GUELMA

If one were looking for the most typical example of what European civilisation has done upon its return to Africa, one would choose Guelma.

I do not mean by the words ‘typical example’ the most remarkable, still less the most admirable, whether in government or in architecture and other externals. I mean: the place where the new effort shows all its various qualities, good and bad, at their average. There in the little town among the mountains you have the strong memories of the Roman time, the mixture in almost equal proportions of the European and the native, the astonishing agricultural development with which French energy has renewed the fertile land of North Africa, the visible relics of the conquest, and all this set in one of the finest and most characteristic landscapes of Barbary. For Guelma stands upon a rise of land central to a great cup in the mountains, a sort of half-way house between the sea and the ancient capital, Constantine.

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As you approach the little place, you have the full illusion of Europe; especially if you come upon it in the spring. The beginning of the desert is not three long days’ walk away, not half a day in a motor: at least, what I should call the beginning of the desert, which is the foot of Aurès and the famous cleft in the hills which is called in Arabic ‘the Mouth of the Sahara.’ Yet here, all around Guelma, are nothing but rich crops, green mountain sides, running water, and even, what is rare in Africa, large groups of timber.

What aids the illusion is the great French road running between rows of trees on either side, now mature; a road which might be in the Bourbonnais; which might have been transported bodily across the Mediterranean! And as one walks along it up the hill, one cannot but expect at the end of it an old French town.

It is when one comes near enough to distinguish detail that the African character is first apparent, for the walls still stand which were built when the whole country was full of fighting, and when the occupation had just begun. And these walls are everywhere loop-holed for defence against attack. In the same view you see, standing up among the group of small provincial houses, essentially French in character, standing up in the neighbourhood of a very French parish church and a typically French market-place (with the unfailing foliage of the _Mail_), the minaret of a mosque and the huge semicircle of the Roman theatre; a pendant to which, upon the other side of the town, is the large ruins of the baths. It stands after two thousand years in the midst of the barracks where the garrison is quartered.

There has been a deliberate effort to restore the memory of Rome, and to impress its greatness upon the men who came in upon its decline, and pillaged its ruins. The portrait statues set up by antiquity, found buried or cast aside, have been raised again upon their pedestals in the public street, and, quite lately, the theatre has been made to look once more as much as possible what it was when Cyprian was the head of the struggling African church, or earlier when the Antonines still ruled the world.

I am not sure whether the French have done well or ill in this restoration. Politically their object was just, and has, perhaps, been obtained; but to the eye, a thing half of which is modern, and which is yet exactly modelled upon the antique, has something strange about it. Perhaps it is only the effect of the onlooker’s age.

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When I first saw this mighty thing I was a young man in my thirty-fourth year. It stood then, a huge hollow of very large worn stones, rising in tiers of seats one above the other, with grass growing between, and shrubs, and, perhaps, the half of it in ruins. Where the stage had been was then nothing but a level sward; the ground fell abruptly away beyond, and the great cup looked solemnly out towards the mountains north and west. I drew a picture of it in pencil to illustrate the book _Esto Perpetua_ which I wrote to describe Africa.

Now, visiting the place after twenty years, I cannot wholly approve the change. Every old stone that could still serve was kept, but all that had fallen into ruin was replaced. An exact scholarship looked after every detail, and has even been at the pains of setting round the half-circle of high exterior wall those sockets in which were placed, so many centuries ago, the masts to support the awning that shaded the audience from the African sun. Indeed, the great theatre of Guelma is actually in use again, and on its new stone stage has been acted the drama of the Ancients and of the Moderns. ‘Great’ I have called it. Yet, somehow, it seems smaller with its modern reparations and close copying of the past. It seemed more vast and more noble in its abandonment, as it had remained for so many centuries, and as I first saw it all those years ago.

Guelma is typical not only in its unison of the modern French, the Mohammedan and the Antique, nor only in its chief character of an African market town, serving the new agricultural wealth of the province; it is typical also of that domesticity and lack of magnificence which, so far, has marked the return of Europe to this land. Algiers and Oran are great French cities, and Tunis and the lesser places bear the same stamp. But the ancients raised monuments everywhere, even in the smaller towns, of a character and endurance, of a nobility to the eye, and of a permanence in intention, which our modern civilisation fails to reach. There has been, perhaps, but one modern moment comparable to the many centuries of the pagan civilisation in the magnificence of its building, and that was the time of Louis XIV. The spirit did not last; it fell from grandeur to prettiness, and after that, save for the brief classical interlude of the end of the First Republic and of the Empire, nothing worthy has appeared.

And Guelma shows all this. There is nothing further that Europe has done, even on a small scale, to compare with the baths in their ruin, or the theatre—let alone with what the whole place must have been when those buildings were alive. The Guelma of antiquity was no larger than the Guelma of to-day. It served the same social purpose, a market town for the farmers in the highlands and of the rich seaward valleys of the Tell. But even in a place upon so small a scale Rome and Greece were able to impose the stamp of nobility. We to-day neither desire to impose such a mark nor are we able to do so.

But with this lack of magnificence goes that pleasant stability of small fortune that you find even better rooted here in Africa than in the mother country, and it applies not only to the colonists, but to the native people. The new civilisation has not only created a new agriculture for its own people, it has multiplied—I know not by how much, but very largely—the wealth of the original Mohammedan farmers. Yet even to-day it is curious to note how the native African race clings to its traditional culture of the soil; with what suspicion or indifference it looks upon agricultural machinery; and what a contrast it continues to make with the increasing area of European tilling.

Yet change is taking place. The occasion of my last passing through Guelma was a sort of little local exhibition or fair of agricultural machinery. And of the many buyers a large minority was native. It was strange to note the big American advertisements attracting a crowd of turbaned men mixed with European farmers, and to see pictures of a reaper and binder on the lands of the Middle West stuck up here in the African hills for an advertisement in that half-Eastern, half-European scene.

Africa is full of such things—I mean full of such odd contrasts and mixtures, and I, for my part, find therein the chief pleasure of African travel. But nowhere did I see contrasts more numerous and balanced than in Guelma that day of the fair. American industry, Islam, the eternal Gallic peasant—and the majesty of Rome, a visible ghost, a background for it all.