'Fezzan is the Siberia of Africa': Desert and Society in the Prison Memoir of Pavel Shatev (1882-1951), An Anarchist from Ottoman Macedonia

Abstract

Between 1906 and 1908, the Ottoman anarchist Pavel Shatev was imprisoned along with hundreds of other political prisoners (Armenians, Young Turks, etc.) in the Ottoman province of Fezzan, present-day Libya. As a member of a group of anarchists from Ottoman Macedonia, he had participated in a series of bombings of Ottoman state institutions and western European financial and commercial interests in Salonica in 1903. Shatev wrote a memoir of his imprisonment, published in 1910, during a peak of efforts by states around the world to persecute anarchists and halt the spread of their ideas. This paper examines the meaning of the Saharan desert environment in Shatev’s prison memoir as a mirror of global political struggles. In Shatev’s writing, desert plants, rocks and sand become images that invoke political oppression and imperialism, while the desert animals become part of his radical arguments for animal rights. This paper challenges an understanding of Ottoman anarchists solely as recipients of anarchist and socialist writings from western Europe, even as it also departs from a scholarship that seeks to frame them within nationalist historiographical frameworks by studying them only as parts of emerging national liberation movements. By contrast, Shatev’s prison memoir both engaged with global theoretical currents and contained new insights and ideas that arose from the particular environment in which he was imprisoned. This paper thus also contributes to the field of Ottoman environmental history by exploring the formation and function of ideas about the environment and ecology in the emerging radical social thought.