Antoine de Saint-Exupery landed on the sands of Cape Juby in
1926, having leapfrogged his biplane along the North-west African coast from
Toulouse in the south of France. I reached the same sands, a rubbish-strewn
beach of occasional low dunes, 85 years later. Cape Juby had become Tarfaya,
and I had come close to following Saint-Exupery’s flight course, but overland.
He, and his cargo of air mail, was on the way to Dakar in Senegal. I was
heading for Dakar too. Unlike my route to South Africa however, the aeropostale aircraft of wood and cloth
would then jump the Atlantic to Brazil.
Aeropostale’s flight
route to Brazil
While it was firmly in the hands of Spain, Saint-Exupery
became manager of the airfield at Cape Juby. The museum dedicated to him in
Tarfaya describes the area as being deep within “the Mauritanian desert”.
Little has changed since. Sand, all I could really see from my vehicle’s
windows, made its slow progress across the perfectly lain roads from Tan Tan
further north. As well as being positioned in a desert, Tarfaya lies close to
the abandoned border formalities between Morocco proper and Western Sahara.
Community
painting of an old aeropostale poster found in the museum at Tarfaya
Western Sahara is indeed the western Sahara. Morocco would
also like to have you believe the county was part of historic ‘greater
Morocco’. The vast number of flags depicting Morocco’s green pentagram star on
red attempt to secure this point of view. Neither the United Nations, nor the
Saharawi people who used to call it home, are quite so sure. Most Saharawi now
live in refugee camps in Algeria’s desert. (This helps to explain why the
Morocco-Algeria border remains closed.) I only met one person willing to admit
to being Saharawi. I met him in a teahouse one evening in the de facto capital Laayoune. He sounded
honestly hurt when he spoke to me of how “Europe had given its colonies
independence, but Morocco would not give independence to Western Sahara”. It’s
perhaps ironic given Morocco’s history as French, Spanish, and international
territory.
This
model biplane stands by Tarfaya’s old air field
Getting between international territories was much harder in
Saint-Exupery’s youth. Flying was still in its early days. Pilots lacked
instrumentation, and fought hard to keep their aircraft under control. Landing
was particularly difficult. An awful lot of the photographs in Tarfaya’s museum
showed Saint-Exupery’s biplane upside-down. He seemed to make a career out of
surviving spectacular crashes. Finally, his career choice caught up with him,
and he disappeared fighting for the Free French in the last year of the Second
World War. His aircraft wasn’t discovered until 2004, though in France his name
had lived on as a national hero and author. Often with a philosophical bent,
his writings sought “to give a sense of the world without repercussions”.