Writing Trans-Saharan History: Methods, Sources and Interpretations Across the African Divide

For ages, the Sahara has been portrayed as an ‘empty-quarter’ where only nomads on their spiteful camels dare to tread. Colonial ethnographic templates reinforced perceptions about the Sahara as a ‘natural’ boundary between the North and the rest of Africa, separating ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Africa and, by extension, ‘Arabs’ and ‘Berbers’ from ‘Africans’. Consequently, very few scholars have ventured into the Sahara despite the overwhelming historical evidence pointing to the interactions, interdependencies and shared histories of neighbouring African countries. By transcending the artificial ‘Saharan frontier’, it is easy to see that the Sahara has always been a hybrid space of cross-cultural interactions marked by continuous flows of peoples, ideas and goods. This paper discusses a methodological approach for writing Saharan history which seeks to transcend this artificial divide and is necessarily transnational. As a scholar of nineteenth and early twentieth century trans-Saharan history, I retrace the steps of trading families across several generations and markets. This research itinerary crisscrossed Saharan regions of Western Africa from Senegal, the Gambia and Mali, to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania and the Kingdom of Morocco, with stops in archival repositories in France. With specific reference to the art of writing African history, I discuss how my own path into the African past was shaped by ad hoc encounters with peoples, their memories and texts. But if the facts, perspectives and narratives that form the evidence I rely upon to reconstruct trans-Saharan history were collected on an accidental trajectory, the interpretation of this data followed a deliberate methodological approach. I explain how orality permeated the process of my historical investigation and I argue for a recognition of the centrality of orality in the creation and interpretation of all forms of historical evidence.