1. Augustin Holl, “Coping with Uncertainty: Neolithic Life in the Dhar-Tichitt-Walata, Mauritania (c. 4000–2300 BP),” Geoscience 341 (2009): 705–712.
2. While relating to recent times (18th to early 20th centuries), a 1976 article on the nature of desert-edge society and economy in Niger-Nigeria, written in the wake of the disastrous Sahelian drought of 1968–1974, reflects the complexities of what we mean by “negotiation with desertification” (desert life and cyclical droughts) as well as any written since. See the seminal Stephen Baier and Paul Lovejoy, “The Desert Edge Economy of the Central Sudan,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 551–581.
3. Chapter 1 of Ralph Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010): 1–22, provides an excellent and readable overview of these eras, including introductions to several of the topics discussed below (e.g., role of regional production and commerce especially in salt; the Garamantes; the introduction of the camel); Eric Ross, “A Historical Geography of the Trans-Saharan Trade,” The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, ed. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 1–34, provides a similar overview of the early eras but also moves into more contemporary times and issues.
4. Holl, “Coping with uncertainty,” 711.
5. Holl, “Coping with uncertainty,” 704–711; see also A. Holl, “Background to the Ghana Empire: Archaeological Investigations on the Transition to Statehood in the Dhar-Tichitt Region (Mauritania),” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 4 (1985): 73–115.
6. Holl, “Coping with uncertainty,” 704, 711.
7. Scott MacEachern, “The Holocene History of the Southern Lake Chad Basin: Archaeological, Linguistic and Genetic Evidence,” African Archaeological Review 29 (2012): 253–271, 263.
8. See also Holl, “Background to the Ghana Empire.”
9. D. J. Mattingly and M. Sterry, “The First Towns in the Central Sahara,” Antiquity 87, no. 336 (2013): 503–518. Mattingly led the 1997–2001 joint British-Libyian project, which has produced many publications (including four volumes on the project itself) since 2002.
10. “Garama: An Ancient Civilization in the Middle of the Sahara,” World Archaeology no. 9 (2005); and Andrew Wilson, “Foggara Irrigation and Early State Formation in the Libyian Sahara: The Garamantes of Fazzan”.
11. Later the case in the northwestern Saharan development of Sijilmassa as well; Amir Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 184–186.
12. Mario Liverani, “The Garamantes: A Fresh Approach,” Libyan Studies 31 (2000): 27.
13. James Owen, “ ‘Lost’ Fortresses of the Sahara Revealed by Satellites,” National Geographic, November 2001. Mattingly’s team calculated that just the construction of the foggara (not including digging wells, maintaining the system) would have taken 77,000 man-years (amount of work one man could deliver in one year) of labor.
14. Mario Liverani, “Rediscovering the Garamantes: Archaeology and History,” Libyan Studies 35 (2004):198; and Wilson, “Foggara Irrigation,” 230.
15. Or, alternately, because a decline in the Saharan trade in the 4th and 5th centuries reduced the supply of slaves available; Wilson, “Foggara Irrigation,” 223.
16. Mattingly and Sterry, “The First Towns,” 516.
17. For a recent variation, see “Caravan Commerce and African Economies,” in Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa, 23–44. For overviews of early interpretations, see T. Lewicki, “The Role of the Sahara and Saharans in Relationships Between North and South,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, ed. M. El Fasi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 3: 276–313; and J. Devisse, “Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa,” in UNESCO General History of Africa (University of California Press, 1988), 3: 367–435.
18. Austen develops these and related points in Trans-Saharan Africa, 1–18.
19. “Saharan trade depended on markets both inside and outside of the desert, constituting the requisite demand to set in motion a fairly complicated commercial machine”; see Michael Brett, “Ifriqiya as a Market for the Sahara from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century AD,” Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969): 351, 358.
20. Brett, “Ifriqiya,” 362; Liverani, “Rediscovering the Garamantes,” 199.
21. Knut Vikor, “The Desert Side Salt Trade of Kawar,” African Economic History 11 (1982): 115–144; see also Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Borno Salt Industry,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 11, no. 4 (1978): 629–631.
22. On Bornu’s 19th/20th-century history, see Vincent Hibarren, A History of Borno: Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State (London: Hurst, 2018). Also see his maps showing changes in this era and bibliography.
23. Paul E. Lovejoy, Salt of the Desert Sun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5, 6; see this volume also for map showing locations for all the salts discussed in this section and others and discussions of each of these Central Sudan salts; later chapters engage extensively with labor and trade networks.
24. A recent study of Chad’s main natron mines at Borku reveals that the complexity of the “political economy of salt” is no less a factor in contemporary tax structures and national–local power struggles than it was in earlier historical eras under the mais (“rulers”) and shaykhs of Bornu; Julien Blanchet and Judith Scheele, “Fiscalité marginale sur mesure. L’économie politique du natron au Borkou, Tchad,” in Fiscalité en Afrique contemporaine: formalités et informalités, Politique africaine, ed. Olly Owen (2018).
25. E. Ann McDougall, “Salts of the Western Sahara: Myths, Mysteries and Historical Significance,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, no. 2 (1990): 231–257, provides historical overview; and McDougall, “The Sahara Reconsidered: Pastoralism, Politics and Salt from the Ninth through the Twelfth Centuries,” African Economic History 12 (1983): 263–286.
26. Ibn Battuta in J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 282.
27. E. Ann McDougall, “The Question of Tegaza and the Conquest of Songhay: Some Saharan Considerations,” in Le Maroc et l’Afrique subsaharienne (Rabat, Morocco: Institut des Etudes Africaines, 1995); and Idem., “Snapshots from the Sahara: ‘Salt’, the Essence of Being,” in The Libyan Desert: Natural Resources and Cultural Heritage, ed. David Mattingly et al. (Society for Libyan Studies, 2006), 295–303.
28. Nehemia Levtzion, A History of Islam in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2000); Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa, also sees Sahara as conduit for Islam. Most recently see engagement with questions and historiography in Michael Gomez, African Domination: A New History Of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Paulo de Moraes Farias engages with yet another aspect of this discussion in Arabic Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali (‘Discussion of Historical Literature, Ft. #14). The British Academy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
29. For most recent work on Almoravids see Amir Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Saharan aspects are still best developed by H. T. Norris: Norris, “New Evidence on the Life of ‘Abd Allah b. Yasin and the Origins of the Almoravid Movement,” Journal of African History 12 (1971): 255–268; and Norris and Chalmeta, “al-Murābiṭūn,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (First Published Online 2012). See also Ronald Messier, The Almoravids and the Meanings of Jihad (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), and “Rethinking the Almoravids, Re-thinking Ibn Khaldun,” in North Africa Islam and the Mediterranean World, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 59–80.
30. David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher, “The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076, Pt I. The External Arabic Sources,” History in Africa 9 (1983): 21–59; and Conrad and Fisher, “The Local Oral Sources,” History in Africa 10 (1984): 53–78. Revisiting the debate, see Sheryl Berkhalter, “Listening for Silences in Almoravid History: Another Reading of ‘The Conquest That Never Was’,” History in Africa 19 (1992): 103–131.
31. E. Ann McDougall, “The View from Awdaghust: War, Trade, and Social Change in the Southwestern Sahara, From the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of African History 26 (1985): 1–31.
32. Conrad and Fisher, “Conquest.”
33. McDougall, “Pastoralism, Politics and Salt.”
34. Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires: 35, 52, 138.
35. Michael Brett, “Islam and Trade in the Bilad al-Sudan, Tenth–Eleventh Century A.D,” Journal of African History 24 (1983): 431–440.
36. Brett, “Islam and Trade”; and E. Ann McDougall, “From Muslim Community to Islamic Society: Law, Slavery and Concubinage in Bilad Al-Sudan,” Special Issue in Honour of Michael Brett, The Maghreb Review 40, no. 1 (2015): 28–50.
37. McDougall, “View from Awdaghust,” 28–30, discusses work of Mauritanian historian “Mohammed al-Chennafi” (a pseudonym).
38. Although the evolution of Islam in the Sahel must remain differentiated from (although not necessarily “different from”) the Sahara, Michael Gomez’s attention to this institution as critical to understanding Songhay is significant; see Gomez, “Of Clerics and Concubines,” in African Domination: A New History of Empire In Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 258–312, especially 300–302.
39. John O. Hunwick, Sharīʻa in Songhay: the replies of al-Maghīlī to the questions of Askia al-Ḥājj Muḥammad (The British Academy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Hunwick Harrak and Fatima Harrak, Mi’raj al-Su’ud: Ahmad Baba’s Replies on Slavery (Rabat, Morocco: Institute of African Studies, University Mohammed V, 2000).
40. Bruce Hall, “Race Along the Desert Edge 1600–1900, ”in A History of Race in West Africa 1600–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27–104
41. McDougall, “Law, Slavery and Concubinage.”
42. The “Tombouctou Manuscript Project” led by South Africa from 2002 is the principal exception; its focus on preservation drew from concerns about climate and local library situations.
43. Charles Stewart with Sidi Ahmed ould Ahmed Salem, The Arabic Literature of Africa, Vol. 5, The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara (Brill, 2016).
44. Yahya Ould al-Bara, Al-Majmūʿa al-kubrā al-shāmila li-fatāwā wa-nawāzil waaḥkām ahl gharb wa-junūb gharb al-Ṣaḥrāʾ [“The Great Collection of Legal Opinions, Case Studies, and Judgments from the People of the West and Southwest Sahara”], 12 vols. Nouakchott, R.I.M: Mūlāy al- asan b. al-Mukhtār b. al- asan, 2009.
45. McDougall, “Snapshots.”
46. See Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires, 227–275; on connections to “the larger Muslim World,” see From Istanbul to Timbuktu: Ink Routes (Cape Town, Tombouctou Manuscript Project, 2009).
47. Nehemia Levtzion and John O Voll, eds., Eighteenth-Century Renewal and Reform in Islam (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987).
48. For early social, cultural, and scholarly dynamics, see H. T. Norris, The Arab Conquest of the Western Sahara (London: Longman, 1986).
49. E. Ann McDougall, “The Economics of Islam in the Southern Sahara. The Rise of the Kunta Clan,” Asian and African Studies 20 (1989): 28–60; for Mauritania, see Charles C. Stewart, Islam and Social Order in Mauritania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
50. McDougall, “Snapshots.”
51. For another example, see H. T. Norris, The Tuaregs: Their Islamic Legacy and Diffusion in the Sahel (Warminster, U.K.: Aris & Phillips, 1976).
52. Saharans self-identified as bidan or “white”; hence maure = white.
53. Jean-Louis Triaud, “Islam in Africa Under French Colonial Rule,” in The History of Islam in Africa, ed. Levtzion and Pouwels, esp. 170–179. The subject is ably revisited recently by Ghislaine Lydon, “Saharan Oceans and Bridges, Barriers and Divides in Africa’s Historical Landscape,” Journal of African History 56 (2015): 3–22. On Algerian resistance and “islam noir,” see Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 15, 6; Pt III “French Scholarship and the Definition of Islam Noir,” 93–117.
54. Known as “le vide,” seen as a useful “buffer” between white north Africa and black Sudanic Africa; Ron Parker, “The Senegal-Mauritania Conflict of 1989: A Fragile Equilibrium,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 21, no. 1 (1991): 156.
55. Natalia Starostina, “Ambiguous Modernity: Representations of French Colonial Railways in the Third Republic,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 38 (2010).
56. Lina Brock, “History, Oral Tradition, and Resistance: The Revolt of 1917 Among the Kel Denneg,” Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerrannée 57 (1990): 49–75 (in French). For its impact in the Air Massif region (on migration and desert economy; relation to drought), see Baier and Lovejoy, “The Desert Side Economy,” 576; and Michael Brett, “The Maghrib,” in Cambridge History of Africa, ed. A. D. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7: 267–328.
57. Charles Stewart, “Islam,” in Cambridge History of Africa, ed. A. D. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7: 191–222; and Harrison, France and Islam, 110, 111.
58. E. Ann McDougall, “Colonial Labour, Tawdenni and ‘L’enfer du sel’,” Labour History 58, no. 2 (2017).
59. Dennis Cordell, “Eastern Libya, Wadai and the Sanusiyya: A Tariqa and Trade Route,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 19, no. 2 (1985).
60. This information and what follows is from Julien Blachet and Judith Scheele, The Value of Disorder: Autonomy, Prosperity and Plunder in Northern Chad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
61. Blachet and Scheele.
62. Insight developed in Chad context by Blachet and Scheele is equally pertinent elsewhere in Sahara.
63. Most material is McDougall’s, archival, not published. On the Tuareg see (Mali) Hall, A History of Race, 105–172; Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Colonial Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 87–133; and Susan Rasmussen, “The Slave Narrative in Life History and Myth, and Problems of Ethnographical Representation of the Tuareg Cultural Predicament,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (1999): 72.
64. Publications on these topics are abundant; readers might best begin by looking at websites of Amnesty International, and Anti-Slavery International
65. E. Ann McDougall, “A Topsy-Turvy World: Slaves and Freed Slaves in the Mauritanian Adrar 1910–1950,” in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Richard Roberts and Suzanne Miers (Wisconsin : University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 262–288; on wala in this context, see Abdel Wedoud ould Cheikh, “Géographie de la liberté: Émancipation légale, émancipation foncière et appartenance tribale en Mauritanie” and Benjamin Acloque, “Les liens serviles en milieu rural: le statut des Ḥarāṭīn et leur attachement à l’agriculture et à l’élevage,” in The In, ed. E. Ann McDougall.
66. McDougall, “Introduction,” The Invisible People.
67. E. Ann McDougall, “Colonialism, Pastoralism and ‘le problem servile’: Case Study Mauritania,” paper presented in homage to the late Pierre Bonte (2015, unpublished).
68. Blatchet and Scheele, The Value of Disorder.
69. W. F. Craven and J. L. Gate, “The Army AirForces in World War II” Vol. VII ‘Services around the World,’ (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948), 63–91 + footnotes 7: 63–76.
70. Characterized as “this kingdom of sand, sun and wind”; Jean Ganiange and Yvonne Brett, “North Africa,” in Cambridge History of Africa, ed. Roland Oliver and R. N. Sanderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6: 206.
71. Berny Sèbe, “In the Shadow of the Algerian War: the United States and the Common Organization of the Saharan Regions (OCRS) 1957–1962,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38, no. 2 (2010): 303–322; and Bruce Whitehouse, “How did Mali get here? Pt 1 Echoes of Decolonization,” Bridges from Bamako, 2017.
72. Relating to oil and gas discoveries in Algerian Sahara to French responses, see I. Hrbek, “North Africa and the Horn,” in UNESCO General History of Africa, ed. Ali A. Mazrui (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), vol. 8, 132–189.
73. Sèbe, “In the Shadow,” 308.
74. Parker, “Senegal-Mauritania Conflict,” 156.
75. “Western Sahara: Why a Referendum Is Implausible and Impossible,” The New Arab, April 15, 2016.
76. All-African People’s Conference, Resolution on Imperialism and Colonialism, Accra, December 5–13, 1958, Article 8.
77. Jean Pierre Oliver de Sardan, “The ‘Tuareg Question’ in Mali Today.”
78. Lecocq, Disputed Desert, 135–294.
79. Parker, “Senegal-Mauritania Conflict,” 159–165. This was a contemporary analysis (1991); later studies confirm even higher levels of violence, put numbers of blacks expelled upwards of 75,000; widely seen as genocide.
80. Whitehouse, “How Did Mali Get Here?”
81. Parker, “Senegal-Mauritania Conflict,” 155–171.
82. Ruth Morgenthau and Lucy Behrman, “French Speaking Tropical Africa,” in Cambridge History of Africa, ed. Michael Crowder (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8: 611–673, provides Saharan post-independence overview—title notwithstanding.
83. Judith Scheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
84. Olivier de Sardan, “The ‘Tuareg Question.” As of July 2018, the war in Mali continues; Canada begins the process of replacing Germans, purportedly as “peace keepers.” There is no desire for “peace” among the combatants—only a desire for “power.” Even the interventionists are not agreed upon their ultimate goal. While this moment will pass relatively soon, it is an important one to “capture” as the Sahara begins to shape its 21st-century role in Africa. See “Canadians Head into Fight That May Be Unwinnable in Mali,” June 26, 2018.
85. Also Ross’s reflections, “A Historical Geography of the Trade,” 24–34.
86. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon, eds., The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa (Boston: Brill, 2011); and Shamil Jeppie, “Travelling Timbuktu Books,” Timbuktu Script and Scholarship): A Catalogue of Selected Manuscripts from the Exhibition, ed. Lalou Meltzer, Lindsay Hooper, and Gerald Klinghardt, Capetown, S. A. (Capetown, 2008).
87. For example, see Bruce Hall, “How Slaves Used Islam: The Letters of Enslaved Muslim Commercial Agents in the Nineteenth-Century Niger Bend and Central Sahara,” Journal of African History 52, no. 3 (2011): 279–297; Idem., with Yacine Daddi Addoun, “The Arabic Letters of the Ghadames Slaves in the Niger Bend, 1860–1900,” in African Slavery/African Voices, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, Carolyn Brown, and Martin Klein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 485–500; and Idem., Ghislaine Lydon, “Excavating Arabic Sources for the History of Slavery in Western Africa,” in African Slavery/African Voices, Vol. 2, Methodology, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, Carolyn Brown, and Martin Klein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 15–49.
88. Site in English; some documents translated into English, others in Arabic. Beautifully illustrated catalogue including sample documents in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish (Arabic script): Timbuktu Script and Scholarship: A Catalogue of Selected Manuscripts from the Exhibition (of the same name), 2008 (as above). Valuable essays include: on Timbuktu manuscripts (types, contents, production), Jeppie, 13–20; on the “Life and Works of Ahmed Baba,” Mahmoud Zoubir (Engl. Trans.), 21–32; on the challenges of preserving the manuscripts, Mary Mlinika, 33–45; annotated presentation of Exhibition’s 40 manuscripts, 45–136.
89. John O. Hunwick: Sharīʻa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghīlī to the Questions of Askia al-ḤājjMuḥammad (The British Academy, 1985); Fatima Harrak, Mi’raj al-Su’ud: Ahmad Baba’s Replies on Slavery (Rabat, Morocco: Institute of African Studies, University Mohammed, 2000); and Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa’Di’s Ta’Rikh Al-Sudan Down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents (Islamic History and Civilization) (Brill, 2003). Christopher Wise translated the early 20th-century French publication Ta’rikh al-Fattash as Timbuktu Chronicles 1493–1599 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011). Our traditional understanding of the ta’rikh is challenged by Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, “Towards a New Study on the So-Called Tārīkh al-fattāsh,” History in Africa 42 (2015): 37–73.
90. Charles C. Stewart, ed., The Arabic Literature of Africa, Vol. 5, The Writings of Mauritania and the Western Sahara (Brill, 2015). Historical introduction and essay on the mahzara (nomadic Islamic schools) by Mohamed Nouhi are in English, as are synopses of significant manuscripts and short biographies of authors. More generally, see Stewart’s “West African Manuscript Project.
91. Ross, “Historical Geography of Trans-Saharan Trade,” 5–9.
92. McDougall, “The View from Awdaghust,” draws extensively on these projects, with full references; on Jarma, see David Mattingly, “The Garamantes and After: The Biography of a Central Saharan Oasis 400 BC–AD 1900,” in Not Only History: Proceedings of the Conference in Honor of Mario Liverani Held in Sapienza-Universita di Roma, Dipartimento di Scienze Dell’Antichita, 20–21 April 2009 (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 147–169.
93. That said, there is no shortage of beautifully produced photoessays on Saharan rock art and writing.
94. Exceptions include H. T. Norris, Saharan Myth and Saga (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); and Idem., The Tuaregs: Their Islamic Legacy and Its Diffusion in the Sahel (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1976). See also traditional epic of Ancient Mali’s legendary founder in David C. Conrad, ed., Sonjata: A New Prose Version (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016).
95. J. F. P. Hopkins,trans., and Nehemia Levtzion, ed., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources; for French version of much the same literature, see J. Cuoq, Recueil des sources Arabes concernant l’Afrique occidentale du XIIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1975).
96. G. R. Crone, The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 2010).
97. Important exceptions include Charles Cochelet, Narrative of the shipwreck of the Sophia: on the 30th of May, 1819, on the western coast of Africa, and of the captivity of a part of the crew in the desert of Sahara . .. (Nabu Press, 2011); René Caillié, Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo:And Across the Great Desert, to Morocco, Performed in the Years 1824–28 (London, 1830). See also rare English account in Thomas Pellow, The history of the long captivity and adventures of Thomas Pellow, in South Barbary. .. (London: Printed for R. Goadby, sold by W. Owen, 1739).
98. Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa 1850–55, 5 vols. (London: 1857–58); and Allan J. B. Fisher and Humphrey Fisher, Sahara and Sudan, 4 vols. (London: C Hurst, 1971–1978). For British expeditions see Missions to the Niger, 4 vols. (Farnham, Surry: Ashgate, 2010).
99. Odette du Puigaudeau, Barefoot Through Mauretania (Hardinge Simpole Ltd, 2010).
100. For exceptions see Michael Benanav, Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara in a Caravan of White Gold (Guilford, Conn: Lyons Press, 2006); and Jeremey Keenan, Sahara Man: Travelling with the Tuareg (London: John Murray, 2001). Keenan’s The Tuareg: People of the Ahaggar (London: Allen Lane, 1977) remains a classic.
101. “The Last Salt Caravan “(Tawdeni, Mali; Journeyman.TV, 1999), and “Women of the Sands” (Mauritania; Journeyman.TV, 2008).
102. J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources; See also Ghislaine Lydon, On Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks and Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth Century West Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–7, 59–63, 73–86; “Saharan Oceans and Bridges, Barriers and Divides in West Africa’s Historiographical Landscape,” Journal of African History 56 (2015): 3–11; and recently Ariela Marcus-Sells, “The Kunta of the Sahara,” Oxford Bibliographies (January 2018) (references to Arabic, French/English-translated Arabic materials extensive—broader than just “Kunta”).
103. Boubacar Barry, La Senegambie du xve au xixième siècle: traite negriere, Islam et conquête coloniale (Paris: Edition l’Harmattan, 1988), 15; also 36, 37.
104. For example, A. G. Hopkins engaged in this discussion in his seminal An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1975), esp. 78–112; Lydon revisits the issues and the literature (broadly) in “Nineteenth-Century Developments,” 106–157, in On Saharan Trails. Although dated, Stephen Baier’s detailed exploration of “Desert Trade and the Nomads” remains the most thorough (see “The Sahara in the Nineteenth-Century” in UNESCO General History of Africa, Ed. J. F. Ade Ajayi Berkeley: California-UNESCO, 1989: 515–536; on trade 524–536).
105. For example, the chapters by M. H. Cherif, A. Laroui, and N. Ivanov on the Maghreb (generally) and Morocco (specifically) in UNESCO General History, VI focus on the mountains, plains, and coastal areas, with scant attention to their Saharan regions which are seen as marginal in spite of their physical significance. From the multi-volume edited history of Africa, the esteemed Cambridge History of Africa, see the following: in Vol. 5 (“From c.1790–1870”), on the 19th century, the Sahara was entirely absent. It appeared only in cameo with reference to trans-Saharan trade with the Maghreb (103, 124), in total decline (221), and as a source of influence for Sudanic jihads (130, 131). In Vol. 6, “From 1870 to 1905,” the chapter “North Africa” devotes three pages to “The Saharan Regions,” where the emphasis is on the role of pacification to protect Algerian possessions (204); the nomads as enslavers of sedentary oases populations (205); Saharans in general as being chronically undernourished and subject to seasonal famine (205); and “this kingdom of sand, sun and wind” as being of no economic value, not even as facilitating access to the Sudan—“Of what use was it to evoke once more the dream of a Saharan Railway” at the turn of the century (206)? In this volume the Sahara “belongs” to the margins of North Africa; it is not evoked at all in the two chapters on Western Africa. The important exception to all of these observations is Baier, “The Sahara”; his chapter takes the Sahara and its nomads as the focal point, evaluating the various interactions of the “imperial powers”—not only the French but the Ottomans and, to some extent, the Moroccan sultanate, with desert clans, as well as the effects these interactions had on intra-Saharan politics and economics.
106. For example, in the Cambridge History of Africa Vol. 7: “From 1905 to 1940” (1986), the Sahara is treated as part of the Maghreb; Michael Brett’s chapter of the same name addresses it in the context of each colony and/or protectorate he discusses (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya) before, during, and after World War I (267–328). The chapter encompassing West Africa is pointedly entitled “French Black Africa” (emphasis mine). Similarly, in the more recent UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. VII: “Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880–1935,” the Sahara is treated as part of the Maghreb—but it includes Mauritania and the desert regions of Mali and Niger. The introductory maps in A. Laroui’s “African Initiatives and Resistance in North Africa and the Sahara” (87–113) do not name these colonies/countries; in one map, the whole region, with a few scattered exceptions, is simply marked “Sahara” (88), in the other the area it is simply portrayed in terms of different eras of French conquest, tellingly titled “European Campaigns in the Maghrib” (91). As the title (in keeping with how each geographical region was approached in Vol. VII) suggests, the focus was European conquest and “African” resistance to it. Returning to the Cambridge History, in Vol. 8: “From 1940 to 1975,” the desert-edge colonies/countries of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad are again located in West Africa by means of inclusion in Ruth Morgenthau and Lucy Behrman’s chapter on “French Speaking Tropical Africa” (my emphasis). The rest of the Sahara disappears into Henry Clement Moore’s “The Maghrib” (564–610), where its principal significance is as the (former) “Spanish Sahara” and the battle first between Morocco and Mauritania against colonial Spain to divide the territory; finally the longer-running war involving Morocco on the one side and the Algerian-backed POLISARIO on the other.
107. I am not attempting to cite the wide range of literature that addressed the economic, scientific, sociological, climate, and scientific aspects of drought and desertification following the drought; a useful beginning is Michael H Glantz, The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought (New York: Praeger, 1976). It was not accidental that a conference held in Niamey, Niger, in 1972 took “Pastoralism in Tropical Africa” as its theme, published as Theodore Monod, ed., Pastoralism in Tropical Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), or that a subsession of the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences chose to look at the viability of nomadism in African (and Asian) steppe regions as a focus; it was the basis of W. Weissleder, ed., The Nomadic Alternative (The Hague: Mouton, 1978). Important exceptions to “lack of interest by historians” are: Stephen Baier and Paul Lovejoy, “The Desert Edge Economy of the Central Sudan,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 551–581; and Stephen Baier, “Economic History and Development: Drought and the Sahelian Economies of Niger,” African Economic History 1 (1976): 1–16. On the role of refugees both in recovering from drought and political disaster and of value to researchers as sources of information, see Gabriele Volpato and Patricia Howard, “The Material and Cultural Recovery of Camels and Camel Husbandry Among Sahrawi Refugees of the Western Sahara,” Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 4, no. 7 (2014): 1–23.
108. For example, see Ralph Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Trade: A Tentative Census,” in Essays in the History of the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 23–76; Dennis Cordell, Dar al-Kuti and the Last Years of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Elizabeth Savage, The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London: F. Cass, 1992); and Sebastian Prange, “Trust in God—But Tie Your Camel First: The Economic Organization Between the 14th and the 19th Centuries,” Economic History Working Papers, 2005.
109. For example, see Benedetta Rossi, ed., Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); Rossi, “African Post-Slavery: A History of the Future,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2015), esp. 307–318; and Rossi, From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Baz Lecocq, “The Bellah Question: Slave Emancipation, Race and Social Categories in Late 20th Century Northern Mali,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 42–68; Bruce Hall, “Bellah Histories of Decolonization, Iklan Paths to Freedom: The Meanings of Race and Slavery in the Late-Colonial Niger Bend, Mali, 1944–1960,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 44, no. 1 (2011): 61–87; Susan Rasmussen, “The Slave Narrative in Life History and Myth, and Problems of Ethnographical Representation of the Tuareg Cultural Predicament,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (1999): 67–108; Rasmussen, “Disputed Boundaries: Tuareg Discourse on Class and Ethnicity,” Ethnology 31, no. 4 (1992): 351–365; and E. Ann McDougall, “ ‘To Marry One’s Slave Is as Easy as Eating a Meal’: The Dynamics of Carnal Relations in Saharan Slavery,” in Sex, Power and Slavery, ed. Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 200–238.
110. In Mauritania SOS Esclaves, Initiative for the Resurgence Movement of Abolition (IRA); in Mali, Temedt; in Niger, Timedria. Members of the Timedria participated in an international academic conference on Slavery in Africa (Nairobi, 2014), for example, rejecting dismissively research findings presented on one panel and delivering an anti-slavery polemic in its place. There is no doubt that the Saharan situation for those of slave descent was exacerbated by the events in northern Mali beginning in 2012; the problem arises when the politics of aid (this is an NGO looking for needed financial support) “trumps” the findings of research rather than opening up discussion.
111. As best articulated in the seminal edited volume by Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels, eds., A History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); there is no section on the Sahara, however. It is subsumed as “gateway” (to sub-Saharan West Africa) and desert “margin” to Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan (“land of the Blacks”).
112. Specifically, J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in West Africa (Oxford University Press, 1959); Trimingham, A History of Islam in West Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962, 1970); Peter Clarke, West Africa and Islam: A Study of Religious Development from the 8th to the 20th Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1982)—an attempt to “update” the field from the Trimingham era, with mixed results; M. Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa (London: Longman, 1984).
113. For example, C. C. Stewart, Islam and Social Order in Mauritania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); M. Hiskett, A History of Hausa Islamic Verse (London: University of London SOAS, 1975); and Thomas Whitcomb, “The Origins and Emergence of the Tribe of Kunta: A Contribution to the History of the Western Sahara Between the Almoravid Period and the Seventeenth Century” (Doctoral thesis, University of London, SOAS, 1978); see individual studies in John Ralph Willis, ed., Studies in West African Islamic History, 2 vols. (London: Frank Cass, 1979).
114. E. Ann McDougall, ed., The War on Terror in the Sahara, special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 25, no. 1 (2007). This collection followed two conference panels (the Canadian Association of African Studies and the American African Studies Association meetings 2005); jointly organized with Middle Eastern studies, they attracted large audiences (including many from governments, NGOs) and very vocal discussions.
115. One such example to which we must draw attention is Paulo de Moraes Farias’s magnum opus, Of Arab Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali. Epigraphy, Chronicles, and Songhay-Tuareg History (The British Academy, Oxford University Press, 2003). He analyzed the historical significance of approximately 400 locally produced Arabic inscriptions on gravestones and rocks (reproducing photographs and providing interpretations of some 250) dating to the 11th to 15th centuries from the Saharan-Sahelian region east of the Niger Bend. In addition, he produced and addressed similar examples of early Tuareg writing (tifinagh), discussing among other issues why we do not find comparable evidence in the more western regions where the Almoravids were predominant during the early part of this era—thus engaging with another aspect of the “advent of Islam” received wisdom, namely its association with writing.
