Combining cultural history with travel writing, Dorrit van Dalen follows the fascinating history and shifting meanings assigned to gum Arabic from Shakespeare to Bin Laden and from the Industrial Revolution to a veteran of a recent coup d’état in Chad. She shows that both Western and African civilisations would not be the same without these tears of the acacia. DORRIT VAN DALEN Gum Arabic has been seen as a symbol of the “noble Orient” and later as a symbol of trouble. It is the hardened sap of varieties of acacia trees which grow exclusively in the Sahel, an area stretching across the African continent just south of the Sahara. From the time of the Crusades, when Europeans purchased it in Arab countries, it has played an ever-growing role in the global economy. It is now a common ingredient in foods, sodas, and cosmetics. DORRIT VAN DALEN DORRIT VAN DALEN has worked in West Africa in international It is both a commodity history and a personal account, with scholarship presented in a narrative rather than formal style. It is very well written. To me, this is the most difficult kind of non-fiction to write, and one of the most rewarding to read, with knowledge conveyed through enjoyment and fascination. – Kaori O’Connor, University College London gum arabic cooperation and as a journalist. She is now affiliated with Leiden University as an Arabist. This book provides much background knowledge on an omnipresent but elusive subject and includes surprising additional information and insights, even for someone who has been studying the history of gum Arabic for years. – Jutta Wimmler, author of The Sun King’s Atlantic: Drugs, Demons and Dyestuffs in the Atlantic World, 1640-1730 gum arabic THE GOLDEN TEARS OF THE ACACIA TREE LEIDEN UNIVERSIT Y PRESS W W W.LUP.NL LUP_vDALEN_(gom)_rug11.3mm_v01.indd 2-3 9 789087 283360 LUP 05-11-19 11:26 Gum Arabic GUM ARABIC The Golden Tears of the Acacia Tree Dorrit van Dalen LEIDEN UNIVERSITY PRESS Cover design: Suzan Beijer Cover illustration: Gum bottle (photo: Volken Beck) Lay-out: Jurgen Leemans Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. ISBN 978 90 8728 336 0 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 358 5 (e-PDF) e-ISBN 978 94 0060 359 2 (e-PUB) NUR 694 © Dorrit van Dalen / Leiden University Press, 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and the author of the book. This book is distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press (www.press.uchicago.edu). Macet, merem jidey nadani. I went out. A young gazelle beckoned me. — A riddle from Chad. For Halime Contents Contents Preface 9 I. Lustre 13 Precious jewels It makes your hair curl Tears of the acacia Gum, balm and resin 13 17 21 26 II. Modest gum 31 Glue Ink The best gum sticks to the teeth III. Noble gum 31 35 41 43 Rubens’s portrait Healing capacities Othello’s plea To Timbuctoo 43 47 51 53 IV. Wealth of Nations 59 Nothing but the pain Nixon’s secret Free trade or privilege? All anomaly! 59 62 68 73 V. The gum wars of the eighteenth century 77 The stakes Brüe and A῾li Shanzura Floating watchmen Cumming and A῾mar ould A῾li Shanzura. 77 84 90 94 7 Gum Arabic VI. Mystère et boule de gomme 99 Far from here These barbarous meetings A battle of cunning and fraud Impotence and prestige Saint-Louis 99 102 108 111 114 VII. Sudan: the rollercoaster 125 Do the world a favour I saw a man in El Obeid The promised land Kitchen talk Manna from heaven 125 127 133 138 146 VIII. Chad: the idea of kitir 149 Purity and danger Land rights and religion The inner circle Arabian nights 149 155 161 166 IX. Intangible tears 173 Definitions To stock or to substitute Botany Chemistry 173 175 177 181 Notes 187 Bibliography 195 Index 201 8 Preface Preface We all use and consume gum Arabic every day. It is irreplaceable in soft drinks. It is a key ingredient in inks and paints, it sticks the coating on glossy magazines and the chocolate pastilles that melt in your mouth but not in your hand. It is used in cosmetics and gel capsules, in lithography, and to form chunks of cat food and fertilizer. It is a component of matches and explosives. It is added to milk to make it creamy, to vegetarian meat to make it tender, to wine to make it clear, and to beer to make it foam. It helps make jams and creamcheese thick and chocolate high in fibre but low in calories. It is even found in toothpaste and in the glue used for dentures. It turns up in stock cubes, instant-dessert powders, laxatives, tobacco, icing and ice-cream, sweets and insecticides. And gum Arabic turns up rather a lot in history. Some of the most significant events in history – the development of cursive script, the industrial revolution, the insights of Adam Smith, the moment when the first African representative (from Senegal) was delegated to the French Assemblée législative – would have turned out quite differently without the role played by gum Arabic. For me gum Arabic does even more. It has lured me to the places where I most like to be, from Mauritania to Sudan, from the shade of boukarous in the Sahel to dimly lit archives in cities from London to Dakar. The more I have asked about it, the more fascinating it has become. The closer I got to its source, the more I found that it is hidden, both by people and by nature. The tears of two species of acacia have been called gum Arabic since the middle ages, even in the Arab world, where samgh arabi was used as an ingredient in ink and hair pomade, among other things.1 The acacias that exude gum Arabic do not grow on Arabian soil, but it 9 Gum Arabic was in Arabian ports that European crusaders and merchants bought it, and brought it to Italy and France. Ever since, gum Arabic has reflected our view of the Arab world, its second fascinating aspect. Until the sixteenth century, the Arab-Islamic world was largely unknown in Europe, although Muslim empires reached from North Africa and al-Andalus, Syria, and Ottoman Turkey to Persia and India. When the “Turcs” conquered Christian Constantinople in 1453 and laid siege to Vienna in 1529, their strength and determination seemed unlimited. In Shakespeare’s day, Arabs were described as utter brutes but also as highly sophisticated, disciplined and models of piety. Europeans feared them and at the same time ascribed to them the virtues they thought were fading in the West. Gum Arabic symbolised to them the wonders and graces of the Levant. Then more traders, diplomats, scholars and adventurers started to travel to the Arab world and to come back with manuscripts, contracts and their observations. In the same era, Ottoman power started to crumble. When Vienna withstood a second Ottoman siege in 1683, it was a triumph that tipped the scales. Europe had come to grips with the threat from the East and, with the knowledge of its seafarers, scholars and geographical societies, began to build the foundations of its own colonial empires. However, while European countries came to dominate a good part of the globe, they could not get a hold on gum Arabic. This was all the more frustrating because this specific type of gum was becoming indispensable for many manufactures. But even when it turned out to be available close to Europe, near the coast of West Africa, it always escaped; or, rather, the Arab or Berber inhabitants who supplied it kept escaping the logic, the “gifts” and the obsession of its pursuers. Again, that became a metaphor for one type of experience that Europeans had with the Orient in general. Gum Arabic came to represent the mystery of what was thought of as “the Oriental mind”. Later, when colonial governments in the Sahel region organised the production of cotton, peanuts and other crops for European use, they found that it was impossible to do the same for gum Arabic. Even today, it is difficult to get a grip on gum Arabic, because it is impossible to reproduce artificially. Therefore, the modern food 10 Preface industry, which is increasingly dependent on this ingredient from the desert, still depends on the willingness of inhabitants of the Sahel to collect it. In 2001, after the attack on the Twin Towers, consumers discovered a connection between Osama bin Laden and the tears of the Acacia and then between gum and their own lives, and they realised they were condemned to the villain. The meaning of gum Arabic shifted again, from mysterious to obscure. On the global market, the name was even changed and some importers now speak of Acacia gum. But gum is elastic, it adapts. New qualities have been discovered that increase its value in the modern world, as a prebiotic ingredient and a commodity that can help sustainable development in the Sahel. u Over the years I have thought about what it is that draws me to gum Arabic, and I have come to realise that that is its very ineffability – the fact that it cannot be drawn into some standard logic of production and consumption, is not readily susceptible of economic analysis under any standard model, and has yet to give up all of the secrets of its chemical composition. I embrace its mystery as the rational excuse to investigate what is fundamentally different. In fact, my research has led me to new questions in a part of the world that I first encountered as a development worker, and it has shown me the same world again, only this time upside down. Many people have shared with me their knowledge about gum, their sense of wonder, and sometimes a secret or two, and I am grateful to them all. Among them are Arvid Meersman of Caldic, without whose help I might not have begun writing this book; Dr. Isam Sidig and his family who showed me exceptional hospitality in Khartoum; Violaine Fauvarque, Frédéric Alland and Charles Alland of Alland & Robert, the world’s second largest transformer and distributor of gum Arabic (or Acacia gum), have generously shared stories, explanations and pictures with me from their long history in the field of gum. I also thank the secretary-general of the Gum Arabic Board of Sudan Dr Abdelmagid al-Qadir for the information he has shared. In Chad, the stories of Ali Mbodou Langa, Hamid Moussa Ibedou, 11 Gum Arabic Moumine and Pierre Ngolsou have brightened many dusty days for me, and it is because of the friendship, hospitality, help, advice and meals of Fatime Ngare, Alizata Triande, Achta Oloussou and Halime Kerim that that country has been my home for many years. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Finally, I thank the director of the Centre de Recherches et de Documentation du Sénégal Abdoul Hadir Aïdara, Ad Stijnman of the Instituut Collectie Nederland, the late Professor Michel Mandel, Professor Henk Jan de Jonge, Mohamad Bakhit, Anita Benech and Hinrich Wolff, Professor Geert-Jan van Gelder, Franco Martellozzo SJ, Kodi Mahamat, and Djimet Seli, Professor Glyn Phillips, Professor Peter Williams, Yousouf Djounouma and Akibou Djounouma for all their help, as well as Jutta Wimmler for her critical reading and Ciaran O’Faolain for editing my text and saving me from mistakes of all shapes and sizes. I dedicate this book to the memory of Halime Kerim. 12 Noble gum III. Noble gum Rubens’s portrait The eldest son of the grocer in the Appelstraat (Apple Street) in Antwerp was a remarkable young man – ambitious, handsome and smart. His name was Bartholomeus Rubens. In 1527, when Bartholomeus was twenty-five, his father died and he inherited his trade. Shortly afterwards, he won the hand of Barbara Arents, daughter of an aristocratic family. She would marry beneath her station, but her parents were convinced that Bartholomeus had sound plans. He wanted to use his inheritance to work his way up from grocer-druggist to the profession of pharmacist, which was at the time gaining prestige. Until late in the fifteenth century, there was no clear distinction between grocers, druggists and pharmacists. The grocer and the druggist sold spices and herbs, preserved fruits, aromatic wines, perfumery, honey, sugar, confectionery, marzipan and household goods such as white powder, wax, cotton wool, cotton yarn and paints. They also had medicinal powders and herbs, and concoctions imported from the Orient. The pharmacist sold more or less the same products, plus theriacs and medicinal oils. The three professions also shared the use of scales, and in Antwerp that was the ground on which they came together in the guild of storekeepers. Officially, there was only one threshold for whoever wanted to open a pharmacy in the city: financial contribution to that guild. In many other cities, pharmacists were registered together with grocers, and that lasted until the end of the fifteenth century.1 Increasingly, however, city councillors objected to this arrangement, arguing that poorly educated or dishonest salesmen of medicines produced too many victims, while the councillors could do 43 Gum Arabic nothing to supervise their trade. Early in the sixteenth century, then, ordinances were issued in Flemish, German and Dutch cities to curb the activities of ‘Quack doctors, Starwatchers and similarly odd people’ (Quaksalvers, Starrekijckers or diergelijcke curieuse personen in an ordinance in Amsterdam, 1555). They were, for instance, allowed to sell their pills and ointments on only one day of the week, and a salesman who sold poison could be burned alive. To distinguish themselves from ‘similarly odd people’, the serious suppliers of medicines, vomitives and laxatives organised exams with acknowledged physicians, who questioned them about their knowledge of herbs and medicines. From the beginning of the sixteenth century candidates could not become pharmacists without a diploma. With a diploma, they could be sworn into the profession and be exempted from paying some of the city taxes. Book learning was not enough to pass. Before a candidate could even register for the exam he had to finish a probationary period in a well-known shop that was checked a few times a year by a committee of physicians and pharmacists. The examiners were especially interested in the candidate’s knowledge about which combinations of herbs were safe. Mixtures were very popular, and belief in them rose with the number of plants, herbs and roots they contained. Syrups, plasters, balms and troches (or lozenges) could have a dozen components; theriacs (or ‘large compositions’) were drinks made of thirty or forty carefully weighed ingredients, among them opium. Only pharmacists were entitled to make them, under the supervision of a medical doctor, and grocers and druggists were not even allowed to have them in their shops any more. And even the pharmacists were supposed to sell medicines or individual herbs only if a client had consulted a physician or could give the exact name and amount of the herb they wished to purchase. However, according to historians, the members of the new profession gladly accepted all the prying and restraint. These guaranteed their emancipation as honourable men of science, independent of the inferior interests of mere vendors. And nothing could stop young Bartholomeus from emancipating himself with them and climbing the ladder his father’s trade had put in place for him. On the contrary, everything worked in his favour – his brains, his inheritance, 44 Noble gum his interests. On the occasion of his marriage, he had a portrait of himself and his future wife painted by Jacob Claesz of Utrecht. She wished to be painted as pious and humble, virtues symbolised by a rosary and violets; he, as a pharmacist. That in itself proves his ambition: his portrait is not only a wedding picture, but also one of the first European professional portraits from the emerging middle Bartholomeus Rubens by Jacob Claesz. Van Utrecht (ca. 1530). Wikimedia Commons. 45 Gum Arabic class. Before, only rich merchants or preachers had sometimes had portraits of themselves painted with the characteristic tools of their profession. For other professions, this became fashionable only about two centuries later. Rubens had to select a symbol to represent his profession. The emblems his colleagues had used as marks of their trade were often a mortar (in which herbs were crushed) or a salamander (standing in for the lizard) to signify expertise in alchemy. In France and Flanders, some used a squirrel or a deer, both referring to the high value of the ingredients used for costly medicines, and in the Netherlands they had the ‘yawning’ head of a North African (a gaper), who was probably not yawning but calling out loud to praise the wares of the druggist who was employing him in the market-place. But Bartholomeus was having none of this. He chose two lumps of gum Arabic. It was completely original and tells us a surprising amount both about his personal character and about the culture of his time. It will take a page or two. Gum was still a modest, quite affordable item. It was known as soothing, but not spectacular in its healing properties. But it was a component in many of the theriacs, the pride of pharmaceutics. I look at Rubens the way Claesz painted him with soft eyes and an unassuming chin– almost in contradiction with the luxury of his attire – and I wonder whether he meant to distance himself and his profession from the shouting in the market and from medieval alchemy, and wanted to replace them with a reference to craftsmanship, theoretical knowledge and practical know-how. At the same time, Rubens seemed to have keenly perceived that the popularity of gum Arabic was growing. The increase in the size of inventories was testament to this. In 1475, a pharmacist in Lüneberg had nine pounds in stock; in 1666, a pharmacist in Braunschweig had 117 pounds. Ever since the first pharmacopoeias appeared in the seventeenth century, gum Arabic has always figured in them.2 Whatever his considerations were, Rubens’s choice was a good one. In 1531 he was registered as a pharmacist. Shortly after that, his son Jan was born. But then his luck ran out: he died when Jan was only seven. Still, he had given Jan an excellent start in life. This grandson of a grocer in the Appelstraat grew up to become a jurist and a 46 Noble gum sheriff in the opulent city of Antwerp, and father of the Rubens whose fame spread around the world: the painter Peter Paul. In his astonishing house on the Wapper in Antwerp, now a museum devoted to his work, the portraits of his grandparents exude a certain calm among the exuberance of artists from the generations that followed. Bartholomeus lightly touches one of two mysteriously transparent stones, thought to be sponges before the painting was cleaned. Healing capacities So what did it do, this miraculous pharmaceutical lump? In the Galenic tradition, in which health was a matter of the right balance between the four bodily ‘humours’, blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm, it was believed that gum ‘thickens bodily fluids that are too watery, and giving them more substance, keeps them from mixing with the blood and spoiling it’.3 In fact, gum can indeed soothe and sometimes cure many ailments. Dissolved in water, and drunk or applied, it will form a film over mucous membranes that protects the throat, eyes, stomach or intestines against whatever is causing irritation. Through the ages and from east to west, tears from acacias have therefore been used to stop coughing and the spitting of blood, to stop the intestines from acting up, to calm inflammations and – because they also attract liquid – to end both diarrhoea and constipation. A drink with liquorice and gum Arabic, both soothing for the throat, worked wonders against a cough. When more gum and sugar were added, the drink turned into a syrup from which pastilles were made – precursors of the Dutch national sweets known as drop. Ground gum was sprinkled on wounds to stem bleeding. In balms and plasters – made of flour, eggs, wax, milk and clay – both in Europe and in Arabian countries, it was added as a thickener. And it played – and still plays – the same role in pills. The medicine chests of ships sailing the Indian Ocean contained gum as a remedy for dysentery. Only one ailment could not be cured with the drug: ‘[t]he flames of love cannot be quenched / by mighty gum, nor wholesome herb, nor dram’, according to the Dutch poet Jacob Cats.4 47 Gum Arabic Most of this knowledge about gum Arabic had been inherited, together with the rest of the art of medicine, from Greek and Roman scholars such as Galen, Dioscurides and Pliny – sometimes via Arabic translations. Dioscurides, in his book on herbs and their pharmacological use, writes about the medicinal properties of the fruit and the gum of the Acacia: Acacia grows in Egypt. It is a thornbush with many branches, growing almost to the size of a tree. It does not grow upright; it has a white flower, and the fruit lies in pods like lupin. … There is also a gum that comes out of this thorn which is astringent and cooling. The juice is good for eye diseases, erysipela [streptococcal skin infection], creeping sores, chilblains, pterygium [membrane on eye], ulcers of the mouth, and falling [sunken] eyes. It stops the flows of women as well as prolapse of the vulva. It is therapeutic for the bowels taken as a drink or a suppository, and it dyes hair black. Pounded with water it is a wash for eye diseases.… The gum of the thorns is the best – which is vermiculatum – resembling glass, transparent, not woody; next to this is the white gum; but that which is resinous and foul is useless. It is able to close pores and dull the strength of sharp medicines with which it is mixed. Daubed on with an egg it does not allow burns to break out into pustules.5 He recommended a plaster made of egg yolk and gum for burn wounds and abscesses. They would dry up because gum drew moisture from them, and even seemed to stimulate the growth of new flesh. The famous Syrian physician Qusta ibn Luqa (820-912), a Christian who wrote a medical guide especially for Muslim travellers to the Holy Cities, advises pilgrims to use pastilles of gum, sugar, liquorice and almond in case of a sore throat.6 In these lands of sand, dust, scalding winds and sweat, ophthalmology was an important branch of medicine, and a good part of the science was devoted to remedies for dry, tired or inflamed eyes. Pliny described a balm for red eyes made of gum Arabic dissolved in vinegar. We now know that the gum protected the mucous membrane in the eyes, while the vinegar reduced the presence of bacteria in the solution. In Alexandria, one of the hubs of medical science at 48 Noble gum “Aqaqia”, in Kitab al-hasha’ish fi hayula al- ilaj al-tibbi, Arabic translation by Hunayn b. Ishaq of Dioscurides’ Materia Medica. In a manuscript from the 11th century. Leiden University Libraries, Or. 289, f 40a. 49 Gum Arabic the time, the Greek anatomist Herophilos (335-280 BC; he was the first to propose that intellect resides in the brain, not in the heart) was a great specialist in the eye and by dissection and observation had gained knowledge even of the nerves that control eyes. He wrote a book On eyes in which he also gives some medicinal recipes, of the kind that makes you count your modern blessings: ‘[f]or those who cannot see in the daytime, twice daily rub an ointment composed of gum, the manure of a land-crocodile, vitriolic copper, and the bile of a hyena made smooth with honey; and give the patient goat-liver to eat on an empty stomach’.7 u One more wonderful application of gum in medieval science: the most famous physician of the Golden Age of Islam was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakaria al-Razi (854-925), who was known in Europe as Rhazes. He was head of the hospitals in Baghdad and Rayy, and a marvel of empirical science. To choose the best location for a new hospital, he once hung raw meat on various potential plots around Baghdad – the idea being that the place where the meat rotted last would be the best for his hospital. Al-Razi was a very rational man, and the fact that he was an alchemist as well was not contradictory. The two professions were closely related. One was about living longer, the other about living forever, and their principles of experiment and observation were the same. A less ambitious goal of alchemists was to make jewels out of common stones, and gold or silver out of animal and plant material. And this is where gum Arabic comes in again. Al-Razi used it in many recipes in his attempts to make gold. Here is a slightly simplified version of a recipe that can well be tried in your backyard: take a quantity of well-washed hair. Pulverise it, sprinkle it in water and distil that until dry powder remains. Repeat the process a few days, then bury the powder in earth. Dig it up again, add egg-yolk and gum Arabic and let it dry. For details see al-Razi’s Book of Secrets. 50 Noble gum Othello’s plea In the end, however, all this medicinal power is not why Bartholomeus Rubens wished to be pictured with two lumps of gum. Had it been just to highlight the curative properties of one or another substance he could have chosen dragon’s blood, goldenrod or any other exotic plant. What he chose was not a drug, but a symbol. In the first place, the word Arabic referred directly to the Levant, from where many medicinal plants and herbs came. Pierre Belon, for instance, knew that very well. He was a French contemporary of Bartholomeus who had studied medicine in Paris and then travelled to Egypt and Palestine to continue his study of medicinal plants and learn from druggists there. Since most of the unique examples of plants, animals and minerals are sent to us by the benefit of pilgrimage, without which it is [now] difficult or even impossible to have such gifts and treasures of strange lands, we decided to go and see them in the places of their origin.8 Belon’s interest in the Orient, like that of many others, also extended to housing and dress, history, habits and agriculture. The Renaissance was well underway. Many scholars and artists sought inspiration in Antiquity or tried to come closer to the original language and culture of the Bible. It was all to be found in the Orient. At the same time, little was known about the lands beyond the coastal region, and much was imagined. The Orient was also a realm of marvel, of winged snakes, bushes that grew lambs, and trees that produced bread, silk or wine. It was the place where Paradise on Earth had been, and where the fountain of youth might still be found. Other fantasies made it an empire of licentious sexuality, a deceitful, false religion and cruelty. But the Muslims’ strength made them fascinating as well. That led to stories about sultan Saladin (Salah al-Din) for instance, the twelfth-century conqueror of Jerusalem, as a model of courage and mildness, of generosity and good governance. By the time of Bartholomeus and Pierre Belon, many saw the Orient as richer, more refined in arts and more advanced in sciences than Europe. 51 Gum Arabic In a word, the Orient was noble, and so was gum Arabic. Since the late Middle Ages, the word ‘noble’ had been connected with gum, as a fixed epitheton ornans. Around 1300, the German poet Heinrich von Hessler wrote, in Die Apokalypse – a poem written to defend Christian values against Islam – of ‘edele Gumme die wol riechen’ (‘noble gums that smell nice’). In 1461, another German, the physician Konrad von Megenburg, recommended a plaster of ‘Zaffran, Kamfir und edele Gumme’ (saffron, camphor and noble gum) in his Buch der Natur. Price lists in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century mentioned ‘noble gum’ (edele gom). Somewhat later than Rubens, Shakespeare chose, in Timon of Athens the emergence of gum from the bark of its tree as a metaphor for the emergence of poetry: ‘[o]ur poesy is as a gum, which oozes/from whence ‘tis nourish’d’. And when Othello, just before the end of his life, appeals to his officers to remember him as a man who was, though passionate, essentially good, he tries to convince them by referring to this Arab nobility: … then you must speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu’d eyes Albeit unused to the melting mood Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gum. In speaking of Arabian gum, Shakespeare knew that his audience would hear ‘noble’ even if it was not said. The adjective was so tightly related to the noun that Jacob Cats, the immensely popular Dutch author of hundreds of didactic poems, still used the combination in the seventeenth century. In a poem called The Christian House Wife, which begins with the unforgettable lines ‘Rise, youngsters, rise, the sun says “‘How d’you do?”/ and sends its rays to shine, betwixt your curtains too’ he educates young couples about married life.9 Oriental trees give the example: 52 Noble gum ... Cypres, Ivy, Laurels Truly know their faithfulness, nigh better than do animals. And so do many herbs that in the woods do grow And many a noble gum that from the trees does flow.10 To Timbuctoo However, an increasing amount of the noble exudate no longer came from the Orient, but from closer by, from the coast of west Africa. It did not make it any less mythical. Europeans knew not much more about the edges of the ‘dark continent’ and its inhabitants than what French and Portuguese seamen recounted over their beers, in inns in Dieppe or Rouen. Much more was imagined about the kingdoms deep in Africa, based on hints by Arab travellers, of gold mines and cannibals. The Portuguese under Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) were the first to try to find a way to the heart of Africa via rivers that flowed into the Atlantic Ocean. South of Morocco, they found a minuscule island, surrounded by ever-shifting sandbanks, but where agile ships could land – during certain months of the year – if their captains were highly skilled. From there, they hoped to link up with a trans-Saharan trade route that had been described by Arab geographers. That route had long since passed out of use, but Arabs and Berbers who lived in the region brought ivory, pepper, ostrich feathers, gum Arabic and slaves to the island. The Portuguese called it Arguin, and in 1445 built a fortress on its seven rocks, which later passed to Prussian, Dutch, French and then English hands. For the next three hundred years it was populated on and off by a few dozen soldiers and sailors, some craftsman and, sometimes, a chaplain. Ther attraction of Arguin was that it had drinking water, but otherwise life there was unpleasant. Nothing would grow there and many died within a few months of their arrival, mostly from fever or dysentery. ‘Common’ dysentery, without fever, could be cured if the patient regularly ate powdered gum Arabic mixed with the flour of cocoa beans. Usually, however, illness led to death. Then, 53 Gum Arabic burning some pulverised gum in the corners of a room took away the stench.11 The survivors lived in constant fear of attacks. To buy gum or other goods, the sailors had to row to the mainland and negotiate there. The Arab and Berber inhabitants, however, saw the men on the island as exiles, homeless men without wives or the support of a community, who sometimes – when they lived on their ship – did not even have firm ground under their feet. They were inferior and good material for the slave trade. Many Europeans were either killed or captured and made to walk with traders’ caravans to North African cities from Meknes to Alexandria. In 1699, it became known in Europe that twenty-five thousand Christian captives were being held in Meknes. Some were saved by priests who were sent to North Africa to buy them free or at least to save their souls by keeping them from converting to Islam.12 The suppliers of gum Arabic were various Berber peoples who lived a nomadic life in the Sahara. One of the first Europeans to report on their way of life, including their use of gum for medicinal ends, was René Caillié (1799-1838). He had been born in a poor workman’s family in Mauzé, a village in the west of France, but was an orphan before he could talk. At a very early age, he understood that without a bit of land or proper schooling his options at home were limited. He was sixteen when he first took off to the isle of Saint-Louis, in the estuary of the River Senegal, where the French had built a fortress and established a major trading post. He learned Wolof, the language of the people on the southern banks of the River Senegal and walked 160 miles along the river to Galam, where he stayed for some time before returning to France.13 Back home, he heard about a prize that the Société de Géographie had promised for the first white man who could make it to Timbuctoo and report about the streets of gold, the palaces and wonders that must be there. Many, such as Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Gordon Laing and others, had already attempted it, but none had survived to tell what they had seen, so that the myth only increased. René decided to give it a try. He left for Saint Louis again in 1824, at the age of twenty-three. He received no support from French officials there, and with little money but a lot of determination, he took 54 Noble gum Detail from a portrait of René Caillié by Amélie Legrand de Saint-Aubin (ca. 1830). Wikimedia Commons. to the road again. He knew that, to be able to travel east, he would have to overcome the mistrust of Berbers – or Moors, Maures, as Europeans called them – and the disapproval of Christians. Therefore, he told people he was an Egyptian who had been kidnapped and brought to France as a child by Napoleon’s army, and was now on his way back to Egypt. He said he wanted to learn more about Islam, 55 Gum Arabic his original religion, and to improve his knowledge of the language of the Quran. The first leg of his journey was from the Wolof to the Brakna, a Berber people who led a nomadic life in the east of what is now Mauritania. They were known for their razzias among ‘black’ neighbours like the Wolof, but also for the profound knowledge their learned men had of Islam. The Brakna authorities agreed to teach him, and since travelling and learning have always been closely related in the culture of Islam, it was perfectly natural for them to send him on his way to meet learned men in the hinterland. He went from village to settlement and from camp to camp, each time with new guides, penetrating deeper and deeper into the Sahel. But as he progressed, he met with ever more suspicion regarding his motives. In fact, quite soon after he left Wolof territory, he was more of a hostage than a guest of his guides. Sometimes he had to walk for miles, while his hosts rode on oxen. At times he was well received and congratulated on his intention to submit to the true faith. Then again he was kept awake for hours by women and children who came to marvel at him and poke thorns in his legs to see if he felt pain like a human being, in spite of his ghostly colour. The recurrent suspicion was troublesome. The Brakna kept seeing a spy in the resolute loner, a scout who must have been sent to the desert to see if there was more to be had there that the Christians valued in ways unknown to its inhabitants. Gum Arabic, they had learned by then, was of great worth to them, because the King of France ate it in quantities. What else was there that drew Caillié’s attention? He was constantly watched. Taking notes or writing anything in French, in the Christian script, was mortally dangerous and could be done only in secret. One day, his hosts did discover some of his notes. René maintained they were nursery songs which he had written down in a nostalgic mood, and had to sing for his life to prove it. But he continued his diary and recorded in great detail everything he thought might interest the French public about social organisation, crafts and healthcare among the Berber communities he visited. In the field of medicine, gum Arabic played an important role. He took the view that the Brakna, although they were always concerned about their physical well-being, knew almost nothing about it and 56 Noble gum acted like children when they were ill. ‘I have noticed, that in general, the Maures do not suffer from any serious diseases, something they owe, no doubt, to their great austerity. But they are terribly sensitive to small ailments. The least discomfort puts them out. Over a slight head-ache, a man can whimper like a child’.14 The cure for every illness was to consume as little as possible, and preferably only milk, which coincided with the normal diet for most of the year anyway. Headaches were fought by tying a cotton band tightly around the head. A cold was treated with some melted butter in the nose. For stomach aches, there was a brew of camel’s urine, diluted in water. Or one could eat some gum. Even today, people in the Sahel refer to a saying by the prophet Muhammad that ‘for every ailment, gum is the remedy’, because it stirs and cleans, or, on the other hand, calms the intestines. Caillié saw that mothers mixed it in their babies’ porridge, and that herders gave it to calves that had just been weaned, as they still do. For all sorts of pain there was a plaster made of gum powder and the powdered leaves of the ‘orchid tree’ (Bauhinia). When dry air and the cold of night made your face hurt, you could daub on it a soothing ‘ink’ made of gum Arabic mixed with grit from a certain red stone. Powdered gum would staunch the blood in open wounds. The Brakna had no medicine for fever, Caillié noted, but when their temperature was high they drank milk in which some gum was dissolved. A patient who spat blood, he reported, should drink this cocktail and really nothing else for three months, and was then sure to recover. Caillié himself suffered considerable hunger, and it was seldom relieved by swelling gum in his stomach. He lived on nothing but milk for months, and once in a while some porridge or couscous. On rare occasions he would have a small serving of boiled meat. In some camps his diet was more frugal than that of the people who sheltered him. He grew weaker and fell ill with severe flu. When this happened in a camp where he was well looked after, ‘[o]ne of my host’s sons prayed by me and spit on my belly, assuring me that it was a good cure. He did likewise on the milk I had to drink. However repulsive I found this, I had the patience to let him go about without contradiction, so as not to vex him’.15 57 Gum Arabic The house in Timbuctoo where René Caillié supposedly stayed in 1827. Picture from 1902/1903 by Francois-Edmond Fortier. He survived the illness – and the remedy – and, after seven months with the Brakna, travelled farther until he reached Timbuctoo in 1827. A year later, he even made it back to France. His safe return, however, was too banal in the eyes of his compatriots. They did give him his prize, but when the news spread of his description of Timbuctoo as a hot, colourless, sad town of earthen buildings where only grey salt was traded and no trace of palaces, full of gold and scholars, was to be seen, they began to doubt that he had really been there. They called him a liar and a fool and then completely lost interest, just as the British public would do about fifty years later, to that other orphan explorer, Henry Stanley, when he reported how he found Livingstone in Ujiji. Except that Stanley was the victim of his own shyness. Caillié was the victim of resistance to the disenchantment of a mythical world. He died in 1838 at the age of just thirty-nine. 58 Wealth of Nations IV. Wealth of Nations Nothing but the pain In the seventeenth century, a new use for gum Arabic was discovered in Europe, in the textile-dyeing process.1 Quite suddenly, the wholesome effects of gum reached far beyond its ability to soothe a sore throat. In Great Britain the livelihood of thousands of working-class families came to depend on gum. French, Dutch and British trading companies brought shiploads of it to European ports, at enormous cost and with great hardship. Even before knowledge of this new discovery spread, the market for gum had been growing, and seafaring nations had invested in developing trade routes to secure a certain supply. One of the new places from which the Dutch West-Indies Company (WIC) tried to import gum was Benin, the kingdom (in present-day Nigeria) west of the bend in the Niger before it flows out into the ocean. Since the seventeenth century, the WIC had been running trading posts there, as had the Portuguese and the British African Company. By 1700, however, all these companies were having trouble – not because the kings of Benin kept the devil at bay with human sacrifices and lured the rain with virgins impaled on skewers, but because the Europeans granted the king credit so that he could buy gum from his suppliers. This arrangement often led to conflict. At the same time, Benin did not yield much ivory or many slaves, and African pepper lost its value when a better variant was imported from Asia. As business dwindled, the number of ships that sailed to Benin also dropped. In 1713, however, the factor at the WIC fortress of St George d’Elmina (on the coast of today’s Ghana) was ordered to give it another try and investigate the possibilities of buying gum and redwood in 59 Gum Arabic Benin. The factor, Revixit van Naerssen, discussed it with Oba (king) Akenzua I, who had never sold gum before, but welcomed the proposal. The king was especially interested in the continuation of the Dutch supply of copper, silk and damask, but he hid what he wanted much better than they did. In the first transaction, he obtained 77 pounds of beads for 761 pounds of gum – a bad deal, according to the WIC’s director-general, altough this first load brought a good profit at auction in Amsterdam and Zeeland. The handwriting in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch documents looks like lines of grass, all identical thin strokes in a western wind. The WIC file I opened at the National Archive in The Hague made me heave a sigh like a blot on the immaculate reading room. Impenetrable reeds. Slowly and painstakingly, I managed to figure out that the WIC had acted quickly. In spite of difficult negotiations, it signed an agreement with Oba Akenzua in 1715. Article 7 of the agreement explained that the WIC had stopped sending ships to fetch ivory because ‘the trade in tooth here has always been slight and not capable of reconciling the costs the Company has needed to make for the sake of it’.2 The WIC wanted the king to realise that, if he and his people wished to be friends with the WIC, they had to make the relationship attractive for the Dutch. Therefore, it was laid down in the agreement, in remarkably vague terms, that the king would supply a quantity of redwood and ‘a certain kind of gum’ that would be worth the trouble of sending three or four ships a year from Elmina to the trading post of Ughoton in his country. They meant gum Arabic and apparently did not realise from how far from the coast the Oba’s suppliers came. In the same year, the WIC dispatched a young man, Fredrik le Grand, first to Elmina for a year-long internship, and then on to Ughoton, to run the factorij there. The circumstances surrounding the treaty were unhappy from the start. Usually, contracts such as these were signed by at least four witnesses for the WIC, often clerks and a ship’s physician. This particular document, however, has only the signature of the ‘chief ’ (opperhooft) Van Naerssen and his assistant De Rycke: the other Dutchmen in Elmina were ill. And not much ever came of it. The price the WIC paid for gum was high. Assuming that they would be able to lower the price later, the 60 Wealth of Nations Dutch had offered good value for the first few loads. But the Oba was an extremely tough negotiator and, according to Nigerian historians, the richest (and most cruel) ruler that had ever sat on that throne. He raised the price, and there was nothing the WIC could do. Soon, five pounds of gum cost as much in copper basins and textile as a pound of ivory, while the quality was found to be less than that of the first load. The lumps were too small and not clean enough, and at the auctions in Holland and Zeeland they never fetched as much again as in 1714. Meanwhile, the Oba treated the Dutch politely and with consideration. When a Dutchman was murdered one day, the king had the village of the murderer burned. Le Grand held tedious meetings with the king, trying to obtain the gum or ‘tooth’ for which the latter had already received copper, beads and damask. But in a letter to the board of the WIC, Le Grand also explained that paying a lower price for gum would not be realistic. After all, the gum did not originate in the king’s own country, but was transported to Ughoton from a distance of ten to twelve days’ journey, by porters who each carried fifty kilos on their heads. Their salary, per load, consisted of gold to the value of five dozen knives and a swig of brandy. The king received a fifth of that amount by way of tax payment. It was not much. Moreover, the WIC was not the Oba’s only client, although it had tried to make the relationship exclusive. But the king did not even feign interest in that wish and also welcomed British and Portuguese traders, who often paid better too. Reading Fredrik le Grand’s 1717 diary, it cannot be denied that there was a certain regularity in the delivery of gum, a few thousand pounds at a time. But what the pages of his journal reveal with much more clarity is the hopelessness of the enterprise. Friday April 2. Nothing happened. Sunday April 4. Held ordinary service. Monday April 5. A fiad [one of the king’s officials] with Gum and cloth as payment. Tuesday April 6. Nothing happened. Then a colleague left for another trading post, the king denied an audience, nothing else happened. 61 Gum Arabic Later that month: Monday 26 ditto. Nothing happened. Tuesday 27 ditto. As above, and received some cloth in payment. … Monday 10 May. A great pain in the mouth accompanied by a great swelling of the throat. Wednesday 12 ditto. Nothing happened but the pain and the swelling increased. Friday 14 ditto. Nothing happened, but the mouth and cheek remained as before and the holes in the leg became worse. Saturday 15 ditto. Nothing happened. Sunday 16 dito. As above, and held ordinary service. Tuesday 25 dito. Received the extract from Arrebo [a trading post] consisting of some tooth, crewel and 4,000 pounds of Gum. In this way, the WIC shipped 150,000 pounds of gum a year, for a while. But the Dutchmen in the trading posts were often attacked, and the Oba, who was losing authority over local chiefs for local political reasons, could no longer repel the attacks. At the same time, there was competition from private shipowners who anchored in the same ports as the WIC but who did not bear the cost of their maintenance. And, finally, the price of gum dropped in Europe in 1719. The WIC stopped buying it and would itself soon cease to exist in any case. Le Grand was transferred to a factory near Elmina, where he died in 1721 at the age of just 30. Hundreds of young men after him would follow similar careers in the trade in gum Arabic, to which the European market would soon be desperately addicted. Nixon’s secret On 17 January 1752, the British House of Commons received a petition that maintained that the printing of textiles, the ‘[t]rade on which the livelihood of many thousands of poor families solely depends, cannot be supported and carried on without a sufficient quantity of 62 Wealth of Nations gum senega’.3 Curious to find out more, a few years ago I travelled to London for a week during the spring and registered as a reader at the British Library. Waiting for my files, I circumambulated the immense black square bookcase in the hall, full of admiration for the architect who managed to evoke the visitor’s reverence for Beowulf, the Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Darwin, Marx and Conrad – all this work arranged in chronological order, thus making an argument about progress. The cartons with the original Journals of the House of Commons arrived in a reading room where everything is clinically white. When I opened the first volume, I was relieved to see that the handwriting was quite clear, and I was soon immersed in the proceedings of the House of Commons of two and a half centuries ago. Gum senega was the term then used for gum that was bought at stations on the river Senegal, and that was considered the best kind of gum Arabic. Since the British Royal African Company did not supply enough of it and the price had rocketed from 30 shillings to more than 12 pounds per hundredweight (just over 50 kilos), misery of Dickensian proportions seemed unavoidable, according to the petitioners, who were asking the House to intervene with exceptions for gum in normal trade regulations. They described what would happen if the House did not allow the Royal African Company to supplement its own supply with gum procured in ports on the continent: ‘this valuable and most improved Branch of Trade, without some speedy Relief, will fall into the hands of Foreigners, the numerous Poor employed become destitute…the publick revenue greatly lessened and the Trade itself in danger of being totally ruined’. The petitioners were ‘Master-printers’, owners of textile-printing factories in London and the surrounding areas. It is clear that the Members of Parliament were quite worried by the petitioners’ appeal. They would usually receive complaints and requests from landowners, farmers and merchants about such matters as corn, beaver hats or tollage. These problems were usually considered by an ad hoc committee, which would then propose a solution. Witnesses were called only in exceptional cases. When the printers’ petition was received, however, a committee was formed comprising more than 63 Gum Arabic fifty members, who met in the Speaker’s Chamber. Within a week of receiving the petition, they invited to interviews fourteen witnesses, twelve printers, a merchant, and a retired secretary of the Royal African Company, so that they could assess the importance of gum senega for the textile trade. I read all the witnesses’ arguments, pages full of tenacious talk about printing and pencilling (hand-painting of fabrics), dyes and finance. It was all new to the committee members, who were apparently fascinated. They may well have known that gum Arabic was used as starch in their felt hats and their wigs. Perhaps they knew that it was added to silk and cambric to give volume, and that the ribbons their spouses wore shone because of it. The wardrobe of anyone who took care of his or her appearance contained gum. In France, a dandy was called un type gommeux. But they had never realised what they now heard: that gum was as good as indispensable for printing textiles or, more precisely, as the ‘biter’ in the process. Two methods were used in Europe to dye and print cotton. In both cases, the original fabric was a white cotton cloth, known as calico after the Indian seaport of Calicot, now Kolkata, through which it was imported. The cloth was stamped with wood blocks or ‘pencilled’. For both methods, which were known in India, too, an extra ingredient was added to the dye to make it stick to the plant fibres. (In wool and silk, dye will stick by itself.) This ‘biter’ was a liquid based on alum or iron acetate that was obtained by soaking aluminium or old iron in beer or wine. In the seventeenth century, it was discovered that the biter did not necessarily have to be mixed with the dye but could also be applied separately to the fabric before it was dyed. That made it much easier to print patterns ‘in oriental fashion’ that were more intricate than European ones. A gum from plum or cherry trees was added to the biter so that it would not be too runny, and with the mixture patterns could be stamped or pencilled on a length of fabric. Then the entire length could be immersed in dye and would come out with coloured patterns, but undyed where it had not been treated with a biter. By repeating the process – applying a biter here and there, then rinsing the complete cloth – patterns in various colours could be printed. The only problem was that the fruit 64 Wealth of Nations tree gums also made the biter lumpy, so that the lines of patterns looked as if they were drawn by a shaking hand. Then it was discovered that gum Arabic or gum Senega dissolved much better, yielding a smoother biter, which allowed for finer lines on the textile. In the competition with textiles from other countries, they soon found, as calico printer Stephen Marshall told the committee, that ‘the pencilling part can’t be done without gum senega; and it is a very trifle of the printing part that can’. But various kinds of gums of African or Arabic origin were found to produce various results when combined with different pigments. The trick of the trade was to understand one’s biters and gums. Each printer had recipes, based on their own experience, that they kept secret. The printers in the Speaker’s Chamber made common cause that day, but they were also rivals and did not give their secrets away. The competition between and among them, and the significance of what was at stake for them, fairly jump off the pages of the Journal. One witness, a Mr Edmund Farmer, explained to the politicians that the scarcity of gum senega was disastrous and could not be relieved by the gum Arabic imported from across the Mediterranean. He had tried it – as well as ‘every thing that was glutinous in the vegetable kingdom’ – and found that gum Arabic worked only on some colours. But ‘it would not do in a Red or Purple; and in a Blue the Colour is much fainter than when gum senega is made use of, and it will wash out’. He would never dare to use gum Arabic for those colours, he said, for fear of losing his reputation. Indeed, John Cecil, the next witness, said that gum Arabic would not do for blue, yellow or purple dyes. For red, however, it did as well as gum senega. But ‘other houses are deficient in the art’. And thus it went on, for days. The printers’ passion was fed by an exploding market. All over western Europe, calico printed with little leaves, clovers, moons, circles and squares became immensely popular, at the cost of silk and woollen materials that were so unpractical for the trendsetting ladies whose husbands took them to the Indies, in the service of some royal trading company. A craze emerged to an extent unknown until then, and it spread beyond the class that could afford ‘fashion’. Printers in Manchester said that three-quarters of their cloth was bought by the 65 Gum Arabic poorer classes. It was part of a revolution that was about to change European industry, economy and society, all in one go. u ‘The introduction of light, gaily patterned Indian cottons’, write historians Chapman and Chassagne, ‘created a sensation that lasted a century, a consumer craze that overrode the opposition of governments, vested interests (the existing wool and silk industries) and, above all, the centuries-old vernacular traditions in dress. Moreover, home-produced prints offered a really cheap and effective substitute for tapestries, exotic silk and expensive imported chintzes, and different varieties were as popular for furnishings as for dress materials. Local and regional variations in dress, even where supported by the Kleiderordnung (state regulations on the appropriate dress for different social classes), were submerged as the new passion spread from western to eastern Europe and percolated down the social hierarchy. For the first time in European history, consumer taste was nearly uniform ….’.4 Within this process, the role of gum – senega or Arabic, the same thing – only grew. The consumers’ taste was for ever finer patterns, for flowers that were ever more slender, and birds that seemed only to grow lighter and lighter – effects that, up until then, only the most delicate embroidery had been able to produce. The petition of the British printers was filed in a year that was crucial in that respect. For in that same year, 1752, the Irish printer Francis Nixon found a method of printing that would exploit the qualities of Sahelian gum to the fullest. The third floor of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London houses the National Art Library, where a beautiful nineteenth-century reading room is still supervised by a librarian behind a high desk on a small podium, in the middle of the room. The supervisor on the morning when I am there seems completely free of curiosity about all those readers’ pursuits, but all the more tickled by any sound or movement that might be the opening note for grabbing a pen instead of a pencil, blowing a nose or other illicit action. His glances are so hard to bear that I am not sure that I find all there is to be found. But the essence is that Francis Nixon started to use copper plates instead 66 Wealth of Nations of wood blocks. This had two advantages: first, the problem with wood blocks was that the images were chiselled and therefore relatively rough. On copper plate they could be engraved. Fine grooves, however, were useless if they were cluttered by the old-fashioned biters with some lumpy gum, or if the biter was not viscous enough and made the colour ‘bleed’ away from the lines. Easily flowing gum Arabic made it possible to print more intricate designs. Secondly, the large copper plates made printing faster and cheaper. Wood blocks usually measured less than one square foot (less than a tenth of a square metre), whereas copper plates were often larger than one square yard (more than four-fifths of a square metre). Shortly after his invention, between 1755 and 1757, Nixon moved from Drumcondra, near Dublin, to Surrey, where he started a new printing company together with a George Amyand, a printer and Member of Parliament, whom he had let into his ‘secret’, the recipe for the ideal biter. They introduced the market to textiles that were decorated with elegant arabesques, elaborate landscapes, mythological figures, romantic scenes and memorial texts.5 This was the beginning of a revolution. Within a few years, Nixon and Amyand had even produced plates measuring six square yards (just over five square metres) and featuring elaborate designs. The resulting materials were quite popular in furniture and curtains. A letter to his wife from Benjamin Franklin – who had started his career as a book printer – illustrates this. In 1758, Franklin was in England as a representative of his state, Pennsylvania. In his letter, he told his wife he had bought her ‘56 yards of cotton printed curiously from copper-plates, a new invention, to make bed and window curtains: and 7 yards of chair bottoms, printed in the same way, very neat’.6 It was twenty years before the secret reached the continent. England continued to set the standard in fashion for a long time, but by the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘toiles de Jouy’ printed by Oberkampf in the French town of Jouy, surpassed all others. Moreover, the printing process was mechanised. Machines were built in England and France from which the unprinted fabric rolled over the copper plates, and in print shops all over Europe starting around 1800 the copper plates themselves were gradually replaced by copper 67 Gum Arabic cylinders. The cylinders could roll, and rolling could be mechanised and driven by energy from other than human sources. The industrial revolution was now well on its way. The Indian cottons were so popular that, starting in 1760, the number of print shops in England and France grew exponentially. In 1785, English printers produced 12.4 million metres of indienne; the French, 16 million. Textile printing formed the basis for the capital built up by many of the important European trading houses established in that period, such as Oberkampf, Koechlin, Dolfuss and Rothschild. And a major contributing factor in all of this was gum Arabic, tons of which were shipped to Europe in the eighteenth century: three hundred tons in 1734, up to one thousand tons by the end of that century.7 The use of gum Arabic in textile printing has not survived the twentieth century. Retired employees of Vlisco, the Dutch producer of African printed cloths, remember a large vessel of tepid water in a corner of the production hall in which gum was left to dissolve over a couple of days, and the faint smell that came off it. But when there was a serious scarcity of gum in the 1970s, and prices rocketed, the textile industry replaced it by dextrine for good, all over Europe. In Africa, however, gum Arabic is still used to ‘starch’ finished textiles. Free trade or privilege? The aim of the printers’ petition was to get permission for ‘British bottoms’ – from the Royal African Company as well as private shipowners – to fetch senega gum, or gum Arabic, in Amsterdam, Le Havre, Hamburg or any European port, at the favourable prices that were charged there. Until then, this was prohibited by law, because buying from rival nations was considered harmful to British interests. But the calico printers felt that this law hurt their interests much more than those of the competing nations. The gum now in the country would last another two months, they wrote. At the same time, it was common knowledge that the Royal African Company was in trouble and had enormous debts. It would never be able to send enough ships to Africa to make up the shortfall by itself. Its exclusive 68 Wealth of Nations privilege to trade in Africa should be lifted, the printers argued, and private shipowners should also be allowed to bring gum to England. In fact, the languishing state of the Royal African Company was a blessing in disguise for the printers. They used it to attract attention to a problem that vexed them profoundly: they suspected that British brokers maintained the gum shortage artificially, by storing part of the stock and selling another part on foreign markets in order to raise the price. They had no proof, however, and wisely refrained from accusations. Step by step, they led the committee to draw its own conclusions. The chair of the committee asked how much gum the industry needed. Between 120 and 130 tons a year, the printers said. They added that they were paying more than 12 pounds per ton, while the price in the Netherlands and Hamburg was between 5 and 7 pounds a ton. If the price in England did not come down, argued Stephen Marshall, a number of printers would have to shut up shop, because they could not compete with the indienne that the Dutch and the Germans were selling. How was it possible, the committee wanted to know, that there was such a great difference in price? ‘It is owing to its being locked up in the hands of brokers, who know the trade cannot do without [gum senega]’, said Mr Willoughby Stevens, a calico printer. There was no other explanation, because brokers usually bought 100 to 120 pounds at a time. Where did it all go, if not to the brokers’ own warehouses? The only broker or merchant who was heard, a Mr Samuel Torin, defended his trade and replied that the only people who stocked secret reserves were the printers themselves. He had recently sold one hundred and fifty tons of gum to druggists and, as far as he knew, all of it had been bought by printers. And yes, he had in the past sold gum to merchants in Holland and Hamburg, but at current prices that was out of the question. He and his colleagues could not help it that gum was so expensive. And by the way, the prices were up on the continent too, because of the loss of a French ship that had gone up in flames. That fire had indeed happened, but it was a one-off event. There was an ongoing problem, though: the French government had prohibited the sale of gum to foreigners. The French, too, were suffering 69 Gum Arabic a shortage, which may have been caused by the exceptionally severe drought that struck West Africa in 1750. African traders made so much selling meat and cereals that year that they did not bother about gum. And any gum that was collected was probably consumed sur place to still hunger.8 After a number of meetings, the parliamentary committee was convinced of the printers’ distress, and of the necessity of the solution they proposed. It advised the House of Commons ‘that gums be allowed to be imported into this kingdom from any place in Europe, under proper limitations’. Thus it was decided. The limitations took the form of an import tax, but apart from that the trade in gum Arabic was opened up, and with that the printers’ plight was over – or so it seemed. To see why the favourable conditions they had sought were unlikely to last we need look no farther than Adam Smith (whose accessible and engaging prose I would recommend highly, even for some bedtime or poolside reading). In An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, Smith used the ‘peculiar history’ of gum senega to explain what he saw as the absurdity of the mercantile system.9 That system, he argued, was intended to make the country richer. All well and good. The standard procedure in the system was to encourage exports and discourage imports, with the exception of those imports that made it possible to produce goods that were needed for domestic production. For the latter imports were even encouraged. In the case of gum Arabic, then, imports were encouraged – it was exempted from import duties – and exports were taxed. That was because, in the reign of George I, gum Arabic, like many other ingredients for the textile-dyeing industry, belonged to the ‘tools of production’ category. However, because exports of extra gum would thus be expensive, importers were careful not to supply more gum than needed, and the price remained higher than it might otherwise have been. The remedy, under George II, was to tax both the import and the export of gum, so that the French Compagnie that sold most of it would not benefit unduly from English customers. The measure worked to the extent that traders took care not to 70 Wealth of Nations import much gum from France. But the price increased further, to the renewed exasperation of the printers. Under George III, the situation got even worse. During the war that Britain and France were waging over the bounties of West Africa (see the next chapter), Britain won direct access, via the island of Saint Louis, to the most important suppliers of gum along the River Senegal. The conquest was given the imprimatur of approval in the peace treaty signed in Paris in 1763. It turned the tables: manufacturers on the European continent now depended on the British supply of gum, and British merchants could create a shortage of it and force the continental textile printers to increase their prices so much that they would lose their international market. The manufacturers, however, then wanted to have their cake and eat it. They convinced the lawmakers to lower the import tax on gum Arabic significantly, and to set the duty on export so high that no one would dream of selling another Acacia tear across the North Sea or the Channel. In their mercantile ingenuity, they expected that, as a result, all available gum would come onto the British market, where its abundance would make the price drop to its lowest levels. ‘Their avidity, however, upon this, as well as upon many other occasions, disappointed itself of its object’.10 Because what merchants did think of was to smuggle gum to the continent, particularly to the Netherlands. Such quantities of gum disappeared this way that the dyers and printers were left with the same shortage as before. In time, the export tax was lowered again. ‘Absurd’, Adam Smith calls these spasms in the mercantile system. With merciless irony, he dissects the mechanism that combined stupidity and avidity to serve the ‘futile interests’ of producers and merchants, at the cost of the poor, the consumers and the customers in a colonial empire that had been established for the sole benefit of those producers and merchants. u In other European countries, too, growing numbers of economists and traders grew averse to the monopolies of privileged companies that administered overseas concessions and trading posts for their 71 Gum Arabic governments, and had the exclusive right to sell the products from those regions. The debate about state monopolies and the mercantile system or free trade stirred up political debate in other capitals as well. But gum Arabic showed that free trade was not a perfect panacea. In 1758, a certain Thomas Cumming, an American merchant living in England, argued against free trade in general, because, he believed, it would lead to such fierce competition that no one would benefit. (It should also be pointed out that he had fond hopes of securing a monopoly in gum for himself.) Based on how he had seen the gum trade at Portendick, an island off the coast of present-day Mauritania, being handled that year, Cumming predicted a mutually destructive rivalry. The captain of a British interloper (a ship that belonged to the state or a private owner, and that had no rights in the territory where it was located) had offered the chief of a Berber community three times as much as usual just for the right to buy gum, apart from the price of the commodity itself, on condition that the chief would sell him his entire supply that year. But the Berbers understood free trade. They politely thanked the captain for his offer and doubled the price of the rights to trade with them for all buyers. Twenty years later, it was a British physician, J. P. Schotte, who argued that the gum trade should be regulated by privilege because it was so different from other trades. Schotte was a man of many opinions, which he shared liberally. He had worked for a number of years in what was then called the St. Lewis trading post in the estuary of the Senegal, during the short period from 1760 to 1779 in which it had been in British hands. Back in London, in May 1780, he gave a long lecture about his experiences to the members of the Royal Society. First, he talked about a contagious fever that made life on St. Lewis extremely hazardous, and about his own indefatigable fight against it (but it would have taken a ‘second Aesculapius’ to heal the afflicted). He went on to hold forth on salt (a person could well do without it if he were used to it), genital excision among African women (does not in the least injure the functions of the whole), the maintenance of the trading post (preferably not by British convicts, because they made a bad impression on the local population) and finally on the exploitation of gum.11 72 Wealth of Nations Although the region that had been named Gum Coast was exceptionally injurious to health – much more so than any other British outpost on the West African coast – Schotte took the view that the risk sailors ran was worthwhile in view of the financial gains the country stood to reap. It was, after all, also the only region in the country’s possession that produced Gum Senega or Gum Arabica. Therefore, Schotte argued, Britain should do everything it could to get it back from the French in the war that had recently flared up again. If that did not succeed, he declared, the gum trade would have to be confided to a single company, following the French example. Because that worked. ‘At present, the French have again put it into the hands of a Company, which will certainly reap the greatest advantage from the gum trade, as they have it in their power to make the Moors lower the price of it, as much as they think proper, which was not practicable when it was in the hands of the English’. For as long as the Union Jack had flown over St. Lewis, the gum trade had been open to every Englishman who was interested. Often, seven or eight ships at a time were anchored off the coast, Schotte told his audience, each of them offering the ‘Moorish’ chiefs a higher price. In five years, the price they paid had multiplied seven-fold.12 At the same time the British market was flooded, and the price there had dropped. Here at least, Schotte hit the mark: the trick was (and still is) to try to maintain a balance between shortage and superabundance. All anomaly! In reality, the French ability to negotiate with the Berbers was not that impressive. What Schotte considered the best way to conduct the trade was downright disaster in the eyes of the French military engineer Sylvestre Golberry. In 1785, shortly after his country had regained ‘exclusive possession of the Senegal’, Golberry had jumped at the opportunity to accompany the new governor to that possession, hoping to have the ‘honour’ of ‘teaching Europe the secrets of Africa’. He came back with a notebook full of observations on governance, beliefs, nature and habits in the lands he had visited, plus 73 Gum Arabic urgent advice for the French government, expressed in a sixty-page chapter on the gum trade.13 Since the seventeenth century, that trade had been run by French Compagnies, one succeeding another as privileged holder of a concession in West Africa granted by the French king. The first of these Compagnies had the same privileges in east Asia, while the others had a contract only for the African trade and had names such as Compagnie d’Afrique or Compagnie du Sénégal. One of the last to hold this privilege was known as Compagnie de la Gomme. Seven out of the nine companies went bankrupt before their privilege ran out. They could not make enough profit to pay their workers or cover the maintenance of the trading posts and the high costs of keeping interlopers at bay. In Golberry’s view it was the system of privileges that made the managers neglectful. Published only five years after Schotte’s lecture to the Royal Society, Golberry’s book reads as the photo-negative of virtually the same situation. As always, he says, the English, ‘hitherto our masters in industry and commerce’ would know how to benefit from the increasing French negligence of affairs.14 The problem was that, although the west African coast was supposedly French, one single Compagnie could not keep the British, Dutch and Prussians from trading there as well. The Compagnie was too privileged and never had enough encouragement to compete with those rivals. In fact, Golberry observed, it served no more than the interests of a small elite of trading houses and investors. And that, he said, had to change. Gum was too important for the entire French economy, for the development of its industry and the expansion of overseas territories, to leave its exploitation in the hands of the sedate members of the board of a company holding a royal trading privilege. Golberry argued, then, that free trade – the English option – had to be the solution: ‘[t]his branch of trade should be encouraged and protected by the government and every idea of exclusive privileges should be abandoned’.15 A few years later, in 1793, the last Compagnie did in fact collapse, together with so many other privileges that came to an end in the French Revolution, and free trade started to expand. Immediately, 74 Wealth of Nations private trading houses and brokers on Saint Louis started a race to get their hands on as much gum as possible. Its price soared, so the competitors summoned all the willpower they could muster to cooperate and fix a maximum price – a compromis, as it was called. It did not work. Most of the merchants secretly paid more after all. And when they did respect the compromis and paid no more for the gum than they had undertaken to, the ‘Moors’ simply refused to deliver the agreed quantities. In 1843, the Ministry of Trade sent a senior government adviser, Anne Jean-Baptiste Raffenel, to analyse the problem. Raffenel concluded that, in general, free trade and equal opportunities for all merchants were better for everyone than monopolies and privileges. He also declared, however, that free trade was pointless in the case of gum Arabic. The two would never go together, because gum Arabic was an abnormal commodity that did not fit into any economic theory. He enumerated: first of all, there was too much brokerage in the gum trade. There were no producers of gum, only finders – this was an anomaly – who exchanged it as barter with a broker or agent, who then sold it to a local buyer, who sold it on to the Saint Louis representative, based in Saint Louis, of a French buyer, who would sell it to a wholesale dealer in Europe. And each of these individuals had to make a profit. Second, the virtues that usually helped to make a profit in the free trade system – diligence and knowledge – played no role whatsoever in the production of gum – another anomaly. Third, competition among merchants did not result in a supply of gum to the consumer at a reasonable price –anomaly! – but on the contrary made them even greedier, since they wanted to buy more than they wanted to sell. In short, Raffenel argued, ‘tout est anomalie’: the gum trade was a merry-go-round that no rational person and no tried-and-true laws could stop, and which favoured only the Arabs and the English – the Arabs because they got ever-higher prices; the English because gum was always paid in guinées, lengths of cloth that were produced in British territory in India.16 The traders themselves, merchants and middlemen, hardly noticed the traps. In 1838 and 1839, a few years before Raffenel’s visit to Saint Louis, a great quantity of gum had been 75 Gum Arabic collected and offered for sale. And what did the bedevilled traders do? Competing with each other, they brought an enormous quantity of guinées onto the market, so that the value of this currency dramatically decreased, thus putting many of them out of business. 76 Mystère et boule de gomme VI. Mystère et boule de gomme Far from here Mystère et boule de gomme!, cried Polichinelle, the French Punch, when he found something obscure or asked his audience to keep a secret. To others the mystery of gum was not amusing. The 1783 Treaty of Versailles had solved one of France’s problems and even bestowed on it ‘the honour to dispense the cloud of darkness [with respect to knowledge of the continent] and of teaching Europe the secrets of Africa’.1 But it did not change the fact that in the gum trade the ‘Arabs’ called the shots. L’Arabe fait la loi, sighed Raffenel. It was the Arabs – here they were called Moors, he explained, persisting in his use of the more general term – who decided when and where they would sell, and at what price. On one day, the head of a caravan bringing gum to a river station would claim that he could not prevent his people from selling to the first buyer they encountered, because their goods could perish. On another, they would take the whole supply back into the desert because the price offered did not suit them, and bury it in the sand. Never did the French know exactly where it went or where it came from. Mystère et boule de gomme. Efforts to map West Africa were only just beginning, the paths that the Niger and the Senegal rivers took had not yet been disentangled. To Europeans, the land north and east of the rivers was one vast and empty expanse all the way to Timbuctoo. Their lack of geographical knowledge, coupled with their economic dependence on acacia gum, locked the French in a relationship with the Berbers that they found extremely unpleasant. It was even difficult for them to acknowledge what sort of relationship it 99 Gum Arabic was in the first place. It was quite unlike the kind of contact they had had anywhere else with the inhabitants of Africa, from the earliest Portuguese voyages onwards. Europeans had always felt that they had the advantage of technological superiority and could derive dominance from it. In the case of gum, however, their technologies meant nothing. But that fact was not grasped until much later. Initially, the whole situation just seemed illogical. The French supposed there was a flaw in their understanding, not only of the trade, but of history itself. Europe’s history was conceived of as one in which devotion and industry, necessarily and with God’s blessing, led to progress. Then what was escaping the industrious men of the Compagnies? Brüe was admired because he almost put his finger on it. Other directors, advisers and authors were mainly frustrated by the ‘inverse’ inequality of the gum trade. In 1686, Governor La Courbe of Saint-Louis had visited the Escale du Désert during the season in which the French and the Trarza had met there. One day, he suddenly suffered terrible colic, as a result of sleeping out in the morning dew. Neither the French nor the Wolof laptots could help him, but some Trarza brought him a medicine that calmed his intestines and soon healed him. They also showed him how they made it, by mixing ground gum, which they called ilk, with warm milk. La Courbe took the opportunity to pose a question that had long been on his mind: what kind of tree was it that produced this ilk, and where did it grow? It was a tall, thorny tree, came the reluctant answer, which grew far from there, in parts that were very dangerous, because of lions, tigers, elephants and other wild animals. But France had good botanists, and the government financed a journey to Saint-Louis by one of them, Michel Adanson. In 1749 he arrived with one of the ships of the Compagnie des Indes and was soon able to establish scientifically which of the six hundred types of Acacia exuded the product for which some Europeans had given their lives. Back home, he explained to the Académie des Sciences in Paris that the best, white gum came from two related sorts of Acacia which were called verek and ded in Wolof. He classified both trees as Acacia Senegal.2 100 Mystère et boule de gomme They were said to grow in three gum forests in ‘Zaarha’, called al-Sahel, al-Fatack and al-Hiebar, which belonged to different groups of ‘Moors’ and were supposedly near the places where these nomads returned every year (see the map on page 78, 79). Sahel, the forest of the Trarza, was believed to be the largest, and to be composed only of white gum trees. But no foreigner knew where exactly the forests were. ‘The Moors are so mysterious with regard to their places of residence, where they retire during the rainy seasons, they answer any questions relative to them with such laconic reserve, and in such an ambiguous, obscure and concise manner, that it is impossible to obtain any information on this interior part of the desert, which they inhabit and call their country’, wrote Sylvestre Golberry.3 (And he did not appreciate secrecy. Golberry was a military engineer, a man of practice. He devoted two paragraphs, for instance, to the way the nomads combined gum Arabic with the juice or gravy of the flesh of camels, oxen or horses and rolled the substance into ‘a large kind of lozenge, which will keep without being spoiled for upwards of a year’. During their wanderings, they added these lozenges to hot water, so that they had what the English called ‘portable soop’. It would be very practical for French soldiers as well.4) u The Frenchman who came closest to the mysterious source of the quantities of gum that were brought to the West African coast each year was René Caillié. One day in December 1824, during his stay with the Brakna, they sent their slaves on a trip deep into the desert that would take weeks to collect gum, and Caillié asked his hosts if he could join them. But they refused. ‘I have attributed this refusal to their suspicion’, he wrote, ‘because they imagine that the Europeans seek to appropriate their country which they believe to be the best and the most beautiful in the world’. It seemed far-fetched to him. But his compatriots, too, were imagining things, he wrote, when they repeated stories about gum forests. There were no such forests, and travellers who had written about them had done so ‘based on faulty information by the Maures who, to boast of their country, 101 Gum Arabic always tell that it has everything in abundance’.5 And although the vegetation was denser then than it is now, he was most probably right not to believe that there were forests of acacias. And he did manage to gather information about the gum collecting. He secretly noted that, when the gum was ripe, each ‘marabout’ (the word the Brakna used for the caste-like group of free, slave-owning Muslims) took off with forty or fifty slaves to some place in the desert, near a well. The marabout brought two cows and a bag of millet for his own subsistence. Each slave had a pair of sandals, one cow for their daily bowl of milk and two empty bags for the harvest. Their work tools included a pulley, a water bag and a rope long enough for the wells, which were about forty metres deep. Free men who wished to make some money could also come and keep half of the gum they collected. The slaves collected for their masters for five days and could keep what they collected on the sixth day. Every morning they left the camp near the well with nothing but water and a long stick with a sharp end, for gum that was too high to pick by hand. At sundown they returned to the camp where they milked their cow for their evening meal. A slave would pick about six pounds of gum a day, which proved, Caillié deduced, that the trees were dispersed over quite a large area. Five times six pounds in a week, times forty men, for as long as the dry season lasts…. Were it not for their very modest needs, the marabouts could be as rich as Croesus, Caillié thought. But their ‘natural indolence’, he wrote, kept them from sending more slaves to harvest even more. What they did gather was not brought home, but was hidden somewhere in the desert, out of fear that it would be stolen by other clans. The full bags were buried in deep pits, which were then covered with cowhides and sand. A stone or a tree marked the spot where the owner would return weeks or months later to fetch his treasure and take it to a comptoir. These barbarous meetings There were three main comptoirs or stations along the River Senegal. Nearest to Saint-Louis, one hundred kilometers up river, was 102 Mystère et boule de gomme the Escale du Désert near a place called Serimpate by the Trarza who ruled frequented it. Then there was the Escale du Coq, near Podor in the land where the Brakna lived. Finally, more than seven days of rowing up the river,) was the station of Bakel, in the region of Galam (or Kajaaga) of the Awlad al-Hajj. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were no structures at the comptoirs. The meeting places were recognised by a bend in the river or a single palm tree. In the off season, Golberry saw at the Escale du Désert ‘an endless plain, formed of white and moving sand; not a single herb, not a plant, nor even a bush destroy the melancholy uniformity, the painful monotony of this immense solitude’. From January to May, however, this desolate flat turned into the stage of a wild spectacle, la traite, the fair, the exchange. It started very quietly. Caravans of different ‘Moorish’ clans – men, women, children and slaves, camels, cows and horses – arrived from different directions at a place one or two days away from the station, where they put up their tents. On the morning of the day of their arrival may be heard at a distance the ‘hubbub wild’ of the Moorish armies, enveloped in a cloud of dust; and towards noon, the immense solitary plain of the desert, where the eye wanders without discovering any object living or vegetating is covered with a numerous multitude of men, women, camels, horses, oxen and goats. All the animals are canopied with the leafy branches of the gum-trees, which at once serve to secure them from the ardent heat of the sun and the gum with which they are laden. One part of these animals carry the tents and bagage, while on others are heaped the women, who are suckling their children and young kids just littered. The chiefs are mounted on noble horses; some chosen camels, elegantly caparisoned, bear the women of the kings and princes, in a kind of basket covered with an awning. A troop of Moors, armed with fusils and sagayes, which are lances from eight to ten feet high, form the escort of these ambulatory hordes, and vainly endeavour to maintain some degree of order among this barbarous multitude. The air rings with the acclamations of this innumerable quantity of men, women, children and animals and the living creatures which now fill 103 Gum Arabic this lately desert plain, appear incalculable. It is impossible to convey a just idea of the disorder and tumult of such a confused assemblage or to give an accurate picture of the singular uproar which pervades these barbarous meetings.6 This scene may seem picturesque, but for Golberry it was oppressive and suffocating, more a picture by Hieronymus Bosch than by Pieter Breughel. ‘The [Compagnie’s] agents as well as the [independent] merchants, are incessantly surrounded by these untutored and perfidious savages; they must be immoveable in the midst of their injuries, their insults and their menaces’. Although Golberry’s characterisations come across as rude, he cannot be accused here of being too subjective in his judgement. The insults and humiliations of the Berbers recur in the travelogues of other Europeans of that time and later. For instance, Mungo Park, the Scot who travelled from the river Gambia eastward to Segou and was kidnapped by Berbers in the east of today’s Mauritania in 1796, wrote: …they hissed, shouted and abused me; they even spat in my face, with a view to irritate me, and afford them a pretext for seizing my baggage. But finding such insults had not the desired effect, they had recourse to the final and decisive argument that I was a Christian, and of course that my property was lawful plunder to the followers of Mahomet. They accordingly opened my bundles and robbed me of every thing they fancied.7 Negotiations at the Escale du Désert had to be conducted amidst the clamour, with the help of Wolof interpreters who also spoke Hassaniya, the Arabic dialect of the region. On the first days, only the chiefs of various clans or caravans and their slaves would go to the station, to negotiate the price to be paid for their gum as well as the composition of the ‘bagatelle’ they wished to receive as gifts and that might include some mirrors, knives, paper and a loaf of sugar for each free man. The rest of the caravan waited in the camp with far more patience than the French on their barks and cutters could muster. While the negotiations went on, the French provided meat 104 Mystère et boule de gomme and grain (and frequently also wine) for the Berbers and their slaves. The longer the negotiations went on, the higher their expenses, also for the food and salaries for their laptots. And often they had the feeling that the Moors delayed their business on purpose, with ‘evil phlegmatism’. The Moors in their roguish dealings possess a coolness which distracts the whites, their patience and phlegmatic conduct singularly disconcerts the vivacity of the Europeans who, full of ardour and impatience, wish to strike the bargain at once, while the Moors, in order to enlarge the presents, or the profits, incessantly defer a final termination.8 When they finally agreed on a price, Golberry tells us, they wanted to be paid extra to take the gum to the boats. Golberry’s laments about the bitter circumstances, the insults, the revolting gestures and the cunning were all repeated in Raffenel’s report of la traite sixty years later. Raffenel also showed, however, that the buyers were not exactly calm either, and neither time nor habit had lessened the tumult. On the contrary: shortly after Golberry’s experience, the French government had officially opened up the trade in gum Arabic, and private merchants had joined the battle. Those who could afford it avoided the hassle of la traite as much as possible and left the negotiations to Africans and the children of a French father and an African mother, who called themselves ‘métis’ in French. But there were still French traitants, or brokers, who took part as well. Raffenel had been warned that he would witness utter chaos at the station of Bakel, and was bewildered nevertheless. The traitants, both French and métis, fought so fiercely for the attention of the ‘Moors’ that the latter’s ‘ferocious horde’ was now met by a gang of aggressive flatterers. Raffenel saw them all getting into fisticuffs: the French, the métis and their Wolof employees fighting amongst themselves, and buyers and sellers fighting with each other. The buyers always arrived at the station first, and would wait there in a competitive but festive kind of atmosphere. As soon as a cloud of dust rose on the northern horizon, Raffenel wrote, 105 Gum Arabic the commotion grew even more. There were caravans arriving, and their leaders were immediately surrounded by twenty language masters (as the interpreters are called) who tried to convince them, all at the same time, with a thousand caresses and a thousand seductive promises, to come to their traitant’s ship; there were caravans that were leaving, accompanied by satisfied customers, getting those leading the caravans to repeat over and again the pledge to return the next year and not to trade with anyone else; there was the bellowing of the cattle and the camels, the piercing cries of negroes chasing birds and insects from the crops they were destroying; there was dancing organised with music and tom-toms, gunshots, and shouts of enthusiasm. Add to that a thick dust, the originality of the costumes, or their almost complete absence – another type of originality; and add the fire and smoke of the open-air kitchens, where an ostrich cutlet was being grilled beside a caiman filet…. And mind you, I am speaking now only of the daytime spectacles….At night, it is pure pleasure – that is, a horrible non-stop noise, and then an orgy, a negro orgy of a kind for which there is no name among men.9 The trading station of Bakel in the trading season; in A. Raffenel, Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres, suivi d’études sur la colonie du Sénégal et de documents historiques, géographiques et scientifique. Paris 1856. Vol I, 19. 106 Mystère et boule de gomme Halfway through the nineteenth century, around three hundred boats with as many traitants and 1,500 laptots were involved in these exchanges every year. On the coast, where fewer people and fewer interested parties were involved, the trade was quieter. But there, too, the buyers experienced discomfort and danger. On their arrival, sailors signalled their presence by lighting fires on their ships and then waited for an answer on the beach. This could go on for days, even weeks or months, which were spent making repairs and offering up prayers, and gazing at the dunes that lay trembling under a sky like a lilac blister, feeding the seamen’s anguish. There was some danger involved for the Berbers, too, as Cumming’s friends found out, and rowing through the surf must have been frightening as well. (I remember the look on the face of a friend, a man of the desert in Chad, when we had to cross a slow-moving river by pirogue one day.) Still, the Berbers preferred to board the ships to see the quality of the wares that were being offered in exchange for their gum: ivory, wax and ostrich feathers. Apparently the risk of buying a pig in a poke was that serious. Once on board, however, the Berbers were treated to a meal, and sometimes spent the night. In general, the perils for Europeans were greater. Approaching the coast was exceptionally difficult because of cliffs, sandbanks and the rough surf. Many ships ran aground. The most famous shipwreck was that of the frigate that carried commander Schmaltz, who had been appointed governor of Saint Louis in 1816, after a third British ‘occupation’ of the island (1809-1816). The name of the frigate was Méduse. It ran aground on the cliffs of Arguin. Schmaltz was one of the fifteen survivors. The scene, with these survivors on a raft, was later depicted by Théodore Géricault. A catastrophe that started at sea was often made even worse when survivors who managed to crawl onto the beach fell into the hands of Berbers, especially if these had been expelled from their clan and were roaming around in small groups. Sometimes they would lure ships with fires to the most hazardous places, where they would comb the beach for goods that would wash up after the shipwreck. The survivors were caught and sold, sometimes to Europeans, more 107 Gum Arabic often to caravans that took them to Morocco or deep into the desert, where they would perish as slaves. In 1787, European readers of news about the progress of science and commerce in Africa were shocked by the story of eight Frenchmen who had survived a massacre by Berbers after their ship ran aground near Arguin but were captured. They were forced to walk dozens of miles through the desert, naked and without shoes to protect them against the burning sand or the thorns of creeping plants, without hats against the sun. For weeks they had to load and unload camels, even when they were exhausted and with bleeding feet. They had so little to drink that they could and would not talk, to spare their swollen tongues. In the evenings women and children spat in their faces, threw stones, stabbed them with thorns. One of them, Brisson, walked to Morocco where he was freed and told his story. The others’ prayers for death were answered before they could be released.10 A battle of cunning and fraud In the first period of trade between Europe and West Africa glass and glass beads, gunpowder, iron utensils and copper basins were among the most frequently used means of payment. Sugar and molasses, eau de vie, buckles and medicines – notably quinine – were also gladly accepted. The preferences of the Berbers, however, were slightly different, as the first Portuguese traders had already remarked. All over West Africa they could barter beads, but not with the nomadic Berbers, who did value clover, for instance, which no one else wanted. And although they did not quite share the culture of high learning valued by the Berber in cities such as Chinguiti and Walata, they did appreciate paper and sealing wax. An example of what was paid for one quintal of gum at the beginning of the eighteenth century was half an el of calico (cotton cloth) or twelve buckles or four copper basins, all of which was equal to one bar of iron. By the end of that century, the calico had become essential to the exchange. It had a fixed measure of 16 x 1 metres, it had to come from India and been dyed blue, and it was called a piece of guinea (pièce de guinée). In 108 Mystère et boule de gomme time, the piece of guinea came to serve as currency on the basis of which the value of other trading goods was calculated. In the end, the actual price of gum Arabic itself was never an obstacle for the buyers. The problem, notably for the French, lay with the coutumes, the customary extra expenses that had to be paid every year to the rulers of various lands in return for safety, the right to barter and to export. These customs could include guns, pistols, biscuits, dried prunes, honey, combs and other goods. Emir A῾li Kuri, for instance, received thirty-one pieces of guinea, twenty-one muskets, six hundred musket flints, two ells of scarlet cloth, three pieces of Silesian linen, two ounces of cloves, twelve pounds of loaf sugar and fifteen barrels of gunpowder from the French every year, and gave them seven oxen in return. The fact that the Berbers would not even start negotiations as long as the tiniest trifle on the list had not been sent exasperated the French more than it did other nations. Actually, it does look as if, somteimes, the Berbers purposely fed this irritation as part of their negotiating strategy. Fundamentally, however, the frustration was due to the French understanding of these customs as presents, the word they most often used to discuss these arrangements. Raffenel explained that, when exchanges with the ‘Moors’ had started in the seventeenth century, the French had offered them copper and gunpowder as an incentive to collect gum in quantities they would otherwise not have supplied, since they did not accord it much value themselves. Now, he argued, they knew the value and were well paid, and there should no longer be any need for gifts. On the other hand, each time a French merchant raised this point, a colleague would remind him: ‘Songez à Portendick! Don’t forget Portendick!’ The ‘Moors’ would happily go to the English there. From what he saw, Raffenel concluded that the trade was a battle of cunning and fraud. The Berbers could never be trusted. In fact, modern scholars have shown that many of them took their commercial obligations quite seriously and kept promises over many years. According to Raffenel, however, at night they would steal the gum they had sold during the day, so they could sell it again the next morning. During the negotiations there was no trick they would not 109 Gum Arabic use, and every year they came with new lies, excuses and threats to raise their price. Agreements or promises meant nothing to them. The French inhabitants of Saint-Louis were easily convinced by their Wolof wives and laptots that the Berbers, and especially their religious leaders, were magicians who ate the spirits of sleeping people. But they had some dodgery themselves, too. To reduce their losses from what they saw as the Berbers’ foul play, they made holes in the bags in which they received and measured gum, and the same trick was played, on a large scale, on the kantar. The kantar – also quintal in French, and kintar in English – has been and still is an essential term in the trade in gum Arabic. On the West African coast, the kantar was a huge, square wooden tub on the bridge of a ship that carried gum, which served as a receptacle and a measure. It had a hole in the bottom, to which a sleeve was attached that led to the ship’s hold. While the kantar was filled, a plank covered the hole – but not always entirely. The word kantar comes from Arabic qantara. Its oldest meaning was to collect or aggregate things, and the substantive derived from it signified a vault or a bridge, meanings that fitted the wooden receptacle on a ship. But when this tub was first used the meaning of the verb qantara had already evolved and signified ‘to possess enormous riches’. For the substantive, modern dictionaries give a measure of a hundred ratl or a hundred pounds. When gum is concerned, however, the content of the kantar is variable. Around 1720, Father Labat had understood from Brüe that ‘gum is not weighed, but put into a square measure called a quantar or a quintal, of a size that we have agreed with the Moors and whose capacity the Europeans carefully increase whenever they can. The one the Dutch used when they were masters of Arguin, measured 220 Marc pounds’.11 The French then worked with a kantar of five hundred pounds. Sixty-five years later, when Golberry looked around on Saint-Louis, their kantar took two thousand pounds of gum, and a witness in the mid-nineteenth century reported that the quantar had a capacity of 2,400 pounds. He knew it had increased, but added that the price paid had increased almost correspondingly, and he assumed the volume would remain as it was from then on.12 110 Mystère et boule de gomme Impotence and prestige In spite of colossal profits and counterfeited kantars, the main feeling on the French side was that they were fighting a losing battle. While compatriots in other parts of the globe were embarking on a mission civilisatrice, the merchants of Saint-Louis had to put up with countless humiliations. ‘Here, where our fleet lies, we are nothing, our influence is zero, and every day we are laughed at, because of our futile anger’. With thanks to the British, there was no end to the rise in prices with which the ‘Moors’ ‘were ruining’ the merchants of Saint-Louis. The only beneficiaries were the ‘Moors’ themselves, ‘who hide themselves in the desert, where they gloat over our tribulations’. Raffenel exclaimed half way through the nineteenth century, ‘How insignificant are the triumphs we gain, and at what cost!!’13 They were triumphs, however, that nobody wished to give up. When the trade was opened up to private merchants, these left the actual negotiations with the Berbers to traitants, and the traitants immediately saw to it that the lucrative profession was closed to people who did not fulfil four conditions: one had to be métis or a black African, be born on Saint-Louis, have three years’ experience as a trainee in the gum trade, and not be a merchant. Often, the business was passed on from father to son. The art of the traitants was to syphon as much of the supply away from their competitors, through large credits and gifts to the Berber chiefs, and to keep these secret so that their rivals would not outbid them.14 To a large extent, their business was virtual. In return for credits – pieces of guinea they would buy on credit from the merchants of Saint-Louis – the traitants extracted promises regarding the quantities of gum they would be able to load onto their boats after the next harvest. They then sold that promise on to one or more merchants. Usually, the profits were fabulous. In meagre years, however, when the weather was not on their side or the Berbers would not cooperate, their credits evaporated and they had to pay exorbitant prices to gum suppliers with whom they had no previous agreement, in order to keep their promises to their clients. But even without financial success, their sangfroid and their cleverness, just 111 Gum Arabic getting the gum from the desert in difficult circumstances earned them considerable respect. By 1830, their zeal had turned into an obsession. The trade was at its zenith, with an annual export of about two thousand tons of gum Arabic. Over the next ten years, the number of traitants rose from forty to 160. Together with the merchants, they employed about three thousand other people. The same period, however, saw too many bad harvests in a row, and a badly deteriorating relationship especially with the Trarza, as well as with other suppliers. The competition among traitants became serious. Many went bankrupt and wanted to leave Saint-Louis. To prevent them from abandoning the island and avert the political risk that this would represent, the government enforced a ‘compromis’ between free trade and a state monopoly, an agreement by which traitants promised each other not to pay more than a fixed price for a certain amount of gum. They all signed, but almost none of them kept their promise. After the closure of the market, they met their suppliers in secret, some distance away from the station, and paid a supplement. They incurred debts, but were hardly concerned. All they cared about was the arrival of their full barques at Saint-Louis quay. Even if they lost money, the gum they desire fills their ships; as always, they will arrive triumphant, prouder than a Roman general carrying his trophy after having killed his enemy’s commander himself. What do they care about tomorrow? They will have a lot of gum to unload at Saint-Louis. They will be congratulated by their captives, and provoke jealousy among their colleagues. Their names will be sung by the choirs conducted by the eager griots.15 Gum had become a cult, and to withdraw from it was heresy. To participate and get away from the ‘Moors’, those villains and slavers, with barges full of valuable cargo, opened a new world. On the Berbers’ side, the fact that the trade had become based on credit led to the question whether gum Arabic itself had not become a currency with which their blue cloth, the pièces de guinée, was paid 112 Mystère et boule de gomme for. Ever since the tenth century, the principles of Islamic law had been studied in the region by expert jurists, and its practice was the basis for the long-distance trade across the desert. Islamic law has different rules for trade in products of different natures. Usury is always forbidden, but paying in instalments is allowed for certain goods. Foodstuffs, however, always have to be paid for directly. Paying for them in instalments or on credit is classified as usury. For Muslims who were concerned not to jeopardise their souls, establishing the nature of gum Arabic therefore mattered. There were jurists who pointed out that only a fraction of the gum that was harvested was consumed by the Berbers, and that much more was exchanged with the Christians. Gum should therefore be seen as a currency or a product of commerce. The influential jurist Shaykh Mahand Baba ould Abayd (who died in 1860) argued just the opposite: he said that gum was principally a foodstuff, because long before the Europeans showed an interest in it it had always been eaten, for pleasure and in times of hunger to fill the stomach. Everybody knew that grilled gum with sugar and milk was a treat. One of the shaykh’s pupils, Harith ould Mahand, did not agree. Of course you could eat gum, and it did help to stave off hunger, but there was no nourishment in it. For those who needed proof: no one would offer a dish of gum to guests, and gum was not consumed communally. People would say, ‘Give me some gum for my ailment’, but never ‘Give me some gum to eat’. But because the Europeans bought it, gum was collected for trade, and so it was a commercial product and payment in instalments was allowed. The debate was not only an intellectual exercise. There was also a political angle. Shaykh Mahand Baba, who argued that gum had to be paid for on the spot, belonged to the Trarza whose leaders wished to control the gum trade as a means of pressuring the French. In the 1850s, the latter’s colonial intentions, long suspected by the Trarza, had become quite clear. The French realised they would not be able to develop the gum trade into a reliable business as long as they did not control the population of the Sahara. Increasingly, therefore, domination became their aim. General Faidherbe was energetically pursuing what Brüe had begun, but with a different strategy: his aim 113 Gum Arabic was to make the gum trade less dependent on the main stations on the river and to spread it to other markets in order to break the Trarza’s virtual monopoly. In addition, France officially abolished slavery in 1848 (after a short-lived abolition between 1791 and 1802) and adopted the fight against ‘acts against humanity’ as the rationale for colonisation. It intended to stop the Trarza slave trade and their raids among the Wolof. The two policies were not in the interest of the Berbers. Their resistance, however, was violently suppressed in 1856 and 1857. The emir reacted by prohibiting his people from selling gum to the French, and this prohibition was supported by Mahand Baba’s religious opinion that the way in which gum was usually traded was haram, forbidden. The result was a general boycott by the Trarza, and again it was effective. The French decided to turn a blind eye to the Trarza slave trade. A few years later, it happened again: a number of slaves escaped from Trarza camps and sought refuge on Saint-Louis. When the Trarza threatened to stop the gum supply again, the slaves were expelled from the island.16 Saint-Louis From this cauldron of calculation and cunning, blindness and triumph arose Saint-Louis du Sénégal, an oasis of civilisation and calm according to its present-day inhabitants. In 2002, the whole town, its wharves and storehouses, and the private houses that had been built in the nineteenth century, was proclaimed a world heritage site by UNESCO. Its streets are straight and wide and exude wellbeing. When Portuguese sailors first found the island, it had been uninhabited. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Golberry estimated its population at no more than 6,000 souls: 2,400 ‘métis’ (children of a French father and an African mother) and ‘free negroes’, 2,400 so-called cottage captives (slaves who were born in the captivity of their owners’ families and who could not be sold), 60 white merchants, soldiers and workmen, 600 persons employed in the administration, including military and naval officers, plus about 1,000 slaves in various prisons, waiting to be shipped off. Most of the houses were 114 Mystère et boule de gomme made of earth and had thatched roofs, with a brick building here and there. There was no space for agriculture or grazing, but cereals, vegetables, fowl and meat were brought from the mainland in abundance. And there was room for a spillover of the population to Ndar, the spit of land between Saint-Louis and the ocean. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were more than 20,000 inhabitants on the island, about 10 per cent of whom were French, and over 400 brick buildings. A street in Saint Louis, early 20th century (courtesy Centre de Recherche et de Documentation de Senegal). The brick houses typically had two floors, and were built around a courtyard, from where a flight of stairs went up, around the outside of the house. The outer walls were covered with yellow or red plaster, as many still are. Often there would be a shop on the street side, on the ground floor. Some houses had a storehouse on the side of the quay. Families lived on the first floor, which had wooden balconies, under eaves and roof tiles from Bordeaux. Where the fort had been, the Hôtel du Gouvernement was built, flanked by a barracks and a hospital. The Muslims built a mosque, the Catholics built a cathedral and a school for boys and another for girls. Today, Saint-Louis’s good 115 Gum Arabic humour is reflected in the nickname of the latter: la Gazellerie, the deer park. Charles de Gaulle once said that, except for Paris, there is no place on earth where a Frenchman feels so much at home as on Saint-Louis. And, indeed, Paris was always the model on which its society fashioned itself. Pictures from around 1900 show living rooms that are perfect copies of salons in the City of Light. Day-today life on the island was bustling with concerts in the bandstand in front of the government building and with the newest goods from Lafayette. Ladies combined crinolines with African headdresses. French tourists like to visit the island. December is the favourite season for the mostly elderly visitors. In their sleeveless summer blouses, the women have a hard time competing with the stylish models in which the Saint-Louisiennes wear their traditional pagnes. Tourists can opt for a tour around the island in a colourful little carriage driven by a guide who tells them all about its history. Strangely enough, they rarely hear about gum Arabic, which has been all but forgotten. They are told about the slave trade, and they are charmed by the tale of the signares, icons of the island’s proud identity. Signare, from Portuguese senhora, was the title held by the African women of Saint-Louis, the descendants of the entrepreneurs who came to the island to sell food and services to the first foreign occupants, moved in with them and advised them how to survive the months of mosquitoes. From the beginning the French were infatuated with African women. The fact that some retired employees of the Compagnies never went back to France can probably be attributed at least in part to the signares. Late in the eighteenth century, their inner and outer beauty was legendary. The women there are good, sensitive, modest, tender, faithful and quite beautiful: they have a look of innocence in their eyes, a softness in their language that adds to their charms; they have an irresistible tendency towards love and sensuousness and express this sentiment with an accent, a tone in their voices whose softness and strength our organs could not reproduce. They have a skin of ebony black, a wellformed nose that is generally aquiline, lively and well-defined eyes, 116 Mystère et boule de gomme The signaré Mary de Saint Jean (1815-1853) (courtesy Centre de Recherche et de Documentation de Senegal). 117 Gum Arabic slender red lips, and the most beautiful teeth in the world; their figures are ravishing: altogether, they bring together all those perfections that make up beauty.17 They also knew business, and those who married traitants or merchants helped them understand the gum trade. Some traded in gum themselves, while others acquired wealth and power by other means. When Africans and the children of a French father and an African mother married amongst themselves, they did so in the mosque or in the small cathedral. Marriages between Frenchmen and African women were concluded selon le mode du pays – according to local custom. They could be dissolved whenever a man returned to France, but their mark on the society was permanent: the children of these marriages could handle a table napkin just as well as a calabash. They knew Wolof genealogies as well as they did prices in Rouen, and they spoke French, Wolof and enough Arabic to hold their ground in negotiations with the Berbers. Even in the time of the Compagnies, these mixed and black employees were wealthier than their French colleagues. Their salary was equal, but with their contacts it was easy for them to have some extra private business. Later, they became traitants and, because they controlled the inland part of the trade, its commerce, logistics and politics, they formed the backbone of the community of the Saint-Louis. They called themselves habitants of Saint-Louis, a term that included both Africans and people of mixed descent, and also referred to their ownership of the land. They also owned the houses and warehouses the French Compagnie and merchants rented from them. The habitants formed the elite, the Grands Hommes, whose names are remembered. Gum Arabic was the basis for their financial and social capital. All the rest – ivory, wax, leather, gold, and the trade in slaves – was peripheral.18 The traitants and signares showed off their wealth with diligence, in what anthropologists call conspicuous consumption. The signares wore gold in their ears, around their necks and ankles, on their arms and in their hair. What was too heavy to carry on their own bodies was hung on the house slaves, groups of whom accompanied their 118 Mystère et boule de gomme mistresses on walks through the town, for no other purpose than to parade her wealth and status. In 1782, a governor wrote in a memorandum to his successor that the mulattoes and the free negroes kept many slaves – thirty was an average number per household – whom they did not put to any use, and would not sell either. They were a status symbol. Some signares were reported to order new jewellery every day, and all of them served as patrons of the jewellers and the griots who sang their praises. For New Year’s celebrations, they financed processions in which paper lanterns in the form of fantastic houses and realistic ships were carried. In the twenty-first century, parades featuring these fanaux are once again being organised in the last week of December, when they turn the island into a kaleidoscope of opulence and splendour, of bowler hats and herders’ hats, Muslim rosaries and catholic surplices, nineteenth-century French dresses and wigs, and the colours of yards and yards of shining pagnes. u The Centre de Recherche et de Documentation on the southern tip of the island houses a small library where one day in November I spent a whole morning filling in fiches to request dozens of books and documents from the rich catalogue. When I had handed them in to the librarian, I crossed the bridge to Ndar for a plate of tie boudienne, rice and fish, in the market. The sea breeze was fresh and added to my excitement. Yes, please, some extra krikri – crunchy scrapings from the bottom of an empty casserole. When I returned to the library, ready for at least two days of reading and pencilling, there was a different librarian at the counter, and he had bad news: only two of the titles I had requested were there. The others had been lost, never brought back, as he might have told me had he been there in the morning. He was clearly embarrassed, and wanted to make up for the bad news, so he went up the stairs and knocked on the director’s door. Ten minutes later I was sitting at a table in Dr. Abdoul Hadir Aïdara’s office, with a glass and a bottle of cold water, and the original manuscripts, bound in leather, of two eighteenth-century documents 119 Gum Arabic that he kept there under lock and key: the Capitulation Treaty of 1758 and the Cahier de Doléances of 1784. Both documents illustrate the significance of the traitants and their families. When the British captured Saint-Louis in 1758 the métis– thirty or forty families – designated Charles Thévenot as their spokesman, and he managed to shore up, and even further strengthen their position. The Capitulation Treaty between the French and the new British governor stipulated that the habitants would not in any way be disadvantaged. Of course, the British needed the brokers, for they had conquered the island in order to get their hands on gum Arabic. For over two decades, the traitants sold their gum to British merchants, and benefitted from the fact that there were so many of them, all of whom were competing over the limited amount of gum and offering ever higher prices. Nevertheless – and in spite of marriages that added names such as Dodds, Wilcock and O’Hara to the Thévenots, Lejuges and Pellegrins of the community – the traitant community remained French at heart, and revolted against the English in 1778. They joined forces with a French military offence and succeeded in ousting the English. However, when the French took over again, the traitants were more than disappointed. It was soon announced that a new Compagnie du Sénegal would have a monopoly on buying and exporting gum. This meant that the opportunities for traitants to maximise profits would be reduced. So they wrote a Cahier de doléances, a plea to the highest French authorities to revoke the decision in favour of a privileged Compagnie, and sent it to the Minister of the Navy in Paris in July 1784. The first argument they made was not the best. They feared that a new Compagnie would chase off all other European ships, so that the habitants would be deprived of all sorts of goods they needed in order to live the life they were accustomed to, such as refined sugar, tobacco, glass and porcelain, wine, mousseline and silk. Most likely, no one in Paris cared too much about that. But the tone of the letter deepened and addressed French sentiments of moral and political duty. The Cahier went on to argue that the return of a privileged Compagnie would ruin the habitants, and would force them to leave the island which, after all, offered nothing but the gum trade. The 120 Mystère et boule de gomme authors were well aware, of course, of the importance of their community to the project of developing French trade along the Senegal river, in competition with the English who were penetrating the same hinterland via The Gambia. This awareness prompted them to issue a clear threat at the end of the epistle: if all the habitants’ efforts ended up being spent on agriculture instead of gum, the French government would be denied the help it depended on for its trade along the river, because only the habitants understood the character of the Berbers – who, as it happened, had already expressed their aversion to dealing with a privileged partner instead of the traitants themselves. It was all in vain. In April 1785 the Governor of Saint-Louis, De Repentigny, invited the mayor and other traitants to the Hôtel du Gouvernement and read to them the official reply of the Ministry of the Navy, as well as an explanation of its policy. There was no way other than a Compagnie with a monopoly to stop the Berbers from always raising the price of their gum, he said. Amid the optimism and promises to the traitants, his speech echoed the frustration of generations of Frenchmen before him: when they refused to pay the Berbers’ exorbitant prices, these simply disappeared with it into the desert and did not show up until the next year. Instead of gaining control over the trade over the past hundred years, the French had lost the little they had had. The Berbers could always wage some war in order to capture slaves for an income, but were too lazy to think of developing the gum trade for the future. If they had no choice, however, but to deal with a single Compagnie again, the Ministry argued, they would be forced to work instead of waging war, and the price of gum would go down. And so the Compagnie got its monopoly back, at least in theory. In practice, other merchants also stayed in the game, and new ones even joined. What’s more, the traitants managed to strengthen their position, both economically and politically. The French governor depended increasingly on the mayor and other habitants for their political knowledge and advice, especially when it came to relations with the surrounding populations. He also borrowed significant amounts of money from them to run the island. One of the mayors was Barthélémy Durand Valantin, a traitant himself, and the son of 121 Gum Arabic a merchant from Marseille and a signare. In 1848 he became the first representative of the colony of Senegal to the Assemblée Constituante and the Assemblée Législative of the Second French Republic. But Valantin was also one of the traitants who went bankrupt in the crisis of the 1840s. u That crisis signalled the end of the dominance of west African gum on the global market. The supply across the Mediterranean had never completely stopped, although gum that came that way was more expensive because the route was longer. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, nomads in the eastern part of the Sahel could sell more gum again to English, Italian and German traders. Meanwhile, Senegal’s first French governor, Louis Faidherbe, moulded the region into a fully fledged colony whose most important product was peanuts. French merchants did well on that market, without intervention from brokers or a state monopoly. They received financial support from their government to lay their hands on all the trade, at the expense of native traders. Valantin criticised this, but without result. Faidherbe dealt the deathblow to the traitants’ power by imposing taxes on them that were twice as high as those for French traders on Saint-Louis. Many traitants had to shut down their businesses and seek employment with French traders. They did receive scholarhips for their sons to study in France, and honorary jobs as notaries for instance, but they lost their economic power. The amount of gum exported dropped rapidly. The peanuts that made up for it came from south of the river, and the river itself lost its importance as a trade route. A railway was built that by-passed Saint-Louis and that had its final station on the mainland. Initially, that did not harm the island’s status. In 1872, it still became the capital of Senegal, and in 1895 the capital of all of French West Africa, which was created that year. But it held the latter position for only seven years. When Senegal gained independence in 1960, the seat of government was moved to Dakar, the new city near Cap Vert. Men from SaintLouis were appointed to prominent positions such as minister of 122 Mystère et boule de gomme foreign affairs, ambassador to Paris or London, or bishop. But the island was left to itself, with empty quays and an Avenue des Grands Hommes, with a mixture of nostalgia and pride in its elegant town. Walking through the streets at the end of an afternoon, I felt that the pride had been eroded by a tacit awareness that the town has become provincial and that its history had escaped its inhabitants. The name Valantin vaguely rang a bell, and the memory of other wealthy traitants was kept alive only if a house still featured a room where slaves had waited to be shipped across the Atlantic. I asked elderly ladies and gentlemen, as well as the high-school gazelles, about gum Arabic, ilk and verek, but all that any of them could tell me was that it was made with a product that came from trees and that it was used to ‘wash’ clothes. Why streets bore such names as Adanson, Brüe and Thevenot, was a mystery to them. 123 Chad: the idea of kitir VIII. Chad: the idea of kitir Purity and danger Riddles are a favourite way of transmitting culture anywhere in Africa. A riddle from the central and northern regions in Chad goes: ‘Mačet, wa merem jidey nadani. I was on my way when a young gazelle (a gazelle princess, literally) beckoned me’. What is it? The answer: gum Arabic, and the link between gum and the gazelle is arresting beauty. Ali Mbodou Langa has been a friend since the time I first came to Chad as a development worker and he had a similar job with another organisation. The country had just emerged from almost three decades of civil war and was deeply longing for reconciliation between peasants and herders, Christians and Muslims, and other groups who all felt they had been set against each other by professional warriors for no good reason. It was a great time for making friends. Ali grew up in the Batha province, in the northern part of the country, where his family used to roam the savanna with their cattle, along routes that have been set generations before. As a child, he walked about twenty kilometres each morning, from well to puddle. I once saw him kill a pigeon for dinner. While he held it in the bend of his left arm, the bird could not have felt anything but kindness, calm and tenderness, until it felt no more. This morning, behind his desk at a small development organisation in Ndjamena – his office in the architectural uniform of such establishments, its concrete walls and floor painted a faint and shiny yellow – he explained the riddle to me: ‘When a gazelle beckons to you, that is, when you come across a gazelle out there that looks you in the eyes, all you can do is stop and respond to that beauty. You are curious and are captivated. You forget everything else. It is the same with gum Arabic’. 149 Gum Arabic I smiled. That is what happened to me. ‘Wherever there are acacias, there will be gazelles’, he went on, ‘and monkeys, snakes, and goats. They all love gum. And so do children. When I was a little boy, I had to take our goats to grassy places every morning, and bring them back in the evening. Before I left, my mother often told me not to eat too much gum, because it would make me thirsty... But sometimes I must have eaten a pound a day’. To Ali it was sweets: ‘When you bite into kitir that you have just picked, it is sweetish and still almost liquid inside’. In towns too, gum is a seasonal treat for children and it reminds many people of their youth. But the first image that gum evokes here is that of the nomadic way of life in the savanna. And nomadic life – because of its asceticism, the Arab roots that many nomadic clans claim, and the clean sands – is associated with purity and the pure Arabic source of Islam. Another colleague development worker was Moumine, a young man I met in Mongo, the capital town of the Guéra province in the heart of the country. The fact that one could make a lot of money with gum was still unknown to many here. Moumine was born in a village in the region, but with his round face he looks like someone from the south, a bit like an outsider. He had found a job as a social worker for a French development organisation and that would be fine for him for as long as they were happy to have him around. One afternoon, I had lunch with him and some of his friends, all of us around a large dish in the shade of a boukarou, a thatch roof on poles. In Chad, people do not talk during meals. But afterwards – when we had helped each other clean our hands, one pouring water from a sakhan while the other washed, and when the leftovers had been replaced by glasses of sweet tea and everyone was lying on the mat – it was time for stories. My earlier questions had reminded Moumine of a story that had made him chuckle over lunch. ‘I will tell you about kitir’, he said, looking at us with his innocent eyes, and he switched from French to Arabic. ‘It happened last year. I went out on my motorbike to a village where people were arguing about an electric mill from our project. I had not been there before. Many kilometres before I reached the village, I saw dozens of acacias, 150 Chad: the idea of kitir and all were full of kitir. I really wanted to taste some, so I stopped and went to a tree that had big lumps’. He sat up, a cushion in his arms, and puffed out his chest, like a rooster. ‘Suddenly, I saw some angry-looking men coming from the village, straight towards me, waving their arms. “Hey! What do think you’re doing?” Those were their trees, they said. And here was I, with my pockets full and a big shiny chunk of gum in my hand, a thieving kid. They were ready to give me a good thrashing, I was sure. So I pretend I’m studying it. I hold it up against the light, looking as if I can read the future in there. They go on rambling, till one of them says: “Hey, you speak Arabic?” And I: “Certainly, good men. And this here, this thing is good! I wish to show it to some Frenchmen...” You know, talking the way people from Ndjamena do, as if they think we’re stupid.’ Moumine is choking with laughter: ‘“The nasara (Europeans), they pay good for this! You make gurus katir, lots of money!” They calmed down, and after a while they were even quite content. In the end they politely said good-bye. When they were out of sight, I put the entire lump in my mouth. I tell you, it lasted half an hour.’ u The association of gum with purity and the original, heroic life of nomads was very useful to the men who are still in power in Chad when they took the capital, Ndjamena, in 1990. That year, on 1 December, the Frolinat (Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad), the rebel army led by Colonel Idriss Déby, entered the city in fourwheel-drive cars that were camouflaged with a mixture of gum and charcoal. Old people remember it well. But even people who have not witnessed it always repeat this detail of the cars that were painted with samukh. It signified that Déby and his men were real men of the desert. It inspired fear in all those with origins in the south of the country – at least half of the population of Ndjamena at the time. Their experience of slave-raids by groups from the north was deeply rooted, and memories of them were fresh. On the other hand, the gum detail convinced those inhabitants of the city who had their own 151 Gum Arabic roots in the north of the authority with which this grasp for power was made. To dominate seemed to be the natural right of these rebels. In two shakes, Déby became president and, thanks to the interest of foreign powers in an ally in the Sahel against radical armed groups and among unstable, Islamic republics all around, he is still in power thirty years later. So many years after the coup, I wanted to know whether the cars had really been camouflaged so primitively, and why. What was the use of ‘camouflage’ for dozens of cars that thundered through the silent landscape in a convoy? I asked around if anyone knew anyone who might be able to tell me about it. People could name two or three, apart from the president himself of course, who had participated in the takeover and might still be found. One of them was Daoussa Déby, an older brother of the president, who had been the head of public services since the coup d’état, and who was now Minister of New Information Technologies and Communication. So I drove out to his office, far from the city centre, with a very correct letter. The guards allowed me in more quickly than I had expected, and in the hall I bumped into the minister’s secretary. He greeted me with excessive politeness. The director was not in his office at the moment, but he would give him my letter. He suggested I call him later to find out when I might have an interview, inshallah. Two days later, I ran into the secretary near the centre of the city. He was on a motorbike, but he stopped and crossed the road to meet me. The director had read my letter, he told me, and would receive me in his office next Friday afternoon at two. I thanked him very much. But I did not go. No Muslim in Chad receives visitors for work on a Friday afternoon. I would have found a closed door, or a deluded secretary in an empty building. Just days after that, I flew home. A few months later, I was back in Chad. I had been to Mongo again and was now on the way back. The chauffeur of the four-wheeldrive I had rented was Hisseini, and it had been a pleasure to work with him over the previous two weeks. With us in the front seat was Jean, a young French development worker who had not taken to Mongo and who was very much looking forward to cold beer and to his friends in Ndjamena. We would try to make the eight hundred 152 Chad: the idea of kitir kilometre trip in one go and arrive before nightfall. There were seven hundred kilometres of dirt road ahead of us, but that was not as bad as it sounds. Long stretches consisted of laterite, which is usually better than asphalt with holes. And we had left early. Around noon, we stopped in Bokoro, a town with an important cattle market. It is a crossroads for nomads and cattle traders with their camels and herds, and the modern transport routes also converge here. Trucks carrying onions, garlic, jerrycans, and, sitting on top of those goods, people on their way to visit relatives would all stop in Bokoro for petrol. In the market, passengers ate grilled meat and performed their prayers. And that is what we did, too. We filled up our tank, Jean bought some biscuits, and I stayed by the car while Hisseini prayed. Just when we were ready to set out again, a man in rather scruffy clothes appeared and asked for a lift to Ndjamena for him and his wife. That morning they had received a message, through travellers from the capital, that their 20-year-old son had had an accident and was in hospital. They were not even sure whether he was still alive. There was no public transport. Almost the only way to travel was on top of a truck. It was cheap, but incredibly slow. A car like ours would be a blessing for them. I saw no problem, but I noticed that Hisseini was not very eager. Later I realised he must have heard from the man’s accent that he was a Zaghawa, a member of the ethnic group from the north – the president’s people – who have a reputation for not giving a rap for the laws of other communities, and for being proud of it. But I felt sorry for the man in his plight, and I gestured as much to Hisseini. He told him they could come, as long as their company in the back would not bother me. The man sent a boy to go and fetch his wife. Within three minutes she arrived with a baby and a bag of clothes, and we were off again. The man, who looked old – my guess was that he was about 45 – took his baby daughter on his lap. He touched her cheek softly, and then folded a towel over her face against the wind and sand that was coming through the open window of the car. We all protected ourselves against it. His wife and I had our scarves over our mouths 153 Gum Arabic and noses. He wore a white shesh around his head, mouth and chin. Hisseini’s shesh was khaki-coloured and made him look like a rebel. Apparently the man was not only worried about his son, but also bothered by the charity he had been forced to accept, because he started telling us who he was: a friend of president Déby, and a member of the same ethnic group – indeed, as good as a relative, in Chadian terms. He became unpleasantly agitated as he talked, and I felt myself tense up. We had hours ahead of us with this man. How could we make sure to avoid a row? His wife looked straight ahead – she was not with us. Jean, in the front seat, was asleep. I tried to catch Hisseini’s eyes in the mirror, but I had the impression he was avoiding mine. The man went on. He said that he was one of the very first group of revolutionaries with whom Idriss Déby had prepared the takeover in the north of the country at the time. They had started with only one car. For six months they had stayed in the region, working patiently on building up their numbers. That is, waiting for sympathisers who would join them with more stolen pick-ups, first four, then another two, and then they started to move. When they wanted to eat, they would stop in a village and ‘feed’ the villagers ‘some lead’, as he put it. Sometimes they would kill someone, just to make a point. They wanted food and support. Yes, those were the days! Now this hero had a patch of land to cultivate near Bokoro, that is all. But even last year the president had stopped to pay him a visit there. Just to make some conversation and hopefully calm him down a bit, I asked whether he could return the visit. Go to the palace? Of course not – that was not how it worked, he answered, amazed at my stupidity and not one bit calmer. But he insisted that the president was a good bloke. On and on he rambled about politics, a topic which is as good as taboo among Chadians who do not know each other. Now he was talking about the measures Déby should take against some form of injustice. Hands should be cut off, and worse. There was no stopping him. Hisseini kept answering with the formulaic ‘da sahi, wallaï ’ – it is true, by God – keeping his voice as low as he could. Now he looked at me in the mirror. He saw that I was about to say something to the man and I got the sense he was warning me. He was not so sure 154 Index Index Brüe, André 77, 84-93, 100, 110, 113, 123, 191 (note) Bush, Jebb 165 Acacia senegal 22, 24, 128, 167, 173, 179, 181, 184 Acacia seyal 22, 25, 128, 142, 167, 175, 179, 181, 184 Adanson, Michel 100, 123 A῾li Kuri 77, 97, 98, 109 Alland, Charles and Fréderic 11, 162, 163, 177 Akenzua I (Oba) 60 ῾Ali Shanzura (Alichandora) 77, 84-89 A῾mar ould (b.) ῾Ali Shanzura 77, 89, 94, 96, 98 Annan, Kofi 165 Antwerp 43, 47 Arguin 53, 80, 81, 88, 89, 107, 108, 110 Association for the International Promotion of Gums 162 Awlad al-Hajj 83, 103 Cahier de Doléances 120 Callié, René 54-58, 101, 102 calico 64, 65, 68, 69, 108 Cats, Jacob 14, 47, 52 Cayar 86 Chao Shuo-Tji 37 Chaucer, Geoffrey 26-27 Chevalier, Auguste 146 Cecil, John 65 Claesz, Jacob 45, 46 Codex Alimentarius 20, 173, 174 Copier, Andries D. 14, 35 Courbe, la 100 Cumming, Thomas 72, 77, 94-98, 107 David, P.F. 93 Déby, Idriss 151, 154 Déby, Daoussa 152 ded 100 Dhu l-Rumma 31 Dioscurides 38, 48, 49 Diouf, Abdou 156 Djounouma, Abdoulaye 12, 163-168 Dondain 162 Bakel 103, 105, 106 Baker, Sir Samuel 15, 16, 21, 23 Bambuk 81, 86 banana 148 Belon, Pierre 51 Bequio Malicouri 86-88 Beshir Awae Tahir 179 Blunt, Henry S. 173, 174, 178 brak 86, 88 Brakna 56-58, 83, 87, 98, 101-103 201 Gum Arabic Elmina 59, 60, 62 El Obeid 126-129, 133-138, 146, 177, 178 Erdimi, Tom 165 European Food Safety Authority 173 Faidherbe 113, 122 Farmer, Edmund 65 FAO 20, 174 Foligny, de 92, 93 Franklin, Benjamin 67 Frolinat 151, 155 Galam 54, 103 Galen, Claudius 47, 48 Gasteren, Louis van 32 Géricault, Théodore 107 Gesenius, Wilhelm 28, 29 George I, king of England 70 George II, king of England 70, 96, 191 (note) George III, king of England and Ireland 71, 98 Gimborn 13, 35, 39 Golberry, Sylvestre 23, 73, 74, 80, 84, 85, 101, 103-105, 110 Gordon, Charles 132 Grand, Fredrik le 60-62 guinées 75, 76, 108, 112 Gum Arabic Company (GAC) 137, 138, 144, 145 Gum Arabic Board 11, 145, 175, 177 gummosis 179 habitants 118, 120, 121 hashab 24, 25, 127, 131, 136, 138, 140, 142, 146, 147, 167, 181 Hamilton 92, 93 Harith ould Mahand 113 Henry the Navigator 53 Herodotus 33 Hessler, Heinrich von 52 Herophilos 50 Ibn Badis, Tamim Ibn al Mu’izz 14, 129 Ibn Thabit, Hassan 31 Ibn Qutayba 31 ῾ilk 31, 100 INS 414 (E 414) 20, 126, 127, 148, 164 Joseph 27, 28 Jouy (toile de) 67 kantar (kintar) 67, 110, 111, 145, 193 (note) kitir 150, 151, 158, 166, 168 Kurdufan 16, 17, 23, 127, 131, 142 Labat, Jean Baptiste 85, 110, 174 Laget 92 laptot 86, 100, 105, 107, 110 Louis XIV, king of France 81, 84, 90 Lucas 33 Mahand Baba 113, 114 Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad) 129, 131, 132 Marshall, Stephen 65, 69 Méduse 107 Mulken, E. van 17-21 mummification 28, 33, 34 al-Muqaddasi 41 Naerssen, Revixit van 60 National Soft Drink Association 125, 126 Nixon, Francis 66, 67 202 Index Oba Akenzua 60-62 Oberkampf 67, 68 Olympic Stadium Amsterdam 40 Osama bin Laden 11, 125, 126 Othello 51, 52 Pitt, Sir William 94-96 Phélypeaux, Jérôme 90 Philippe V de Valois, king of France 42 Phillips, Glyn O. 162, 181, 182 Pliny the Elder 38, 41, 48 Podor 103 Poldervaart, Peter 40 Pomet, Pierre 25, 173, 174 Portendick 72, 80, 81, 87, 89-93, 98, 109 quintal (also see kantar) 89, 108, 110 Qusta ibn Luqa 48 Raffenel, Anne Jean-Baptiste 75, 99, 105, 109, 111 Rawlings, Jerry 165 rawnaq 14, 129 al-Razi 50 Reers, Jan 88 Repentigny, de 121 resin 26-29, 34, 37, 38, 48 Revixit van Naerssen 60 Royal African Company (RAC) 63, 64, 68, 69, 91-93 Royal Society 72, 74 Rubens, Bartholomeus 43-52 Rubens, Peter Paul 47 Saint-Robert, de 87 samgh (samuk, shumuk) 9, 27, 31, 141 sarab 31, 32 Schotte, J.P. 72-74 Schmaltz 107 Seven Years War 77, 90, 98 seyal 22, 25, 167, 175, 179, 181, 184 Shakespeare 10, 52 Sheller, William 32 signare 116-119, 122 Smith, Adam 70, 71 Societé de Géographie 54 Stanley, Henry 58 Stevens, Willoughby 69 Sultan Saladin 51 talha 25, 142, 148, 166-168 Thevenot, Charles 120 Timbuctoo 53, 54, 58, 86, 99 ton, tonne 68, 189 (note) Torin, Samuel 69 tragacanth 27, 28 Trarza 77, 81, 83, 86, 89, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 112-114 Ughoton 60, 61 Valantin, Barthélemy Durand 121, 122 verek 24, 100 Versailles (treaty) 98, 99 Visscher, Anna 14 West Indische Compagnie (WIC) 59-62, 81, 88, 89 Wils, Jan 40 Wolff, Hinrich 162 Wolff, Alfred 137 Wolof 54, 56, 83, 85-88, 100, 104, 105, 110, 114, 118 Woolf, Virginia 32 Yerim Bagnie 86-88 203