FRANCE: The Traveling Salesman

For the man who played so crucial a role in catapulting Charles de Gaulle to power, the post at first seemed rather an anticlimax. But from the moment he took it over in January, burly Jacques Soustelle, 47, has made the most of the Ministry of the Sahara. Last week, in the oasis town of Ouargla, he briskly inspected a 2O-acre terminal servicing the 25-ton trucks that haul pipe to the huge (500 million tons) oil strike at Hassi Messaoud. He checked over plans for a loo-room, air-conditioned hotel, invested the new mayor with a tricolor sash. As he went through these ceremonies, he was not only the minister in charge of two new French dèpartements (states) that together are three times the size of Texas. He was also the man most responsible for making France’s “Saharan dream” come true. “It is here in this desert region,” he told a crowd of Moslem patriarchs and young French technicians, “that the destiny of the French Republic will be settled.”

United, We Prosper. The French government and private investors are already pouring a million dollars a day into schools and roads, water prospecting, and most of all, the development of the desert’s proven oil and gas reserves. By 1964 France hopes to be pumping 30 million tons of oil a year out of the Sahara—almost the exact amount needed for domestic consumption. But if France is sold on the Sahara, the Sahara is not entirely sold on France. Last week, as self-styled commis voyageur (traveling salesman) for the Sahara, Soustelle flew in his ministerial plane straight into the scorched and craggy land of the Mozabites, the most sales-resistant people in the desert.

Though only 30,000 strong (among a French Saharan population of 840,000), the Mozabites occupy a crucial area, so rich is it in oil. The descendants of a persecuted splinter group of Moslems that took refuge in their present inaccessible home back in the Middle Ages, they do not allow their wives to unveil even for the dentist. But they have been shrewd in jumping aboard the oil bandwagon, and French officials estimate that there are already at least a score of franc billionaires among the Mozabites. “France never has and never will tamper with your faith and customs,” Soustelle told the bearded oldsters. And to a group of young oil truckers he said: “But now I bring you a message from De Gaulle. That message is that, united in our effort for peace and prosperity, we will have them both and more. If we are wise enough to work together, we cannot fail.” . We Will Never Leave. For four 18-hour days, at walled village after village, he went through the same routine—the greeting of the pipers, the investiture of new mayors and councilmen, the decorating of soldiers and civilians with everything from the Mėdaille Militaire to the Sanitation Cross with Palms. But wherever he was—the marketplaces, at a feast of whole roast sheep, or in private audience—he knew that those to whom he spoke may well have served with the Algerian rebels.

The rebels, said Soustelle, “are only misleaders. The war they want to involve you in is without aim or end. They abandon you always; France will never leave.”