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SAHARAN OCEANS AND BRIDGES, BARRIERS AND DIVIDES IN AFRICA'S HISTORIOGRAPHICAL LANDSCAPE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2015

GHISLAINE LYDON
GHISLAINE LYDON*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Based on a broad assessment of the scholarship on North-Western Africa, this article examines Saharan historiography with a particular view towards understanding how and why historians have long represented the continent as being composed of two ‘Africas’. Starting with the earliest Arabic writings, and, much later, French colonial renderings, it traces the epistemological creation of a racial and geographic divide. Then, the article considers the field of African studies in North African universities and ends with a review of recent multidisciplinary research that embraces a trans-Saharan approach.

Keywords

SaharaNorth AfricaWest Africahistoriographycolonialismracism

Information

Type
JAH Forum: Trans-Saharan Histories
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 2015, pp. 3 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Each geographic space, insofar as it is a space for a possible history, is … a function of many variables.Footnote 1

More than six decades ago, Fernand Braudel pointed the way towards a ‘total history’ of Africa. His method, anchored in the concept of ‘liquid planes’ that treated seas and oceans as heuristic devices, was to collapse geographical barriers in order to recast the parameters of history.Footnote 2 Braudel wrote of a ‘greater Sahara’ extending from the Atlantic to China. For him, Africa's Sahara Desert, representing the entire northern half of the continent including the North African littoral, was ‘one of the faces of the Mediterranean’.Footnote 3 In his conception, this vast physical space was connected through the movement of caravans and ‘grand nomads’ circulating across its various shores and oases from the Tunisian Sahel to the Senegal River.Footnote 4 Given how entrenched the idea of a divided continent was then, and still remains in Africa's historiographical landscape, Braudel's vision was remarkable even if his overall interest in African history would remain peripheral.

Covering close to one-third of Africa's continental landmass, the Sahara has long been romanticized as an arid, rugged, and impenetrable desert. In much of Western historiography, the Sahara was misconstrued as a buffer zone separating two culturally and racially contrasted ‘Africas’. Muslim writers similarly imagined a ‘land of the blacks’ (Bilād al-Sūdān), south of the Sahara Desert that separated it from the Maghrib. Yet, notable scholars across the ages have questioned, as did Braudel, this particular paradigm. Théodore Monod, a founder of the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, an avid camel rider and an authority on western Saharan studies, delivered a lecture in 1937 at the Rotary Club of Dakar entitled ‘The Sahara: Barrier or Hyphen?’ He concluded by stating ‘the historian can only answer in one way: indubitably “hyphen (trait d'union)”’.Footnote 5 Echoing Monod, the political scientist of North Africa, William Zartman published an essay in 1963 entitled ‘Sahara: Bridge or Barrier?’ that began with the following statement:

There is a well-entrenched idea, a hangover from the Middle Ages and from French colonial notions, that Africa stops at the Sahara. As long as the Continent could be divided into convenient zones of colonial influence and Africans could be spoken of as anthropological specimens rather than political beings, the world could get by with this sort of concept. As long as it lasted, architectural similarities between Warzazat in the Moroccan Valley of the Dra and Bamako on the Malian Niger went unnoticed, the presence of both Nilotic and Negroid types on the Tassili frescoes went unexplained, and the column of General Leclerc marching up from Lake Chad across the desert in 1943 was a brave anomaly. Today this attitude is rapidly becoming outmoded.Footnote 6

Contrary to Zartman's assessment, however, it would be another fifty years before debunking the myth of a Saharan divide would begin in earnest.

Today an increasing number of scholars engage in Saharan and trans-Saharan research. Still, due to the schism between North and so-called sub-Saharan Africa the Sahara remains a glaring blind spot in the historiography. Varying efforts to set geographic limits to both Africas and to disregard the Sahara proper have tended to insulate and isolate information exchange. The history of the discursive fracture, reimagined from antiquity to postmodernity, is deeply layered. Depending on scholarly tradition and regional location, the parameters of African history, ‘a function of many variables’, in José Ortega y Gasset's meaning, have shifted in orientation and scope.

Orientalism and the politics of race, religion, and conquest are among the reasons behind this bipolarized episteme. Given their historic hold on north-western Africa, the French played no small part in the construction of the Saharan divide, all the while generating a voluminous literature on Saharan zones. This colonial discourse has proven enduring, and in many ways, it continues to constrict intellectual exchange in and out of Africa, and yet today many prominent Saharanists are francophone. Still, African and Saharan studies, as well as trans-Saharan research, remain underdeveloped in North Africa, especially in Algeria. In West Africa, Mauritanian scholars have done much to promote western Saharan studies. As for North America, where university research tends to be compartmentalized in area studies, the field attracts few students. This article is a modest attempt to reflect upon the state of Saharan studies with particular reference to the scholarship on north-western Africa, or the region from West Africa to the Maghrib. I trace the Saharan divide's formation and underlying causes, examining recent scholars' efforts to confront and transcend it. Throughout this article I make a distinction between studies on Saharan history and society, and studies that explicitly embrace a trans-Saharan approach.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SAHARAN DIVIDE

In The Invention of Africa, Valentin Mudimbe recognized the extent to which African gnosis was shaped by ‘a silent dependence on a Western episteme’.Footnote 7 Yet, for him ‘Africa’ was implicitly ‘the black continent’, a conception that paradoxically replicates Hegel's nineteenth-century ‘framing’,Footnote 8 which equated what he termed ‘Africa proper’ with ‘that which lies to the south of the Sahara desert’.Footnote 9 This synthetic construct that makes an abstraction of ‘North Africa’ and relegates Africa to a sub-Saharan part of the continent, is, to borrow from Théophile Obienga, a ‘Eurocentric Africanism’.Footnote 10

The idea of a divided continent has deep roots. Herodotus's description of the northern desert-edge of Africa (then known as ‘Libya’) as a region of ‘wild beasts’ beyond which was a ‘ridge of sand’, must have made a lasting impression.Footnote 11 How the northern part of the continent was erased of its ‘blackness’ to become what Hegel thought of as ‘European Africa’, is much less understood. Starting as early as the eighth century, Muslim writers, geographers, and travelers invariably infused their mappings of Africa with racialist attitudes. Like Jews and Christians before them, their interpretative framework for ‘black Africa’ was the story of Ham.Footnote 12 The Hamitic template influenced subsequent interpretations of Africa and its inhabitants and gave shape to the formulation of Africa's racial divide. The rhetoric of ‘black equals slave’ would prove enduring as Baz Lecocq explains in his contribution to this Forum. Arabic-writing scholars invariably borrowed stereotypes from the Greek and Latin works (some based on Ancient Egyptian scholarship) they translated and reproduced, starting with Ptolemy's Geographia.

The expression Bilād al-Sūdān, country of the blacks, was first recorded in the writings of Muslims of the eighth century. At roughly the same time the word ‘Sahara,’ Arabic for desert, desolate environment, was applied to regions of Africa.Footnote 13 Racism against black-skinned people was already so pronounced among certain Muslims by the next century that several scholars of black descent were prompted to react in writing. One of the earliest was the Iraqi ‘Uthman ‘Amr Ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869), author of ‘The Book of the Glory of the Blacks over the Whites’ (Kitāb Fakhr al-Sūdān ‘alā l-Biḍān).Footnote 14 In this essay, al-Jāḥiẓ highlighted the contributions of black people, including Prophet Muhammad's supposed black ancestors. He criticized the association of blacks with ignorance and enslavement – an idea that would remain entrenched among Muslims, including some Saharans. What most exasperated al-Jāḥiẓ was the classification of blacks as non-Muslim and unbelievers. For many Muslims, the color line often was conflated with a religious one, and so the land of the blacks was thought to lie beyond the abode of Islam (Dār al-Islām). Such prejudice was clearly expressed by the tenth-century Tunisian Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (d. 996). In his Risāla, one of the most popular compendia of Mālikī law in Africa, he declared: ‘it is detestable to trade in the land of enmity (arḍi al-‘adūw) and the country of the Blacks'.Footnote 15 Prejudice among North Africans was to the point that some deemed Western African trade goods and even profits derived from trans-Saharan trade to be tainted. Still, neither racism nor legal edicts would deter intra-African exchange.

The geographical limits of the Bilād al-Sūdān, the Sahara and the Maghrib were a matter of perspective, but they also shifted in relationship to the movement of people and of the desert. Based on oral sources, the eleventh-century Al-Bakrī reckoned the Sahara Desert began at Sijilmāsa, and Ancient Ghana was its southern limit.Footnote 16 In a fatwa composed some eight centuries later about the payment of commercial agents written by a legal scholar from Tichitt, a town that sprang to the north of Awdaghust after Ghana's decline, the limits of the Bilād al-Sūdān were set at several days by camel to the south of that town.Footnote 17 The so-called Arabo-Berber communities of south-western Sahara, in today's Islamic Republic of Mauritania, would have adjusted the borders of the ‘land of the Blacks’ over time. Because of the ideologies of race and Islam, these particular Saharans would struggle with the question of belonging. Aḥmad al-Shinqīṭī reported a late nineteenth-century case of a pilgrim who, like himself, was originally from south-western Sahara, and strove to convince people in Mecca that his homeland was part of the Maghrib not the Bilād al-Sūdān.Footnote 18

Early Muslim geographers from the Middle East dubbed the northern half of north-west Africa ‘the island of the West’ or ‘place of the sun's setting’ (jazīrat al-maghrib). Their knowledge was so limited that they either assumed this region was surrounded by water, or that it was an island between the Mediterranean Sea and the sea of sand to the south.Footnote 19 Concomitantly, several writers depicted the Bilād al-Sūdān as separate from the rest of the world. The Persian geographer Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Istakhārī was an early proponent of this concept, which would be plagiarized by the tenth-century scholar Ibn Ḥawqal. For the latter, the Sūdān was ‘an encircled land, which has no contact with other kingdoms. But one of its frontiers extends to the Ocean; another to the desert (al-ṣaḥrā’) which separates it from the land of the Maghrib’.Footnote 20 Ibn Ḥawqal would then proceed to contradict himself when describing Sijilmāsa, a city he visited, as having ‘uninterrupted trade with the land of the Sūdān’.Footnote 21 Many of these early writers composed for a readership interested in the trade routes and realms of the land of gold dust (bilād al-tibr), a region that the tenth-century geographer Muqaddasī placed above the Sūdān.Footnote 22

The celebrated Maghribi fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldūn described three parts constituting black Africa. The first was the land of Abyssinia, or north-east Africa, then the land of the Zanj (another term for black, nowadays considered pejorative) for Africa's eastern coast, and finally the land of the blacks, by which he meant Western Africa. For him ‘the boundary of the Maghrib south-east (qibla) and south is marked by heaped sands standing as a barrier between the land of the Sūdān and the lands of the Berbers'.Footnote 23 Although he never traveled to the heart of the Sahara, he provided one of the earliest descriptions of its diverse zones and environments.Footnote 24 He depicted the Sanhaja Berbers as quintessential Saharans who refused to be dominated, presenting a romantic view of this desert land that, in the mind of many Africans, especially nomads, would become synonymous with freedom.

Bilād al-Sūdān and the Sahara were external labels, and it would be several centuries before they would become appropriated locally. Muslim Africans of the Sahara and Sahel also would create their own geographical constructs. One of the earliest was the ‘country of Takrūr’ (bilād al-takrūr), from the kingdom by the same name, which flourished in what is today Senegal in the eleventh century and was one of the earliest Islamic polities in the area. For centuries, Western Africans used Takrūr and the adjective Takrūrī as an identity marker, to the point that the name became synonymous with West Africans of the Muslim world, and entire neighborhoods, from Cairo and Khartoum, to Jedda and Mecca, took on the name.Footnote 25 This marker would take on racial inference assigned to black Muslims, particularly West Africans. At some point in time, however, some south-western Sahara scholars from the oasis town of Chinguetti started writing about a bilād shinqīṭ perhaps to demarcate themselves from a bilād takrūr. Over time, these communities came to label themselves as ‘whites’ (biḍān), and began writing about theirs as ‘a territory of the whites’ ‘(trāb al-biḍān)’, though how this came about is not well known.

The writings of Ibn Khaldūn circulated across the northern half of the continent with increased velocity in the age of printing. It would not be until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that Europeans would begin reading and translating them. Jewish scholars in Spain and North Africa, including the fourteenth-century cartographer of the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, also provided detailed information about the regions and kingdoms of the Sahara and Sahel. One of the earliest works to profoundly influence European ideas about Africa was the sixteenth-century Latin description of Africa by the Maghribi Hasān ibn Muḥammad al-Wazzānī.Footnote 26 Although it is likely that he never traveled to Western Africa, as Pekka Masonen suggests, Leo Africanus was versed in Maghribi scholarship. Yet he relied heavily on European epistemes when compartmentalizing the continent into four parts: Barbary, Numidia, Libya, and ‘the land of the Negroes’.Footnote 27 It is worth mentioning that he wrote in Latin for a readership that included ‘Italian’ communities with a centuries-old commercial and residential presence in North Africa's port cities.

The Saharan divide was more firmly drawn in the modern era. As in Roman times, North Africa witnessed the most intensive colonization at the hands of Europeans. Decades after Napoleon's expedition to Egypt of 1798, France (Algeria in 1830) carved out a North African colony ahead of the Berlin Conference. In myriad ways these experiences shaped their subsequent colonial experiments. This is particularly true of the French, many of whose colonial personnel in Western Africa were trained in Algeria, France's first ‘Muslim power’, as David Robinson has shown.Footnote 28 The trans-Saharan dimensions of colonial rule in Africa, however, remain unexplored.Footnote 29

The invention of ‘white Africa’ (Afrique blanche) in French epistemology is not well understood. The self-identification of North Africans and Middle Easterners as ‘white’ clearly has a long history, as evidenced by Al-Jāḥiẓ's writings. A further consideration is the belief among French colonists that some ‘Berber’ (Amazigh) groups were descendants of former Roman colonizers. Eugène Daumas and Paul-Dieudonné Fabar made this argument quite explicitly in their influential book La Grande Kabylie. Published in 1847, it not only lent currency to the notion that North Africa was an extension of Europe, but it also cemented colonial constructs about Arabs and Berbers, all the while reinforcing the practice of turning a blind eye to the blacks of the Maghrib. In the process, the French translation of Ibn Khaldūn's so-called history of the Berbers apparently was manipulated in order to legitimize France's manifest destiny in Algeria, in what anthropologist Abdelmajid Hannoum terms a ‘heretical colonial discourse’.Footnote 30 By the late nineteenth century, the expression l'Afrique blanche had become common.Footnote 31 It was popularized in the next century when it was used synonymously with l'Afrique française, a region where, paradoxically, Algerian-born Frenchmen would be nicknamed ‘black feet’ (pieds noirs). At least by the 1890s a further racial inversion was the French borrowing from Senegal the Wolof phrase bougnoul (bu ñuul) meaning ‘that is black’ as a derogatory term first for all blacks, and then, over time, exclusively for North Africans living in France.

The race across the Sahara led by explorers Hugh Clapperton (and company) and Réné Caillié (1820s), and followed by German adventurer-scholars Heinrich Barth (1850s), Friedrich Gerhard Rolhfs (1860s), Gustav Nachtigal (1870s), and Oscar Lenz (1880s), fueled European interest in the region. General Eugène Daumas (d. 1871), the co-author of La Grande Kabylie, became one of France's first prolific Saharanists. Other notable Frenchmen include Henri Duveyrier – who spent time among Algeria's Tuareg, and was fascinated by caravan trade – and Paul Soleillet who also traveled extensively in the Sahara. Soleillet was a keen advocate of the French pipedream to build a trans-Saharan railway from Algiers to Timbuktu. Also significant is the work of colonial officer Alfred Le Chatelier (1855–1929), who visited West Africa and later taught the sociology of Islam at the College de France. It could be said that he and Soleillet were early Western practitioners of trans-Saharan research.

In the wake of France's conquest of the Western African interior, it became imperative to stake out the Saharan trait d'union in order to build a ‘homogenous French empire’.Footnote 32 The French were especially keen on connecting the early African territories, or, as the nineteenth-century Governor Faidherbe expressed, ‘Senegal and Algeria must extend a hand across the Sahara.’Footnote 33 Le Chatelier had participated in the first mission led by Colonel Paul Flatters (who perished in 1881 at the hands of a Tuareg party in an ill-fated second expedition). In his Questions sahariennes (1890), he reported on his expedition to the oases of south-western Algeria, and proposed Zinder would be a more viable destination for the projected trans-Saharan railway than Timbuktu.Footnote 34 By this time, France's ‘Saharan penetration’ of the Sudān was all the more imperative given British and German claims over parts of Niger. That the European colonization of West Africa was led in part by military expeditions to and from North Africa tends to be forgotten. After the British-French agreement of August 1890, Colonel Parfait-Louis Monteil would lead a mission to stake out the official borders between Nigeria, and Niger and Chad, and between Algeria and Libya.Footnote 35

The early twentieth century marked a high moment in the consolidation of the Saharan divide. Incongruously, the French scholar who had a heavy hand in fashioning the paradigm was another specialist of Saharan affairs. Émile-Félix Gautier (d. 1940), who began his career in Madagascar, explored the Algerian Sahara and published extensively.Footnote 36 His final works were entitled L'Afrique noire occidentale (1935), followed by L'Afrique blanche (1939). In this last book he equated the Sahara to an ‘ethnic partition’ (cloison ethnique) separating the black African from the white African, and he assimilated the latter to the ‘White Mediterranean’.Footnote 37 For him it functioned as a cordon sanitaire that prevented the movement of, among other things, malaria-infected mosquitoes to ‘white Africa’. Ten years later, Jean Despois and Robert Capot-Rey published L'Afrique blanche française, consisting of two volumes, one on North Africa and the other on the ‘French Sahara’.Footnote 38

For the former doyen of North African history, Charles-André Julien (whose family migrated to Algeria when he was a teenager), l'Afrique du nord was not really part of Africa – a region he, like Hegel, considered removed from history.Footnote 39 Taking Gautier's thinking to the next level, he describes Africa as a ‘thankless land’ (pays ingrat), isolated, and hostile.Footnote 40 Julien described the boundary between the two Africas as ‘an imprecise frontier that goes south of the Senegal River to the Indian Ocean, separates two distinct blocs of humanity: White Africa and Black Africa’.Footnote 41 Like Gautier, he excluded Ethiopia, considered ‘civilized’ due to its literate tradition, from his mapping of ‘Africa proper’.Footnote 42 In spite of nineteenth-century efforts to ‘unite’ France's African Empire, twentieth-century epistemology clearly was bent on erecting the Sahara as a racial cordon.

A religious divide was grafted to the racial divide, with the development of French ideas about different types of Muslims. In the early twentieth century, the French came to realize to what extent the frontiers of Islam and its ‘civilizing’ potential, epitomized by Arabic literacy, extended well below the Sahara. In order to fix this epistemological anomaly it became necessary to put a racial and hierarchical spin on ‘Islam’. Following an Orientalist perspective fixated on the ‘Arab’, the study of ‘Africa’ had to remain marginalized from that of the Muslim North. Arguably, the first action, made by a decree in 1911, was to ban the use of Arabic in the colonial administration of ‘black’ Africa, starting with the justice system.Footnote 43 Then colonial scholars invented the new taxonomies of ‘black Islam’ (islam noire) and Moorish Islam (islam maure), to set African Muslims apart from others practicing a ‘pure’ (arabe) Islam in North Africa and the Middle East.Footnote 44 It is difficult to disassociate such labels from the iterations of later scholars writing about a so-called African Islam.

ERASURES IN AND OUT OF NORTH AFRICAN HISTORY

In the early postcolonial days of our historical profession, many conceived of the continent in its pan-African dimensions. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, editor of UNESCO's General History of Africa, asserted:

this history can only be the history of the peoples of the African continent as a whole, seen as a whole, including the mainland and neighbouring islands such as Madagascar, according to the definition in the OAU charter. The history of Africa obviously includes the Mediterranean sector in a unity consecrated by age-long and sometimes bloody links, which make the two parts of Africa on either side of the Sahara the two leaves of one door, the two sides of one coin.Footnote 45

The Cambridge History of Africa editors similarly embraced a continental approach, as did Philip Curtin et al., in a textbook that – more than most – provides reasonable coverage of North Africa across the ages.Footnote 46

Still, the erasure of the Sahara is such that most frequently by ‘Africa’ is meant the so-called sub-Saharan part of the continent. This is despite the fact that technically this designated region includes a large portion of the Sahara (from Mauritania to the Sudan). Guides to African historical methods and sources are silent on this issue.Footnote 47 The artificial constructs of ‘black Africa’ and, to a lesser extent that of ‘white Africa’, remain usual in francophone literature when they have become outmoded elsewhere.Footnote 48 Arabophone scholars progressively have abandoned the use of ‘land of the blacks’, or black Africa (Ifrīqiya al-sawda), in favor of ‘Africa behind the Sahara’ (fī mā warã’a al-Ṣaḥrā’), an expression derived from geographically inaccurate English and French nomenclatures.

Although not as voluminous as that of the Middle East, scholarship on North Africa is substantial, surpassing that of any other region of the continent. A big portion deals with pre-Late Antiquity and is largely concerned with ‘the projection of the history of Europe on the African continent’.Footnote 49 Another portion covers the period from the Muslim conquest through the ‘Umayyad rulers of Ifriqiya to the Hafsids, and beyond. Most of the historiography deals with societies of littoral North Africa, and research on the Sahara – an area constituting most of the landmass of northern countries such as Algeria and Libya – has been uneven, despite the existence of a sizeable French colonial literature.

Scholars of North Africa across the ages have been conditioned to look up beyond the Mediterranean and not down across the Sahara. Aside from forgetting their ‘Africanity’, a trend slowly in the process of being reversed, three major groups, blacks, Berbers, and Jews, traditionally have been excluded from the general histories. While there is a substantial literature on Maghribi Jews, it has until recently been insular and marginalized. The scholarship on Moroccan Jews by Michel Abitbol, one of the first Moroccans to engage in trans-Saharan research (with his study of the conquest of Songhay), is exceptional in this regard.Footnote 50 Both he and Daniel Schroeter have researched the case of Jewish merchants working on behalf of Moroccan Sultans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 51 More recently, I have studied the commercial partnerships between Maghribi Jews and Muslims engaged in trans-Saharan commerce.Footnote 52

More than is now the case for Africa, North African history textbooks remain generally locked in the area-studies paradigm. Most make cursory mention of Ghana and Songhay in relationship to the eleventh-century Almoravids and the Moroccan invasion of 1591 respectively, but rarely do they acknowledge the trans-Saharan trade system supplying markets from Tangier to Tripoli, a major source of economic wealth in the region, let alone Africa's historical connectivity.Footnote 53 In his recent Approaching African History, Michael Brett makes an attempt to provide a ‘unified account’ that highlights Saharan history but falls short of decrying the African divide.Footnote 54

Over time, North African representations of ‘black Africa’ became coded in racialism and Arabocentrism. The classic texts by early North African, Middle Eastern, and Andalusian writers starting in the eighth century all contain elements of racial prejudice towards black Africans that go largely unproblematized in the scholarship. Even the venerated Ibn Khaldūn thought ‘blacks’ lacked in humanity (naqṣ al-insāniya).Footnote 55 Cultural chauvinism and ideas not unlike the pseudo-scientific theories of race in nineteenth-century Western thought still prevail among North Africans today. A cult of superiority of the kind exhibited by former colonists lingers among ‘Arabs’, many of whom do not consider themselves to be ‘African’. Using the example of the travels to West Africa of Jacques Berque, the prolific French islamologue of North Africa, Mustapha El Qadéry sheds light on the attitude problem of a ‘Maghribist going to “Africa” who considers himself an Arabicist (arabisant).’Footnote 56 Particularly emblematic was Berque's confession that he was a specialist of ‘civilized’ and not ‘primitive’ societies. When confronting the scholarly barriers towards a holistic treatment of African history, the realities of race and prejudice throughout the northern half of the continent remain stark, as recent events in northern Mali have brought to the fore. Some scholars write frankly about the ‘negrophobia’ in countries such as Algeria, while others decry racist practices towards Western African migrants, referred to as subsahariens in Morocco and recently as ‘the black peril’.Footnote 57 As Lecocq suggests, it is the discomfort with race and confronting the legacies of the slave trades that accounts for the serious lack of historical research on trans-Saharan connectivities.

The tendency to write the history of Arabs and Berbers separately is a result of the legacies of both Arab and French colonial discourses. Despite the voluminous scholarship on various groups in the colonial period, Berbers have been slighted in the postcolonial historiography of North Africa in line with their political invisibility, linked to questions of religious ideology, language hegemony, and national identity. An exception is the history of the Tuareg that has garnered constant scholarly attention since the nineteenth century.Footnote 58 On the question of Arabocentrism in Moroccan historiography, El Qadéry points to various anomalies in the dominant discourse, including overlooking the Berber identity of the fêted Almoravids.Footnote 59 Gabriel Camps, founder of the Encyclopédie berbère, and specialist of the pre-Roman and Roman periods, exposed the erasure of Berbers in North African history.Footnote 60

Among Camps' noteworthy contributions is an article where he discussed the ‘ancient black domination’ in the Sahara. He also exposed how colonial use of ‘haratin’ (erroneously defined as ‘freed slave’) as a blanket term for all blacks of the Sahara and North Africa masks the history of indigenous black populations.Footnote 61 Research on black North Africa is relatively new. Several social scientists examine the cultures, religions, art, and aesthetics of black Maghribis (sometimes referred to as Afro-maghrébins or Sudani Africans). Noteworthy is the surge in the study of the Gnawa, the Moroccan religious group with Western African roots, by a variety of scholars, starting with ethnomusicologists.Footnote 62 Anthropologist Salim Khiat of the Centre National de Recherches Préhistoriques, Anthropologiques et Historiques (CNRPAH) in Algiers has studied religious practices among black Algerians.Footnote 63 A 2009 special issue of Critical Interventions: A Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, entitled ‘Africanity and North Africa’ explores visual cultures, literary traditions, and performance arts across the Saharan divide.

With the exception of Tunisia, the history of slavery and the slave trades remains a relatively unpopular subject among North Africanists. On the other hand, and not surprisingly, the slave trade across the Mediterranean has garnered considerable attention. In 1967, Lucette Valensi made a rare attempt to trace the origin of enslaved Africans sold in Tunis to Sahelian markets.Footnote 64 Tawfiq Bin ‘Āmir's dissertation considers the beginnings of the Muslim slave trade, one of the rare works on the subject in Arabic.Footnote 65 More recently, Ahmed Rahal and Ismael Montana have researched the religious practices of the enslaved in Tunisia.Footnote 66 Using court records, Schroeter studied the slave market of Marrakech from a transregional perspective.Footnote 67 Almost twenty years ago, Mohamed Ennaji produced a landmark history of slavery in Morocco that inspired further research.Footnote 68 In 2006, a Libyan historian published her master's thesis on nineteenth-century families in Tripoli in which close attention is paid to domestic slavery.Footnote 69 As for Algerian research, Raed Bader completed a dissertation in France on slavery in colonial Algeria, and Benjamin Claude Brower documents French efforts to import enslaved Africans in the first half of the nineteenth century as a settlement strategy.Footnote 70 Brower's book on the conquest of Algeria's Sahara, while not particularly concerned with the Sahelian zones, does engage with West Africanist scholarship to inform his chapter on the French policies towards the trans-Saharan slave trade, and he uncovers the voices of at least one enslaved woman originally from the Middle Niger region.Footnote 71

RECENT SAHARAN HISTORY AND TRANS-SAHARAN RESEARCH

Ann McDougall assessed the burgeoning state of Saharan history some 15 years ago, noting its ‘intellectual vitality’.Footnote 72 Her contributions to African historiography are well known. Together with John Hunwick, she founded the Saharan Studies Association in 1992.Footnote 73 Despite its long-standing tradition, the field of Saharan studies gained visibility only relatively recently in North America. Scholars such as E. W. Bovill, Albert Adu Boahen, Harry Norris, Nehemia Levztion, Paul Lovejoy, and Jean-Louis Triaud, major contributors to the field, are not always branded as ‘Saharanists’. Today, this vitality is primarily being felt in disciplines other than history, and particularly among francophone scholars. At the same time, North African research centers, especially in Morocco and Libya, have been actively promoting and publishing trans-Saharan research, as have scholars working on the region from Mauritania to Chad.

Given France's fascination with the Sahara, and because this settler colony was its crown possession, it stands to reason that Algeria would house the world's first Saharan studies center. The Institut de Recherches Sahariennes (IRS) of the University of Algiers was founded by none other than Gautier in 1937.Footnote 74 It published an annual volume containing research in the natural and social sciences, including articles by Monod, as well as over a dozen monographs.Footnote 75 Postcolonial research in Saharan studies, however, has been irregular. Curiously, the IRS did not survive after independence unlike the CNRPAH, which remains the premier center for historical and social science research in Algeria, publishing journals and monographs and hosting a yearly international conference. In the recent past the center's scholars have contributed greatly to reversing the disregard for Berber studies. Although it does not include an African studies focus, the CNRPAH has organized of late two conferences catering to the interests of all specialists of Africa, namely one on the 1969 pan-African Art Festival held in Algiers and another on Sufi networks in Africa. The center does not seem to have a particular research agenda for Saharan studies, although it did publish in 2001 the proceedings of a singular conference on caravan routes.Footnote 76

The Libyan Center of Manuscripts and Historical Studies (Markaz al-Lībīyī lil-Makhṭūṭāt wal-Dirāsāt al-Ta'rīkhīya), also known as the Libyan Studies Center, promotes the country's own Saharan and trans-Saharan history. African studies are not an explicit part of its agenda, but it is significant that the Center's long-standing director, Dr. Mohamed Jerary, is Jan Vansina's former student.Footnote 77 The Center, which survived the Libyan revolution, publishes extensively, convenes international conferences, and carries out archival and oral history training and preservation. Its publications range from primary sources to monographs, including on Western African history.Footnote 78 It releases a journal of historical research that regularly features articles on Sahelian history, especially about Chad, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria.Footnote 79 The proceedings of the Center's first international conference, entitled ‘trans-Saharan caravan trade’, were published in an issue containing translated articles by West Africanist historians Paulo de Moraes Farias, Ahmad M. Kani, and Marion Johnson.Footnote 80 In a preface to the special issue, Jerary lamented that the Sahara was perceived as ‘a dividing barricade (saddan fāṣilan) between two worlds’, when in fact it is and always has been a connecting space.Footnote 81

One of Libya's historians of Africa is Al-Hādī al-Mabrūk al-Dālī.Footnote 82 Like many North African scholars, Al-Dālī sees Muslims as the source of Western African ‘civilization’.Footnote 83 Aside from its limitations, his research is noteworthy and he remains one of the few to have undertaken trans-Saharan research in Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. His publications include studies of the Hausa, the Tuareg, and the Berabish.Footnote 84 One of his focuses has been Libyan-West African relations as documented in scholarly and commercial letters. Moreover, he has edited several original Malian manuscripts, starting with the bio-bibliography of Aḥmad Būla‘rāf (d. 1955) entitled ‘The removal of suspicion, doubt and neglect in the memory of the authors from the people of Takrūr, the Sahara and Shinqīṭ’.Footnote 85

Morocco's historical dealings in Western Africa have prompted notable historians to engage in trans-Saharan research, especially since the 1980s. The sixteenth-century conquest of Songhay encouraged scholars to pay attention to the linkages and exchanges between West Africa and the Maghrib. The above-mentioned Abitbol published on trans-Saharan caravan trade and Jewish participation in it, as well as on the history of Timbuktu.Footnote 86 The economic historian Louis Miège attempted to quantify trans-Saharan trade.Footnote 87 Largely due to the legacy of Aḥmad Bābā (d. 1627) of Timbuktu, who trained notable Moroccan scholars in Islamic legal studies during his nine years in exile, several scholars took an interest in West African manuscripts held in Moroccan archives. These efforts began with Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Kattānī and Muḥammad ḥājjī, who together edited an eighteenth-century manuscript, the now well-known bio-bibliography of the scholars of Takrūr, on which the above-mentioned Būla‘rāf drew.Footnote 88 In the same period, two important dissertations filed in France focused on Morocco's trade with Western African polities.Footnote 89

With the creation in 1990 of the Institut des Études Africaines, affiliated with the University Muhammad V in Rabat, research on Western Africa and transregional exchanges accelerated. Founded to further knowledge about Morocco's relations with its neighbors to the south, it later changed its agenda to promote African studies broadly.Footnote 90 Aside from research monographs, the institute publishes Western African primary sources, including manuscripts, such as Aḥmad Bābā's fatwa on slavery or Aḥmad Ṭiyūr al-Jinna's pilgrimage account. Since 2000, it also issues a yearly journal (Al-Maghrib al-Ifrīqī). Naturally, the first subject of interest to scholars associated with the institute was the history of the Moroccan Sultan Aḥmad al-Manṣūr's 1591 conquest of the Songhay Empire. The institute's first international conference, held in Marrakech to commemorate four-hundred years since the sojourn in that city of the celebrated Timbuktu scholar Aḥmad Bābā, brought together scholars from West and North Africa, as well as foreigners such as McDougall and Hunwick. The proceedings in Arabic, English, and French include papers on the Ottoman response to the conquest, legal disputes about property rights in colonial Songhay and Morocco-Timbuktu relations since 1591.Footnote 91 More recently, the institute has tackled Mudimbe's concept of ‘othering’ (alterité) that has become a useful way to begin confronting North Africa's Africanity beyond the divide.Footnote 92

Another popular subject promoted by the institute is the history of Moroccan merchants in West Africa, starting with the merchants of Fez.Footnote 93 Rita Aouad's scholarship on this subject is especially noteworthy, beginning with her dissertation based on the case study of the Benbarka family that settled in several southern Saharan towns, including Timbuktu.Footnote 94 More recently, she has examined Moroccan-Jewish relations in trans-Saharan trade.Footnote 95 It must be noted that West Africanists also have studied the history North African merchants without necessarily engaging in trans-Saharan research.Footnote 96 The institute houses historians such as Aḥmad al-Shukrī who publishes on the history of ancient Ghana and Khalid Chegraoui who studies Islamic discourse in nineteenth-century Western Africa.Footnote 97 Without a doubt, this African studies institute is the most active in the Maghrib in promoting North–South African scholarly exchanges.

In 2009, a handful of Moroccan scholars created the ‘Research and Study Group on the Saharan Littoral’ (Majmū`at al-Baḥth wal-Dirāsāt ḥawla Sāḥil al-ṣaḥrā). They self-published an edited volume containing chapters covering a range of research topics from water scarcity management and a cultural history of the camel, to a history of western Saharan saints.Footnote 98 The most accomplished specialist of Saharan history in Morocco is Rahal Boubrik, a sociologist by training who has written extensively on the political and religious history of the region from Mauritania to Morocco. His first book examines the Fāḍilīya Sufi Order, and his most recent, Saharan Studies: Society, Power and Religion, is a broad historical synthesis of the western Saharan region.Footnote 99 In 2013, he founded a Saharan Studies Center at the University Mohammed V in Rabat. Given the pending liberation of the Western Sahara, however, Saharan history remains compromised in Morocco. As for the historiography in Spanish, it is relatively slim, lacking a transnational perspective and primarily concerned with the colonial experience of the Spanish Sahara. Notable exceptions include Alberto López Bardagos' work focused on the Awlad Dlim, whose nomadic history reaches south of the Senegal River. He, more than any other Spaniard, has built on Julio Caro Baroja's legacy.Footnote 100

Scholars of Mauritania, a quintessential Saharan country, have been at the forefront of Saharan history. Because it is a country betwixt and between West Africa and the Maghrib, I include a brief note on some relevant scholarship, much of which is written in Arabic and deserves wider distribution. The Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherches Historiques of the University of Nouakchott publishes regularly a historical research journal (Maṣādir). Lately, however, independent initiatives such as the Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur l'Ouest Saharien, and the association ‘Reseau d’Études Sahariennes’ have become dynamic intellectual hubs. As McDougall noted in her 1998 review, Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh is a central figure in the field and he continues to publish widely.Footnote 101 The recent work of four historians is of particular interest. The first three obtained their doctorates in North African universities, whereas Yaḥya Wuld al-Bara studied with the late Pierre Bonte in Paris. Muḥammadu Wuld Mḥammadan sheds light on the French mis/interpretations of the Sahara in the of age exploration, Nāni ḥusayn shifts the orientation of our knowledge on the Almoravids, and Aḥmad Mawlūd Wuld Aidda published a comparative history of Saharan architecture.Footnote 102 Finally, Wuld al-Bara recently compiled a monumental collection in ten volumes of fatwas and shorter legal responses, dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and straddling north-western Africa from Guinea to Morocco.Footnote 103

In the past decade or so, a new historiographical trend has been the study of trans-Saharan migration of West Africans seeking economic refuge in North Africa or passage to the European Union. Economic flight stories and maritime death tolls have encouraged historical reevaluations of Africa's migration history. In line with the political and economic agendas of the Global North, this has become a popular dissertation subject among African and foreign students. To a large extent, however, North Africanists are more consumed with studying the history of the migrations of their nationals to Europe than they are about migrants from the South. This is in line with the predominant Mediterranean orientation of this scholarly tradition.Footnote 104 It must be noted that the study of the clandestine migration of Western Africans to Europe, risked by embarking on treacherous voyages by sea and across the desert, on the one hand, and the terrorist activities of Islamic fundamentalists in the Sahara, on the other, have generated colloquia and publications, especially in Europe.

In the past decade or so, some historians but especially geographers and anthropologists have made significant contributions to the study of trans-Saharan flows. Lawrence Marfaing, a specialist of Senegal's commercial history, turned her attention to trans-Saharan migrations and the Senegalese in Morocco, and she has co-edited several landmark studies.Footnote 105 Scholars at the Centre des Mondes Africains (CEMAf), France's most dynamic center for African studies, have made substantial contributions.Footnote 106 Jean Schmitz organized a special issue of Politique Africaine on the plight of West Africans, prompted by the cases of migrants in Ceuta and Melilla in 2005 and 2006, and the fated travelers to the Canary Islands.Footnote 107 He and Emmanuel Grégoire published a special journal issue entitled ‘Afrique noire et monde arabe’. In the preface they observe that despite the perception of the Sahara as an obstacle, ‘it has been throughout the ages a hyphen between these two universes … black Africa and white Africa [sic]’.Footnote 108 This same journal later issued a number entitled ‘Migrations entre les deux rives du Sahara’, edited by Sylvie Bredeloup and Olivier Pliez.Footnote 109 Grégoire and André Bourgeot edited a 2011 issue of Hérodote on the geopolitics of the Sahara, prefaced with the remark that the frontiers of the ‘saharo-sahelian space’ are increasing challenging to traverse. This issue features articles on the legal and illegal circulation of northbound migrants seeking economic refuge and merchandise such as powered-milk, cigarettes, drugs, and firearms.

Three geographers – Karine Bennafla, Julien Brachet, and Olivier Pliez – have charted new pathways into the study of the central Saharan regions of Chad, Niger, and Libya.Footnote 110 Anthropologist Judith Scheele's study of Algerian-Malian connections incorporates a historical perspective.Footnote 111 Recently, linguists have been shedding light on the northern distribution of Chadic, Nilo-Saharan, and Mande languages that stands to significantly transform Africa's historiographical landscape. Mohamed Tilmatine and Lameen Souag have studied Algerian Songhay, reflecting on the history of Songhay, Gao and Timbuktu's northern migrations, and Souag documents the infusion of Hausa, Songhay, Manding, and Kanuri in Algerian Arabic.Footnote 112 Finally, the archaeological research by Kevin MacDonald, Sam Nixon, and Andrew Wilson is also producing new knowledge about West Africa's ancient Saharan and trans-Saharan networks.Footnote 113

CONCLUSION

Although it took centuries for scholars and colonists to erect the Saharan divide and fabricate the gnosis of two ‘Africas’, it can now be said that Zartman's statement made half a century ago rings true at last, namely that this paradigm is ‘rapidly becoming outmoded’. The tides have turned over the past twenty years with historians and other social scientists organizing conferences and producing publications that bring previously separated specialists and literatures of Africa in conversation with each other.

Inspired by Braudel, it has been useful to perceive the Sahara as a sea of connectivity afforded by its veritable hero, the camel or ‘ship of the desert’ (safīnat al-ṣaḥrā’), now largely superseded by four-wheeled vehicles and mobile phones. Still, his inclusive geographical rendering has motivated too few scholars to envision the reach of the African continent. It is important to underscore the extent to which the language of flows with its oceanic metaphors may sometimes conceal the fact that oceans historically have acted as barriers to human migration, communication, and exchange. Besides, it is important to be reminded that before the last African Humid Period, vast sectors of this space were covered in vegetation, rivers, and lakes, and inhabited by both humans and animals circulating along green corridors in this central continental space. As desertification progressively claimed the terrain, it would require specialized knowledge and skills to inhabit and navigate within the Sahara. Yet, it still endured as a porous landmass. In other words, the Sahara as an ocean of sand connecting Africa's internal shores is a metaphor that has its limits. The notion that the Sahara has ‘two shores’ likewise masks the complexity of the interconnectedness of its various oases and frontiers, and ignores local geographical lexicons. Indeed, just as the focus on trans-Saharan trade obfuscates the history of commercial exchange within the Sahara, so too can the notion of a ‘trans-Saharan Africa’ potentially deviate scholarship away from the path towards a pan-African history by promoting the idea of the Sahara as Africa's transcontinental thoroughfare.

Saharan Africa should be considered along the same lines as the history of the other regions of the continent, North, East, West, and South. It might be useful to use the adjective ‘trans-Saharan’, implying multidirectional movement among the region's many deserts, mountains, plateaus, and shores, to describe not a field of study but a research method transcending previously contained epistemes. The field of Saharan Africa poses new methodological challenges to historians. These encompass training in languages not commonly taught (such as Hasaniya, Songhay, Tamazigh, and Tifinagh), on top of mastering classical Arabic, its dialects and scriptural traditions. It entails acquiring cross-cultural dexterity to maneuver among Saharan societies and spaces. Working across previously divided historiographical traditions presents additional problems, such as agreements on common terminology and lexicographic nomenclatures. Still, the historical profession suffers from linguistic divides, with francophone scholars engaging with the anglophone literature, but rarely the other way around, and arabophones and their scholarship remaining far too isolated. Besides, the cost of engaging in Saharan and trans-Saharan research is prohibitive, for Africans and foreigners alike.

As transregional and global research causes the collapse of both geographical and epistemological barriers, the Saharan rift will dissolve leading the way towards a new African history. Filling the scholarly chasms about Saharan history through the ages stands to significantly transform the contours of world history as a whole. If neither the crisis in Darfur nor the struggle for independence of the people of South Sudan brought it to the fore, the activities of Al-Qa`ida and the crisis in northern Mali certainly have laid bare the dangerous gap in knowledge the Saharan divide represents. Sadly, much as the Algerian civil war of the 1990s stalled research on the Sahara, so too does the current political situation threaten to close the doors of Saharan studies to all but the most intrepid researcher.

Footnotes

*

This article is dedicated to historian and diplomat Mohamed Saïd Ould Hamody with whom I spend many enjoyable afternoons discussing Saharan myths and sagas in the propitious setting of his library. I am grateful to Richard Von Glahn and Ross Dunn for editing and guidance, and to four anonymous reviewers of this journal for critical readings.

1 Gasset, O. y, An Interpretation of Universal History (New York, 1973), 118.

2 Braudel, F., La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1966 [orig. pub. 1949]), 94.

3 Footnote Ibid. 21. This particular insight inspired other historians to investigate Saharan-Mediterranean links, starting with Godinho, V. M., O ‘Mediterrâneo’ saariano e as caravanas do ouro: geografia econômica e social do Sáara Ocidental e Central do XI ao XVI século (São Paulo, 1956), whose work was included in Braudel's second edition.

4 P. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 161, esp. 156–72.

5 An excerpt of this unpublished lecture entitled ‘Le Sahara: barrière où trait d'union’ is featured in Capot-Rey, R., L'Afrique blanche française tome second: le sahara français (Paris, 1953), 533 and a copy is preserved at the Archives Nationales du Sénégal. See Marfaing, L. and Wippel, S. (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes à l’époque contemporaine: un espace en constante mutation (Paris, 2004), 7.

6 Zartman, W., Sahara: Bridge or Barrier? (New York, 1963), 3.

7 Mudimbe, V., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN, 1988), x.

8 Footnote Ibid. 11.

9 Hegel divided the continent in three parts, the two others being ‘the land to the north of the desert, a coastal region which might be described as European Africa [sic]. And the third is the region of the Nile, the only valley land of Africa, which is closely connected to Asia.’ Hegel, G. W., Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History (Cambridge, 1975), 173.

10 Obenga, T., ‘Africanismes eurocentristes’, in Gassama, M. (ed.), L'Afrique répond à Sarkozy: contre le discours de Dakar (Paris, 2008).

11 Herodotus, Histories I; IV (London, 1978), 181–5.

12 Muhammad, A., ‘The image of Africans in Arabic literature’, in Willis, J. R. (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London, 1985), 47–74; Hunwick, J. and Powell, E. Troutt, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, 2002); Schmitz, J., ‘Islam et “esclavage” ou l'impossible “négritude” des Africains musulmans’, Africultures, 67 (2006), 110–15.

13 First used to designate Libya's region of Tripolitania, the word Sahara overtime became more broadly applied to the entire zone known today. See Capot-Rey, Sahara Français, 1–4.

14 Al-Jāḥiẓ is one of the ninth century's most prolific Muslim scholars. Vincent Cornell translated this particular book under the title The Book of the Glory of the Black Race (Waddington, NY, 1981). A later Iraqi scholar, Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1200), similarly would write on the ‘virtues of the Sūdān’, cited by the seventeenth-century Timbuktu jurist Aḥmad Bābā. See Hunwick, J. and Harrak, F., Mi‘rāj al-Ṣu‘ūd: Aḥmad Bābā's Replies on Ethnicity and Slavery (Rabat, 2000).

15 Ibn Ḥamāma al-Maghrāwī, (ed.), Al-Risāla al-fiqhiya lil-Shaykh Abī Muḥammad ‘Abd Allāh ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, 43:7 (Beirut, 1980). It is interesting to note that this particular rule is absent from the Mālikī compendium by Khalīl Ibn Isḥāq (Al-Mukhtaṣar) most popular in Western Africa.

16 Levtzion, N. and Hopkins, J. F. P. (eds.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History [hereafter Corpus] (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 65.

17 Fatwā of Shaykh Sīdi, ‘Abayda b. Muhammad al-Saghīr b. Anbūja (c. 1840s) on Caravan Wages (SBA 3), Family Archives of Sharīf Shaykhna Būyaḥmad (Tichitt, Mauritania).

18 Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails, 6–7.

19 Dīyāb Ḥusayn, Ṣ. M., Bilād al-Maghrib fī al-qarn al-awwal al-Hijrī (Cairo, 1984); al-‘Arabī, Ismā‘īl, ḥāḍir al-duwal al-Islāmīya fī al-qārra al-Afrīqīya (Algiers, 1984). See also ‘Arabī, Ismā’īl, Al-ṣaḥrā’ al-kubrā wa-shawāṭi'uhā (Algiers, 1983).

20 Corpus, 41 and 45.

21 Footnote Ibid. 47.

22 Muqaddasī, , Kitāb Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī ma‘rifat al-aqālīm (Beirut, 1965), 28.

23 Corpus, 325.

24 Footnote Ibid. 324–7.

25 See ‘Umar al-Naqar, , ‘Takrūr: the history of a name’, The Journal of African History, 10:3 (1969), 365–74.

26 Masonen, P., The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages (Helsinki, 2000), 167–75.

27 Épaulard, A. (ed. and trans.), Description de l'Afrique [par] Jean-Léon L'Africain (Paris, 1896), 3.

28 Robinson, D., ‘France as a Muslim power in West Africa’, African Studies Review, 46:3/4 (1999), 105–27.

29 Samuel Anderson, a doctoral student at UCLA, is writing a dissertation on the migrations in Western African history of Algerian institutions and genealogies of colonial knowledge.

30 Hannoum, A., Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 22–31. Hannoum does not broach the concept of ‘white Africa’, although his focal point is France's obsession with Berbers and Arabs.

31 An early expression of the paradigm appears in a public lecture on linguistics. Henri, V., ‘La distribution géographique des langues’, Bulletin de la société de géographie de Lille, 1 (1882), 114 (‘l’Afrique noire, séparée de l'Afrique blanche par le Sahara, qui constitue encore aujourd'hui une ligne de démarcation ethnique et linguistique parfaitement tranchée’).

32 Le Chatelier, A., Questions sahariennes: Touat, Châamba, Touareg: mission dans le sud Algérien en juin-août 1890 (Paris, 1890).

33 L. Faidherbe, ‘L'Avenir’, 242 (‘Le Sénégal et L'Algérie doivent se donner la main par dessus le Sahara’).

34 Footnote Ibid. 130. Le Chatelier was of the opinion that the ‘Transsaharien ne deviendrait viable, commercialement, qu’à la suite d'une transformation complète des populations nègres, auxquelles il apporterait la civilisation.’

35 Monteil, P.-L., De Saint-Louis à Tripoli par le Lac Tchad, voyage au travers du Soudan et du Sahara accompli pendant les années 1890–91–92 (Paris, 1895).

36 His best known works are Missions au Sahara: Tome I, Sahara Algérien (Paris, 1908); La conquête du Sahara: essai de psychologie politique (Paris, 1910); and Le Sahara (Paris, 1928).

37 Gautier, E. F., L'Afrique blanche (Paris, 1939), 8–10. It is tempting to link this ‘hardening of racial boundaries’ to the psychological impact of the French field of eugenics and the social-hygiene movement. Keller, R., Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago, 2007), 65.

38 Despois, J. and Capot-Rey, R., L'Afrique blanche française (Paris, 1953 [orig. pub. 1949]).

39 Julien, C. A., L'histoire de l'Afrique des origines à 1945 (Paris, 1958), 23 (‘l'Afrique Noire, la véritable Afrique, se dérobe à l'histoire’.) This pocket history of Africa, in the ‘Que sais-je ?’ series, was originally published in 1941 and went through no less than six editions. Naturally, Julien also wrote a pocket history of ‘white Africa’. See Julien, C. A., Histoire de l'Afrique blanche (Paris, 1966).

40 Footnote Ibid. 7.

41 Footnote Ibid. 17. It is interesting to note how far south he drew the boundary between white and black Africa.

42 As P. Curtin aptly remarked, Eurocentric chauvinism caused scholars ‘to draw the line between literacy and non-literacy at the edge of the desert, contributing further to the unfortunate tendency to separate North African history from that of the rest of the continent’. See P. Curtin, ‘Recent trends in African historiography and their contribution to history in general’, in Ki-Zerbo, J. (ed.), General History of Africa I: Methodology and African Prehistory (Berkeley, CA, 1981), 58.

43 See G. Lydon ‘Obtaining freedom at the Muslims’ court: women, divorce, and Islamic law in colonial Senegal’, in Jeppie, S., Roberts, R., and Moosa, E. (eds.), Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa (Amsterdam, 2010), 139.

44 Harrison, C., France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge, 1988); Robinson, D., Paths of Accommodation (Athens, OH, 2000); Triaud, J.-L., ‘L'islam au sud du Sahara: une saison orientaliste en Afrique occidentale’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 198–200 (2010), 907–50. See M. Monjib, who examines how the encounter with West African Islam caused the French to invent an ‘Arab Islam’: ‘L'Islam arabe en Afrique de l'Ouest: une construction altruisante au temps de la colonisation’, in Harrak, F. and Chegraoui, K. (eds.), Les constructions de l'autre dans les relations interafricaines (Rabat, 2008).

45 J. Ki-Zerbo, ‘General introduction’, in Ki-Zerbo (ed.), General History, 20–1.

46 Curtin, P., Feirman, S., Thompson, L., and Vansina, J., African History: From Earliest Times to Independence (London, 1995). The editors discussed the challenges posed by an inclusion of North Africa ‘a special case and a long-standing problem for the organization of historical knowledge’.

47 Jewsiewicki, B. and Newbury, D. (eds.), African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa (Beverly Hills, CA, 1986); Awenengo, S., Barthélemy, P., and Tshimanga, C. (eds.), Écrire l'histoire de l'Afrique autrement? (Paris, 2004); Philips, J. E. (ed.), Writing African History (Rochester, NY, 2006).

48 Sarkozy's 2007 Dakar speech is a bleak reminder that racism and prejudicial ignorance about African history is still very much alive in France. See M. Gassama (ed.), L'Afrique; Ba Konaré, Adame (ed.), Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l'histoire africaine à l'usage du président Sarkozy (Paris, 2008); and Chrétien, J.-P. (ed.), Le Discours de Sarkozy: un déni d'histoire (Paris, 2008).

49 Cornevin, R., L'Histoire de l'Afrique tome I des origines au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1962), 11.

50 Abitbol, M., Tombouctou et les Arma, de la conquête marocaine du Soudan nigérien en 1591 à l'hégémonie de l'empire peul du Macina en 1833 (Paris, 1979).

51 Abitbol, M., Les commerçants du roi: Tujjār al-Sultān (Paris: 1998); Schroeter, D., The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardic World (Stanford, CA, 2002); see also Gottreich, E. and Schroeter, D. (eds.), Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2011). See Jessica Marglin's 2013 review in this journal.

52 Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails.

53 Laroui, A., L'histoire du Maghreb: un essai de synthèse (Casablanca, 1995). A more recent textbook in English, claims that it ‘tangentially includes the Sahara and the Sahel … [and that] this book North Africa also embraces Egypt and the Sahara’, but in the end it follows well-known historiographical patterns. Naylor, P. C., North Africa: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Austin, TX, 2009), 2.

54 Brett, M., Approaching African History (Woodbridge, 2013).

55 Khaldūn, Ibn, Kitāb al-ibar wa-dīwān al-mubtada’ wa-al-khabar f̣ī ayyām al-‘Arab wa-al-‘ajam ẉa-al-barbar, Vol. 2 (Cairo, 1867). See also Kāẓim, Tamthīlāt al-ākhar.

56 Qadéry, El, ‘L'Afrique a-t-elle perdu le nord? Le Maghreb et ses dichotomies coloniales’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 198–200 (2010), 736–9. El Qadéry's article is mainly concerned with the colonial construction of the Arab-Berber divide.

57 Pouessel, S. (ed.), Noirs au Maghreb: enjeux identitaires (Paris, 2012).

58 For a review of this voluminous literature, see Hama, B., Recherches sur l'histoire des Touareg sahariens et soudanais (Paris, 1967); Boilley, P., Les touaregs Kel Adagh, dépendances et révoltes: du Soudan français au Mali contemporain (Paris, 1999); Lecocq, B., Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms, and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden, 2010).

59 El Qadéry, ‘L'Afrique’, 734.

60 Camps, G., Berbères: aux marges de l'histoire (Paris, 1980).

61 Various works, several are alluded to in Camps’ article, used partial cranial analysis to argue that ‘negroids’ were recent newcomers to the Sahara. Camps, ‘Recherches sur l'origine des cultivateurs noirs’, Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, 7 (1970), 35–45. See also Capot-Rey, Sahara français, 166–90.

62 Chlyeh, A. (ed.), L'Univers des Gnaoua (Grenoble, 1999); Kapchan, D., Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Transe and Musique in the Global Marketplace (Middletown, CT, 2007); El Hamel, , ‘Constructing a diasporic identity: tracing the origins of the Gnawa spiritual group in Morocco’, The Journal of African History, 49:2 (2008), 241–60.

63 Among his publications, see Khiat, S., ‘La confrérie noire de Baba Merzoug: la sainteté présumée et la fête de l’équilibre’, Insāniyāt, 31 (2006), 113–34.

64 Valensi, L., ‘Esclaves chrétiens et esclaves noirs à Tunis au XVIIIe siècle’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 22:6 (1967), 1267–88. For a more recent study, see Mrad Dali, Inès, ‘De l'esclavage à la servitude: le cas des noirs de la Tunisie’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 179–80 (2005), 935–56.

65 Bin, T., Āmir, Ḥaḍāra al-Islāmīya wa-tijārat al-raqīq khilāl al-qarnayn al-thālith wa-l-rābi` lil-Hijra (Tunis, 1996).

66 Rahal, A., La communauté noire de Tunis: thérapie initiatique et rite de possession (Paris, 2000); Montana, I. M., The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainsville, FL, 2013).

67 Schroeter, D., ‘Slave markets and slavery in Moroccan urban society’, in Savage, E. (ed.), The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (London, 1992), 185–213.

68 Ennaji, M., Soldats, domestiques et concubines: l'esclavage au Maroc au XIXe siècle (Casablanca, 1994). See also Aouad, R., ‘Esclavage et situation des “noirs” au Maroc dans la première moitié du XXe siècle’, in Marfaing, and Wippel, (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes, 337–59; Hamel, C. El, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge, 2013).

69 Āmāl Muḥammad al-Ṭālib, Al-Ḥayat al-Usriya fī wilāya Ṭrāblus al-gharbi fī al-‘uthmānī al-thānī (1911–1835) (Tripoli, 2006), esp. ch. 3. Currently she is completing at University of Manchester a dissertation entitled ‘Slavery: an economic reality and social concept in Tripoli, Libya (1711–1911)’. Of relevance is Renault, F., ‘La traite des esclaves noirs en Libye au XVIII esiècle’, The Journal of African History, 23:1 (1982), 163–81.

70 R. Bader, ‘Une Algérie noire? Traite et esclaves noirs en Algérie coloniale’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Université Aix-Marseille III, 2005); Brower, B. C., ‘Rethinking abolition in Algeria: slavery and the “indigenous” question’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 195:3 (2009), 805–28.

71 Brower, B. C., A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara (New York, 2009).

72 McDougall, E. A., ‘Research in Saharan history’, The Journal of African History, 39:3 (1998), 467–80.

73 The Saharan Studies Association (http://ssa.asu.edu/) regularly sponsors conference panels and maintains an informative website, currently edited by Jacob Mundy (Colgate College), a specialist of the politics of the Western Sahara.

74 Depois, J., ‘L'institut de recherches sahariennes et les sciences de l'homme’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés et Civilisations, 13:3 (1958), 523–6. See also Larneaud, M., ‘La géographie du Sahara et l'institut de recherches sahariennes’, Annales de géographie, 55 (1946), 294–9, who discusses how researchers of the institute assisted the French military during the Second World War.

75 Monod, M. T., ‘La structure du Sahara atlantique’, Travaux de l'institut de recherches sahariennes, 3 (1945), 27–35.

76 Colloque international sur les routes des caravanes, ṭarīq al-qawāfil (Algiers, 2001), 99–120.

77 In the 1970s, Vansina spent several months in Tripoli as a guest of the Center where he set up its oral history laboratory.

78 Particularly noteworthy are the transcribed commercial records and correspondence from Ghadames by Qāsim Yūsha`, B., Ghadāmis: Wathā'iq Tijāriya wa Ta'rīkhiya wa Ijtimā‘iya (1228–1312) (Tripoli, 1982) and a second volume Wathā'iq Ghadāmis: Wathā'iq Tijāriya wa Ta'rīkhiya wa Ijtimā‘iya (949–1343), 2 (Tripoli, 1995). Also relevant are two histories of the caravanning towns of Ghat and Murzuk, bearing very similar titles. Rajab ḍayyāf, N., Madīnat Ghāt wa-tijārat al-qawāfil al-ṣaḥrāwīya khilāl al-qarn al-tāsi‘ ‘ashar al-milādī (Tripoli: 1999); Naṣīr al-Abayḍ, R., Madīnat Murzuq wa-tijārat al-qawāfil al-ṣaḥrāwīya khilāl al-qarn al-tāsi‘ ‘ashar (Tripoli, 1998); Muḥammad al-Takītaka, J., Mamlaka Sunghāyi al-Islāmiya fī ‘ahad al-Askiya Muḥammad al-Kabīr 1493–1528 (Tripoli, 1998).

79 Since 1979, Majallat al-Buḥūth al-Ta'rīkhiya (journal of historical research) publishes multiple yearly volumes each of which includes a section listing recent works of relevance in Romance languages, English and German.

80 Majallat al-Buḥūth al-Ta'rīkhiya, ‘Tijārat al-qawāfil ‘abr al-ṣaḥrā’, 3:1 (1981). The proceedings of a more recent conference on caravan trade were published in Abdullatif Ahmida, Ali (ed.), Bridges Across the Sahara: Social, Economic, and Cultural Impact of the Trans-Saharan Trade During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 2009).

81 Footnote Ibid. 5.

82 Al-Dālī wrote his Master's thesis on the Mali Empire and its relationship with Northern states (University of Tripoli) and his doctoral dissertation on the history of West Africa from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century (University Hassan II, Morocco). See his Mamlakat Mālī al-Islāmīyah wa-‘alāqāt ma‘a al-Maghrib wa-Lībīyā min al-qarn 13–15 m: ṣafaḥāt min ta'rīkh al-‘alāqāt al-‘Arabīyah al-Afrīqīyah (Beirut, 1993); Al-Tārīkh al-ḥaḍārī li-Afrīqiyā fī mā warā'a al-ṣaḥrā’: min nihāyat al-qarn al-khāmis ‘ashar ilá bidāyat al-qarn al-thāmin ‘ashar (Tripoli, 2001).

83 Al-Dālī, Al-Tārīkh al-ḥaḍārī, 9–10.

84 Al-Dālī, Qabā'il al-Hawsā: dirāsah wathā'iqīyah (Tripoli, 2005).

85 Al-Dālī (ed.), Izāla al-rayyib wa al-shak wa al-tafrīṭ fī al-mu'alifīn min ahl al-Takrūr wa al-ṣaḥrā’ wa ahl Shinqīṭ li-Aḥmad Būla‘āf al-Tiknī (Tripoli, 2001). It must be noted that Al-Dālī's introduction and the brief biographical note on Būla‘rāf contain a number of errors. See Lydon, G., ‘A thirst for knowledge: Arabic literacy, writing paper and bibliophiles in southwestern Sahara’, in Krätli, G. and Lydon, G. (eds.), The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Arabic Literacy, Manuscript Culture, and Intellectual History in Islamic Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 35–72.

86 Abitbol, M., ‘Le Maroc et le commerce transsaharien du XVIIe au début du XIXe siècle’, Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, 30:1 (1980), 5–19; ‘Juifs maghrébins et commerce transsaharien du VIIIe au XVe siècle’, in Le sol, la parole et l’écrit: mélanges en hommage à Raymond Mauny (Paris, 1981), 561–76.

87 Miège, J.-L., ‘La Libye et le commerce transsaharien au XIXe siècle’, Revue de l'occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 19 (1975), 135–68; ‘Le commerce transsaharien au XIXe siècle, essai de quantification’, Revue du monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée, 32 (1981–2), 93–120.

88 Al-Kattānī, M. I. and ḥājjī, M. (eds.), Fatḥ al-Shakūr fī ma‘rifati a‘yān ‘ulamā’ al-Takrūr lil-ṭālib Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-ṣadīq Al-Bartaylī al-Walātī. (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1981).

89 These often-cited works remain unpublished: Z. Tamouh, ‘Le Maroc et le Soudan au XIXe siècle (1830–1894): contribution à l'histoire inter-régionale de l'Afrique (Thèse de Doctorat 3ème cycle, Centre de Recherches Africaines, Université de Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris I, 1982); A. El Alaoui, ‘Le Maghreb et le commerce transsaharien (milieu XI au milieu du XIVè s.)’ (Thèse de 3ème cycle, Université de Bordeaux, 1983).

90 For a historiographical review of research on Morocco and Western Africa, that includes a review of relevant theses in Arabic and in French see Zahra Tamouh, ‘L'histoire interrégionale comme socle de l'intégration panafricaine: l’émergence d'une école des historiens spécialisés dans les relations du Maroc avec le Soudan’, in Adandé, A. B. A. (ed.), Intégration régionale, démocratie et panafricanisme: paradigmes anciens et nouveaux défis (Dakar, 2007), 21–36.

91 Publications de l'Institut des Études Africaines, Le Maroc et l'Afrique Subsaharienne aux débuts des temps modernes (Rabat, 1995).

92 See, for example, Harrak, F. and Chegraoui, K. (ed.), Les constructions de l'autre dans les relations interafricaines (Rabat, 2008). Incidentally, the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain in Tunis recently held a conference entitled ‘Le Maghreb et ses Africanités: l'identité nationale au regard de ses “altérités”’ (Mar. 2011).

93 Abou El Farah, Y., Akmir, A., and Beni Azza, A. (eds.), La présence Marocaine en Afrique de L'Ouest: cas du Sénégal, du Mali et de la Côte d'Ivoire (Rabat, 1997).

94 Aouad, R., ‘Réseaux marocains en Afrique sub-saharienne: le Tekna de l'oued noun: l'exemple de la famille Benbarka, 1880–1930’, Revue Maroc-Europe, 4 (1993), 219–245; ‘Aspects des relations entre Fès et l'Afrique noire au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècle’, in Páez López, J. and Triki, H. (eds.), Fès: Mille deux cents ans d'histoire (Casablanca, 2009), 396–412.

95 Aouad, R., ‘De Tombouctou à Conakry: musulmans et juifs du Maroc dans l'espace de la relation Maroc-Afrique noire (fin XIXe siècle – début XXe siècle)’, in Abécassis, F., Simani-Dirèche, K., and Aouad, R. (eds.), La bienvenue et l'adieu: Migrants juifs et musulmans au Maghreb, XVe-XXe siècle, 1 (Paris, 2012), 191–206.

96 Brenner, L., ‘The North African trading community in the nineteenth century central Sudan’, in McCall, D. F. and Bennett, N. R. (eds.), Aspects of West African Islam (Boston, 1971), 137–50; Grégoire, É., ‘Territoires marchands en Afrique subsaharienne’, Historiens et Géographes, 379 (2002), 133–40.

97 Their publications include: Al-Shukrī, Mamlakat Ghāna wa ‘alāqātiha bil-ḥarakat al-Murābiṭīn (Rabat, 1997) and Chergraoui, ‘Etat et islam en Afrique de l'ouest à propos du discours politique soudanais au XIXème siècle’, Al-Maghrib al-Ifrīqī (2002).

98 Shrāyimī, M. (ed.), Abḥāth wa-dirāsāt ḥawla al-ṣaḥrā (Rabat, 2009).

99 Boubrik, R., Saints et société en Islam: la confrérie ouest-saharienne Fâdiliyya (Paris, 1999); Dirasāt ṣaḥrāwīya: al-Mujtāma‘a wa al-ṣulta wa al-Dīn (Rabat, 2008).

100 Bardagos, A. López, Arenas Coloniales: Los Awlad Dalim Ante la Colonización Franco-Española del Sáhara (Barcelona, 2003); Baroja, J. C., Estudios Saharianos (Madrid, 1955).

101 His three-volume dissertation ,‘Nomadisme, Islam et pouvoir politique dans la société maure précoloniale: essai sur quelques aspects du tribalisme’ (Thèse de Doctorat 3ème cycle, Université de Paris V, René Descartes, 1985) is a foundational work in western Saharan history. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as Eléments d'histoire de la Mauritanie (Nouakchott, 1988) and edited Sahara: l'Adrar de Mauritanie sur les traces de Théodore Monod (Paris, 2002). Also see McDougall, ‘Research’.

102 al-ḥusayn, Wuld, ṣaḥrā’ al-mulathamīn: dirāsah li-ta'rīkh Mūrītāniyā wa-tafā’uluhā ma‘a muḥīṭīhā al-iqlīmī khilāl al-‘aṣr al-wasīṭ min muntaṣaf al-qarn 2 H/8 M. ilā nihāyat al-qarn 5 H./11 M (Beirut, 2007). Aiddah, Wuld, Al-ṣaḥrā’ al-kubrā: Mudun wa Quṣūr, Vol. 2 (Algiers, 2009).

103 al-Bara, Wuld, Al-Majmū‘āt al-Kubrā fī Fatāwī wa Nawāzil Ahl ‘Arb wa Janūb ‘Arb ṣaḥrā’, Vol. 10 (Nouakchott, 2010–11). He also publishes in French as Ould El Bara.

104 A case in point is Julia Clancy-Smith latest book, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 ( Berkeley, CA, 2010).

105 Marfaing and Wippel (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes; Boesen, E. and Marfaing, L. (eds.), Les nouveaux urbains dans l'espace Sahara-Sahel: un cosmopolitisme par le bas (Paris, 2007).

106 Since 1998, the center publishes annually the journal L'ouest saharien/The Western Sahara with an editorial board headed by Pierre Boilley (University Paris-Sorbonne and Centre d’Études des Mondes Africains).

107 Schmitz, J., ‘Migrants ouest-africains: miséreux, aventuriers ou notables?’, Politique Africaine, 109 (2008). Also relevant is Streiff-Fenart, J. and Segatti, A. (eds.), The Challenge of the Threshold: Border Closures and Migration Movements in Africa (Lanham, 2011).

108 J. Schmitz and E. Grégoire (eds.), Autrepart, 16 (Nov. 2001). ‘Ce numéro d'Autrepart entend donner une vision large et diversifiée des relations entre l'Afrique blanche et noire.’

109 S. Bredeloup and O. Pliez (eds.), Autrepart, 36:4 (2005).

110 Bennafla, , ‘La réactivation des échanges transsahariens: l'exemple tchado-libyen’, in Marfaing et, Wippel, (eds.), Les relations transsahariennes, 89–112; Pliez, O. and Bennafla, K., in Pliez, (ed.), Les Cités du désert: des villes sahariennes aux saharatowns (Toulouse, 2011); Brachet, J., Migrations transsahariennes: vers un désert cosmopolite et morcelé (Niger) (Paris, 2009); O. Pliez, ‘De la guerre à la coopération: les dangereuses liaisons tchado-libyennes’, in Pliez, O. (éd.), La nouvelle Libye, sociétés, espaces et géopolitique au lendemain de l'embargo (Paris, 2004).

111 Scheele, J., Smugglers and Saints: Saharan Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2012); and with McDougall, J., Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwestern Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2012).

112 Tilmatine, M., ‘Un parler berbèro-songhay du sud-ouest algérien (Tabelbala): eléments d'histoire et de linguistique’, Etudes et Documents Berbères, 14 (1996), 163–98; Souag, L., ‘Sub-Saharan lexical influences on North African Arabic and Berber’, in Lafkioui, M., African Arabic: Approaches to Dialectology (Berlin, 2013), 211–36; L. Souag, ‘The subclassification of Songhay and its historical implications’, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics (2014).

113 MacDonald, K., ‘A view from the south: sub-Saharan evidence for contacts between North Africa, Mauritania and the Niger, 1000 BC–AD 700’, in Dowler, A. and Galvin, E. R. (eds.), Money, Trade, and Trade Routes in pre-Islamic North Africa (London, 2011). See also Fentress, E., ‘Slavers on chariots’, in Dowler, A. and Galvin, E. R. (eds.), Money, 65–71; Wilson, A., ‘Saharan trade in the Roman period: short-, medium-, and long-distance trade networks’, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 47:4 (2012), 409–49; , S.Nixon, , ‘Excavating Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali): new archaeological investigations of early Islamic trans-Saharan trade’, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 44:2 (2009), 217–55.

Ibid
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* This article is dedicated to historian and diplomat Mohamed Saïd Ould Hamody with whom I spend many enjoyable afternoons discussing Saharan myths and sagas in the propitious setting of his library. I am grateful to Richard Von Glahn and Ross Dunn for editing and guidance, and to four anonymous reviewers of this journal for critical readings.