Pit-stops, strangers and family trees: approaches to Saharan connectivity

The Sahara, stereotypical ‘desert’, has long been portrayed as a proverbial empty space, dividing the Mediterranean world from Africa ‘proper’, isolating the countries of the Maghreb from their southern and eastern neighbours and constituting entirely different areas of study: a space of marginality, outside of history, incapable of change and arid of ‘events’. More recently, it has become equally commonplace to argue that the Sahara has been a ‘bridge’ as well as a ‘barrier’: research has focussed on trans-Saharan trade, for instance, or on the ‘spread of Islam’, and, more recently, on supposed threats of trans-Saharan migration and ‘Islamist networks’. Yet such research is often little concerned with the Sahara itself – the image of the bridge is revealing here – and exists in almost total independence from local detailed case-studies, which in turn tend to relegate wider connections to the footnotes. Rather than an integrated regional approach, we are thus dealing with the juxtaposition of two ‘Saharas’: one settled, isolated, stubbornly retrograde and fragmented, the other connected across vast distances, relatively homogeneous, ‘cosmopolitan’, and strangely disembodied. Certainly, a comprehensive study of the Sahara requires in-depth knowledge of a vast area characterised by ecological, political, cultural and linguistic diversity hardly to be mastered within a life-time, let alone within contemporary academic time-limits; but conceptual difficulties also seem to be at stake here. How, indeed, can we develop a ‘truly regional’ approach to Saharan history, that would be different from a mere ‘adding up’ of more traditional forms?

In the Sahel, approaches to history that privilege local ecology have been useful in pointing to regional interdependence as a fundamental structuring feature of local societies. In the Sahara we encounter a similar setting of scarce resources linked to intense cultural variety, with life largely depending on the creation of ecological niches, perplexing in their local complexity and distinctiveness, but whose very survival hinges on regional ‘connectivity’ (a term borrowed from Mediterranean studies). Due to high initial investment and relative insecurity, oasis agriculture is hardly viable on its own, but only as an integral part of larger projects: travel, trade, the visible affirmation of political or saintly prestige, for instance. Oulata, Timbuktu, and Tichit waxed and waned according to shifting trade routes and political struggles fought elsewhere; today’s Sahara abounds in examples of cities constructed overnight in improbable places, and abandoned shortly after, as external resources – such as income from international smuggling - dried up. ‘Connectivity’, hence, and thus movement, becomes the vital principle and precondition of place and community: we need to reconsider our common-sense assumption of the – temporal and logical - primacy of place over movement, and hence of the local over the regional.

Yet ecological interdependence is more than a question of economy: it relies on trust and shared standards of behaviour (even during raids and other forms of violent ‘exchange’) that, even if they are not always heeded, can be invoked publicly, thus creating an imagined region-wide moral space. If social interaction with relative strangers becomes an essential part of livelihood and indeed constitutive of local societies, mutually recognisable, although locally inflected, ways of dealing with them are vital; if such strangers are at times from truly distant places, these ways have to be at least theoretically all-encompassing. Reference to the universal moral standard of quranic law, whose frequent mention in local documents seems to be rather out of proportion with its practical import (judging by the very same documents), might be one aspect of such a ‘global’ scheme; local social hierarchies – divisions into ‘noble’ and dependent, free and unfree, ‘warrior’ and ‘clerk’ - whose underlying logic and rhetoric is strikingly similar throughout the region and across linguistic, social and cultural divides, might be another. The elucidation of this shared ‘moral space’ constitutes another possible starting point for a truly regional approach to the Sahara.

Similarly, local historiographies are rarely concerned with an isolated local: history here is about people, not place, and how they fit into a ‘universal’ all-encompassing whole. This is mostly expressed through inter-related genealogies – relations between relations. Yet such ‘universal’ schemes are nonetheless expressive of local particularities: famously, co-existing conflicting interpretations of genealogical schemes - in a patrilineal or a matrilineal ‘key’, for instance - allow for an overall coherence of historical narratives despite clear disagreements over their moral purport. Marital alliances between different families and groups can thus be interpreted as a triumph for both. In this reading, Saharan historiography is not merely of regional, but of truly ‘cosmopolitan’ ambition: representing the entire world, and reshaping that world to its own image. In such a view, coherence does not imply homogeneity, but rather the careful maintaining of difference according to shared notions of value and ‘order’: perhaps providing a model ‘to think with’ throughout our own regional endeavours, and to help us understand more recent developments, such as the current integration-cum-segregation of Sahelien migrants into the fast-growing Saharan cities.

On a more practical level, the attempt to write regional history requires great methodological flexibility. Secondary sources are patchy; primary sources hardly exploited, and rarely institutionally and culturally defined as such. To work with them involves local collaboration, for access but especially comprehension, both of content and context. Further, written sources need to be played off against other ways of remembering and constructing history – the dialectic between the written and the oral being yet another aspect of the intimate link between the ‘local’ and the ‘universal’ outlined above. Fieldwork is thus not optional, but a necessity; to investigate regional logics and interconnections, historians need to be as mobile and well-connected as their ‘sources’, and spend much time on bumpy Saharan trucks - an effort that, if it will finally help us to understand the Sahara in its own terms, and to unravel the conceptual challenges of producing regional history – rather than history in or about a region - is certainly worth its while. 

Judith Scheele is Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford University (England). Her past research has focused on notions of knowledge, political legitimacy and community in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking area in north-eastern Algeria. Current research investigates trans-Saharan connections of all kinds, including legal and illegal trade, migration, and scholarly links, with particular emphasis on southern Algeria and northern Mali. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in both countries. Her publications include Village Matters: knowledge, politics and local identity in Kabylia (Oxford: James Currey), and various related book chapters and articles.