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’. 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. Mystere 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 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.