have to be determined without doubt, at least temporarily. The civil servant, himself from the south of Chad, who was sent to Faya to do this quickly realised that his task was not so much impossible – ‘I found lots of title deeds, at the town hall, but the only valid ones belong to Libyans’ – as dangerous. He thus left Faya as quickly as he could, worried about his personal safety.Footnote 103
CONCLUSION
‘Libyan’ and ‘Chadian’ are certainly categories that matter in the contemporary border region. The Chadian national army fought a bloody war against its Libyan counterpart in 1987, and won, and memories of this struggle – now mostly referred as being ‘about’ the Aouzou strip – are still painfully alive on both sides of the border. However, the border region, like other Saharan regions, is also an area that always has been and still is closely connected, and to focus uniquely on categories of national distinction that emerged with imperialism and war is to ignore important tools of historical analysis.Footnote 104 This article has retraced various periods of heightened connectivity between northern Chad and southern Libya, and the regional entanglement they have led to. Entanglement of this kind, and the at times uncomfortable degree of intimacy it involves, in no ways implies equality, or an absence of tension or conflict. On the contrary, it thrives on hierarchy, mutual distrust and disdain, the reification of rigid categories of belonging, and, in both a moral and a practical sense, on war. As elsewhere in the Sahara, the dominant vocabulary of distinction employed in the area today is thus not one of ethnic opposition, but of moral shortcomings, which are attributed with great liberality to anybody who might have turned themselves into an ‘outsider’. ‘Libyans’ are thus accused by B. E. T. residents not only of strange sexual mores, arrogance and gluttony, but also of the regular theft of children; while Chadians resident (and often also born) in Libya who ‘returned’ to northern Chad with the 2011 war were treated as bunduq jāb-ha – those brought by the guns – in other words, as cowards. There can be no doubt that Libyan stereotypes about Tubu are hardly more flattering. Connectedness in this sense might attenuate hostility, but it might also make conflicts worse, as any new offence is read in the light of past grievances, and as all feel equally entitled to the resources at stake (such as, in this particular case, transborder trade). Much as the history of Libyan involvement in what is now Chad thus cannot be understood simply as ‘foreign meddling’, contemporary conflicts in Libya's south are partly ‘domestic’, with all the potentially gruesome implications of this term.
