The Dhar-Tichitt Complex

In today’s eastern Mauritania the once greener Sahara of the late stone age (approximately 4000–2000 bce) gave rise to West Africa’s first “extensive village community system” based on seasonally-driven agro-pastoralism in the Dhar-Tichitt region.⁴ The apex of this civilization spanned the final two millennia (c. 2200–3/400 bce), giving way to an acute arid period that stretched well into the 1st millennium bce and saw the introduction of the camel into the desert. But this very early Saharan society remains important for what it tells us of how people came to not only survive but thrive, developing complex social, political, and economic systems in what was even in its wetter phase, a precarious environment.

The Sahara was not homogeneous; it was comprised of climatic and environmental niches that allowed for different kinds of development irrespective of larger climate trends. The “Tichitt complex” centered on an expansive escarpment. During the three-to-four wet months, people lived on the upper levels, making use of grasslands for herding (cattle, sheep, and goats), building permanent settlements, and (according to some), cultivating the first forms of domesticated grains. During the even longer, fairly predictable dry season, many activities moved to the lowlands around drying lakes and wadis (channels that flood during the rainy season), adding hunting, fishing, and the gathering of wild plants and grains. Over the long-durée, colonization occurred both across the dhar and into the lowlands. This process increased noticeably during the last “wet” millennium, with initial settlements expanding outward into villages and hamlets. Some scholars think that they comprised a recognizable political system, complete with a regional center and provincial capitals. It is also suggested, based on the physical layout of the upland settlements that have been excavated, that a fully hierarchical society may have emerged, directed by better-off families who attracted and controlled dependents.⁵ What is probably least controversial in the still-ongoing debates over what should be interpreted about societal formation is that the evidence highlights an economy in need of substantial labor. Workers, whether extended family members or other “dependents,” were employed/deployed differently according to gender (and probably age), place (domestic/public), season (upland, lowland), and occupation (cultivators, herders, hunters, gatherers, craftspeople).

The aridity that struck in mid-1st millennium bce probably did not seem so sudden to those living the experience—the dry seasons becoming longer, hotter, and dryer but still interspersed with normal years. What archaeologists have termed the “disaggregation” of the Tichitt complex occurred very gradually, with (it is believed) people moving both south and southeast. Some may have settled in the Niger Delta and Bend as early as the 4th/3rd centuries bce and, from there, established contact of some sort with peoples much further east.⁶ Contemporaneous evidence of what is called “the Tichitt culture,” the use of plant fibers twisted and braided in ornate fashion used to decorate pottery before it was fired, has been found in the southern Lake Chad Basin. Even as the drying conditions were dispersing people from Dhar-Tichitt, their shrinking effect on Lake “Mega-Chad” was creating a basin of rich, sandy cultivatable soils that was attracting new populations.⁷ Other Dhar-Tichitt migrants moving more to the south may have constituted the mobile herders known to have been early inhabitants of Awdaghust or, indeed, the Ancient Kingdom of Ghana itself, whose rise at that time was still at least a half-millennium in the future!⁸

The Garamantes

Even as the Dhar-Tichitt was seeing its communities disperse and the Sahara enter its driest era to date, far to the east in the Libyan desert a people called the Garamantes were establishing the origins of their own state. In the course of the next 1,000 years, they built a civilization (“classic” era, 100–400 ce) that, although at one point conquered by Roman North Africa, survived the decline of that empire by at least a century. Its legacies lived on in Muslim populations who built powerful states on its remnants; it is fair to say that the economic and political authority emanating from the region waxed and waned but remained a recognizable reality until the rise of the powerful Sahel-based Kanem Empire in the 13th century.

The Garamantes were indigenous Saharans, small-stock herders who, according to Herodotus, used horse-drawn chariots to conquer neighbors and capture slaves.⁹ But when these neighbors began to include Roman territories on a regular basis, the empire retaliated, forcing Garamantes recognition of Roman authority. In practice, however, becoming the empire’s desert province seems to have encouraged trade—Saharan products (including slaves) found profitable markets among the Romans and Mediterranean goods enlarged Garamantes consumerism. At one point the capital Jarma boasted a Roman bath!

It was the Garamantes towns and villages in the wadis of Libya’s southwestern Fezzan region that physically marked this civilization. Archaeologists have excavated extensively in and around Jarma, noting that it was comparable in size and complexity to several contemporaneous towns in North Africa. They have also identified and partially excavated about eight other sites, provisionally termed “towns,” as well as several villages. The latter were surrounded by grain fields that were watered by complex irrigation systems known as foggara. These were tunnels dug increasingly deeper into surrounding mountains in order to tap into underground fossil water; the concept was sophisticated, as was its execution.¹⁰ The Garamantes state would not have been possible without foggara; this system permitted population growth and extensive agriculture.¹¹ The presence of sizable granaries confirms that crops produced surpluses capable of supporting external exchange.

The foggara also allowed for the production of evaporated salts (from mineral-rich ground water) on an industrial, commercialized scale. Remains of what was likely a state-controlled industry reveals a multi-stage process by which salt was extracted, dried, and “packaged” in some way. Scholars agree that its exchange with southern markets was a “driving dynamic” of the economy, in part for the gold it purchased (and which was then traded to Egypt and the Mediterranean) but, most importantly, for the impetus it gave to the slave trade and to domestic slavery.¹²Foggara were labor-intensive: digging the approximately 600 tunnels (many with tributaries), ranging from 100 ms to 4.5 kms in length, keeping them shored up and cleared of obstacles, and assuring the access-shafts sunk at regular intervals were stabilized was difficult, dangerous, and ongoing work. Nothing short of access to non-remunerated, forced labor could have created and sustained foggara.¹³ The intersection between foggara-sustained agriculture, salt production, and international trade was critical to the growth in slave labor.

There is no agreement as to why the Garamantes civilization, complete with its urban complexes, foggara, granaries, salt works, and herds—declined by the late 7th century ce. It may be because the water sources in the mountains were “tapped out” by the expanding population and agricultural expansion.¹⁴ It could have been because the slave labor needed to sustain all of the above could no longer be obtained; one theory postulates that as the Northern and Nile slave trades grew, it became more profitable to sell slaves than to use them, ultimately undermining the domestic economy.¹⁵ Or, as archaeologists most recently have suggested, as the trans-Saharan networks into which Jarma’s commerce fed shifted by the 6th century ce (tied in part to the fortunes of the Roman empire), the region became marginalized, eventually declining.¹⁶ It would seem that the interdependency of the Garamantes socioeconomic system, its local slave labor, foggara, grain and salt production, and its long-distance trade in salt, slaves, grain, and Mediterranean goods was simultaneously a strength and weakness: should one component cease to be accessible, the system could, would—and ultimately did—collapse.

Challenging Received Wisdom

The current focus on the possible role of shifting trans-Saharan trade routes on the decline of Garamantes civilization recalls a paradigm long associated with the broader history of the Sahara—namely, that the desert entered both African and global history in the wake of trans-Saharan commerce, which itself correlated closely with the “advent of Islam.” That rather simplistic view inadvertently tied the history of the West African Sahara and Sahel to the whims of North African Islam: as different Muslim groups competed for political power along the Mediterranean in the vacuum left by the Romans, control of the rich trans-Saharan trade was always a sought-after prize; routes then shifted accordingly, shaping sub-Saharan societies in the process—or so it was argued.¹⁷ This perspective implied a Sahara empty of people, other than peripatetic nomads who conveniently facilitated these shifts by serving as guides. In reality, this early trans-Saharan commerce, whether in famed Sudanese gold and slaves or lesser-known Saharan oryx (antelope) skins and ostrich feathers, depended on those who lived in the desert. It depended on the regional networks they operated (and into which the trans-Saharan trade fed), the camels they raised (with physical characteristics suited to the terrain to be crossed), the food they cultivated (grains but also oasis dates and vegetables), the animals and game they hunted (like antelope and ostrich), and the wells they dug and maintained along caravan routes (which sustained all Saharan trade).

Indeed, this is part of the importance of the “Garamantes discovery,” the clear evidence that this society initially emerged independently of traditionally understood trans-Saharan connections and centuries before the so-called “arrival” of Islam.¹⁸ As we have seen, Saharan trade was interregional and as much east-west as it was north-south oriented; its people produced for and invested in those networks that brought so much prosperity—these included the warriors Herodotus described as well as the enslaved who made so much of it possible. During its later centuries as a southern “outpost” of the Roman Empire, there is no doubt that the Garamantes state became more deeply involved in and more dependent on the trade that tied them to both the Mediterranean and the Sudan. But to assume that a shift in that international commerce would bring about an overall decline is to, perhaps unintentionally, buy into that earlier paradigm whose underlying assumptions are clearly untenable here. Moreover, research on the Fezzan subsequent to the 7th century specifically notes that its oases had “long formed a community irrespective of trade routes to the Sudan” and that until at least the mid-11th century it was their “ordinary” (local, regional) exchange networks that supported the luxury-based trans-Saharan trade—just as it had done so many centuries earlier.¹⁹

“White Gold”: Saharan Salt Industries

“Ordinary production” and “ordinary trade” had long relied in large part on the Sahara’s most readily exploitable mineral—salt (or, more precisely, salts). To our knowledge, the Dhar-Tichitt complex had not developed a commercial use for its amersal (“bitter, dirty”), the salt crust that formed naturally in pans at the base of the dhar; nevertheless, it is highly likely that local people had discovered its uses for the domestic (human and animal) economy. Its value was undoubtedly realized with the growth of the camel economy that emerged a millennium later, amersal being an excellent source of the salt cure camels need annually. In later centuries, it was collected (in pieces), bagged, and marketed into the Sahel. The Garamantes, on the other hand (as we have seen), were fully exploiting the commercial possibilities of salt produced by large-scale evaporation processes by the late 1st millennium bce.

But by the mid-11th-century chronological marker referred to above, it was no longer the Garamantes’ salt production that was playing such a crucial role anchoring ordinary and luxury trans-Saharan trade. Another community of date-producing oases to the southeast, Kawar, had replaced it. A 12th-century source tells us that the trade between the western Maghreb and Kawar (in today’s Niger desert) was already “extensive.”²⁰ Kawar’s salt, like that of the Garamantes, was the product of evaporation—in this case, hundreds of pits in which natural sun evaporation produced a salt crust that was repeatedly broken, allowing re-formations that increased its thickness. The extensive industry lay at the heart of relations between different Saharan groups, all of whom profited from it: those who owned the pits, those who controlled their distribution, and those who taxed their salt. The ability to tax the trans-Saharan trade in this salt was a function of political power: Kawar was fought over for this privilege both by successor states to the Garamantes and new polities emerging to the east and south: first Kanem (at its peak between the 13th and 14th centuries), then Kanem-Bornu (16th to 17th centuries), and lastly Borno (18th to 19th centuries). Throughout, Kawar remained a critical regional market and production center (the Bilma pits being the largest), epitomizing the intersection between “trans-Saharan” and “Saharan” political economies.²¹

Borno’s history as it evolved in the wake of a major 18th-century drought and the creation of the revolutionary Islamic caliphate of Sokoto (northern Nigeria) at the turn of the 19th century provides a vital window into that intersection.²² Prior to the drought, this Sahelian-based empire not only exercised at least nominal suzerainty over Kawar, but in conjunction with Saharan (Agades) Tuareg, it controlled the salt ponds (where salt replenished itself annually through evaporation) at Teguidda n’tesemt. The drought facilitated a political shift in power with Kawar coming under Tuareg control and Borno’s role in regional salt commercialization declining. A century later, that “decline” became a precipitous drop: the Sokoto caliphate consolidated itself as the new regional “desert-edge” power, took full control of lucrative Sahelian salt marketing and redistributed political rights to salt production within the caliphate. While Saharan Tuareg retained their influence over the major desert mines, Bornu lost control of two major Niger River salines and was subsequently restricted to minor sources west of Lake Chad. This basic political division of the regional salt industry between Borno, the Tuareg, and the Sokoto caliphate—epitomizing the centuries-old role of the “desert-edge dynamic”—lasted until the European conquest.²³ This continued as southern Bornu became a British Nigerian state and the rest (the majority) the French desert colony of Chad.²⁴

The salts playing comparable roles in both regional and international trade further to the west were mostly of different origins and compositions; consequently, they were exploited differently.²⁵ Where the Mauritanian Sahara meets the Atlantic Ocean, there were many areas where seawater evaporated in depressions deep enough to form layers that could be removed from the surface in blocks. One of these, “Awlil,” was known as early as the 11th to 12th centuries and gave rise to extensive trade into and across the desert; it was reputedly a source of both revenue and conflict among the early Sanhaja clans that would later form the Almoravid movement. Also in Mauritania’s desert, in the upland region of the Adrar, was a rock salt mine identified by a famous 11th-century Arab writer as “Tatintal”; it may have been the mine known since the 15th century as “Ijil.” Either way, it was certainly the source of the salt that was so important to Awdaghust’s relations with the Sudan. Its formation had nothing to do with evaporation; it was part of an ancient salt lake buried over the millennia by the desert itself. However, it could be dug from the surface in trenches about a meter deep.

If today one speaks of subterranean oil as the Sahara’s “black gold,” at least from medieval times, Saharan rock salt was its “white gold”—one of the few commodities considered valuable enough to be traded directly for Sudanic gold. The best-known source of rock salt was the Taoudeni basin to the northwest of Timbuktu. Mined in bars like Ijil, the layers were deeper; while some could be dug from surface trenches, the best-quality salt could only be reached through lateral, underground tunnels. Mining here was very labor-intensive. The famous 14th-century Muslim world traveler Ibn Battuta visited the first mine we know to have been exploited here, Tegaza. As part of his travels to the medieval empire of Mali, he wrote that Tegaza was critical to trans-Saharan trade. It was Tegaza salt marketed in Timbuktu that purchased the sought-after gold and slaves from the Sudan.²⁶ It was not a coincidence that Mali’s successor state, Songhay, extended its authority far into the Sahara, becoming the first Sahelian Empire to claim ownership of Tegaza. Its askia (ruler) understood that it was controlling Tegaza’s salt rather than trying to intervene in local marketing controls over Sudan’s gold that would ensure the profitability of the trans-Saharan trade.

This fact did not go unnoticed north of the Sahara. From what is today Morocco, Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur’s (in)famous conquest of Songhay in 1591 is well known; less known are the repeated exchanges between the sultan and the askia over who had “rights” to taxes on Tegaza’s production and trade. The nature of the argument involved an aspect of “Saharan Islam,” but ultimately the Sultan’s claim, which he justified from his position as caliph, was enforced through conquest—the heart of which was not Songhay or its slaves, as is often postulated, but control of Tegaza. Subsequently Mulay Ismail, the first sultan whose dynasty was fully desert-based, despaired of his son’s poor management of Tegaza. He ordered his useless son to supply the envoy he sent with enough camels for the trans-desert trip that was to ensure all overdue taxes were collected. Tegaza salt taxes remained a disputed issue until Moroccan forces finally destroyed the mine’s settlement around 1800. By then, new mines at nearby Tawdenni had been exploited for some time. The histories of these mines—who worked them, traded their salt, taxed their production and trade—is not clear. What is clear is that just as had occurred in the Central Sahara (first around the Garamantes and the Roman Empire, later around Kawar, Kanem, and Bornu), Saharan salt industries of the central basin—Tegaza and Tawdenni—generated workers, camel raisers, and taxes that became increasingly important to the political economy of people and polities both to the north and to the south of the desert.²⁷

The Advent of Islam

Saharan Scholarship and Islamic Heritage

The Imperial Project

The intrusion of the French into this Saharan space during the 19th century of New Imperialism was a moment of illusion, disillusion, and disaster, not that French explorers and politicians or Saharan warriors and clerics would necessarily have seen their interaction in such terms. The Sahara was part of the French “Imperial Project.” As such, it simultaneously challenged the “Mission Civilatrice” (civilizing mission) as home to fanatic “Mohammedens” and represented an opportunity to display the modernity of French industry in the form of the trans-Saharan railroad (TSR).

A generation-long unsuccessful struggle against a Berber jihad in Algeria (c. 1830–1880s) created in the French psyche the idea of racialized Islam. Saharans practiced a “white Islam” (Islam maure) that was dangerous and should be closely watched; moderates were to be supported, non-moderates to be dealt with proactively.⁵² The Islam practiced south of the Sahara was “black Islam” (Islam noir); as an “Africanized” version of the volatile religion, it was seen as less threatening to French interests.⁵³ This understanding of West African Islam, bifurcated by race and geography, erased the realities of Saharan–Sahel relations and the integral—indeed, at times intimate—associations formed through recent centuries of religious, social, and political integration.

The projected trans-Saharan railroad, however, reflected another vision of the desert—a “void,” empty of people, inviting French development.⁵⁴ In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the project was tied to the obsessions that the desert was the gateway to “Timbuktu the Mysterious” and the inestimable wealth hidden beyond; it was argued to be the answer to protecting French colonies to the north and south. This illusion persisted in spite of the massacre of the Flatters Expedition (1880–1881), sent out to evaluate the viability of the railway, by Algerian “fanatical” Saharans. The project, dropped in the wake of Flatters, then postponed because of World War I, was reprieved in the late 1920s. Serious plans were then rejected as too expensive during the onset of the Great Depression. The TSR saw its last gasp as a kind of national resurrection during the “dark years” of Vichy France during World War II. About 300 kilometers of desert rail were constructed south from Oujda to Bouarfa in eastern Morocco before financial shortages brought a halt to the project, which was then definitively abandoned in 1945.⁵⁵

In the infamous “Scramble for Africa”, France succeeded in acquiring most of the Sahara, which it then divided between its North African and Sudan (French West African, or AOF) territories; the Sahara was transformed into the southern and northern margins, respectively, of each. It was then also subdivided between those colonies in a north-south direction. But it rapidly became apparent that a line drawn on a European map was not actually a line drawn in the sand: Saharan exchange networks, families, and access to resources (“fire, water, pasture, and salt”) were not relinquished to colonial cartographers. That said, it remains true that this moment of 19th-century European chess-playing on the board called Africa was critical in shaping the Sahara’s role in the continent’s 20th-century future.

Desert Resistance

Pacification, Taxation, and Social Change

The Sahara was still seen more in terms of a potential threat to these interests than as an intrinsically valuable colonial addition; the first post-conquest challenge was to “pacify” this space. In addition to directly confronting Muslim-led resistors like the Sanusiyya, French meharistes also engaged desert warriors regularly, usually in response to raids on camps, animals, and military patrols. These warriors were also Muslims but did not have the religious credentials of those who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad (as noted above). Their role in Saharan society had evolved over time into that of “paid protectors” for other clans’ herds, oases, slaves, and caravans. In exchange for hefty taxes, they policed the desert. The French saw them not only as a military challenge but as an exploitative sector—producing nothing, preying on others, superfluous in the context of pacification.

New taxes now levied by the French to ensure “peace” were meant to eliminate the need for any other paid protection. Local administrators pointed out repeatedly that this policy was creating an impoverished class with no access to land or other resources that remained (traditionally) in the hands of clerical clans. Moreover, warriors’ ability to attract followers and clients was predicated on their skills as protectors, retaliators, and “re-possessors” of raided animals and women/children taken as slaves, a profession now rendered redundant. The balance that had been Saharan society was one in which instability was the norm, conflict essential, and social flexibility the key to survival.⁶² Pacification all but eliminated the economic and social viability of these “warrior” clans and their clients, shifting additional power of many kinds into the hands of the “clerics.” This in turn undermined any remaining political legitimacy of embryonic states such as the emirates that had emerged in Mauritania or the Tuareg confederations in northern Mali and Niger. The immediate consequences of this process may have frustrated local administrators—but longer-term legacies challenged the very viability of post-colonial states.⁶³

Underlying the goal of pacification was another pillar of colonialism, namely effective taxation. But the very nature of Saharan societies, irrespective of their political position vis-à-vis French policy, worked against it. Across the full west-east spectrum of the desert, all clans encompassed varying degrees of nomadism: “full,” which could embrace thousands of kilometers in several directions according to camel needs, raiding opportunities, and/or commercial interests; “transhumant,” annual movements within a limited regional or interregional sphere, depending on herd (often mixed camels, sheep, goats) requirements or exchange opportunities, sometimes combined with agriculture; and “sporadic,” a variant on “transhumant” but determined more by annual climate changes, which might necessitate a large cycle one year, a moderate one another, or a division of animals among clan members traveling in different patterns at different moments of the year. While most French administrators on the ground understood the pastoralist adaptations they observed, they still had to answer to Dakar and, ultimately, to Paris. They were required to define “tribes” (tribus) and families (fractions), identify relations between them, and fix their territorial boundaries in order to tax them. Not only was this process complicated and unrealistic, it had a hugely detrimental impact on the Saharan societal flexibility that buffered the vagaries of desert living.

Saharan Slavery in Transition

These two processes—pacification and taxation—together shaped a third ostensible goal of colonialism, namely the abolition of slavery. The undisputed continuation of the institution well beyond the colonial era and arguably in practice (if not in law) even into the early 21st century in Saharan regions has drawn much contemporary media and academic attention; “Sahara” and “slavery,” especially in Mauritania but also in Mali and Niger, are often presented as synonymous.⁶⁴

The French readily accepted local explanations of Islamic slavery. They used them to turn a blind eye to what they called “domestic slavery,” slaves born into the family who had various opportunities to be freed (or free themselves, known among Moors as haratine, among Tuareg as ikalen). What was prohibited was enslavement and slave-trading. There was enough ambiguity between legal definitions to frustrate local administrators attempting to implement these laws, the more so because they openly permitted local Saharans to continue “business as usual.” Masters willingly freed male slaves to accommodate colonial demands for labor because Islamic law advocated a kinship-like relationship, wala, that kept former master and former slave “tied.” Intended to protect freed slaves from being left destitute by their masters, wala in the colonial context also assured that masters and their families retained an ongoing economic and moral authority.⁶⁵

Those same masters resisted freeing female slaves; female slaves produced children. When the father was also the master, the child was born free, belonging to and enlarging the master’s family. The female acquired a special status alleviating labor demands, prohibiting her sale, and assuring her eventual manumission. When he was another slave or hratani, the child was born a slave, belonging to the mother’s master. Haratine families (including those with slave wives) were increasingly settled in semi-autonomous agricultural villages, adwaba, as part of French policy to expand grain cultivation and “sedentarize” Saharans.⁶⁶

While it is true that slavery as an institution was not really abolished, it was being transformed. The emergence of the colonial economy—towns housing soldiers and administrators, needs for food supplies, services and recruits, and provisions of schools and health clinics, alongside the growth of adwaba—offered new opportunities for those previously limited in choices. This included poorer families who had been clients to wealthier pastoralists, so-called inferior classes like musicians and blacksmiths who were “casted” in traditional society, and slaves and haratine who renegotiated relationships with masters or, in some cases, simply left.

It also included women from all of these social groups whose traditional limitations had been doubly enforced by status and patriarchy. Their options offered dubious improvement—prostitution and other “street life” or domestic service much like that they had left. Some returned home voluntarily, preferring the security of “family”; some were forced home by fathers, brothers, and/or former masters (with or without the assistance of colonial justice). But many remained in urban neighborhoods that came to be known as “liberty villages,” where there was protection and support from others seeking to similarly transform their lives.⁶⁷

World War II and Decolonization

New Future for the Sahara?

The 1950s, the decade of decolonization, were characterized by intense politicization and widespread conflict throughout Africa—the Sahara included. Saharans had been treated mostly as those to be contained, controlled, and pacified throughout French colonial presence, and in the immediate post-war era it was still true to say that the French saw the Sahara as little more than a vast expanse of expensive sand.⁷⁰ While it may have played episodic roles of importance during the war, the (now) mythic trans-Saharan railroad was permanently stalled and the sands had yet to deliver up anything of modern economic value. This, however, was soon to change.

As early as the 1920s, geological exploration had suggested rich underground Saharan oil deposits, but it was only in the post-war years when concerns for rebuilding France were paramount that the reports were acted upon and explorations undertaken. By 1956, oil and gas had been located in the Algerian Sahara; suspicions were that this was just the beginning. Figures were projected suggesting that the Sahara could be the answer to France’s critical need for oil (“Black Gold”)—ironically, so symbolically opposed to the Sahara’s long-held economic role as provider of desert salts. During the late 1950s, it was being argued not only among politicians but to the general public that unifying the Saharan regions of Mauritania, Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Chad was the key to France’s industrial future.

The Common Organization of Saharan Regions

The 1957 law that finally created the Common Organization of Saharan Regions (OCRS in its French acronym) had known previous unsuccessful attempts.⁷¹ The difference in 1957 was the Algerian War. The idea that Algeria might be lost to France suddenly underscored the need to protect the resource-rich part of the colony.⁷² It was promoted at home and abroad as an elision of colonial/post-colonial discourse: the ORCS was about development (mise en valeur), economic expansion of the Saharan regions of the French Republic, the purpose of which was “the social promotion of Saharan populations.” To some Tuareg in northern Mali and Niger, this rhetoric resonated with a promise of autonomy vis-à-vis the post-colonial states whose power centers of Bamako and Niamey, respectively, were far to the south, among “black” cattle herders and cultivators.

But the OCRS had never had Tuareg separatist interests in mind; far from it. It was seen by most for what it was: a strategy by which France could decolonize while simultaneously retaining influence. Morocco openly labeled it an “ultra-colonialistic institution,” albeit not without a large dose of self-interest.⁷³ Its own political claim to the Sahara dating from the 16th century remained alive and well, now re-invigorated by decolonization. The “Greater Morocco” lobby had Mauritania in its sights—or at least the Saharan part where iron ore had been discovered in 1952; production was set to begin in 1958.⁷⁴ This reclamation also encompassed the Spanish Sahara, where rich deposits of phosphates gave additional promise of wealth. Mauritania’s soon-to-be Saharan rulers had similar suspicions about the OCRS’s political designs disguised as economic development; however, they were also aware of the Greater Morocco threat. By refusing to be part of the French project but simultaneously rejecting Moroccan overtures, they played the competing neo-imperialists off against each other, temporarily retaining their own autonomy. Ironically, it was their subsequent attempt to divide up the Spanish Sahara with Morocco that most jeopardized this achievement. The costs of the war and its unpopularity with the several northern clans who traditionally nomadized in the region ended post-independence democracy with a military coup and simultaneously terminated Mauritania’s claims in the area. Morocco’s “occupation” of the Western Sahara has become semi-permanent; as of 2018, it remains a United Nations political issue largely independent of the Sahara itself.⁷⁵

As for the OCRS, it was quickly decried in the famous Accra Resolution on Imperialism and Colonialism in December 1958, along with NATO and the European Common Market, as one of the “military and economic pacts intended to strengthen Imperialist activities in Africa.”⁷⁶ The OCRS had never been meant to serve any but French interests. Algeria’s independence and reclamation of “its” Sahara in 1960 put an end to the project; a short-lived attempt to keep it alive as a technical initiative was an abysmal failure. In 1963, the original idea and its adaptations were all abandoned.

Disillusion and Dissent

For those Tuareg who had invested hopes in a Saharan state, this disappointment added to other more localized grievances against the Malian government; the first of their repeated rebellions broke out in the north between 1962 and 1964.⁷⁷ The immediate and harsh retaliation of the new independent state served to reinforce northern fears of a life of marginalization and poverty; even those who had not initially supported the idea of a Saharan state (including non-Tuareg) began to move into this political camp. There is no direct thread between subsequent rebellions (including those between 1990 and 1995 and 2007 and 2009) because interest groups shifted and the Malian state changed not only leadership but ideological direction and therefore “global allies.” Moreover, in the course of the disastrous 1968–1972 drought that devastated herds and crops across the West African Sahara-Sahel, thousands of Saharan pastoralists, including Mali’s and Niger’s Tuareg, were forced out of the desert and into Sahel towns. The latter were themselves hard-hit by food shortages and the collapsing economy; Saharans looking for non-existent employment opportunities with equally non-existent skills and education exacerbated the already volatile situation. It did not improve perceptions of differences between “north and south,” Sahara and Sahel, “white and black” (overlaid in Niger and Chad by “Islam and Christianity”), which continued to write themselves onto political tensions and social conflicts.⁷⁸

In Mauritania, a similar phenomenon unfolded but with a marked “social” character: former slave masters (pastoralists, owners of oases and date palms) lost herds and agricultural produce and thus the means to care for their servile dependents. Slaves and haratine flooded into urban centers including the new cities of Nouakchott and Nouadhibou. Unlike their former masters, however, they were accustomed to physical and domestic labor and were able to make the transition not only more quickly but more successfully. These drought years are said to have marked the most important watershed in the evolution of the country’s history of slavery, having impact more far-reaching than either colonial or independent Mauritanian government legal policies. But exacerbating economic with social struggles here too had political consequences: Mauritania moved rapidly to fulfill its new identity of the “Islamic” Republic, jealously guarding power in the hands of the “white,” clerical Saharans and becoming increasingly conservative in religious terms. These moves also produced political conflict; between 1989 and 1992 over 80,000 “blacks” from the south were forced into exile, not counting the untold numbers who disappeared permanently into prisons or were killed without accountability.⁷⁹

The Sahara in Modern Politics

There is no doubt that differing visions of the Sahara during the critical moments of decolonization and early independence had enduring legacies for each nation in which the Sahara constituted a substantial territory and in which Saharans, however demographically few and however identified—by skin color, ethnicity, and/or religion—were declared citizens. In all but one case, the French transferred power to their “sub-Saharan” partners, those who had complied with colonial laws, accepted colonial rule, and digested colonial culture and education, leaving Saharans feeling further marginalized or, as in Mali, outright betrayed. That much of the international aid during the drought intended to help both the Sahel and Saharans remained in the hands of businessmen and politicians living in Bamako, Niamey, and Ndjamena did not help.⁸⁰ In Mauritania, the exception where power was given to the “white” Saharans, the rapid marginalization of and discrimination against blacks, combined with the government’s refusal to acknowledge the very real social changes colonial and climate influences had wrought with respect to former “warriors,” clients, slaves, and haratine meant inevitable political instability. It also ensured reactive attempts by Saharan elites to protect their privileged positions.⁸¹ Consequently, the history of post-colonial Sahara writ large was one of political authoritarianism (if not dictatorship, as occurred in Mauritania), civil war (as in Chad), growing social conflicts (racial, class, urban-rural, religious), and declining economic sustainability.⁸²

Using and Abusing the Past

Today we are experiencing a cruel irony. Once again, the Sahara has a role in Africa that affects Africa’s global position significantly. It has become infamous for its “trans-Saharan trade” and its “Islamic practices.” But they are not what they once were.

The trans-Saharan trade that once was rooted in Saharan resources and aided in developing a healthy economy is now based on externally produced commodities: drugs from South America, cigarettes, and arms from Europe and the Middle East. Saharans are using traditional transport networks, but they are now traversed by trucks, not camels, and they have established their own systems of controls and taxes that lie well outside the laws of any recognized state.⁸³ And while not the base of this increasingly humanitarian problem, these networks also support the desperate attempts of West Africans to find economic security in Europe. The Sahara has become “the gateway to the North”, a perverted inversion of its once-perceived and celebrated role. The migrants are not Saharans per se, but they trust Saharan networks to get them “out of Africa” and into Europe.

The Sahara as a center of Islamic learning and development has not only been largely erased by historiography, contemporary fundamentalist Islam has done its best to destroy any physical (manuscript, monument) evidence of its earlier history. It is important to understand that it is precisely because the Sahara has been for so long an intellectual incubator that evolving Islamic ideas gravitate here. Also, modern Islamic movements have tended to build on a very early premise of Islam—that it is a religion that helps the poor and the discriminated-against and reminds them that they are equal in the eyes of Allah. Saharan former French colonial states in West Africa, ranked among the world’s poorest, have long been seen by traditionalist Islamic movements like the Wahhabi (active in parts of West Africa from the 1940s) as areas in which investment in education and health, in particular, will have an impact.

Globalizing the Sahara in an Age of Islamization

In today’s global climate, however, more radical strains initially imported from the Middle East are taking root among the Sahara’s fertile-fold, especially its unemployed, uneducated young. Just as traditional clerics managed the desert economy, they too have successfully piggybacked onto and often taken control over profitable trans-Saharan commerce to support their activities. Since 2012, Mali’s north has borne the brunt of the ongoing instability generated by the activities of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an offshoot of Algerian problems associated with Osama bin Laden. It has spread attacks and kidnappings into Mauritania and Niger, alternately allied with or fighting against locally grown movements like Ansar Dine, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (splintered from AQIM, led by a Mauritanian, having a heavy hand in Malian drug-trading), and the Islamic Movement for the Azawad (the most independence-oriented of the groups, announcing by their name the geographical focus of a future state). That said, it was—and remains—the National Army for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA) that advocates establishing an autonomous Tuareg nation. Although AQIM claimed as one of its goals the “ultimate” liberation of Mali from France, and the MNLA to “right the wrongs” of the legacies of colonialism (the post-colonial Malian state), the result of their escalated conflicts drew the French military back into their former colony with “boots on the ground” and fighter jets in the air in Operation Serval (2013–2014). Although officially an international effort requested by Mali and supported with Malian troops, it opened the door for regional and international accusations of the launch of a new “post-colonial imperialism.” Neither the conflicts nor their political and religious fallout has ceased either in Mali or in neighboring Mauritania, Niger, or Chad (or in the Algerian Sahara, for that matter) as of 2018.⁸⁴

Media comparisons of contemporary drug trading and human trafficking, as well as religious “fanaticism” with the Sahara’s history of trans-Saharan trade, Islamic networks, and jihads, may resonate with a sensationalist-seeking general public, but they distort our understanding of what has made the Sahara a viable place for sustainable societies over the centuries—and most importantly, what could ultimately destroy it. Looking even superficially at the history of Saharans is to underscore the dynamic elements in their societies, which were as much economic and social as they were religious, and the extent to which their embedded flexibility and adaptive nature shaped long-term evolution. Their challenges have been both “internal,” generated by climate change, local warfare, and political instability, and “external,” sometimes welcomed, sometimes resisted, usually in some way negotiated. The latter included colonial interests from the Romans through the Ottomans to the Europeans; neo-colonialism from seemingly everywhere but especially America and the Middle East; and capitalism in general, bringing opportunities and exploitation and, most recently, “global culture”—perhaps the largest challenge of all. But something called “Saharan life” continued to be identified and lived albeit in rapidly transforming ways.⁸⁵Will the conjuncture of extremist politics and religious movements characterizing the early 21st century become, in hindsight, the beginning of the end or merely another dramatic phase in Saharan adaptation and sustainability? Neither outcome is self-evident.