RS6: Saharan Becomings

The Sahara Desert, an expanse spanning 5,000 kilometres from west to east across the African continent, stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. It blankets an area of more than 8.5 million square kilometres, encompassing nearly 30% of the continent’s landmass. This geographical region, now partitioned by the borders of 10 North African and Sahelian nations, is a rich tapestry of landscapes and terrains: from sandy (only 20% of the Sahara) to stony deserts, imposing mountain ranges such as Aïr, Hoggar, Tassili, and Tibesti, rocky plateaus, inhabited valleys, oases, and towns where half of the Saharan population reside today.

The Sahara is home to several nomadic or semi-nomadic societies: such as the Amazigh (Imuhagh (Tuareg), Zenaga, Ait Atta...), Moor, Sahrawi, Fulani (Fula), Kanuri, Teda (Tubu), and Beja, among many others. Despite the diversity of their cultures, languages and the environments within which they reside, those saharan populations share a common thread—they inhabit arid to semi-arid regions that have been made fertile through centuries of nomadic, semi-nomadic, and sedentary practices carefully adapted to their ecosystem.

For its populations, the Sahara desert is far from being empty. It constitutes a meaningful living space: an organised nomadic territory, inhabited, criss-crossed and structured politically and socially by its narratives and circulations. The “desert” is constructed locally through the practices of its populations, their mobility, their relationships and their local and trans-Saharan exchanges; and internationally, through the exploitation of the rare and dispersed resources of its ecosystem.

The invention of the Sahara as a periphery to be conquered, exploited and disciplined, took shape during the colonial period. Articulating natural, racial and political geography, colonial administration reduced nomadic lands to “wild” and vacant territories, “dead lands” in need of “development”. These categories dominate scholarly and cultural representations of the Sahara even today. It is based on this idea – a Sahara as terra nullius – that most national and international land-use planning, development and anti-desertification policies are still in practice today.

Meanwhile, the lives and livelihood of Saharan communities intersect a variety of conditions that have dislocated and impeded their centuries-old relationship to the desert(s): nuclear testing at the hand of French colonial forces; contemporary extractive economies that aim to exploit the riches of the Sahara; the effects of the climate crisis in exacerbating all of these conditions; and the transformation of vast inhabited areas into natural reserves from which locals are excluded.

RS6: Saharan Becomings aspires to examine the different conceptions of the desert and its inhabited territories, and to analyse the variety of habitat technologies (existing and historical) that have allowed for centuries of reciprocal cultivation between Saharan societies and the desert(s) they call home.