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 The Italians in Libya

Italy had won Libya in its war against the Ottoman Turks in 1912, and now, after World War I, in Libya the Italians were facing resistance to their attempt to expand their rule. In 1922, Mussolini's Italy launched a mechanized drive into Libya's interior, using tanks and aerial bombardment. It was a war that was to last through the decade. As the Italians moved deeper into the desert, the Libyan guerrillas had greater successes against them. Mussolini was determined to succeed in Libya, and he agreed to let his military pursue his war without restraints. The Italians herded thousands of Libyan civilians into concentration camps - the old tactic of separating guerrillas from its civilian base. According to a Libyan historian, Mohammed Ali Al-Taeb, as many as seventeen a day died of hunger, illness and depression. The Italian military responded to newspaper accounts of the suffering by starting to increase rations to the imprisoned, which was too little and too late. The Italians built a barbed wire barrier to block supplies coming to the guerrillas from Egypt. The Italians defeated the guerrilla bands one by one, and they captured the eighty-year-old rebel leader, Omar al-Moktar (the Lion of the Desert), and in 1931, in the city of Solouq, they hanged him, forcing the city's residents to watch.

The French in Tunisia and Algeria

After World War I, a new nationalist movement arose in Tunisia, inspired in part by Egypt's liberation from British tutelage. Various groups united to form a Constitutional Party, which advocated improved health services, an economy that served Muslims as well as European settlers, better educational opportunities for Muslims, full recognition of Islamic customs, and local government with equal representation for Muslims. The Constitutional Party remained a party of intellectuals, without support among the common people. And in 1925, when the French exiled leaders of the Constitutional Party, the Constitutional Party disintegrated.

Just west of Tunisia, in Algeria, conflict had arisen between European settlers and Muslims. The Muslims were the majority, and their population was growing faster than the Europeans. The Europeans maintained dominant political power, and they wished to keep the Muslims subservient and politically weak. Farming - largely of wine grapes, citrus crops and vegetables - was dominated by European settlers, and the Europeans produced forty percent of Algeria's wheat. Poverty among Muslim Algerians was widespread, with many forced to seek work on European owned farms at extremely low wages. Inflation had diminished the purchasing power. And, after the war, harvests through 1924 were poor and hurt most everybody in Algeria. The herds of sheep and cattle and other farm animals that Muslims owned dropped substantially. The death rate was rising among the Muslims, and so too was unrest.

Beginning in 1925, harvests were good. Wine production was especially successful, the European growers in Algeria having defeated an effort by growers in France to limit competition from Algeria. Algeria was on its way to becoming the world's third largest producer of wine. The prosperity increased the demand for Muslim labor and services, especially in the labor intensive wine industry, which hired rural Muslims for pruning, cultivating, and harvesting.

Some other Muslims, meanwhile, had gone to France to work. New laws restricted the migration of Algerians to France. And new movements for Algerian rights were organized in France and in Algeria. In the city of Algiers in 1927, 150 Muslim Algerians attended the first congress of a nationalist group called the Federation. The Federation called for representation for native Algerians in France's Parliament, equal pay for equal work on government jobs, equality in length of military service, free travel between France and Algeria, more educational opportunities and other social benefits for native Algerians.

A more militant nationalist group was led by Messali al-Hadj, a laborer and army veteran who had married a French communist. France's Communist Party had been supporting Algerian demands for reform, hoping to win Algerians to its ranks, but it had been reluctant to support independence movements among the colonized, Communist Party leadership describing calls for independence as a diversion from the class struggle. According to France's Communist Party, Marxists were supposed to advocate worker solidarity rather than nationalist aspirations. Marxists were not supposed to be drawing lines between white Frenchmen and black Africans.   

Hadj left the Communist Party, and his movement, called the Etoile Nord-Africaine (North African Star), called for Algerian independence and for the withdrawal of France's "army of occupation" from Algeria. His movement grew to about  4,000 members inside France. Then in 1929, France outlawed Hadj's movement, and Hadj became a fugitive.

The French and Spanish in Morocco

In French controlled Morocco, a Muslim Sultan held nominal power, but the real power lay with the French resident-general, an aristocrat and former army colonel, Louis Lyautey. Lyautey was bright and sophisticated. His policies closely fit the French colonial ideal, and he was a favorite among French conservatives. Lyautey had served  in Madagascar while a colonel, and he had convinced tribes there that the French army was on their side, the army giving them machine-made tools and teaching them scientific methods in farming. In Madagascar his troops had built roads and had established telegraphic installations, and Lyautey had left Madagascar materially better off and more tranquil than it had been in its entire history.

In that part of Morocco controlled by the French, French farmers had incomes that averaged eight times higher than the average of Moroccan farmers, and the French farmers looked upon their Muslim neighbors as an inferior race. Lyautey had been in Morocco since 1912, and he had become popular with the local French and the Moroccans. Lyautey dealt with the Moroccan people through the authority of their own chiefs. He endeavored to avoid offending any local customs and religious practices. Under Lyautey the French taught Moroccans how to grow more and better crops. More market places were developed for the Moroccans, and the French built hospitals, schools and roads. In that part of Morocco that the French controlled the economy improved, benefiting local people and French investors. And Lyautey created two new coastal cities: Kenitra (to be renamed Port Lyautey) and Casablanca.

In 1920, while France was having success in its portion of Morocco, rebellion erupted among mountain tribes in that part of Morocco nominally controlled by Spain (a stretch of two hundred miles between the two Mediterranean port cities of Ceuta and Melilla, ports that Spain had held for over 300 years). The rebellion was led by Mohammed ben Abel Krim. In 1922 Krim announced the creation of an Islamic republic. He was receiving aide from abroad, while describing his struggle as nationalist rather than pan-Islamic.

During the rebellion, atrocities were committed by both Krim's forces and the Spanish. The Spanish bombed the Moroccans but hit mainly rocks and cactus plants. By mid-1924 many Spaniards were sick of the fighting. So too was Spain's dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. Spain had spent a lot of money and was gaining nothing in wealth from Morocco, and Primo de Rivera complained about the tens of thousands of men killed in the war. He wanted to end Spain's pursuit of the rebel forces, but  he complained that Britain would not let him withdraw. The British were concerned about the French expanding in Morocco near the Strait of Gibraltar. Also, Spain's military officers in Morocco - among them colonel Francisco Franco - were adamant about continuing the fighting. They were concerned about their careers, and they saw Spain's imperial enterprise in Morocco as an effort at wiping out the shame of defeat by the United States in 1898 and reclaiming for Spain the glory of empire.

In 1925, Krim's advances spilled over into tribal areas governed by France. Resident-general Lyautey did not want a war against Krim. But Krim allowed incursions against French controlled Morocco to continue. Krim recognized that Lyautey had given Moroccans order, security and economic prosperity, but he claimed that he would bring all Moroccans the same benefits but with the advantage that he was a Muslim, a leader of their own faith rather than an infidel. Krim expanded to within twenty-five kilometers of Fez, where the Sultan and Lyautey were headquartered. But the Moroccans in French controlled areas largely supported French rule and viewed Krim as a menace. Krim was facing too much of an enemy. For Lyautey, a policy that appealed to hearts and minds had proved successful.

A joint French and Spanish force applied overwhelming force against Krim. This included artillery barrages, aerial bombardment and the use of gasoline bombs from a volunteer airforce commanded by an American soldier of fortune, Charles Sweeney. Krim and a party of twenty-seven surrendered to the French in May 1926. The French received Krim and his party courteously and exiled them to French islands in the Indian Ocean. Krim and his family went to the island of Réunion, where the climate was similar to Morocco, and where with Krim and family lived on an annual stipend on a large estate not far from the island's capital, St. Denis. The French wanted Krim not as a martyr but to be forgotten. Spain wanted revenge against Krim and viewed France's treatment of Krim as a disgrace.

The French in West Africa

Among those ruled by the French in western Africa, the spectacle of white men killing each other in World War I eroded much if not all of whatever view they had that whites were indeed superior to Africans. During the war, the French had recruited 175,000 from their colonies in Western Africa, some of these recruits becoming combat soldiers, some others becoming support personnel. These Africans were a variety of men of many shades of brown, some of them Moslems, and some not. After the war some of them stayed in France, where several became advocates for more rights for Africans, most of them favoring assimilation rather than national independence. One movement that favored nationalist independence was led by a missionary-educated military veteran, André Matswa, whose movement spread to Brazzaville.

France's colonies in western Africa covered an enormous area, from the dry and sparsely populated Sahara to the rain forests farther south - an area that in the decade of the twenties was calculated to have only 3.1 million people. It was a population that had been declining. The flu epidemic at the close of World War I had spread to France's sub-Saharan colonies, killing about five percent of the population there. And diseases continued doing their damage through French West Africa, including venereal diseases, which spread sterility, while the most damaging diseases were malaria, yellow fever and smallpox.

In their West African colonies the French were less successful than they were in Morocco, and British colonialists looked down upon French colonial rule in West Africa, deriding the French for  failing to live up to their pretended standard of liberty, equality and fraternity. The French were letting their colonies in West Africa develop as French enterprises there saw fit - enterprises that were  largely coffee and banana plantations and lacking the restraint of public opinion with which businesses in France had to contend. In France, the average person or politician had little grasp of conditions in West Africa. There were no television camera crews going about in West Africa doing documentary exposés, and French businessmen in West Africa were doing whatever they pleased. An free enterprise by people with power and without any form of cultural restrains was dangerous, and the French had too few civil servants to travel about looking for and prosecuting abuses. Africans, moreover, had little protection from the colonial court system - a system that frequently prosecuted minor "offenses" by Africans with death sentences.

Instead of supporting local autonomy, the French in Africa had been making local African leaders their tools. The French obliged these leaders to enforce arbitrary colonial rules on taxation and all other matters, including the drafting of labor. The French had wiped out the most eminent chiefs in its conquest of West Africa, and in the peace that followed they had replaced chiefs that were legitimate in the eyes of Africans with chiefs of their own choosing, the qualification for chiefdom being that of willingness to please the French.

Beyond investments in coffee and banana plantations, very little was being invested by the French in West Africa, and very few Africans were able to accumulate capital. The capital that was raised was squeezed from Africans in the form of taxes. Taxation in some areas was such that African farmers had to grow cash crops in order to meet their tax requirements. The French forced cotton growing requirement on farmers who might have been better off growing food. And the cotton they produced they sold to French merchants at prices that brought very little return.

Taxation forced farmers in French ruled Sudan to migrate seasonally to Senegal to work in groundnut fields there. Anyone who did not grow cash crops in great quantity had to sell their labor. Laborers traveled to work on cocoa plantations and to cut timber in the Ivory Coast. And the French conscripted Africans to labor on public works projects and on French owned plantations - for the growing of crops destined not for Africans but for the people of Europe. And Africans were forced to work on the construction of three hundred miles of railroad from Brazzaville (on the Congo River) to Pointe Noire (on the Atlantic coast), construction that over a ten-year period killed nearly ten thousand.

In 1927, while this railway was being laid, the French writer André Gide had his book, Travels in the Congo, published, which in France caused a furor of indignation calls for reform. Gide wrote French rule Africa as opposed to the Belgian Congo. He wrote that the less intelligent the white man he found in Africa the more stupid this person considered blacks to be. He wrote of dim-minded young whites being sent to remote stations in the colonies, being put in supervisory positions without sufficient training and trying to make blacks obey and respect them by brute force.

Africans were not overjoyed at the prospect of working for the French. Many of them were debilitated by one or more of a variety of diseases. Some of them preferred to work for subsistence outside the money economy. Some French in Africa saw any lack of enthusiasm in working for them and for money as laziness. Some French saw the Africans as lacking the Westerner's belief that work ennobles man's character.

Like the British, the French were pursuing a program to educate their African subjects. The French wished to ennoble them with French culture. The education that the French advocated was mostly primary, with some secondary schooling to fill a need for office workers. Christian missionaries tried making Africans more French by eliminating the tradition of men having more than one wife. They proclaimed that one could not be a Christian and have more than one wife. But facing competition with Islam, which permitted polygamy, some missionaries gave up the struggle.

Many Africans who were unhappy with French rule joined religious cults, such as the Kimbangu cult in the Congo. Most educated Africans, on the other hand, favored assimilation with the French. They advocated that with this assimilation should come more political power, civil rights and French citizenship for Africans. The most successful of the Africans who favored assimilation was Blaise Diagne, who believed in the superiority of western civilization. Diagne was a black who had lifted himself from humble circumstances to become the representative from Senegal in France's parliament (the Chamber of Deputies). He was the first black to fill that position who was not mixed white and black or a French merchant from Africa.

Diagne found fault with the American W. E. B. Du Bois for his efforts in Africa and for Du Bois having obscured what he, Diagne, described as the benefits that European powers were bestowing upon colonial peoples. Diagne called for labor legislation that was in force in France to be applied to France West African colonies, legislation that would have provided French subjects with more leisure time and arbitration in labor disputes. But Diagne's proposals never progressed in parliament beyond talk.

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