A desert far from empty

The battle which ravaged Libya once again brings back into the Western imagination these two shores bordering the temperate strip of North Africa, refuge of many empires, colonial powers, former kings and other despots. From the North, on the other side of the Mediterranean, come the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Arab League which, despite a recent lack of clear objectives and effectiveness, have remade themselves composure in the case of Libya behind the banner of “ right to protect “. Deprived of the unconditional support of their allies, the traditional military forces of Europe, Great Britain and France still managed, with the help of the United States, to reaffirm their role on the military level by allowing the monarchies of Gulf Cooperation Council to assert their hold on the Arab political scene to eliminate their sworn enemy, Gaddafi, the last survivor of Nasser’s generation. But perhaps the biggest surprise was the unlikely emergence of Qatar, a country as rich and tenacious as it is tiny, as a new African power ready to double its capital and the cultural power of al-Jazeera. military adventurism involving responses with F-16s, arms shipments and the ground deployment of its national special forces.

Following the denunciation of the genocide and the threats weighing on the city of Benghazi, what could be more natural than an intervention by the international community to protect the Libyan people ? Since the events in Libya were easily interpreted as a new episode of the Arab Spring, it became so easy to restrict Libyan identity to the Arab sphere, to then present the country’s Africans as foreigners. The dissociation between Libya and Africa was particularly useful to those who sought to isolate the Gaddafi regime. Indeed, despite the fact that Gaddafi’s repeated interventions in this area since his coming to power in 1969 often had disastrous consequences, he nonetheless remained an active and legitimate member of the continent’s political order, in partly thanks to long-standing support for African revolutionary movements. Proof of this is the gestures of support from states like South Africa, as well as the clumsy calls for mediation, ceasefires and solidarity launched at regular intervals by the African Union until the fall of Tripoli.

Reclaiming ties between Libya and Africa

The erasure of links between Libya and Africa is certainly not a historical novelty. Indeed, Louis Faidherbe, famous French governor of Senegal in XIX^e century, already described the Sahara Desert as a “ large empty space ”, despite his knowledge of the region and his frequent contacts with the people of Western Sahara. It is the idea, as widespread as it is erroneous, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon press, that far from being port cities carrying out dynamic commercial activities with the other shores of the desert, the oases of southern Libya constitute the last bastions on the borders of a desolate and impossible to cross land, which explains the surprise aroused by the discovery of the vast African population of the country. Thus the first feat of Ghislaine Lydon’s remarkable work is to replace the distorting image of the desert as a large barrier with the trope of the desert as a true living ocean.

Lydon’s book offers both a Braudelian history of the Sahara and a serious contribution to the history of economic institutions borrowing its methods from the political economists Timur Kuran and Douglas North.

But before embarking on this historical and economic study, Lydon presents a very timely reflection on the sources and methods necessary for the development of the history of the Sahara. This work, like some before it and hopefully many others subsequently, very solidly refutes the hypothesis according to which there remains no written source coming from the societies of medieval Africa and the beginning of the modern era, or even that Africans of that era would have been illiterate. She admits that Africanists of the previous generation, not having the skills necessary to understand texts written either in Arabic or in African languages ​​using the same alphabet, often based their work on techniques for the development of ‘an oral history. It also recognizes the limits of Arabist works limited to textual analysis. Lydon, for her part, recommends that historians of Africa combine these two techniques, which she herself did in “ (linking) systematically the oral to the written » (p. 46).

The desert as a zone of cultural exchange

Thanks to the combination of written and oral documents on Western Sahara to which she had access, Lydon paints a striking portrait of this society, from before the common era to the end of the XIX^e century. It can thus show how the idea of ​​an empty Sahara allowed foreigners to clearly divide the continent between an Arab and Islamic North African sphere and a Bantu sub-Saharan Africa, even if this ultimately proved more confusing than ever. illuminating. Lydon’s account, embellished with rich details such as the description of crocodiles roaming the desert, carefully details the political, cultural and commercial networks operating in symbiosis from one end of the Sahara to the other, and shows in great detail how the extent to which these cultural interactions had an influence on both northern and southern societies. She then explains that to the extent that racial markers like bidan (white) and sudani (black) are representative of the culture and politics of the period in which they were first used, historians who emphasize the foreign-native paradigm actually end up falsifying history and legitimizing certain voices for marginalize others (p. 6-7).

Finally, in his study of the Tikna merchants of Wad Nun, Lydon reveals historical details that had until then been forgotten, due to failure to recognize the existence of the desert as a zone of cultural exchange. Lydon highlights the ties of blood and culture woven across the desert ; For example, it was the merchants of Wad Nun who brought the Moroccan tagine and the custom of tea to the people of the Sahara and the Sahel. Likewise, the Tikna of Wad Nun learned to speak African languages ​​such as Songhai, Bambara and Wolof. They also adopted griots, ceremonial umbrellas and indigo-colored fabrics. It was common to marry someone from across the desert, both because of the slavery practiced at the time and to facilitate the creation of political alliances. So from XI^e century, no group could anymore claim uncontested hegemony over the desert or even on one of its banks. And it was indeed through the caravans of merchants that social change came, so that it is only possible to understand many of the practices essential to the analysis of the cultures present on each side of the desert by paying attention to the long tradition of borrowing from one end of the Sahara to the other.

The written economy of faith

But by being too ambitious, this work, although so necessary for any true understanding of the Sahara, sometimes ends up lacking clarity in its arguments. Thus, while Lydon presents many powerful details about the Saharan trade and the lives of merchants, it is only in the final chapters of the book that the reader can truly appreciate the author’s innovative and inventive argument on the relationship between Islamic law and commerce. Even the most courageous readers therefore risk putting the work on their shelf before Lydon has had time to fully develop his thesis, which is a great shame since the theory of “ written economy of faith » is definitely worth the detour.

Lydon in fact combines the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and SD Goitein to explain that the widespread adoption of paper and literacy increased the economic efficiency of Muslim and Jewish trading networks operating in the Sahara. In another very insightful digression, Lydon skillfully highlights how the Muslim merchants of Wad Nun managed to integrate Jewish merchants into their trading networks. But the crux of Lydon’s argument lies in the fact that literacy and the use of written contracts allowed not only better transmission of information from one end of the desert to the other, but also notable progress in managing trust issues. For believers, the signing of a contract was in fact a means of binding the two parties before God, even if in Malikite law this contract could not directly serve as proof in a court, where only the oral testimony of the signature of ‘an agreement had legal value. Furthermore, following the adoption of Arabic or Hassanya, a lingua franca with strong Arabic influences, in Western Sahara, and the adoption of the Islamic legal code for the drafting of more reliable contracts, it became possible to call upon specialists in Islamic law in the arbitration of commercial conflicts. It was the advent of this class of impartial arbiters that subsequently enabled a vast expansion of trade in the region.Lydon shows that as access to paper and literacy grew in the XVIII^e and at XIX^e centuries, the commercial activities of Muslim caravans became more intense in the Saharan regions. The author also sets out to explain Timur Kuran’s assertion that Western and Islamic commercial networks would not have had the same success at the time. According to Lydon, the peoples of the Sahara, like many others in the Islamic world, had a “ written economy of faith without having faith in the written word “. Thus, if Saharan societies were characterized by a high degree of literacy, a wide adoption of innovations linked to paper and an Islamic legal vocabulary allowing more efficiency in commercial transactions, the prohibition of using written contracts without Oral witnesses as legal evidence in commercial disputes necessarily limited the reach of commercial networks. This was a serious disadvantage compared to European commercial networks which recognized the validity of writing without requiring the support of oral testimony. But while Lydon’s study stops just before the start of the XX^e century, she nevertheless suggests that the commercial networks she speaks of then managed to adapt and continue to prosper during the colonial period.

Overall, Lydon’s work offers a serious contribution to the study of the Sahara, recalling the dynamism of the commercial networks that have always dominated a desert that is anything but empty. It also paints a fascinating picture of historical change and the evolution of social and economic institutions, which should put an end once and for all to the idea of ​​the inertia of pre-colonial societies in the northern, southern and southern regions of Africa. even within the Sahara.

Article first published in Booksandideas.net. Translated from English by Emilie L’Hôte with the support of the Florence Gould Foundation.