America's African Rifles

With a Marine Platoon

African Sahel, Summer 2004

In the early summer of 2004, just as the United States was dismantling the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, sending home its effective proconsul, L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces were in various stages of deploying to the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, one of the few battlegrounds left in the Global War on Terror for the U.S. military to enter, as it was already deployed in so many other parts of the world.

Local alliances and the training of indigenous troops have been a traditional means of projecting power at minimum risk and fanfare. This was true of Rome even in regard to adjacent North Africa, to say nothing of its Near Eastern borderlands; and it was particularly true of France and Britain, two-thirds of whose expeditions were composed of troops recruited in the colonies.* As Tacitus writes, "We Romans value real power but disdain its vanities."1 Taking Tacitus to heart, I went to

* See Sallust's The Jugurthine War, composed between 44 and 40 b.c., and Douglas Porch's introduction to the Bison edition of Col. C. E. Callwell's Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice (1896; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996). These are but two examples of a vast military literature about how imperial powers used their influence.

the Niger River region of the African Sahel, or "coast," a belt of savannah and scrub on the Sahara's southern edge, to witness a version of America's reach that was radically different from Iraq, certainly more modest, and hopefully more successful.

Among the great rivers of Africa, after the Nile and the Congo there is the Niger, which medieval Arab geographers such as Ibn Battuta called "the Nile of the Negroes." The Niger rises within 492 feet of the Atlantic Ocean in the jungly, mountainous borderland of Guinea and Sierra Leone and flows northeast into Mali, past the desert caravan centers of Timbuktu and Gao. Then, arcing southeast through Niger and along the Benin border, it drops down into Nigeria, breaking up into an immense delta amid the malarial swamps of the Bight of Biafra. The curvilinear journey of 2,600 miles from the sea deep into the desert, and back to the sea again, seems almost contrary to the laws of nature.

Herodotus, in the course of his travels in the fifth century b.c., heard mention of the river. In the vicinity of eastern Libya he was told about a group of young and adventurous Nasamonians, who lived in nearby Syrtis along the Mediterranean coast. These Nasamonians had packed a good supply of food and water and set off into the interior of Libya. After traveling for many days southwestward through the desert they came upon a region of sparse vegetation where they were attacked by black men "of less than middle height," speaking an unintelligible language. These "dwarfs" carried the Nasamonians through a marshy country whereupon they sighted a "great river with crocodiles" that "flowed from west to east."2

The Niger was no less remote to twenty-first-century Americans than it had been to the ancient Greeks. It passed through some of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. The Sahara Desert had effectively cut West Africa off from the traffic of peoples, ideas, and technology that moved between the Mediterranean and Eurasia from the classical age onward. Islam itself was weakened in the course of its arduous journey south. The Tuaregs, for example, a Berber people who began moving south from the central Sahara to the Niger River about a.d. 1000, were only nominally Muslim. They built few mosques; few of them made the haj to Mecca....

 

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