What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people who call it home.
That’s not for a lack of trying. The Romans tried to cross the Sahara, going back as least as far as Cornelius Balbus (19 BC): Starting from Sabratha in Libya, Balbus led a force of 10,000 legionaries to conquer the Garamantes in the Fezzan region (modern Libya). He then sent a smaller group south across the Ahaggar Mountains, likely reaching the Niger River near modern Timbuktu in Mali, traveling over 1,000 miles inland. Ibn Battuta, the medieval explorer, experienced the wealth of West Africa’s vast gold mines long before the Portuguese made their way down the African coast.

Today’s guest is Judith Scheele, author of “Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara.” We see how the desert is not the empty wasteland of the romantic imagination but the vast and highly differentiated space in which Saharan peoples and, increasingly, new arrivals from other parts of Africa live, work, and move. It takes us from the ancient Roman Empire through the colonial era, whose future holds implications for us all.

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