Word: tuareg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bidanes), felt itself too poor to have a capital of its own: it shared Saint-Louis, which was the capital of black Senegal. In Dahomey, which means "The Belly of Dan," after an ancient king who ate his victims, the fiercest warriors were once the Amazons. And among the Tuareg tribes of the Niger, it is the men, not the women, who wear veils...
...pull of the desert and the sense of a religious and patriotic mission-"to give ands to France and souls to God"-proved too strong. He was ordained, and went to minister to the Tuareg, 900 miles south of Algiers. His parish covered 1,500,000 square miles of the Sahara. His parish house was a small mud hut in Tamanrasset, 400 miles from the nearest French outpost. His daily meal was a miserable date-and-barley stew. Within a year he translated the Gospels into Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg, writing with an ink made from charcoal...
...selfless imitation of Christ could not fail to impress the Tuareg. They called him the Great White Marabout (holy man), and kissed the hem of his robe. But by the middle of World War I, a group of fanatic Moslems, incited by the Turks, had marked him for capture. A native trusted by Abbé de Foucauld decoyed him from the new French fort at Tamanrasset. Grilled by his captors, he prayed in silence, made no resistance, and said only: "Baghi n'mout-This is the hour of my death." Shortly after, his chief captor put a carbine muzzle...