Esleman Abay

Mass Media and the Colonial Informant: Messaoud Djebari and the French Empire, 1880–1901

Arthur Asseraf, December 2021

Abstract

The nineteenth century saw an explosion of mass media as well as an expansion of colonial states. These two processes mutually influenced each other, and at the intersection lay a thin layer of individuals who could gain inordinate power to influence global information flows. This article follows the career of one such individual, Messaoud Djebari, an Algerian man who generated several controversies by fabricating information first in Tunisia in 1881, and then across West Africa and France in 1892–5. Djebari’s case suggests that some men trained to act as colonial intermediaries could end up playing important roles in shaping the circulation of information well beyond their territory of origin. Colonial informants were defined less by their role within a given colonial territory than by an ability to portray themselves as conduits to valuable information inaccessible to Europeans, irrespective of the location. Beyond the colonial context, this calls our attention to a particular practice of information manipulation characteristic of this age: the art of making oneself into a conduit by passing off one’s opinions as somebody else’s information.

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On 20 September 1895, a large crowd filed into the Grand Hôtel in Paris, just opposite the Opéra, to hear a talk by an Algerian man.¹ Messaoud Djebari, born near Bône on the Mediterranean, held their attention with stories about his recent expedition to West Africa. Returning from Dahomey and Nigeria, he claimed to have found the survivors of the Flatters Mission, a French expedition that had been massacred in the Sahara in 1881. The Parisian public were thrilled with the possibility that members of the mission might still be alive in darkest Africa over ten years later. His spectacular yet unverifiable claims confused the public and experts, and the reunion in Paris ended in disarray. Prominent men formed a committee to investigate his assertions. The next day, reports of this meeting splashed the pages of most Parisian newspapers. This was ‘a subject that captivates the entire press’.²

Late nineteenth-century France was not short of controversies played out through the mass media. Djebari’s press conference occurred a few years after the Panama Affair and in the early stages of the Dreyfus Affair, which more than any other dramatized the role of newspapers and public opinion at the centre of modern politics. Nor was it unusual for European explorers returning from Africa to have their findings create great excitement and suspicion in the pages of newspapers. However, as an Algerian Muslim subject of modest birth at the peak of colonial rule, Djebari’s ability to command the attention of French public opinion is more surprising.

Yet, newspaper editors were more interested in the survivors than in Djebari himself. He quickly faded away from the record, and despite ample contemporary coverage of his activities, he is relatively unknown in historical scholarship. Djebari was a man accomplished in the art of generating information that was both plausible yet unverifiable. In fact, this was not his first affair, and over a decade earlier he had managed to create another major commotion in 1881 in Tunisia and Algeria. Yet, this brought him no lasting fame: each time, he attracted attention by portraying himself as a conduit to privileged information and then faded into obscurity.

The globalization of information in the nineteenth century created new opportunities for certain cunning individuals. By positioning themselves at the valves where information flows narrowed, men like Djebari could have disproportionate influence. However, this was also a colonial globalization, where one’s position in a racialized world order determined the truth claims one could make. As a North African Muslim colonial subject, Djebari could not hope to gain attention in his own right. However, he could portray himself as a conduit between a European audience and worlds that they had no access to, especially sub-Saharan Africans who were further below him in the imagined racial order. Thus, to gain attention, Djebari portrayed himself as a mere intermediary. He consistently passed off his own opinions and fictions as somebody else’s information.

This article analyses the art of making yourself into a conduit in the modern information system by following Djebari’s career. The simultaneous expansions of colonialism and mass media generated an environment where information had to appear depersonalized to be taken seriously, and yet where only certain individuals could have access to particular kinds of knowledge. This encouraged a practice of passing off one’s own fictions as somebody else’s information, especially for colonized subjects like Djebari.

Trained to work for the French state in colonial Algeria, Djebari was an avid consumer of French newspapers. Unable to participate in journalism or politics, he ended up manipulating both the colonial state and the metropolitan mass media.

In 1881, he inserted himself into a brewing diplomatic controversy between Tunisia, Italy and France by claiming to speak on behalf of an Algerian secret society. In 1892–5, he was sent on a secret mission to West Africa and then generated controversy about what he claimed to have seen there. Both of these affairs have appeared (briefly) in historical scholarship before; his first controversy in 1881 was mentioned in passing in an article by Allan Christelow and the second in 1894 in an article by Alexander Kanya-Forstner, but in both of these he is a minor character on the sidelines.³

Instead, I take Djebari to be central to a number of interconnected changes unfolding in this period. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of an integrated transcontinental news system based on the electric telegraph dominated by Europeans and North Americans. Information flows became faster, more technologically complex, and more concentrated in the hands of the few who had huge power to broadcast to the many.⁴ Third Republic France (1870–1940) was at the forefront of these evolutions. Paris was the birthplace of the first modern news agency, Havas, in 1835, and formed one of the world’s largest mass media markets: Parisian daily newspaper publication had exploded from 36,000 copies in 1800 to two million in 1880.⁵ This was a society where information appeared increasingly industrialized, large-scale and thus, depersonalized. New norms of objectivity emphasized ‘reporting’ information faithfully rather than generating it.⁶

Yet, contemporaries also worried that this new system provided opportunities for cunning individuals to distort truth on a huge scale. Mass media was constantly threatening to default on its promise to sever information from the vices of individuals. New figures became the object of a dense cultural production that crystallized the anxieties of the age. Sometimes they were unscrupulous journalists like in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami.⁷ Others were impostors and confidence men who generated attention because they revealed the ‘precariousness of truth in a mediated mass culture and politics’, as Matt Houlbrook has written about interwar Britain.⁸ These figures revived the older tradition of the trickster — an individual culturally celebrated for their ability to assume multiple identities and thus reveal the limits of the system — in the age of mass media.⁹

Djebari was neither a corrupt editor nor a confidence man. He represents a different, though closely related type: the bad informant, a figure more familiar to historians of colonial societies. Djebari was an interpreter for the French army in North Africa who ended up producing unreliable information and generating huge problems for the authorities. In the nineteenth century, European powers tried to rule new colonial empires relying on a small number of administrators stretched thinly across Africa and Asia. To do so, they relied on informants who frequently gamed the intelligence system to their own advantage. At least since Christopher Bayly’s study of information in British India in 1996, Empire and Information, the role of these informants is well known, as is their ability to generate ‘information panics’ when the colonial intelligence system realized its fragility.¹⁰ Since then, scholars have extended these findings well beyond South Asia, whether in the work of Ann Laura Stoler on the Dutch East Indies, Martin Thomas on the Middle East and North Africa, or Alexander Morrison on Russian Turkestan.¹¹ Closest to Djebari, Emily Osborne and others have shown how in French West Africa, interpreters were the ‘hidden linchpins of colonial rule’, often at the centre of controversies.¹² Together, these studies stress how under colonial regimes where formal politics were forbidden, politics was often best disguised as intelligence work.

However, these studies have remained confined to colonial societies. Their focus is the relationship between informants and empire in territories where the state was stretched especially thin, and on how their activities disrupted the smooth functioning of empire. But then how do we explain the presence of a man like Djebari, not in Algiers, but in Paris and Lagos? Djebari’s unique skills as an informant led him to travel far beyond his place of birth and the boundaries of the French Empire. Though deeply rooted in the colonial Algerian context, his story overflows from it. To put it differently, what does one do with a rogue Algerian interpreter dominating the pages of the Parisian press in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair?

This requires analysing colonialism as a truly global phenomenon that was not restricted to colonial territories. Historians have long since heeded the call by Stoler and Cooper in 1997 to study the metropole and the colony in the same analytical frame.¹³ Yet, rather than a face-à-face between the metropole and the colony, Djebari’s trajectory sketches a triangle between the Maghrib, Europe and West Africa. Djebari gained attention, not on the basis of providing information on his colony of origin to a metropolitan audience, but through providing information on an entirely different space in which he was sent as an ‘explorer’.

Djebari’s case thus calls for a reassessment of the global role of colonial informants, defined by their ability to portray themselves as conduits to valuable information inaccessible to Europeans. This was rather different to other characters: unlike impostors, it involved maintaining a consistent self-description of one’s identity. In a rigidly racialized society, Djebari did not claim to be someone else, consistently emphasizing his humble, Muslim origins. It is on this basis that he was able to give his information credibility. It is this same consistency that makes it possible to trace him archivally throughout multiple affairs, as writings by and about him in French and in Arabic are scattered across different arms of the French state, in the archives of the Government-General of Algeria, the département of Constantine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Colonies and the Paris Geographical Society, as well as across different newspapers on both sides of the Mediterranean and his own publication.¹⁴ Djebari generated fictions not about who he was, but about what he had seen.

I

the man who read too many newspapers

Messaoud Djebari was part of a small group of Algerians trained to serve in the French administration. Around the world, men like him, trained to work for colonial states, made up an important but unexpected audience for the expanding European newspaper industry. Djebari was a product of the colonial system: his family was not part of the traditional Algerian nobility that continued to monopolize positions within the French system, and with whom he had fraught relations.¹⁵ He claimed to have been born in 1862 near Bône in Eastern Algeria, some thirty years after the French had taken control of the city.¹⁶ His father, Ali, described himself as a ‘farmer’ (agriculteur), and seems to have owned some land in Mondovi, later famous as Albert Camus’ birthplace.¹⁷ Despite this somewhat modest though not destitute background of small landholders, Djebari had managed to study at the médersa in Constantine, one of only three schools throughout Algeria founded in 1850 to train officials in the Islamic judicial system.¹⁸ As reported by one local French administrator who knew him well, Djebari was convinced that, given his superior intelligence and training, he was entitled to a steady administrative job: ‘His vanity leads him to believe that he is entitled to a high position, and he would stop at nothing to obtain satisfaction of his desire’.¹⁹ He repeatedly contacted local authorities begging for a stable position, to no avail.²⁰ Instead, he found himself navigating between various lowly jobs: a brief stint as a teaching assistant, sometimes stationmaster in the small village of Bordj Sabath on the new train line between Constantine and Guelma. He was thus that creature most feared by administrators the world over — an educated, frustrated man with a lot of time on his hands.

In particular, Djebari seems to have been fond of reading newspapers. One report written during his first affair describes him as ‘a vivacious, intelligent, ambitious spirit, belonging to the lower Arab class, feeling superior to his compatriots by his intelligence and his instruction, fed with reading political newspapers (nourri de la lecture des journaux politiques)’.²¹ His double literacy in Arabic and French gave him access to new forms of printed news that were booming in colonial Algeria.²²

Conquered in fits and starts from 1830 and integrated into French territory in 1848, Algeria came under a more aggressively assimilationist regime that stressed the ascendancy of the growing European settler minority under the Third Republic (1870–1939).²³ Heavily encouraged by government programmes of colonisation officielle, the European population doubled from 244,600 in 1872 to 482,000 in 1891, split in roughly equal numbers between French citizens and European foreigners.²⁴ Buoyed by greater settler numbers, a fractious political culture and a Republican regime increasingly tolerant of press freedom, newspaper publication exploded. In the Constantine département alone, which made up the Eastern third of Algeria where Djebari was raised, eighty-nine newspapers were launched between 1881 and 1888.²⁵

Like many others, however, these new freedoms would not be extended to Algerian Muslims. The same French parliament within a few weeks in the summer of 1881 passed two laws that both granted extensive press freedoms to French citizens and reinforced the indigénat, a parallel system of justice for Algerian natives. Under the indigénat, Algerians were not allowed to speak in public against authority, let alone in print. They were therefore guaranteed no freedom of expression.²⁶

The onslaught of settlers thus had unexpected side-effects for the few Muslim men who could read French (for they were nearly all men, literacy in French for Muslim women being extremely rare in this period). They found themselves both politically disenfranchized yet surrounded with the newspapers characteristic of the highly liberal press regime of the French Third Republic. Like in other colonial territories, the few colonized men who could access this world of newspapers in French were also those who worked for the administration.

In 1880, Djebari first appears in the archives trying to get noticed by publishing in the newspaper. He wrote a letter to the editor of the government newspaper Le Mobacher/Al-Mubasshir, a rather stolid publication that had announced official decrees to members of the native administration since 1847.²⁷ Combining Algerian dialect (darija), literary Arabic (fusha) and French administrative turns of phrase translated into Arabic, its style was distinctive of Djebari’s writings. Tellingly, like many other contemporary Algerian documents he referred to the newspaper as al-jurnal, using the French word, rather than the Modern Arabic jarida or sahifa, which were in use in other regions of the Arab world.²⁸ His letter enjoined his fellow Algerian Muslims to organize meetings to discuss their own affairs and uplift themselves to be worthy of citizenship. It reveals an awareness of contemporary debates in French politics about a new freedom of assembly law obtained via newspaper reading.²⁹ Djebari was thus aware of these debates but unable to participate in them himself. The letter was never published and was seized in a later police investigation.

Shortly afterwards, this led to a second attempt to gain attention. This time, however, Djebari claimed to be speaking on behalf of other people. In the autumn of 1880, he wrote a stash of letters inviting prominent Republican politicians to the small town of Bordj Sabath, where he worked as a stationmaster on the railway line between Constantine and Guelma. There, he claimed, he was the ‘secretary of a Republican committee’, merely acting on the initiative of ‘a number of Arabs’, but the conceit seems clear: the committee only ever comprised Djebari himself and possibly his father.³⁰ Early on, Djebari seems to have taken to manufacturing evidence of false reunions to gain attention for his political projects, and to further his desire for civil rights for Algerians.

Djebari was an avid reader of newspapers written by and for a European audience. As a native, he could only be a reader of these newspapers, and not legitimately participate in their world of political debates for citizen-journalists. His political activity had to be indirect, capturing the attention of French men in power by offering them information on the activities of others. This practice would lead him to get involved in affairs well beyond his native Algeria.

II

the tunisian crisis: using the state as a broadcaster

In 1881, Djebari took advantage of a major geopolitical upheaval unfolding next door in Tunisia and manufactured evidence of a secret society that fulfilled his desires for political engagement. In this first major affair, Djebari positioned himself within an information gap: between the vast amounts of information on European diplomatic rivalry circulating in newspapers on the one hand, and the dearth of information on the political behaviour of North African Muslims available to the French administration on the other. Trained to perform tasks in the service of the colonial state, he portrayed himself as a conduit on the behaviour of other natives.

Having been fired from his job as a stationmaster after unsuccessfully seeking employment with a rival train company, Djebari crossed the border to make his way to Tunis in the winter of 1881. In 1881, Tunisia was at a tense international juncture, marked by competing French and Italian influence and a declining central government. French authorities worried about another European power setting up a colony on the border with Algeria, while Italy, freshly unified, argued that Tunisia’s large Italian community and geographical position made it naturally Italian.³¹ In the spring of 1881, the French government seized the pretext of tribal warfare on the Algerian–Tunisian border to declare the Tunisian government incapable of maintaining the security of its border with France, and sent an army to re-establish order. Following a brief military campaign in late April, French troops reached Tunis in early May, beginning the French protectorate in Tunisia, which would last until 1956.³²

Franco-Italian rivalry over Tunisia spread well beyond the corridors of ministries in Paris and Rome. For Italians, the French takeover would long be known as the ‘slap of Tunis’ (schiaffo di Tunisi), a national humiliation. On the French side too, the affair stirred popular nationalism: in June 1881, it would even lead to the massacre of Italians in Marseille when the French expeditionary corps returned from Tunisia. The dispute between Paris and Rome was all over the pages of newspapers across Europe.³³

Djebari originally became interested in Tunisian affairs through reading European newspapers: as he wrote, ‘Whosoever pays attention to the Talian [sic] and French newspapers (awraq al-talianiyya wa al-faransawiyya) finds news there that is difficult to understand (sa’iba li-l-fahm)’ about the state of Tunis. It emerged during the subsequent investigation that the ‘Talian’ paper in question was al-Mustaqill (‘The Independent’), a newspaper published in Arabic in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia.³⁴ Launched on 28 March 1880 by Sardinian business interests with at least some direct assistance from the Italian government, al-Mustaqill was a mouthpiece of Italian interests in Tunisia founded by Giovanni de Francesco with the explicit aim to rival the French presence in North Africa.³⁵ Yet, al-Mustaqill only enjoyed an extremely small distribution in Algeria, so it is quite likely that Djebari found out about it first through the French press: from August 1880, Le Figaro, Le Sémaphore and Le Temps, all in Paris, lambasted this new pro-Italian Arabic newspaper, which became the centrepiece of growing tensions around Tunisia.³⁶ Djebari was at the centre of a French–Italian media war over the future of Tunisia, part of which was waged in Arabic via rival newspapers.³⁷

For Djebari, this crisis was an opportunity to broadcast his distinctive set of political views. Documents found on him in Tunis included a report on the political situation in Tunisia, a detailed plan to stage a coup in Tunisia to depose the bey and create a Tunisian Republic, and a call to Algerians to take ‘political weapons’ (al-salaha al-siyasi [sic]) to struggle against the French state, which ‘feigns freedom’ (taza’am al-hurriya) while attacking Tunisia.³⁸ Djebari was not a nationalist and he did not advocate for Algerian independence, but he was a passionate advocate for equality.

At the time, as Allan Christelow has pointed out, this made his ideas rather idiosyncratic.³⁹ Djebari does not appear to have been a member of any collective network, and there were few established cultural or political institutions for this kind of discussion in Algeria at the time: most formalized, organized political activity in Algeria would have been illegal under French law. While there is evidence of private meetings happening in notables’ houses, Djebari’s writings explicitly rejected the politics of the existing notability: his call to action was targeted to ‘native Muslims from the élite and commoners in Algeria’.⁴⁰ This concern about the contrast between the khas — the elite, and the ’am — the common people, with whom he identified, pervaded his writings.⁴¹ Djebari’s perspective was neither that of the French administrators nor that of the Arab elite, but was explicitly that of the Arab underclass. Djebari articulated a deep social tension within Algerian Muslim society that other sources in this period were silent about. For Djebari, the core problem was that France had sold out on its Republican values by reinforcing a feudal system within Algeria.

Yet, there were few outlets available for Djebari to express these kinds of ideas. As we have seen, trying to get published in newspapers does not seem to have met with great success. It was the diplomatic importance of the Tunisian crisis that gained Djebari a receptive audience in the form of the colonial administration.

French authorities worried that the invasion of Tunisia would create instability back in the older colony of Algeria. As a number of disconnected incidents unfolded across Algerian territory, they read any sign of agitation as the premise of a major insurrection. There was a ‘possible, even probable correlation’ of all these incidents, so there must have been, somewhere, a subversive nexus from which these people were getting their instructions, a giant Muslim conspiracy.⁴² The behaviour of Muslims, especially in spaces where they met and Europeans could not enter, was mysterious to them.

Feeding off these fears, Djebari concocted the exact dish the authorities were expecting: a conspiracy of almost all the notables in Eastern Algeria with Tunisian authorities, and worse, with Italians. In Tunis, Djebari carried a stash of documents claiming to be from an Algerian secret society plotting with Tunisians and Italians, ‘The Islamic secret society which concerns itself with general peace in the country of Algeria’ (al-majmu’ al-sirri al-islami al-lati min sha’nuha al-raha al-umumiyya bi-iqlim al-jaza’ir).⁴³ According to Djebari, local Muslim magistrates around Guelma in Eastern Algeria had started a Secret Islamic Society for General Tranquillity in November 1880. The society, as Djebari described it, involved respectable people from prominent regional families, employed by the French state to run the Islamic justice system, who were concerned about losing their jobs as a consequence of potential reforms to the judicial system.⁴⁴ In Djebari’s account, the society’s original aims to protect Muslim interests in Algeria slipped to protecting Tunisia from falling out of Islam and into the hands of Europeans. He claimed that he was in Tunis as an envoy of this mysterious society sent to investigate Tunisian affairs.

The document is implausible: the alleged transcripts of the society’s meetings all contained perfectly round numbers (sixty members attending, forty for, twenty against) and repeatedly emphasized just how ‘SECRET’ the society was, even though the name of the society itself changes multiple times throughout it. Yet, his documents sent the administration into overdrive, particularly as the affair involved two separate ministries who had trouble coordinating across the Algerian–Tunisian border: the French consul in Tunis reported back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while the préfet of Constantine reported back to the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for Algeria.

When the préfet of Constantine, Eugène Doucin, summoned him from Tunis back to Algeria for interrogation, Djebari was only too happy to oblige. On 14 May 1881, he gave a deposition so highly detailed that he seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the process, as the préfet noted his eager cooperation.⁴⁵ This launched a chain of reporting in which Djebari’s speech and writings found themselves copied across multiple administrators’ desks in Tunis, Constantine, Algiers and Paris, and ultimately in different archives.

The deposition was full of his rather baroque political concepts. Djebari told the préfet that he had met the Tunisian Prime Minister, Mustafa bin Isma’il.⁴⁶ In Djebari’s account, the Tunisian Prime Minister confesses to the unemployed Algerian railway employee a secret plan to overthrow the bey and to become president of a Tunisian Republic. Though supportive, Djebari countered that republics are difficult, ‘see in France, there are many intelligent and advanced men and yet they do not agree with each other’. He also claimed to have travelled to Rome, where ‘an old man asked me for information about Algeria … in a magnificent palace near the Piazza di Napoli’.

Somehow, the préfet Doucin was convinced. He certainly entertained the possibility that Djebari was making it all up: ‘could he not have dreamt up the existence of this society that he created wholesale in his imagination?’⁴⁷ Yet, Doucin ultimately did not agree with that sceptical interpretation of events. ‘It is clear from his physiognomy … that Djebari was not making it up (n’a pas joué la comédie)’.⁴⁸

While he found Djebari credible, the préfet did not show much interest in his description of either Tunisian or Italian political circles. Instead, he was mainly interested in Djebari’s information on the local elite in Eastern Algeria, the qadis, shaykhs and other members of the Islamic judiciary who had allegedly attended the secret meetings. French authorities found the inner motivations of the local Algerian notability hard to discern. As pointed out by Ann Laura Stoler, in the Dutch East Indies ‘The quest for affective knowledge — that which moves people to feel and act — was the coveted pursuit of state intelligence yet beyond its grasp’.⁴⁹ Djebari’s imaginary conspiracy was effective because the information he gave could not be easily verified by the préfet. The investigation turned the administration into overdrive, leading to a succession of interrogations, searches and accumulations of inconclusive details of the suspects.

For the Algerian notables, by contrast, Djebari seems to have been mainly useful as an access point to European news. Under interrogation, the main suspect, Ben Chettah the qadi of Guelma, admitted that his only contact with Djebari was when Djebari read the French newspapers out loud to him.⁵⁰ Though of a lower social status and not part of the traditional Islamic literati, Djebari was essential as a way to access the information in European mass media.

None of the men surrounding him seem to have been interested in listening to Djebari’s ideas. Beyond its colourful details, Djebari’s first major affair showed that he occupied an essential intermediary position between the information networks of the French state and media on the one hand, and Algerian notables on the other. It also showed that he could have a great impact by fabricating information as long as it looked like it was coming from elsewhere.

Djebari’s allegations of a secret society had very real consequences, as the French administration arrested thirteen local notables on 12 May 1881. Upon their arrest, these respectable men denied having ever met Djebari, whom they saw as riff-raff beneath their standing. During the investigation Djebari was briefly imprisoned, from where he railed against the notables who oppressed the Arab lower class. Eventually, the trial brought in Algiers against the qadis of Bône, Guelma and Mondovi for forming a secret society and conspiring with foreign powers seems to have collapsed due to lack of evidence.⁵¹ The case of the alleged Islamic secret society of Guelma faded into obscurity, but Djebari’s thoughts had been successfully disseminated through administrative reporting networks.

One might expect this affair to permanently discredit his reputation as an informant. But this does not seem to have hindered his career — quite the opposite. After 1881 his trace disappears from the record for a while, but he seems to have embarked on increasingly ambitious activities.

III

From interpreter to explorer

New activities led Djebari to ever more distant geographical spaces, though he always entered them by portraying himself as an Algerian Muslim man from a poor background. In 1884, he gave a lecture on the ‘Algerian question’ at the Société Française de Protection des Indigènes in Paris (founded on the model of the British Aborigines’ Protection Society).⁵² He also retained the same name: in 1886, presumably in quest for stable employment, he joined the military as part of the Bône regiment of spahis (cavalry), and his military paperwork retained the same name and that of his parents that he had used in 1881.⁵³ Given the lacunae of the French administration when it came to identifying Algerians, it would have been easy for him to give a different name. But it was his particular position within the colonial order and his ability to navigate gaps in information networks that saw him propelled to a key position within the expanding French Empire, far away from North Africa.

By emphasizing his position as an Algerian Muslim, Djebari was able to play a significant role in the Scramble for Africa. Having become a military interpreter first in Algeria and then in Tunisia in 1891, he was sent from Tunisia on a secret exploration mission to Central Africa by the French army in 1892. While it is well known that the Scramble for Africa offered opportunities for desperate Europeans explorers such as Stanley to gain dramatic ‘rag-to-riches’ social advancement, Djebari offers an unusual perspective on the Scramble. For Djebari, as well as for other Algerians, French expansion in West Africa offered opportunities to escape the stifling restrictions of settler rule in North Africa, in which they could hope to ascend the racial hierarchy by becoming white agents of the French Empire among the uncivilized blacks.

Within North Africa, the position of military interpreter was a job with relatively low pay and low prestige.⁵⁴ In the glory days of the Algerian conquest, some native interpreters could rise to positions of power, but by the late nineteenth century, their progression was strictly limited compared with their white peers in North Africa.⁵⁵ In the 1890s, the action was elsewhere. French armies were progressing at a frenetic pace to occupy the African interior before other European rivals. From Senegal, they moved East down the Niger river to what is now Mali; from Gabon, they moved North from the Atlantic coast up the Congo, Ubangi and Chari rivers; from Algeria, they moved South through the Sahara. The blind spot of the growing French Empire in Africa lay at the intersection of these three axes, in the region around Lake Chad. In particular, colonial enthusiasts focused their attention on the sultanate of Bornu, an area of competition between the British and the Germans moving northwards from Nigeria and Cameroon, respectively, and the warlord Rabih al-Zubayr moving westwards from Sudan.⁵⁶ Once again, European diplomatic rivalry intersected with mass media and popular nationalism: newspapers printed maps so that their readers in Europe could follow the progression of different expeditions.⁵⁷

Several Algerian interpreters played an important role in this expansion.⁵⁸ The French Empire, by now well established in Algeria (1830) and Tunisia (1881), used North Africa as a launching pad to expand into West and Central Africa. Muslim and Arabic-speaking, Algerians were thought to be able to travel much further into the vast Muslim region south of the Sahara known as the Soudan (from the Arabic bilad al-sudan and not to be confused with the modern Sudan, which was but a small portion of this region), stretching from Senegal to the Red Sea. There, they hoped that Algerian interpreters would use their status as fellow believers, as well as Arabs in a society where that ascendancy was prestigious, to gain the trust of West Africans.

Europeans had long relied on the accounts of North African travellers to the southern shores of the desert, at least since the times of Leo Africanus, and this trend did not disappear with the increase in European exploration in the nineteenth century. Men from Tunis, Tétouan and Tripoli made good on European audiences’ appetite for geographical information on the African interior.⁵⁹ Europeans thus sought to make use of existing connections between the northern and southern shores of the desert, infiltrating older networks of trade, education and pilgrimage to obtain information on the African interior. Recent scholarship has begun to recognize that North Africans played important roles in the Scramble for Africa, which was not just a process of European expansion. As Mustafa Minawi points out, area studies logics have often obscured the important contemporary links at the turn of the twentieth century between the ‘Middle East’ and ‘Africa’.⁶⁰

The expansion of imperialism in West and Central Africa gave Djebari an opportunity to go beyond the boundaries of the French Empire into uncharted territory. The military attaché to the Resident-General in Tunis, Lieutenant-Colonel Rebillet, had been trying to collect more intelligence on Bornu, from a Fulani Islamic scholar from the sultanate of Kano (in what is now Northern Nigeria) named al-Hajj Muhammad Fellati. Fellati had promised to guide any French agent in exchange for Rebillet paying his hajj from Tunis to Mecca.⁶¹ Excited about Fellati’s potential as a guide into this uncharted territory, Rebillet recruited Djebari for the mission.⁶² Djebari’s long experience of the French state and his linguistic abilities made him an ideal recruit: interpreters made for great explorers.

Becoming an explorer fitted with Djebari’s desire for social recognition, and by performing a useful mission for France he could hope to become a full citizen of the Republic. The Paris Geographical Society, in its mission order to Djebari, described him as a full participant in the French colonial project, a ‘fellow citizen’ (concitoyen), an explorer in his own right, enjoining him to ‘accomplish work useful to your country’.⁶³ In his writings at this time, he enthusiastically took on the language of furthering French civilization. He described his expedition as playing an important part of ‘our colonial policy’ (notre politique coloniale).⁶⁴

Djebari was happy to be an agent of empire. He positioned himself as a white explorer, describing the Yoruba as very savage and in dire need of missionary attention, for ‘the instrument of civilization par excellence is religion’.⁶⁵ Such ideas do not merely reflect Djebari’s French education, but rather the extent of the overlap between European and North African racial conceptions of black people. While Islamic notions of race had their own distinctive history, in this case they could agree with European views that sub-Saharan black populations were savage and should be brought into progress by monotheistic religion. Moroccans, Egyptians and Ottomans all had their own imperial projects in sub-Saharan Africa during this period. For an Algerian like Djebari, this could be neatly folded into the French Empire’s imperial project in sub-Saharan Africa.⁶⁶ In the subsequent controversy, he would particularly resent being confused with a West African, a ‘mere negro’ (un simple nègre).⁶⁷ Thus, Djebari was now a fully fledged participant in the European competition of the Scramble for Africa. In fact, he even had his own native informant in the form of the Fulani traveller Fellati.

Djebari’s mission was shaped by discrepancies between different information networks. No one in Tunis seems to have found out anything about Djebari’s previous dubious activities in 1881. Djebari probably benefited from the poor lines of communication between the separate administrations of Algeria and Tunisia — the former was run as a part of France by the Ministry of the Interior and the latter as a protectorate run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Because of its strategic importance, Djebari’s mission had to be disguised. While his expedition was in fact financed by the Ministry of War, as was common at the time, he was officially sent by the Paris Geographical Society for purely scientific purposes.⁶⁸

In order to perform his transformation from interpreter to explorer, Djebari had to bring back new information from the African interior. Unfortunately for him, the expedition did not go well. With his guide Fellati, Djebari left from Tunis to Bordeaux in November 1892, and then arrived at the French post of Cotonou the next month by boat, amidst the French conquest of Dahomey. From there, Djebari and Fellati travelled on to Porto-Novo, and then to the British colony of Lagos, and through Yorubaland into the interior of Nigeria. It is fairly certain that he reached Bida in the Nupe kingdom in May 1893, as he managed to send a coded letter from there back to Rebillet.⁶⁹ By this point, Fellati had abandoned him, returning home to Sokoto after having gained a free pilgrimage to Mecca courtesy of the French state.

After Bida, it is not clear exactly what happened to Djebari. He emerged back in Porto-Novo on 10 January 1894, haggard, accompanied by a retinue of porters who he had promised to pay. When the local French official refused to advance further funds to pay for the porters, he attempted to commit suicide by shooting himself in the heart. Following a period of recovery in Cotonou, he was sent back by boat to Oran and then Tunis, where Rebillet eagerly awaited his story.⁷⁰

Djebari seems to have been deeply affected by his journey. By this stage, he was described as extremely ill, ‘monomaniacal’ (that is, obsessed with a single preoccupation), and according to one medical report, addicted to morphine. He requested a thermal cure in Vichy to improve his health.⁷¹ He must also have been concerned that he had risked his entire social advancement on the success of this expedition: his salary, his marriage, the possibility of citizenship. Djebari’s wife, for instance, seems to have doubted him from the beginning, writing letters to Rebillet asking if the mission was fake.⁷²

Under pressure, Djebari returned to his previous pattern of behaviour from 1881. He made a series of increasingly fanciful claims to Rebillet. He claimed to have seen the remains of French explorer Paul Crampel along his travels in Nigeria, while Crampel actually died along the Oubangui River, some distance away in what is now the Central African Republic.⁷³ In another version, he told Rebillet he had managed to travel all the way from Nigeria to the country of the Touaregs in Aïr in what is now northern Niger. It is unlikely that Djebari had managed to travel over 1,200 kilometres from Bida to what is now Northern Niger and back in seven months. His narrative of that section of the journey was so imprecise as to suggest that he had never made it far beyond Bida in central Nigeria. As Camille Lefebvre has pointed out in her important work on Niger, foreign travellers in the region were dependent on the patronage of local rulers who could easily block them from crossing their territory, so it is possible that Djebari was never allowed into Sokoto.⁷⁴ There, he said he had seen some white men, who he claimed he had good reason to believe were the survivors of the Flatters Mission, whose members had been killed while trying to cross the Sahara in 1881.

Once again, when stuck in a corner Djebari seemed to be creating a fiction based on information about previous explorers that he had studied carefully before leaving for Nigeria. Before his departure in 1894, Djebari compared himself to Heinrich Barth, Henri Duveyrier and Gustav Nachtigal, acclaimed explorers of the Sahara.⁷⁵ The disappearance of the Flatters Mission in 1881 had generated a huge deal of emotional media attention in France, which Djebari was only too aware of; General Derrécagaix who had signed off on his mission had written an entire book on the subject.⁷⁶ While Rebillet tried to persist and obtain whatever factual information might be salvaged from this failed mission, Djebari instead broke off relations with him. He refused to take a new position as an interpreter in Zarzis, in far southern Tunisia, which he saw as a demotion, and was fired from his job.⁷⁷

Djebari’s expedition to West Africa showed that the particular skills of a colonial intermediary in North Africa (linguistic fluency and a familiarity with the functioning of the French state) could have different uses when taken elsewhere, as he became an explorer on an official French mission beyond the empire. Yet, once again Djebari was drawing profit from his ability to act as a conduit of information for Europeans in areas that they could not access. Rebillet, the officer who sent him, would rather that this work had remained invisible, but these skills could also be aimed at a different audience. Breaking with Rebillet, Djebari took the case directly to the media himself. It is in this final phase that he reached the peak of his influence by going public and directly influencing the metropolitan mass media.

IV

targeting the metropolitan media

In 1895, Djebari managed to produce a major commotion by feeding information directly into the vibrant Parisian newspaper industry. This final affair reveals a different discrepancy between information networks: speed. While news of his claims spread extremely fast from Tunisia to France via newspapers, it took considerably longer to disprove his claims in West Africa. As Isabelle Surun has pointed out, explorers were fascinating figures for mass media because for the duration of their expedition they were out of reach of normal news networks. It was thus very difficult to verify their accounts, and Djebari’s story was no exception.⁷⁸

Dissatisfied with doing Rebillet’s secretive intelligence work, he went public with his claims of having visited the Touareg in a press conference at the Institut de Carthage in Tunis in late 1894, and added an extremely detailed story of having seen the survivors of the Flatters Mission deep in the Sahara.⁷⁹ Initially, this only seems to have resonated among French newspapers in North Africa, which ridiculed his claims. In June of 1895, ruined and fired from his job as an interpreter, Djebari hit back, publishing with a local editor in Tunis a short book explaining his position, Les survivants de la mission Flatters.⁸⁰

It is this piece of writing that seemed to have grabbed the attention of metropolitan newspapers. A brief notice hit Parisian newspapers in early August 1895, which was initially not taken very seriously. On 11 August 1895 Le Journal published a letter by Gaston Donnet supporting the claims of the ‘Arab Djebari’ and calling for a mission to save the survivors of the Flatters Mission. The affair took a sudden turn when in the same newspaper, the famous socialist and feminist journalist Séverine (pen name of Caroline Rémy de Guebhard) wrote an emotional front-page plea ‘FOR THE DELIVERY OF THE CAPTIVES!’ on 19 August, which caused a large reaction. The director of Le Journal, Fernand Xau, launched a subscription to save the survivors, and several other men prominent in Saharan affairs intervened to support or contradict his claims.⁸¹

The controversy might have fizzled out if Djebari had not travelled to Paris himself in early September to defend his claims in person. He was interviewed in Le Journal and on 20 September, he gave his major talk at the Grand Hôtel, which ended with a committee of experts being formed to examine the possibility of rescuing the survivors that Djebari had found. The coverage, however, focused on the potential white survivors in the Sahara, not on the Arab interpreter who claimed to have found them. Djebari was mentioned in passing in articles, which printed detail after detail about the potential survivors.

His story was met with some scepticism by some of his audience in France, but Djebari responded by further racializing his claim to truth by portraying himself as a political enemy of untrustworthy Jews. He politicized the affair by accusing Rebillet of covering up Flatters’ survival and aligned himself with political anti-Semites. In his book, which he claimed was ‘not a novel, but a terrible story’, Djebari constantly spoke as a defender of national French honour, dedicating his book to ‘the whole of France, not the corrupt France, debased by the presence of Jews and foreigners, but to honest and hardworking France’.⁸²

Political anti-Semitism was editorial big business in France since the publication of Édouard Drumont’s bestseller La France juive in 1886.⁸³ Djebari’s distinctive political ideas calling for the extension of equality to poor Algerian Muslims, already visible in his first affair in 1881, converged with a strand of this movement. At the time, political anti-Semitism was common among radical Republicans and Socialists, as Jews were seen as upholding the bourgeois Third Republic. Among the settler population in Algeria, political anti-Semitism was especially virulent: the only deaths that occurred during the Dreyfus Affair happened in Algeria. Algerians Jews, naturalized en masse by the 1870 Décret Crémieux, played a crucial role in the electoral politics of the small European minority in Algeria. As they usually supported the more moderate Opportunist Republicans, Radical Republicans targeted Jews and attempted to have their citizenship revoked. In particular, they claimed that the naturalization of Jews had provoked resentment among Muslims, and thus positioned themselves as defenders of the Muslim majority against the rapacious Jews.⁸⁴

Thus, radical anti-Semites allied with men like Djebari who acted as spokespeople for marginalized Muslims. Djebari frequently attacked Jews in his writings, which gained him much sympathy among a section of the French media, which published excerpts from his book and quoted his interviews. In fact, 1895 was not Djebari’s first flirtation with metropolitan anti-Semitism, and his 1884 talk in Paris had attracted the attention of Georges Meynié, the author of Les juifs en Algérie, a pamphlet modelled on Drumont’s La France juive.⁸⁵

In the controversy over the survivors of the Flatters Mission, newspapers sympathetic to Djebari’s radical views attacked Rebillet for covering up the existence of the survivors and suspected him of being a servant of the freemasons, the Jews and the British. In the build-up to the Fashoda crisis, this was, after all, a time not only of great anti-Semitic agitation, but also of French–British rivalry.⁸⁶ Thus, within certain circumstances an Algerian Muslim informant could be believed and reprinted in metropolitan newspapers.

Yet, Djebari only gained his brief spell of fame courtesy of discrepancies in information networks. Once again, Djebari had manufactured detailed information that French colonial networks could not verify. As Djebari filled up the reception rooms of fancy hotels in Paris, it took some time to prove that his story was implausible. Further investigation revealed that Djebari’s story of travelling up to Touareg territory in the Aïr from Sokoto was completely fanciful. While Djebari described the town of ‘Thaoua [sic]’ as only ‘4 or 6 days’ walk from Timbuktu’, the French resident officer in Timbuktu pointed out by November 1895 that the distance was at least 450 kilometres, or about 70–80 days’ walk.⁸⁷ In fact, the distance was about double that, as Tahoua in Niger lies about 800 kilometres east of Timbuktu in Mali. Marius Gabriel Cazemajou, a young ambitious French officer who had previously been sent to Indochina and Tunisia, begged to be sent on a mission to confirm Djebari’s allegations. Leaving in October 1896, he produced a comprehensive report denying every single one of Djebari’s claims, but by this point it was 1898; it had taken several years to refute Djebari’s claims.⁸⁸ That Djebari was able to claim this for several months reveals a poor knowledge of the geography of the Soudan by the French public.

It also reveals a poor level of integration between the empire’s constituent parts. Nobody seems to have been aware of Djebari’s previous illustrious career of fabrications, so his story was met with a surprising degree of trust. In Toulouse, for instance, the secretary of the Geographical Society Stanislas Guénot noted that the lack of details in Djebari’s itinerary was difficult to explain, but insisted that Djebari’s ‘words seem filled with the utmost sincerity and the most ardent conviction’.⁸⁹ Just as the préfet in Constantine had done in 1881, many fell for Djebari’s performances, possibly because he believed in them himself.

In Algeria, the narrative of a mere native was met with more suspicion. L’Impartial de Bône, the newspaper from his home town (which seems to have been unaware of Djebari’s origins), noted that Djebari’s story was bizarre as early as December 1894. Comparing Djebari’s tale to the recent flurry of fictional novels set in the mysterious Sahara, the newspaper asked: ‘are we not currently in the period of the romans du désert?’⁹⁰

Only one article, from a publication at the centre of his first affair back in Guelma, made the connection with Djebari’s previous activities in 1881. Paul Albert, in Guelma-Journal in September 1895, noted that

this Djebari looks disturbingly like (ressemble à s’y méprendre) the character of the same name that left a bad memory in Guelma … he completely invented a conspiracy which shows that this native has a lot of imagination so it is hardly surprising he would have found the survivors of the Flatters Mission.⁹¹

With this small exception, what is striking about events in 1895 is the contrast between how poorly French information networks retained information about Djebari’s actions ten years earlier, and how fast the same media system on both sides of the Mediterranean allowed Djebari’s allegations to circulate. Djebari profited from the division of responsibility between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Colonies and the nominally academic but effectively para-governmental Paris Geographical Society, and the brewing political crisis between pro- and anti-Dreyfusards in France at a time of jingoistic colonial expansion.

The affair of the Flatters survivors gradually fizzled out. In 1896, Djebari was still attempting to further milk the Saharan adventure. Having run out of contacts in Paris, we find him in the second-largest francophone publishing centre, Brussels, forging a telegram sent from Libya that he alleged was written in a secret Arabic code and contained proof of the survival of yet another failed French expedition into the Sahara.⁹² But by this stage his luck was running short and his spectacular fame in 1894–5 was short-lived.

Then, his trace disappears. In 1901, a short notice in the local newspaper in his home town of Bône notified that a certain Messaoud Ben Athman Djebari was condemned to prison for three months for theft. If this was him, this would mean he had ended up back in the place where he was born, likely destitute, having agitated and roamed the world largely for nothing.⁹³

***

Djebari navigated the gaps in the circulation of information. An enthusiastic reader of newspapers, he used them to gain knowledge of the wider world, but also to assess what was not known and that only he could provide information on. First, in the 1881 affair of the Islamic secret society, he profited from the inability of French authorities to know the desires of the Algerian elite. With few ties to the local notability, he was able to position himself as a central broker of information between the administration and the notables. In the second affair of the survivors of the Flatters Mission, Djebari exploited European lack of knowledge of the African interior and long lines of communication back to Europe.

Djebari profited from the heightened circulation of a new widespread popular press for Europeans on both sides of the Mediterranean. At the same time, these new rapid information networks struggled to understand connections between Africans, and relied on men like Djebari to make sense either of the inner political life of Algerian Muslims, or of the interior geography of Bornu. This proliferation of chatty newspapers made it easy for him to obtain material from which he could manufacture his claims. He was an expert at using concerns and information floating in French media to weave fictions that placed him as a crucial informant — first the widely covered Franco-Italian diplomatic rivalry over Tunisia, then the ongoing cause célèbre of the Mission Flatters during the Scramble for Africa. False information circulated through the press faster than the state’s investigations could conclusively disprove them, and it is in the time-lag between the speed of these two different networks that Djebari created his affairs.

He gained the most traction at times of instability when the French Empire was expanding and in competition with European rivals, first into Tunisia in 1881, then into Soudan in 1892–5. His best results were achieved when he was able to slip between the cracks of competing ministerial agencies. As the French Empire expanded in Africa, the division between the Ministry of the Interior in charge of Algeria, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in charge of Tunisia and then Morocco, and the Ministry of Colonies in charge of West Africa led to a lack of coordination that could be exploited by cunning individuals.

Thus, Djebari’s multiple affairs help us map out information networks, where they overlapped and where the gaps lay. He was a consummate and knowing operator of these networks. As he tellingly wrote in Les survivants de la mission Flatters, ‘knowing the cogs of the administration, I am able to know how investigations are conducted’ (connaissant les rouages de l’administration, je suis à même de savoir comment se pratiquent les enquêtes).⁹⁴ Whenever his claims were doubted, he generated further details, further seemingly authentic documents, further complications that made it more difficult to disprove his claims. Like a squid, whenever he was trapped in a corner, Djebari produced further ink.

Djebari’s exact professional position changed frequently: teacher, stationmaster, interpreter, explorer, publicist. Sometimes he worked for the state administration, sometimes for private companies, sometimes independently. But the remarkable repetition of his modus operandi across multiple affairs and geographical contexts suggests a common practice. It is only by following his individual trajectory, and not a professional category, that this becomes clear: Djebari was a kind of information specialist skilled at providing men in power with detailed intelligence of spaces they could not themselves enter.

To do this, he maintained a consistent identity and repeatedly emphasized his unique position as an Algerian Muslim within a variety of circumstances. Though it is tempting to amalgamate different types of information manipulation, Djebari was not an impostor. Nor does he seem to have engaged in fraud, in the sense that his motive was not financial gain. Rather, he dramatized his access to information to gain an audience for his ideas, which is a rather different kind of scam.

The figure of the ‘native informant’ has travelled well beyond its historical context: in postcolonial studies, following on from the work of Gayatri Spivak, the phrase has come to refer more to a discursive position to be critiqued.⁹⁵ Djebari’s case suggests that, historically, becoming a native informant involved a great deal of work, skill and intelligence, work that was sometimes frustrating. In his most sustained piece of writing, Les survivants de la mission Flatters, he said that he did not want to be ‘reduced to the mere role of a provider of information (simple donneur de renseignements)’.⁹⁶ The title page below his name, featured his military title ‘ancien interprète militaire’, and below in italics, ‘explorateur’, titles that he much preferred. Djebari had his own series of ideas and his own agenda for social advancement, yet it was only by appearing to be an informant that he gained attention well beyond his native Algeria. Djebari seems to have resented merely being a conduit for other people’s projects.

After all, the practice of making oneself into a conduit involved a certain degree of invisibility. Unlike tricksters, who are celebrated for their ability to show the limits of social rules, Djebari the informant gained no cultural representation of his activities. This was unlike some other colonial informants, among the most famous of whom was Wangrin, a Malian interpreter who was made by Amadou Hampaté Bâ into the folk hero of an epic involving the manipulation of the colonial state.⁹⁷ Djebari, however, could not be celebrated: his work could not be passed off as resistance and was far too uncomfortable to provide a hero for an Algerian audience. Moreover, unlike Wangrin he was too mobile to gain an audience.

Born in a colony, Djebari travelled far and wide, to Tunis, Lagos, Paris and Brussels. His career suggests that men trained to serve colonial states could perform a wide range of activities as information professionals that went well beyond their place and training of origin, but that they retained the marks of their colonized status. Djebari navigated a world in which information could move fast with little regard for national borders but was heavily divided by a colonial fracture between Europeans and the rest. Geographical mobility did not equal social mobility.

Historians have primarily used informants to diagnose the limits of colonial power. But the susceptibility to stories from a cunning individual was not limited to colonial spaces. Djebari’s travels far beyond his colonial origins suggest a different interpretation, which may well be applied to other contexts: in a rapidly expanding and accelerating information system, the best way to spread one’s radical ideas was to pass them off as someone else’s.

Footnotes

This article is part of a longer research project that has benefited from the assistance of many people and institutions. The author would particularly like to thank Simone Langiu and Géraud Létang for providing access to documents; and Ike Achebe, Muriam Davis, Tabetha Ewing, Brian Larkin, Mary Lewis, Renaud Morieux, Helen Pfeifer, Emmanuelle Saada, Partha Shil and Sylvie Thénault for discussing previous versions of this article.

Many different accounts were given of this talk, with divergent attendance numbers, including in Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 21 Sept. 1895; Le Rappel, 21 Sept. 1895; La Lanterne, 23 Sept. 1895.

Gaston Dujarric, ‘La mission Flatters’, Revue de l’Islam (1895), 26.

Allan Christelow briefly deals with Messaoud Djebari in ‘Intellectual History in a Culture under Siege: Algerian Thought in the Last Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Middle Eastern Studies, xviii, no. 4 (1982). He also mentions Djebari’s first major affair, the case of the Secret Society of Guelma, in Allan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, 1985). For Djebari’s role in West Africa, see A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘French Missions to the Central Sudan in the 1890s: The Role of Algerian Agents and Interpreters’, Paideuma: Mitteilunger zur Kulturkunde, xl (1994).

For an overview of arguments about the concentration of media, see Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Media Imperialism (London, 2015). On the globalization of news, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981); Terhi Rantanen, The Media and Globalization (London, 2005); Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge, 2012); Heidi Tworek, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2019); Simone M. Müller, Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (New York, 2016).

Dominique Kalifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Ève Thérenty, and Alain Vaillant (eds.), La civilisation du journal: histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIX^e siècle (Paris, 2011), 29–31.

Jean K. Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (London, 1998). For France, see Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française, ii and iii (Paris, 1969); Christophe Charle, Le siècle de la presse, 1830–1939 (Paris, 2004). For other cases, see Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991); Amelia Bonea, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c.1830–1900 (Oxford, 2016).

Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami (Paris, 1885). Maupassant’s novel was published about midway through Djebari’s career, following a trip to Algeria. I thank Judith Surkis for pointing my attention to this. More widely on fictions of journalism and media in this period in France, see Guillaume Pinson, L’imaginaire médiatique: histoire et fiction du journal au XIX^e siècle (Paris, 2012); and Edmund Birch, Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France (London, 2018).

Matt Houlbrook, Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (Chicago, 2016), 7.

Tricksters have attracted a great deal of historical attention. Many studies deal with cases of multiple or contested identity. Most relevant in the North African context is Nathalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York, 2006). For other examples in a colonial context, see Rohan McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London, 2007); and Ian Duffield, ‘Identity Fraud: Interrogating the Impostures of “Robert de Bruce Keith Stewart” in Early Nineteenth-Century Penang and Calcutta’, Journal of Social History, xlv, no. 2 (2011).

C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 147–9.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009), 186; Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, 2008); Alexander Morrison, ‘Sufism, Pan-Islamism and Information Panic: Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin and the Aftermath of the Andijan Uprising’, Past and Present, no. 214 (Feb. 2012). For a further South Asian case, see also D. K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c.1880–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, xxxviii, no. 4 (2004).

Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, 2006), 4. For more on surveillance and intelligence in French North and West Africa, see Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, 1994); and Kathleen Keller, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (Lincoln, Nebr., 2018).

Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (eds.), ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culture in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997).

Messaoud Djebari, Les survivants de la mission Flatters (Tunis, 1895).

On the continuity of the local notability in Eastern Algeria under French rule, see Peter von Sivers, ‘Insurrection and Accommodation: Indigenous Leadership in Eastern Algeria, 1840–1900’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vi (1975).

This is the information contained in his military file at Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes, GR5 YE 60381. I thank Géraud Létang for allowing me to access this. Given that there was no systematic population registry for Algerian Muslims until 1882, this is best understood as an approximate date.

Letter from Djebari’s father soliciting a job for his son, 21 Nov. 1880, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter ANOM), Préfecture de Constantine (hereafter PC), B²5.

As kindly indicated by Samuel Anderson, records of students for the Constantine médersa are patchy, so it is difficult to know exactly when Djebari attended the médersa in Constantine. Studies at the médersa typically lasted three years, but before 1876, there was no age restriction on students.

Administrator of the Commune Mixte de Oued-Zenati to préfet of Constantine, 12 May 1881, ANOM, PC/B²5.

The qadi of Bône, al Fassi, who was incriminated in Djebari’s first affair in 1881, only remembers ever hearing about Djebari when Djebari sent him a letter begging for a job: al Fassi’s deposition in prison, 10 June 1881, ANOM, PC/B²5.

Report by the préfet of Constantine to the Governor-General, 23 May 1881, ANOM, Gouvernement-Général de l’Algérie (hereafter GGA), 9H4.

See, especially, on the role of bilingual médersa students Abdelkader Djeghloul, ‘La formation des intellectuels algériens modernes, 1880–1930’, Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques, économiques et politiques, xxii, no. 4 (1985).

James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge, 2017), 86–128. For Djebari’s region in particular, see David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1990).

Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (Paris, 1979), 119.

Louis Pierre Montoy, ‘La presse dans le département de Constantine, 1870–1918’ (Univ. de Provence Ph.D. thesis, 1982), 181; Didier Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir dans l’Algérie coloniale (Nanterre, 2010), 311. On the development of the newspaper industry in Algeria, see Arthur Asseraf, Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford, 2019), 27–64.

Gregory Mann, ‘What Was the Indigénat? The “Empire of Law” in French West Africa’, Journal of African History, l, no. 3 (2009), 331; Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, De l’indigénat: anatomie d’un ‘monstre’ juridique: le droit colonial en Algérie et dans l’empire français (Paris, 2010) and its critique by Isabelle Merle online in Genèses, 14 Sept. 2011, <http://geneses.hypotheses.org/114> (accessed 5 July 2019).

On the beginnings of the Mobacher, see Yvonne Turin, ‘L’instruction sans l’école? Les débuts du Mobacher, d’après une correspondance inédite d’Ismaël Urbain’, Revue de l’occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, xv–xvi (1973); and Zahir Ihaddaden, Histoire de la presse indigène en Algérie: des origines jusqu’en 1930 (Algiers, 2003).

ila al-mukarram al-ajal al-sayyid al-munshi al-mubasshir bi-al-jazair al-salam ‘alayhi wa hadha fi al-murad minkum in tadraj fi al-jurnal al-mustaqbal al-nus al-ladhi sayadhkar ba’d’, ANOM, PC/B²5.

Eventually, the law was passed on 30 June 1881 as the Loi du 30 juin 1881 sur la liberté de réunion.

Djebari to Administrator of Oued Zenati, 3 Nov. 1880, ANOM, PC/B²5.

Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley, 2014). See also Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c.1800–1900 (Berkeley, 2012). For a recent summary of Italian colonial policy, see Nicola Labanca, L’Oltremare: storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna, 2002).

On this period in Tunisian history, see Kenneth Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge, 2004), 10–37. For more detail on the struggle between the two consuls, see the now dated Jean Ganiage, Les origines du protectorat français en Tunisie (Tunis, 1969).

William Langer, ‘The European Powers and the French Occupation of Tunis, 1878–1881, I’, American Historical Review, xxxi, no. 1 (1925), and William Langer, ‘The European Powers and the French Occupation of Tunis, 1878–1881, II’, American Historical Review xxxi, no. 2 (1926). In particular, the Italian consul Macciò visited Palermo in early 1881 for extensive press coverage. Key documents during negotiations were also published in The Times. More generally on the Tunis affair in the development of Italian imperialism, see Labanca, L’Oltremare, 48–9.

I was able to locate a copy of Al Mustaqill in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Cagliari thanks to Simone Langiu and the digitizing team of the BUC. For more on the newspaper, see Ernesto Concas, ‘Un giornale arabo pubblicato a Cagliari nel 1880–1881: El Mostakel (L’indipendente)’, Mediterranea, ii (1927); and Francesco Atzeni, ‘Italia e Africa del Nord nell’Ottocento’, Rivista dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea, vi (2011).

De Francesco wrote most of the articles and hired Yusif Bakhus, a Maronite Christian, to translate the articles into Arabic. The identity of al-Mustaqill’s editors would also give rise to a great deal of coverage in French newspapers, see Ganiage, Origines du protectorat français en Tunisie, 466–8.

Governor-General to Ministry of the Interior, 20 Aug. 1880, ANOM, Fonds Ministériel, F80/1729; Concas, ‘Un giornale arabo pubblicato a Cagliari’, 17.

For a similar observation involving Egyptian nationalists using the European press during this period, see Ziad Fahmy, ‘Francophone Egyptian Nationalists, Anti-British Discourse, and European Public Opinion, 1885–1910: The Case of Mustafa Kamil and Ya’qub Sannu’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, xxviii (2008).

The document is in the dossier in ANOM, PC/B²5.

Allan Christelow, ‘Intellectual History in a Culture under Siege: Algerian Thought in the Last Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Middle Eastern Studies, xviii, no. 4 (1982).

The full title was ‘Ard hal umur tunis al-hadira bi-jami’ al-ahali al-muslimin min al-khas wa al-’am fi al-jaza’ir’. If anything, the French translation made the class dimension more explicit by translating his words as ‘société des musulmans algériens quel que soit leur rang’; the document is part of the dossier ANOM, PC/B²5.

Djebari in prison to préfet in Constantine, June 1881, ANOM, PC/B²5.

Governor-General of Algeria to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 8 Apr. 1881, Archives Diplomatiques de La Courneuve, Correspondance Politique, Algérie/8.

Different versions of the document can be found in: French Consul in Tunis to GGA, 16 Apr. 1881, Archives Diplomatiques, Correspondance Politique, Algérie/9 and ANOM/PC/B²5.

On the controversy over the Islamic justice system and the ‘war of the qadi’, see Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria, 224–39.

The narrative that follows comes from Djebari’s deposition on 14 May 1881 in ANOM/PC/B²5. A summary can be found in the préfet’s final report on 23 May 1881 in ANOM/GGA/9H4.

A copy of Djebari’s letter to Mustafa bin Isma’il requesting an audience is also part of the dossier in ANOM/PC/ B²5.

Report 23 May 1881, ANOM/GGA/9H4.

Ibid.

Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 8.

Ben Chettah, deposition at the civil prison of Constantine, 14 June 1881, ANOM/PC/B²5.

Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria, 234–6. On the arrests, see La Seybouse, ‘Arrestations dans l’arrondissement de Bône’, 17 May 1881; and Le Pays (Paris), ‘Question du jour’, 28 May 1881.

Le Rappel, 7 July 1884; L’Intransigeant, 11 July 1884.

His military file shows that he proved his identity on joining by producing four witnesses in front of a notary (’ādil), which was permissible under Islamic law: Service Historique de la Défense, GR5 YE 60381. As there was no civil registry for Algerian Muslims until 1882, for a person born in the 1860s like Djebari it was entirely possible to generate multiple identities as long as one could find or corrupt witnesses to do so. For a case at this time involving Jews generating fake identities, see Jessica M. Marglin, ‘The Two Lives of Mas’ud Amoyal: Pseudo-Algerians in Morocco, 1830–1912’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, xliv (2012).

La Liberté de Bône, 21 July 1891, quoting the nomination decree of 7 July 1891.

Charles Féraud, Les interprètes de l’armée d’Afrique (Algiers, 1876); Raymond Mopoho, ‘Statut de l’interprète dans l’administration coloniale en Afrique francophone’, Meta, xlvi, no. 3 (2001). More generally, see Alain Messaoudi, Les arabisants et la France coloniale: savants, conseillers, médiateurs, 1780–1930 (Lyon, 2015); Soraya Mouloudji-Garroudji, ‘An al-athar al-’ilmi lil-mutarjimin al-’askariyin fi al-buldan al-maghribiyya al-musta’mira: al-jaza’ir namudhaj’ [On the Academic Works of Military Translators in the Colonized Maghreb: The Case of Algeria], Insaniyat, 67 (2015), 53–66.

On the diplomatic context at this time, see R. A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and its Enemies (London, 1971).

Alexander S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French Military Imperialism (Cambridge, 1969); William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1982); Clare Pettitt, Dr. Livingstone I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire (London, 2007); Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester, 2013).

One notable example was Ahmed Ben Mechkane, the interpreter who played a key role in Louis Mizon’s expedition to Adamawa as described in Le Temps, 10 Aug. 1892. More generally, see Kanya-Forstner, ‘French Missions to the Central Sudan in the 1890s’; and Allan Christelow, ‘Algerian Interpreters and the French Colonial Adventure in sub-Saharan Africa’, Maghreb Review, x (1985).

On Leo Africanus, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York, 2006). For examples of influential nineteenth-century accounts, see the Moroccan al-Hajj Abd al Salam Shabini, in James Grey Jackson, An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa: Territories in the Interior of Africa, by el Hage Abd Salam Shabeeny (London, 1820); the Tunisian Mohammed Ibn-Omar el-Tounsy, Voyage au Soudan Oriental (Paris, 1845), recently edited in a bilingual English-Arabic edition as Muhammad al-Tunisi, In Darfur: An Account of the Sultanate and its Peoples, ed. Humphrey Davies, 2 vols. (New York, 2018); or the Moroccan Mardochée Aby Serour, in Jacob Oliel, De Jérusalem à Tombouctou: l’odysée saharienne du rabbin Mardochée, 1826–1886 (Olbia, 1998).

Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford, 2016). On the connections between North Africa and the Soudan in the nineteenth century, see Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge, 2009); and James McDougall and Judith Scheele, Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 2012).

For more on Fellati and in particular the possibility that he was himself a spy for the Sokoto Caliphate attempting to gather more information on the French and British, see Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Alhaji Ahmad el-Fellati ibn Dauda ibn Muhammad Manga and the Kano Civil War, 1893–95’, in Femi J. Kolapo and Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry (eds.), African Agency and European Colonialism, 45–57.

The entire correspondence is in Archives de la Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP), Missions, Di-Du, 360.

‘Programme général’, Letter from général Derrécagaix to Djebari, 26 Sept. 1892, SGP, Di-Du, 360.

Djebari, Les survivants de la mission Flatters, 58.

Quoted by Stanislas Guénot, 9 Oct. 1895, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Toulouse, xi–xii (1895), 419–20.

For more on North African concepts of race and understandings of the bilad al-Sudan, see Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge, 2013); and Bruce S. Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge, 2011). On Egyptian and Ottoman imperial projects, see Minawi, Ottoman Scramble for Africa; and Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, 2002).

Djebari, Les survivants de la mission Flatters, 109.

‘Programme général’, Letter from général Derrécagaix to Djebari, 26 Sept. 1892, SGP, Di-Du, 360. On the political role of the Société de Géographie de Paris, see Donald Vernon McKay, ‘Colonialism in the French Geographical Movement, 1871–1881’, Geographical Review, xxxiii, no. 2 (1943); Dominique Lejeune, Les sociétés de géographie en France et l’expansion coloniale au XIX^e siècle (Paris, 1993); and Pierre Singaravélou (ed.), L’Empire des géographes: géographie, exploration et colonisation, XIX^e–XX^e siècle (Paris, 2008).

The letter is contained in SGP, Colis 1 TER, 1511.

Report on Djebari from Ministry of War, 1894, SGP, Colis 37, 4011.

Ministry of War to Ministry of Colonies, 5 June 1895, ANOM, Ministère des Colonies, 50COL/2. Rebillet to Derrécagaix, 27 June 1894, SGP, Di-Du, 360. On the trope of explorers going crazy, see Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley, 2000).

Letter from Djebari’s wife to Rebillet, 31 Mar. 1893, SGP, Di-Du, 360.

‘Note sommaire sur le voyage de Djebari’, SGP, Di-Du, 360.

Camille Lefèbvre, Frontières de sable, frontières de papier: histoire de territoires et de frontières, du jihad de Sokoto à la colonisation française du Niger, XIX^e–XX^e siècles (Paris, 2015).

Djebari to Derrécagaix, 31 Aug. 1894. Barth, Duveyrier and Nachtigal had all been awarded the Société de Géographie’s prized Gold Medal for Exploration.

Victor-Bernard Derrécagaix, Exploration du Sahara: les deux missions du Lieutenant-colonel Flatters (Paris, 1882).

The Annuaire de l’armée française pour l’année 1895 listed Messaoud Djébari as a second-class auxiliary interpreter in Zarzis, Tunisia. A cabinet decision of 8 May 1895 removed him from his position.

Isabelle Surun, ‘Les figures de l’explorateur dans la presse du XIX^e siècle’, Le Temps des médias, i, no. 8 (2007); and Isabelle Surun, Dévoiler l’Afrique? Lieux et pratiques de l’exploration (Afrique occidentale, 1780–1880) (Paris, 2018).

La Dépêche algérienne, 20 Nov. 1894.

Djebari, Les survivants de la mission Flatters, 1895.

Gaston Donnet, ‘Les survivants de la mission Flatters’, Le Journal, 11 Aug. 1895; Séverine, ‘Pour la délivrance des captifs’, Le Journal, 19 Aug. 1895; Victor Cottens, ‘Conversation avec M. Djebari’, Le Journal, 11 Sept. 1895.

Djebari, Les survivants de la mission Flatters, 3, 72.

Patrice Boussel, L’affaire Dreyfus et la presse (Paris, 1960); Michel Winock, Édouard Drumont et Cie: antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris, 1982); Nancy Fitch, ‘Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair in Rural France’, American Historical Review, xcvii (1992).

Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca, 2019); Geneviève Dermenjian, La crise anti-juive oranaise, 1895–1905: l’antisémitisme dans l’Algérie coloniale (Paris, 1986); Lucette Valensi, Juifs et musulmans en Algérie: VII^e–XX^e siècle (Paris, 2018).

Georges Meynié, Les juifs en Algérie (Paris, 1888),

Esleman Abay

Mass Media and the Colonial Informant: Messaoud Djebari and the French Empire, 1880–1901

Abstract

I

the man who read too many newspapers

II

the tunisian crisis: using the state as a broadcaster

III

From interpreter to explorer

IV

targeting the metropolitan media

Footnotes

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