Resistance in the Desert

Book excerpt: This work, first published in 1977, is a study of African responses to European conquest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It centers on the Muslim pastoral tribes and oasis communities which inhabited southeastern Morocco, a semi-arid region on the northern fringe of the Sahara Desert. Between 1881 and 1912 the French army, advancing from Algeria, invaded and occupied this region. This book examines the decades of French conquest as an episode in African, rather than European, colonial or military history.