This post is part of a series about “uncharismatic” species in environmental history, emerging from a workshop at Universität Augsburg in September 2026.
I still remember my uncle crying, bleeding from his head. Whenever I think about locusts, this is the image that comes to mind. This was in 2005, when a swarm of locusts invaded the city of Tan Tan, Morocco.1 I was around six years old then, and I thought that if I threw a rock at the massive, buzzing wave I might catch one or two. Of course, this didn’t work. By that evening, I had caught some of the locusts, which we kept safe inside the house. My family gathered a good amount and cooked them the next day, a common Saharan food that traces back to centuries of nomadic life. The crunch of locusts tasted like a mild mix of dust and seafood! I did not enjoy it at all, but it did not disgust me in the context of my history and my family’s history with insects, a history of unexplained fear and curiosity.
Perhaps the same characteristic shaped the relationship between the American merchants shipwrecked on the coast of Africa during the early nineteenth century and locusts. In August 1815, the American brig Commerce ran aground on the western coast of Africa (Cape Bojador, now Boujdour) and its crew was taken into captivity by nomadic Saharan Arabs. Two of those crew members, Captain James Riley and common sailor Archibald Robbins, later published accounts of their captivity, producing in the process some of the early nineteenth century’s most ecologically detailed Anglophone writing about the Sahara and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Their narratives might be seen as “uncharismatic-species history,” where the desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) functions as a rich interpretive site at which competing epistemologies of the natural world, ranging from the scientific and providential to the alimentary, coalesce and reveal their limits. In these narratives, the Sahara Desert provides a context where un/charisma is best challenged, dismantling enlightenment notions of human/charismatic-species centrality due to its complex, arid environment.
Riley devotes substantial passages to the locust as he performs a full act of natural-historical “charismatization.” In a remarkable digression in his book, he uses a microscope to examine locust egg cells near Mogadore (now Essaouira, Morocco), counts seven hundred and forty-one eggs on the tip of a penknife, and calculates that a single female can produce a number “amounting to near a million” in a season.2 He measures the insect, describes its morphology by analogy with the domesticated sheep and goat (its face “similar to that of a common sheep,” its claws “divided something like the hoof of a sheep”), and situates it within a global biblical genealogy, claiming that the West Saharan locust is “the same race of insects that are mentioned in the Bible, as one of the plagues sent upon the land of Egypt.”3 Having made the locust legible through acts of quantitative measurement and empirical charismatization, Riley then closes this anatomic digression by folding the insect back into the scripture. The biblical citations Riley makes throughout his description of the locust, in parallel with the scientific observations, are set against a species of persistence, stubbornness, and characteristics that exceed both frameworks.
Riley also describes his party’s sensorial experience as they pass through a flight of locusts in the countryside north of Safi, Morocco. In this episode, he employs an interesting coalition of the sensory (sound) and the spiritual, quoting directly from the Book of Joel, the sound of “this host of destroyers” as being “like the rushing of horses into battle.”4 This biblical reference also parallels Riley’s continuous reference to locusts as plagues and Providence. It is not an afterthought appended to a scientific description, but rather the only available vocabulary Riley had to make sense of that sound. Yet, contrary to Riley’s biblical understanding, “such fair prospects of crops thus blasted [by locusts] in a moment, would fill the inhabitants of more refined countries with feelings of despair, and their fields would be left untilled; while the Mohammedan considers it either as a just chastisement from heaven for his own or his nation’s sins, or as directed by that fatality in which they all believe.”5 This notion still existed when I attempted to catch locusts as a kid. My family and other families felt gracious when ingesting a species that is considered disgusting and perhaps uncharismatic for many, especially in Western contexts.
In the introductory post for this series, Harrison Croft asks an important question: “What do horses, dogs, and whales all have in common?” He then proceeds to answer that “they are charismatic;” in the biological realm, charisma is unevenly distributed across the animal kingdom, where the large defies the small, the sentient overpowers the numerous, and the visually striking wins hearts over the visually undifferentiated. But what the Commerce narratives suggest, I think, is that “uncharisma” does not become a fixed stamp of the species itself so much as a developing effect of the observer and their relationship with and relation to it. In Riley’s text, the locust does not become charismatic per se. Rather, it becomes legible, particularized, and countable, in the same kind of close attention given to other species, we might call “charismatic.”
- Ceccato, Pietro, Keith Cressman, Alessandra Giannini, and Sylwia Trzaska. 2007. “The Desert Locust Upsurge in West Africa (2003 – 2005): Information on the Desert Locust Early Warning System and the Prospects for Seasonal Climate Forecasting.” International Journal of Pest Management 53 (1): 7–13. doi:10.1080/09670870600968826. ↩︎
- James Riley, An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, with an Account of the Sufferings of the Surviving Officers and Crew, Who Were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs, on the African Desart, or Zahahrah; and Observation Historical, Geographical, &c. Made during the Travels of the Author, while a Slave to the Arabs, and in the Empire of Morocco (T. & W. Mercein, 1817), 477. ↩︎
- Riley, An Authentic Narrative, 475–76. ↩︎
- Riley, An Authentic Narrative, 473-74.
↩︎ - Riley, An Authentic Narrative, 474. ↩︎
Cover image: Dry soil (mudcracks) near Dawra village, Western Sahara. Photo taken by the author.
Erragab Eljanhaoui
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