CHAPTER XXV

TEN YEARS OF FRENCH ACTION IN WEST AFRICA

The history of France’s action in West Africa during the last ten years has been so remarkable that it deserves to be recorded in some detail, and where possible her policy may be usefully compared with our own. On January 23, 1892, the Paris _Figaro_ published a literary supplement entitled “Our African Domain,” in which was set forth by various competent authorities—amongst whom was Captain Binger;[202] Emile Masqueray, the well-known student of Algerian problems; Georges Rolland, one of the foremost advocates of the Trans-Saharan Railway; and “Harry Alis,” the redoubtable Colonial propagandist, Lord Cromer’s _bête noire_, whose tragic end will be in the recollection of many—the past achievements, actual position and future aspirations of France in Western and Central Africa. The supplement was divided into five parts, entitled respectively “Algeria”; “Penetration towards the Chad”; “Senegal and Dependencies”; “Our Position on the Gulf of Guinea”; “Congo and Chad.” At the time this supplement appeared, the revival of Colonial ambition in France, which owed its inception largely to the foresight and courage of Jules Ferry, had taken firm root among the _élite_ of French public opinion. But although the seed where it fell gave forth lusty fruit, the sowers were relatively few, and the area under cultivation was still but small in 1892. The Chamber of Deputies was slow to grant fresh credits. Politicians as a whole viewed the eloquence of Eugène Etienne and other exponents of the Ferry school with ill-disguised nervousness, if not with positive apprehension, fearing that the country was being turned from its true business of guarding against possible aggression from Germany, and was playing into Bismarck’s hands by rushing into Colonial adventures which it was known that Bismarck, for his own reasons, was desirous of encouraging. No one party or rather group cared to identify itself too closely with the expansionists, remembering the whirlwind of popular passion which assailed and overwhelmed _le Tonkinois_. On the other hand, it was not wise to entirely dissociate one’s self from a movement which was steadily gaining a hold over the masses. So Parliament vacillated, and, swayed by contrary winds, voted funds one minute and sought to withdraw them the next.

The _Figaro’s_ supplement was widely criticised. The schemes it elaborated were not merely ambitious, they were gigantic. “Our policy,” it argued, “is to make one homogeneous entity of Algeria, Senegal, and Congo _viâ_ the Tuareg-Sahara and the Central and Western Sudan.” The timid Deputy shuddered at the prospect. What must have been, even to the master-minds who initiated the policy, not much more than a fond hope strengthened by an unshaken faith in the destiny of the country; what, in the eyes of those who opposed it, appeared as a monstrous figment of the imagination, is to-day in its main lines a reality! How has it been accomplished?

“Our intentions are pure and noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail us,” wrote Faidherbe in 1859, and, on the whole, despite errors, despite the effects of temporary reaction coming after acute disappointment, despite some individual instances of cruelty and oppression, events have justified Faidherbe’s confident declaration. The work of France in Africa during the last ten years and more has, in the main, been a work of progress tending to benefit the populations with whom she has come in contact. Notable exceptions there have been, of course, especially during the years 1897 and 1898, when the scramble for West Africa was at its height, and under the spell of an insensate rivalry deeds were committed by all the parties in the struggle which cannot be too strongly condemned. To France’s debit account must be placed the ruthless proceedings of Bretonnet in Borgu; the needless bloodshed of which Mossi, Kipprisi, and Gurunsi were the scenes; the inevitable barbarity which characterised Marchand’s hunt for carriers in the Upper Ubanghi and Bahr-el-Ghazal. These incidents in themselves are odious and reprehensible; but it is only fair to recognise that they were the outcome of international jealousies the responsibility for which was collective rather than single, shared in by other Powers as well as by France herself. In what may be regarded as France’s own sphere of influence, acts have also been perpetrated from time to time which call for censure. The punishment meted out to certain towns hostile to the French in the Western Sudan have been altogether disproportionate to the offence. In the case of the French officers Voulet and Chanoine, an incalculable amount of suffering was inflicted upon the unfortunate people on the western banks of the Niger. But from these isolated transgressions against the principles of humanity, culpable as they have been, the records of no European Power in Africa are free; and they cannot, in the circumstances of France, be held to negative or even weaken the advantages she has undoubtedly conferred upon the population of the Western and Central Sudan, nor yet tarnish the great reputation France has achieved in the emancipation of millions from centuries of tyranny and invasion. If she has had her Voulets and Chanoines, France can show in the persons of her De Brazzas, her Bingers, her Monteils, her Crozats, her Foureaus, Noirots, Gentils, Hoursts, and Lenfants, performances which the subjects of other Powers may have equalled but have not surpassed; always excepting Barth, whose moral grandeur towers high above that of all his competitors on West African soil.

From the time when the Sieur de Brüe—one of the clearest-headed Frenchmen who ever served his country in Africa—paid ceremonious visits to the King of Kayor and the “grand Seratik” of the Fulas at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth century; from the time when raiding bands of Trarza Moors, extending their depredations to the very confines of St. Louis (1840-60) compelled Faidherbe to take the offensive against them, to the present day, it has been the lot of France to find herself confronted in West Africa with races differentiating in every respect from the true Negro of the coast regions—the people whom England had, up to 1900, been chiefly concerned with. Eight years before, a certain Select Committee of the House of Commons, frightened at the responsibilities England was assuming in West Africa, pusillanimously recommended the abandonment of all our settlements except Sierra Leone, thus enunciating a policy the evil effects of which continued until 1895 and greatly limited our footing in West and Central Africa; France had just emerged successfully from a death grapple with one of the most powerful individuals that ever sprung from African loins, el Haj-Omar, the great Tukulor Mallam and warrior. Looking backward at that long vista of years, when France was slowly but irresistibly thrusting her influence into West Africa, _viâ_ the Senegal and Upper Niger, by pouring out her treasure and the blood of her sons like water; while England remained supine on the coast heedless of the representations of her merchant-pioneers, it was not surprising that, awakening almost too late from our lethargy, we should have found the French, having triumphed over their obstacles in the north, forging southwards and cutting off our rich hinterlands in the interior. Writing to the Marquis of Dufferin in 1892, Lord Salisbury contrasted the policy of Great Britain and France in Western Africa. “France,” wrote Lord Salisbury, “from her basis on the Senegal Coast, has pursued steadily the aim of establishing herself on the Upper Niger and its affluents.... Great Britain, on the other hand, has adopted the policy of advance by commercial enterprise.” There was, indeed, on the part of Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol merchants, plenty of “commercial enterprise,” but it would have been difficult for Lord Salisbury to have quoted a single instance where that “commercial enterprise” had constituted “a policy of advance.”

It is due to the type of native inhabiting the chief radius of France’s operations in Western Africa, that her task has been rendered so dangerous and so difficult, and its fulfilment so remarkable. Criticise as we may, and often enough unjustly, because ignorantly, the colonising capacities of our Gallic neighbours, and the fluctuations of their colonial policy, it is beyond question that no nation on earth could have achieved what she has achieved in Western Africa, without the possession of a doggedness and determination for which we do not—to our own injury, be it said—even now, give her the credit which she deserves. For centuries upon centuries the enormous tract which lies between the edge of the Sahara Desert and the fringe of the tropical forest belt—consisting for the most part of grassy uplands varied by wide plains of amazing fertility, by reason of the yearly overflow of the waters of the Niger—had been the cockpit of Africa. Empire after empire rose and fell; invasion and counter-invasion swept devastatingly over the country. The splendours of Jenne and Timbuctoo vanished with the sway of the Songhay, beneath the bullets of Morocco’s musketeers. Fulani domination arose and gave way before Tukulor cruelties. Semi-negro kingdoms came into being, declared their independence of this or that conqueror, only to be subdued, while their victors had, in turn, to bite the dust before some stronger foe. The mingling of races in that vast region has no parallel in Africa. Ages ago the pastoral Fula—veritable Asiatic—had settled therein with his flocks and herds, destined in time by the sheer force of superior intellect to become the master where he had been either the guest or the despised tenant. Later came infiltrations of the Moorish element proper; pastorals also these, emigrating from the plateaux of Adrar to the well-watered valley of the Niger. Tuaregs, the redskins of the Sahara, descendants, as some affect to believe, of those tall, fair-haired, long-limbed warriors of Northern Europe who, about 1500 B.C., advanced slowly through Gaul and Spain, and crossing the Mediterranean in ships, landed on the North African Coast, ever pushing southwards, overcoming the terrors of the desert and reaching the green pastures beyond, but repairing the greater part of the year to the desolate Saharan solitudes of which they remain the virtual masters, though Foureau and his _tirailleurs_ have for the first time in history passed through without paying the toll. Arabs too, but again later, and generally speaking farther south and east in Kanem, Wadai and Baghirmi, where Lamy met his death and Gentil was fighting two years and more; Arabs from the north with caravans of merchandise, and other Arabs from the east; Shuwas, of whom no man knows the history or the origin. They intermarried, these tawny, straight-haired nomadic strangers, with the aboriginal blacks, or raped their women, as the case might be; and from these unions, legitimate or otherwise, through long centuries, there sprang into existence fierce cross-races and wild, reared in war, nurtured in an atmosphere of turmoil and brigandage; negro Fula, negro Moor, negro Arab, exaggerating the savage instincts of the parent stock, whom they turned and rent when strong enough. One such hybrid product became in time the scourge of the Western Sudan—the Tukulor, offspring of Negro (Joloff) and Fula, unsparing, ruthless, dreaded alike by Fula and Negro, and whose atrocities are written in letters of blood from Toro (Senegal) to the frontiers of Hausa.

In this medley of races there came in the tenth century of our era the first whisperings of a revealed religion. The whispering quickly changed to the deep hum of many voices proclaiming aloud the word of the Prophet. Islam spread with inconceivable rapidity. The Fulani became speedy converts, but the arts they employed to win over their pagan neighbours were usually peaceful. Not so with the Tukulors and the other cross-races. They saw in it naught but a fresh incentive to warlike deeds, and soon professed Mohammedans were not merely massacring the infidels, but waging battle against their more peaceable co-religionists. As though this were not enough, another fruitful cause of bloodshed and disturbance was fated to arise, and still further plunge in woe this distracted country. The Portuguese adventurers on the coast, in the course of their professed desire to save the soul of the Negro, made a discovery, to wit, that the muscular development of the Negro eminently fitted him for manual labour. From that discovery dates the most atrocious traffic the world has ever witnessed. In their greed for slaves, the Christians of Western Europe and of America—without distinction of nationality, though perhaps the Portuguese and English were the worst offenders—set tribe against tribe; and the better to stimulate the industry, imported wholesale guns and gunpowder, objects which they ascertained the Negroes greatly coveted. The blacks waged war right merrily upon one another, and their so-called prisoners of war filled the slavers’ hulks. Presently the tawny races beyond the forest belt joined in the game, desiring above all things the acquisition of guns and the wherewithal to use them, which meant power and increased facilities for plunder. Slave-raiding then assumed almost incredible proportions. Internecine warfare received a new and terrible impetus. No excuse, whether valid or imaginary, was henceforth needed to attack one’s neighbour; and where in former days contentment might have been secured by a rich booty of cattle and sheep, the requirements of the case now necessitated the capture of the human animal himself. In such a country, desolated by centuries of strife; among such a people, upon whose vices Europe had grafted her own; under such circumstances, has lain the destiny of France in Western Africa.

A favourite argument used by those who favour a militarist policy in Northern Nigeria consists in pointing to the action of the French in the Western Sudan. It is held by some to be inconsistent to express approval of the military trend of French policy in regions adjacent to Northern Nigeria, and to disapprove of it in Northern Nigeria itself. I do not think that the charge of inconsistency will bear examination. In the first place, we should be careful not to generalise. In West Africa proper—that is, in the coastwise regions, the home of the true Negroes—the military policy has, on the whole, been rarely resorted to by the French. In the Western Sudan, although, no doubt, a good deal of bloodshed might have been avoided at different times, I fail to see myself, bearing in mind the object of French policy, how that object could have been obtained without military conquest. As far as the purely moral aspect of the matter is concerned, the right of any European Power to interfere in the internal affairs of West Africa may be queried; but if a given region can, in West Africa, be pointed to where the results of such interference are of a beneficent nature, that region is the Western Sudan. France is restoring to the enormous expanse of territory between the Niger and the tropical forest belt the prosperity which it possessed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under the Songhay, when Jenne was the granary and the store-house of the Niger countries. She is laying the basis of a prosperity far greater than in those days, because she is able to bring peace where the Songhays could not. Having conquered the cross-races, she wisely refrains from either interfering with their customs, such as domestic slavery, upon which the social fabric of West Africa depends, or from allowing, save in strictly circumscribed limits, Christian propaganda among them, being well aware that such propaganda in Mohammedan communities but newly subjugated is the certain precursor of trouble, bloodshed, and fanaticism. She has hunted down and destroyed the four tyrants who successively barred her way to the interior, and who had perpetrated untold miseries upon hundreds of thousands of human beings—El-Haji-Omar, Amadu, Samory and Rabah. Had she been able to acquire the services of these men, it would perhaps have been better, but the body of evidence is against the possibility of her power to have done so. But there is a limit to approval of French military action, and if, now that France’s political influence is internationally secure in the regions east and north of the Chad, she chooses to embark open-eyed in a struggle with the Senussi, she will be making a grave mistake. Unless deliberately incited by unprovoked aggression, her game there is to sheath the sword and give diplomacy the innings, and those Frenchmen who see the danger of precipitate, immature action in Wadai and Kanem, and are strenuously agitating against it, are wise in their generation.[203]

But, taken all in all, the circumstances in which England finds herself in Northern Nigeria, and the circumstances in which France found herself in relation to the Western Sudan before the conquest, are widely different. The aims pursued by France in the Western Sudan, and by the English in Nigeria, were not in their inception the same. The regions coveted by France were for the most part widely removed—at immense distances indeed—from her basis on the coast and her basis on the Senegal River. To make her claims to those regions _internationally_ valid, it was requisite that France should wield some tangible influence over them, and in many cases that was impossible without conquest.

But the British in Northern Nigeria were very differently placed. Northern Nigeria was the prolongation, so to speak, of the British base in “the Rivers.” It lay immediately at the back of them. The possession of the Niger’s mouth facilitated the extension of British influence up the River and its affluent the Binue. Moreover, British merchants and explorers had ascended both the Niger and the Binue many years before; they had paved the way for what was to follow; and for fifteen years before the advent of direct Imperial control in Northern Nigeria, its native potentates had been united in close ties of political relationship with a British Chartered Company. The Government stepped into the shoes of the Chartered Company, not to play the _rôle_ of _conquisitador_ and initiator, but to reap crops sown for it; to consolidate work already half accomplished. It should, in parenthesis, be stated that France manages the Western Sudan, a territory very much larger than Northern Nigeria, and where a state of continuous internecine warfare had existed for centuries, with an army not more than 3000 strong. Again, if warfare has attended the establishment of French influence in the Shari region, it has been due to special circumstances. Thus Gentil acquired a Protectorate over Baghirmi without firing a shot. It was only when the country which France had placed under her protection was invaded and laid waste by Rabah that military action became a duty.

No comparison is really possible between the respective parts of Great Britain and France. Both are distinct, and must be judged according to their antecedents and special features.

In Northern Nigeria[204] we have to do with native rulers with whom we have been in treaty relationship for fifteen years, and in commercial relationship for longer still. They are our wards, we are in a fiduciary capacity towards them; they are our _protégés_. We undertook by treaty to subsidise them; we pledged ourselves by treaty “not to interfere with the customs” of their people. It should be our object, following the precepts of Sir Andrew Clarke, to make those rulers “far bigger” men than they are, not to break them. They come of a proud race, a capable race, of superior mental calibre, possessed of statesmanship and skill. They have played a great part in the history of Western Africa. Barth, who knew them well, has said of them that “they are the most intelligent people in Africa.” To reduce them to impotence; to scatter their power; to break the organisation they have created into small pieces would be politically foolish, practically unwise, morally unjust, Imperially disastrous. To strengthen their rule where weak; to perfect it where oppressive; to assist them, work with them, and through them along their natural lines; to interfere as little as possible with the customs and habits of themselves and their people; to respect their religious beliefs; to work gradually, peacefully, tactfully, for the attainment of the only conceivable objects which have taken us to their country—commercial development, advancement, prosperity—those should be the political principles guiding us in Northern Nigeria.

The accomplishment of the colossal plan sketched out by the _Figaro_ in 1892, viz. the unification (if the word be permissible) of the French possessions in Africa by expeditions from north, west, and south, designed to meet on the shores of Lake Chad, may now be briefly given. It is a stirring tale. The first attempt—if we exclude that of Flatters from the north, of which the purpose was limited—was made from the south, by the blue-eyed, fair-haired enthusiast, Paul Crampbel. He fell assassinated by Rabah’s emissaries at El Kuti on April 15, 1891. Dybowski and Maistre, sent out by the French African Committee in Crampbel’s footsteps, had to retire without doing much more than useful exploring work. Then came Gentil’s turn, a modest naval lieutenant who, profiting by Rabah’s complications in Bornu, succeeded after incredible difficulties in reaching the mouth of the Shari (after signing a treaty of Protectorate with Baghirmi) and floating a small steamer upon the waters of the mysterious lake. But the success was short-lived. Rabah recrossed the Shari, forced the French to retire, and once again swept Baghirmi with fire and sword. France hurried fresh reinforcements to the spot, and these under Bretonnet were attacked by Rabah and decimated. A further and more vigorous effort was required.

And here the scene shifts to the north. In October 1898 that intrepid explorer, Foureau, left the oasis of Sadrata, near Wargla, in Algeria, at the head of a force of picked men, 310 strong, consisting of troopers from the Senegalese and Saharan _tirailleurs_, than whom there are probably no more splendid fighters in the world, unless it be our own Sikhs. Foureau was accompanied by three civilian friends. Commandant Lamy led the military portion of the expedition, which comprised four other officers besides himself. The object of the expedition was to cross the Algerian Sahara and reach the Chad, while Gentil and Bretonnet gained a firm foothold on its shores by working upwards from the Congo and Ubanghi. Foureau and his companions plunged into the unknown desert, and for ten months entirely disappeared from view. Frequent rumours of a wholesale massacre reached Europe, and remembering the fate of Douls, De Palot, Dournaux-Dupérré, and Joubert, Flatters and Bonnier, at the hands of the fierce nomads who roam the desolate wastes through which Foureau had to pass, France held her breath. If Foureau fell, it would not only be a frightful disaster, fraught with peril to French policy throughout her vast Mohammedan zone in Africa; it might also mean a revulsion of popular feeling, a hanging up of cherished schemes for a generation or more. But Foureau did not fall or fail. He reached the Asben oases in safety, and demonstrated to timid minds that the Tuaregs, when confronted by a well-armed and disciplined force, skilfully led and sufficiently numerous to inspire respect, prefer, in the main, to hold themselves at a distance.[205]

Again the scene changes. The plan was half-performed. The third advance came from the west by the way of the Niger Bend. It was at first attended by the direst results. The gallant Cazemajou met a cruel and treacherous death at Zinder. Voulet and Chanoine, who succeeded him, showed what evil unlimited authority and the disordering effects of the African climate can work upon ill-regulated minds. Denounced by one of their subordinates for barbarous conduct towards the natives, they, having already forgotten the ordinary dictates of humanity, forgot alike honour and patriotism, foully murdered the superior officer who had been instructed to replace them, tore off their uniforms, declared themselves renegades, and perpetrated the wildest excesses. But their shrift was short, and they soon met their fate from the rifles of the native soldiers they had temporarily led astray.

The French Government, however, did not relinquish its determination. The fragments of the Voulet-Chanoine mission were got together, and under the joint leadership of Captain Joalland and Lieutenant Meynier reached the Chad, subsequently joining Gentil’s forces in the Lower Shari. By this time Foureau had also gained the Chad. The three missions, which after so many vicissitudes thus met together in their common goal, were immediately called upon to face a new and most formidable danger. Against the town of Kusri or Kusseri, where the French had established their headquarters, Rabah was marching at the head of 5000 men, of whom 2000 were armed with guns of various patterns. He had also three fieldpieces, captured from Bretonnet. The French disposed of a total strength of 774 officers and men—the latter natives without exception—with four fieldpieces. They were assisted by 1500 Baghirmi auxiliaries, who do not appear to have been of much use, contenting themselves with looting after the battle was over. Rabah pitched his war camp three miles from Kusri, and awaited the onslaught of the French. It proved to be irresistible. Rabah himself perished. His losses amounted to 1000 killed and wounded, and his camp, with the whole of its contents, fell into the hands of the French. The French losses were severe. They included the brave Lamy, Captain Cointet, a white non-commissioned officer and seventeen men killed. Their wounded amounted to sixty, among them Captain Lamothe and Lieutenants Meynier and Galland. But the victory was complete, and Rabah, the noise of whose conquests had filled Central Africa for close upon a quarter of a century; whose destructive strides had left a bloody track from the Bahr-el-Ghazal to the Chad; Rabah, the last of the great _conquisitadores_, had gone the way of El-Haji-Omar, and of Samory. The plan elaborated by the _Figaro_ eight years previously was an accomplished fact.

Since Rabah’s overthrow the French have been engaged in systematically consolidating their hold upon the Central Sudan and the lower Shari. M. Terrier, the able Secrétaire-Général of the French African Committee, explains in the Committee’s Bulletin for April 1901 the procedure which is being adopted. One cannot but be impressed with the grasp, the sagacity, and the statesmanship displayed. The Shari region has been divided into two districts, the most northerly of which abuts on Lake Chad, and includes Baghirmi and the Shari mouths. It is administered on military lines. The southern district, comprising the upper reaches of the river and its affluents, is administered on civil lines. The population of the southern district is composed of Negroes, whose religion is fetishism, or what it pleases us to call fetishism. The northern district is inhabited by various branches of the Negroid Baghirmis; by the Kotokos; by the Shuwa Arabs, and by a few pastoral Fulani. The pagans of the southern district have for centuries been subjected to the raids of the Arabised-Negroes of Bornu and Baghirmi. It was from among them that the principal supplies of slaves which used to find their way across the desert route to Tripoli before the Firman of 1865 were drawn. France, by ridding them of their external foes, claims the right to make them share in her administrative expenses. She is all the more justified in doing so, as for many years to come, and until the Shari is connected with the Ubanghi by a railway, there will be no trade upon which to levy duties in order to obtain revenue. One-half of the population is expected to furnish carriers, and the other half pays an annual tax of four pounds of rubber per hut, of which two pounds is returned to the chiefs as commission. We are assured—on the authority of M. Terrier—that the chiefs are bringing in the tax voluntarily from long distances. In the northern district, which was directly under Rabah’s influence, the French found an existing organisation which they have in the main retained, but the tax levied by the Emir of Baghirmi upon his subjects being considered too heavy, the French have reduced it by two-thirds, thus relieving the population from an undue burden of taxation. The Emir and his chiefs—through whom French influence is exercised—benefit by this reduced tax; that is to say, they keep it for themselves. Contributions of slaves to the Emir and chiefs in the form of tribute by the sub-chiefs are, of course, suppressed. The revenue of the Emir being thus limited, but nevertheless assured to him, together with the continuation of his prestige, the Emir himself, who owes his throne to the French, and has, moreover, been relieved by them of the necessity of paying an annual tribute to Wadai, is expected to furnish annually to the Administration 240 pounds of millet, 500 cloths, and 100 oxen, amounting roughly to £1680.

Here, then, as in the Western Sudan, the words of Faidherbe ring sound; and M. Etienne, speaking at a Conference held the other day at the Paris Colonial School, was only saying what has hitherto been true when he asserted that:

“France can in all sincerity maintain that she has delivered the peoples of inland Africa from an intolerable yoke. She has liberated millions of human beings from sanguinary tyrants who had reduced them to slavery. She has accomplished a work of emancipation, of liberty, and of generosity.” It would be sad indeed if, led astray by evil counsels, France should be induced in another portion of her West African domain, viz. French Congo, to tarnish the great reputation she has undoubtedly built up.

It may be doubted whether the problems with which France has had to contend in West Africa have ever been rightly understood among us, for Englishmen are usually generous-minded enough to appreciate good work carried out by others, even though the others are sometimes rivals. Certain is it that of the nature of French exploits in West and Central Africa the average Englishman is hopelessly ignorant, and even English writers of repute persist in shutting their eyes to the great, the almost revolutionary changes which experience, dearly bought, has wrought in French Colonial conceptions. We have failed as a nation in doing justice to the actions of the French in Africa. We have underrated their capacity and refused to admit the existence at their council boards of a central plan carefully matured which the frequent shuffling of Ministerial portfolios merely retarded but did not alter. At the present moment we apparently will not realise that France is applying to the economic development of her vast territories the same strenuousness of purpose with which she steadily pursued her work of conquest and absorption.