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54 3 The Sahara as Connective Space Historical Themes and Patterns In both North African history and the history of sub-Saharan Africa, the Sahara has been seen as a geographical, political, and economic periphery. As a result, the Sahara and its populations have been presented as forming merely an extension of either the bilād al-maghrib or the bilād al-sūdān. This perspective neglects the fact that the Sahara has been a major connective space and has been as such an intrinsic part of the economic systems of both the bilād al-maghrib and the bilād al-sūdān. Due to these entanglements, the Sahara cannot be seen as an isolated backwater of world history and economics. The economic importance of the Sahara and its trade routes in fact has been so important for the bilād al-maghrib and the bilād al-sūdān that the rulers in the north and the south have repeatedly tried to gain control over the Sahara and trans-Saharan trade routes. Consequently, knowledge of trade and trade routes, wells, oases, and terrain was of paramount importance and collected eagerly. At the same time, knowledge was withheld as far as possible from possible competitors, especially European nations and traders. Over a long history of more than a thousand years, trans-Saharan movement led to the emergence of major centers of trade such as Agadez in the Ahīr (Aïr) Mountains or Timbuktu on the Niger. In these centers of trade, Muslim scholars developed traditions of Islamic learning, which contributed to the development of Islamic learning in the bilād al-maghrib and the bilād al-sūdān. Rather than seeing the Sahara as a periphery, the Sahara and its various populations should thus be perceived as a major region in its own right that has survived and repeatedly denied efforts to impose outside control. The Trans-Saharan Trade The Sahara, the great desert, stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and from the Atlas Mountains and Mediterranean coast to the edges of the bilād al-sūdān in the south, has often been depicted as a great divide, separating North Africa from subSaharan Africa. This has been far from the truth for most of the time. In reality, the Sahara has been one of the world’s major connective spaces, crisscrossed by trading routes and dotted with numerous smaller or larger oases which made the crossing of the Sahara with an experienced guide a fairly uncomplicated undertaking. The major problem involved in crossing the Sahara was of a logistic nature: the central question was which route would sustain a caravan of which size in which season of the year. Not all oases would yield the water to supply a caravan of several thousand camels and The Sahara as Connective Space | 55 a corresponding number of men (and women). Sometimes, caravans might choose a longer route when rainfall had produced good pastures in a specific region. The bigger the distances between watering places, the more water and fodder had to be transported by the caravan itself, to the detriment of trade goods. Supply of water and fodder , distances between watering places, and annual variations thus largely defined the size of caravans. In addition, there was the problem of recurrent feuding and raiding in the Sahara, often over the control of oases and caravan routes. Correspondingly, the knowledge as to which route would be best at which time of the year was crucial. Crossing the Sahara following one of the major routes was possible as soon as camels had been introduced into the Sahara and were raised by Saharan (often Imasighen/ Tuareg, later also Arab) populations. There were a number of major routes and many smaller routes and their branches (see map 4). The westernmost route collected the trade from southern Morocco, both the Sūs region and the Wādī Darʿa and their respective centers, Aghmāt and Sijilmāsa, as well as the Wādī Nūn region. It ran south at a distance of about 300–400 kilometers from the arid coasts of the Atlantic, until reaching the western Saharan Ādrār region and the oases of Shinqīt ˙ and Wadān. From here, trade either went west to the Atlantic, where the Portuguese created a trading post, Arguin, south of Cabo Blanco in 1455; or south, to reach the northern towns of Ghāna (later...

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