Frontiers in North Africa

2.3 Colonial Occupation

All this was to change with the advent of colonial occupation in North Africa. In the aftermath of the occupation of Algiers by the French army in 1830, a new system of administration was imported into the region. This was based on the concept of territorial demarcation of authority (Muller 1982; 165) - not just between different European colonial administrations, but between different types of administrative practice within the same colonial domain. The French occupation of Algiers, in short, marked a profound change in the nature of political authority - not just because alien authorities had replaced their indigeneous counterparts and had introduced a different political philosophy but also because the way in which that authority would be spatially applied had changed.

During the 1840s, French colonial control spread through the Beyliks that made up the equivalent of modern Algeria. In 1845, France was able to impose a border delimitation on Morocco in the Treaty of Lalla Marnia, after the Moroccan defeat at Isly in 1844. In 1881, after apparent provocation by the border Khumir tribes, France invaded and occupied Tunisia (Morsy 1984; 199) - on the grounds that its own control over the populations on its Algerian territories was threatened. In 1910, a border treaty was imposed on the Ottoman administration in Tripoli in order to delimit the territories of Tunisia and Tripolitania - less than a year before Italy invaded what was to become Libya.

In 1912, after several years of slow French penetration into Morocco from the east and from the coast around Anfa (later to become Casablanca) while Spain extended its influence from its presidios in Ceuta and Melilla which were occupied during the sixteenth century, France and Spain imposed a settlement on the sultanate of Morocco. This involved the problem of delimitation between the French and Spanish zones and was later to involve delimitations between different regions of French administration. It also brought to the fore the difficult problem of the future administration and frontier demarcation of the international zone around Tangier (Stuart 1931; 87-96), as well as reminding Spain of its ambitions for a Saharan empire.

At the same time, French colonial penetration into Chad and Niger from West Africa and southwards from Algeria was to link up the new colonial empire that had been created by France in North, West and Central Africa. The occupation of Chad began with the Battle of Kousseri in 1900 and was completed with the occupation of Tibesti in 1913 (Decalo 1977; iv-v). This immediately introduced the problem of the practical consequences of the 1899 Franco-British agreement over delimitation of their respective spheres of influence in central and east Africa and initiated the dispute over the border between Libya and Chad - a problem that began to receive attention as early as 1902. All in all, however, by the outbreak of the First World War, an initial delimitation of territorial frontiers throughout North Africa which was recognisably similar to that to be found after independence had been created.