ABSTRACT
For most of the twentieth century, historians of Africa have represented the Sahara through the eyes of outsiders. We began with the medieval accounts of Arab travellers and merchants, many of whom had never visited the region. These were mercifully translated into French and English, thereby making them, and by implication the Sahara, more readily accessible. 1 These travellers and compilers shaped our view of the Sahara to the extent that we have spent years trying to reconcile their understanding of geography with our own, and have developed research in archaeology and oral history based on the framework these writings gave us. 2 We then shifted attention to the knowledge provided us by Europeans as they first interacted with coastal regions and then began to ‘penetrate’ the interior. We began to feel comfortable replacing drawings of fabled kings on thrones with golden orbs in their hands, 3 with tribal names scrawled across the interior. 4 By the nineteenth century, European explorers (and merchants and military scouts) moved not only inland but overland – Europeans actually began to cross the Sahara, usually from North to South but there were exceptions. From them and from occasional shipwrecked captives, our ‘knowledge’ of the Sahara was fleshed out sufficiently to map it – tribes, confederations, emirates all gave shape and identity to the otherwise vast desert void. 5 From the medieval through to the modern, however, one characteristic of the knowledge being produced was its focus on, if not obsession with, trade: what exotic valuables could be drawn out of Africa, what kind of a market for goods from the ‘outside’ world could be created within it. In addition to mapping the Sahara by its peoples, Europeans delineated it with a genre of commercial scaffolding – lines representing caravan routes drawn predominately north-south, with feeder routes cross-cutting them in places. In the nineteenth century, the age of abolition, these lines were given life with images of actual Saharans – raiders and traders, driving their hapless victims across the desert to a life of slavery in the Arab Muslim world. 6
