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TWENTY-SIX

Uniting Africa

WHEN THE VICHY GOVERNMENT reconfirmed its commitment to the Trans-Saharan Pipeline, Charles Bedaux left the internment camp at Compiègne. Sumner Jackson had left a week earlier, and more ‘special cases’ were allowed to return to their homes in Paris. Charles Junior was released several days after his father. In the meantime, Bedaux lobbied the Germans to obtain transportation, fuel, building materials and heavy machinery for the African pipeline. ‘The German authorities were not particularly impressed,’ Gaston Bedaux wrote, ‘but Charles was so persuasive, so seductive, that he made his point.’ It happened at a meeting, where Gaston observed his brother ‘at a green baize table surrounded by Frenchmen in civilian clothes and Germans in uniform. The French nodded, and the Germans said nothing. All of a sudden, my brother looked more severe than before and, turning towards the Germans, said to them, “Messieurs, you are the victors. That is a great responsibility.”’ The Germans, Gaston recalled, looked thoughtful and finally granted him an Ausweis and ‘the required raw materials’. Dr Franz Medicus’s Department of Administrative Economy set aside 15,000 litres of fuel, 140 kilograms of lubricants and 350 litres of oil for an expedition to survey the route. The supplies would await Bedaux at Casablanca. In addition, he would take thirty engineers and surveyors, a fleet of American trucks, Ford tractors and 200 labourers. He confidently predicted to Gaston that the pipeline would supply peanut oil to France at an annual rate of 200,000 tons within a year.

Gaston asked Charles whether he was afraid of tackling a job, difficult even in peacetime, that could be impossible during a war. ‘But that’s why I’m going there,’ Charles answered. To Gaston, his brother’s motives were humanitarian, removing the Sahara ‘as a barrier to human progress’. More cynically, Janet Flanner wrote, ‘This peanut scheme was the pinnacle in the fantasy, intelligence, and possible treason of Bedaux’s business career, since it might actually have squeezed hundreds of thousands of tons of fat a year out of his projected Niger Valley peanut plantations for our enemies, the fat-hungry Herrenvolk, masters of the Continent.’ The project stood to increase Charles’s considerable fortune. He subscribed 2.5 million francs to a four million franc bond issue, the rest coming from French banks. His Syndicat d’Études du Continent Africain pour le Transport des Huiles Africaines would build and operate peanut refineries in the interior of Niger that would have a captive market for peanut oil in carbohydrate-starved France and, undoubtedly, in Germany. His enterprise would compete with French peanut planters along Africa’s west coast and, given its lower delivery costs, probably put them out of business.

A few weeks after his release from internment, Bedaux had everything in place for his expedition to map out the pipeline route. Although Friedrich von Ledebur had declined to join the survey, there was no shortage of volunteers for the desert and jungle adventure. Bedaux prepared to leave for Algiers in late October with the blessings of his friends in the Nazi administration. On 23 October, Dr Franz Medicus wrote to him, ‘When I put myself in your situation today, there can be but one thought in your mind: the welfare of your Fern during your absence. Go in perfect tranquility! Only look ahead of you, concentrate your attention on your great mission. Soldiers cannot fight with trouble behind them … We who are staying behind form a ring of steel around Fern.’ Four days later, Bedaux left Fern at Candé and flew to Marseilles, where he changed planes. Bedaux landed at Algiers’ Maison Blanche airfield on the same day, 27 October. A torrid desert wind drove sand into the eyes of his son, Charles Emile, and a dozen assistants waiting to welcome his father to Algeria. They stayed at Algiers’ most fashionable hotel, the art deco Aletti beside the port. One of the first people Bedaux sought out was