Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara
Judith Scheele. Basic, $32.50 (368p) ISBN 978-1-5416-0711-8
That the Sahara is “empty, barren and everywhere the same” is a misperception anthropologist Scheele (The Value of Disorder) sets out to correct in this captivating study. She dates the notion partly to the impression created by medieval Europe’s first “aerial view” map, which depicted North Africa, a place of little importance to European travelers, as an unpeopled expanse. Such a barren wasteland was ripe for the “orientalist” imaginings of the colonial era through today’s foreign policy complex, which tends to perceive the region as “ungoverned space.” To counter such perspectives, Scheele unravels common Sahara myths: only 15% of the region is covered by sand dunes, the rest being “mostly rocky hard surface or desert pavement”; the “oasis garden” is largely fictive; and reports of desert “slavery” are mostly misrepresentations of either the current migrant crisis (when sub-Saharan Africans end up stranded in North Africa due largely to Western meddling, the oft-elided subtext of articles on “Libyan people smuggling”) or of a past system in which kin-less people needed to commit their labor to a new group in order to survive. Drawing on her own extensive travels, Scheele presents an invigorating alternate vision of the Sahara as a place where social life is deeply intertwined with ecology but which is just as varied and complex as anywhere. It’s an immersive view of a too often oversimplified region. (June)
Details
Reviewed on: 06/20/2025
Genre: Nonfiction