Theodore Monod

UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1994 by Michel Batisse

Theodore Monod is a naturalist who himself belongs to a disappearing species: that of the explorer-scientists who travel to remote regions to satisfy their passion for knowledge. In his Paris workplace, the Ichthyology Laboratory of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, he welcomed me amid shelves packed with books, phials, preserving jars, fishes' jaws, samples of rocks and stone tools.

He has travelled far and wide through his beloved Sahara and--at the age of ninety-one--is currently preparing for his "last long-distance expedition by camel". As well as a scientist, Theodore Monod is also a man of peace and convictions, who has fought tirelessly for the respect of human rights and the defence of Nature.

* You are famous for your travels through the desert by camel, but you began your scientific career as a student of marine species. What was your real vocation?

The important decisions in life are usually made by chance. I joined the Museum as an assistant in a department concerned with "Fish and colonial productions of animal origin". The staff were required to travel in the then French colonies, and in 1922 I was sent to Mauritania to study, not the desert, but the coast and fishing. Instead of returning to Bordeaux by ship at the end of my stay, which lasted almost a year, I took a camel and crossed the whole of western Mauritania as far as Senegal. The conditions were somewhat arduous, since I was poorly equipped and quite inexperienced. But that did not turn me against the desert, and in 1934 I went on another big expedition into the western Sahara. Then in 1938 I was appointed head of the French Institute for Black Africa (IFAN) in Dakar, where the desert was right on my doorstep.

I started out studying fish and I still work as a zoologist. Right now I am trying to finish a study I began forty years ago on the skull of the parrot-fish, whose buccopharyngeal anatomy is highly distinctive. I have also spent part of my life studying the marvellous world of crustaceans. In 1924 I discovered a group so unique that no-one had even suspected their existence, the Thermosbaenacea, the first example of which had been identified in a Roman bath in Tunisia. I managed to organize my activities so as to specialize in these two areas, while continuing to pursue my interests in desert regions.

* Was it a taste for adventure that took you on your expeditions to Mauritania and elsewhere? Was there a scientific or spiritual link between your passion for the sea and your passion for the desert?

My curiosity is insatiable. If I go to the Sahara, or if I dissect the skulls of fish, it is to try to understand, to add a little more to human knowledge. That is the mission of the researcher. No, it's not a matter of adventure but of research, of making precise observations intended to add a little to the volume of existing knowledge. Rejection of ignorance, the desire to know and to explain are, I think, the honour and glory of the human mind.

Sometimes--and it's no bad thing--there is also an attraction for a certain kind of life. The life of the sailor and that of the camel-driver have several points in common--in the sense that they both experience intense freedom and solitude in the midst of extreme heat or cold. . . . Life in the desert demands a strategy for survival, for plants, animals and man. The true Saharan nomads are an ecological success just as the Inuit of Baffin Island are. They are people who live on the outer edge of the Earth's habitable region and they are admirably adapted to life in their territory--which they think is the finest land in the world. They know all there is to know about its resources. For the camel-drivers of the Sahara, each plant has a use, as a medicine or a source of food.

* In the modern world is there a future for the knowledge, traditions and ways of life of desert people?

The nomads are today threatened by a number of new factors. Several of the economic pillars of nomadism have collapsed. The razzia, for example, as it was practised in the past, as raiding for booty, not for the pleasure of going off to kill or be killed (on the contrary there was as little killing as possible). You went to a Sudanese village, stole camels and children to be your slaves, then returned home and shared the proceeds--if there were any, for some of these expeditions ended very badly. You could also invest in a big raid, become a kind of shareholder in it, just as the ladies of Versailles did in eighteenth-century corsair expeditions. It was all perfectly legal and highly structured.

Razzias came to an end with the nineteenth century. There were also the tolls that had to be paid in the days of trans-Saharan trade. Caravans of thousands of camels plied through the desert from Morocco to Timbuktu, In-Salah, Ghadames and Tripoli, carrying salt, gold dust, a few animal skins, a little gum arabic. They would have to cross land claimed by such and such a tribe, and to get through they would have to leave something behind en route. Not money, for they had no money, but a share of what they were carrying. Today only trucks make these journeys.