ABSTRACT

Lake Chad is the largest African lake north of the equator but it is situated in some of West Africa’s driest savanna and to its north lies the Sahara Desert. Indeed, it would not exist without the rivers that flow into its southern end bringing water from areas with greater rainfall. Its climate is markedly seasonal, with a relatively short wet season and a long and increasingly hot dry season. The resulting rainfall is adequate to the south but declines towards the north until it is very low. Consequently, the area around the lake, which is nowadays divided between the countries of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, provides a considerable challenge to human settlement. On the one hand it offers grazing for livestock, land for cereal cultivation and abundant fishing, but on the other it threatens contrasting extremes of both drought and flooding, as well as high temperatures and seasonal absence of surface water and animal feed. In addition, climatic oscillations have further complicated the environment to which people have had to adapt. Thus, so far as human populations have been concerned, the Lake Chad region has been characterized by a complex interplay of opportunity and constraint, an interplay constantly shifting in time and space. The manner in which communities have adapted to these conditions makes a remarkable story, a story that starts at least 8000 years ago and whose details we are still piecing together, mainly from archaeological evidence from Borno in the extreme north-east of Nigeria.