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The Sahara: A Long Way Away from a Cultural Desert

Published: July 8th, 2011Author: mikael3 Comments

Sahara…listen to the word…it is best pronounced when in the Great Desert itself, when a visitor tries to

take a breath in the most demanding of heat…it will than be said properly Sahra! My first visit, on a

bicycle, crossing it from north to South, back in 1988, are some of the most memorable days of my life. Six

hot, but enthralling months of my life made me forever love the smell of the desert, the people and the great

sense of freedom experienced. I am therefore, extremely honored and happy to share this article by the

arabist Eamonn Gearon with you and I look forward to reading his book about one of the most spiritual

places on earth - the Sahara!

The Sahara: A Long Way Away from a Cultural Desert

by

Eamonn Gearon

In keeping with anyone blessed with an active imagination, as extensive as my wanderings through theSahara have been, they are nothing compared to my mental journeys through the Great Desert. The greatestjourneys are not always physical, and one can be transported just as easily in an armchair as on a camel.

I was a child the first time I entered the Sahara, sitting on my father’s knee. We were at home in

Wiltshire, that fat, green English county best known as the home of Stonehenge. Beethoven’s 6th

Symphony, the Pastoral, was on the record player. My father always played Beethoven when heremembered Egypt in the 1950s.

Although he was there in an official, military capacity – something to do with a canal by the name ofSuez – his memories of that country and its people were fond ones, and invariably revolved around thedesert.

If this reminiscing seems a long way from the Sahara, it both is and is not. Even unremembered,unremarkable incidents in one’s childhood can have a profound impact on the rest of his or her life.

There is no doubt that I have spent the past two decades in the Greater Middle East because of myfather’s tales of a far away country he loved, even if, unsurprisingly, this love was not always equal on thepart of the Egyptians.

When I started reading about the Sahara for myself, the first thing that struck me was its scale and itsseeming emptiness. A part of the earth roughly the size as the entire United States of America, but with apopulation of approximately 3 million.

Once these figures had been absorbed, it was not the limited numbers of people that impressed me somuch as the fact that the desert was not empty. It was, and always has been, home to a diverse number of

peoples, both locals and foreigners.

I next understood that the Sahara had not always been a desert, but was once an ocean, and latervariously forests and pastures; that “Sahara” simply means “desert” in Arabic; and that the human records oflife in the Great Desert, its cultural history, are as many and varied as the flora and fauna one finds there.

Indeed, the landscapes of the imagination are far more numerous than the various physical landscapes onefinds there.

The earliest extent records are those rock paintings and carvings found across today’s desert. Theseglobal treasures hold out the promise of great insight into our Saharan-dwelling forefathers, and yet they arefrustratingly among the least understood human records, and most open to fantastical interpretations.

Hunting scenes are fairly easy to interpret. Recognisably male figures carrying spears and chasing four-legged animals with horns do not require the observer to have a degree in archaeology or art history. Otherimages are less straightforward. People swimming? Big cats dancing?

Did the “round-headed” figures come down from outer space? What do you think?

And while men apparently copulating with elephants and rhinoceros might just be examples ofprehistoric lavatorial, schoolboy humour, they could easily have another, deeper meaning: we simply do notknow.

Rushing forward thousands of years, the artistic records created by European artists who have been‘discovering’ the Sahara since the late Eighteenth century were created in the same environment. In

response to an encounter with their surroundings, the artists were impelled to create, to leave behind somerecord of a moment in time or a day in the life. They are all saying, “We were here, this is who we were,what we did and what we found.”

Fromentin declared that he only fully came alive in the Sahara, and that the intensity of these feelingsgrew the further south he travelled into it, while Paul Klee announced that it was the influence of beingunder North African skies, and the intensity of the light there, that he became an artist.

The paintings of David Roberts, who travelled through Egypt and the Levant in the 1830s, became thevirtually canonical interpretation of the East for close to one hundred years.

Roberts’ time in the region was inspired in turn by a far less pacific visitor to Egypt. On Napoleon’s1798 invasion of Egypt, he was accompanied by two armies: one of soldiers, the other of scholars. Thesesavants were responsible for exposing Europeans to a world they had more or less ignored for centuries.Perhaps this was no bad thing.

Napoleon’s short, inconclusive invasion marked the start of the last great scramble for the Sahara. By1900, of the 11 modern nations that now make up the Sahara, only Libya remained independent. This toofell after the Italians invaded, snapping up the last slice of independent North Africa in 1911.

But these European invaders were just the last in a millennia-long line of like-motivated imperialists,which included the Greeks, Romans, and Vandals. Non-European invaders included the Phoenicians,Persians and, of course, the Arabs.

It was the invasions by this last group that most permanently changed the cultural face of the Saharaand its people. The eventual imposition, or adoption, of Arabic as the language of commerce, governmentand worship is the most obvious changes in local circumstances. The spread of Islam, which utterlyreplaced older, indigenous faith systems, was the most important reason for this.

Returning to the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, this was not just the era of European expansionand domination of the Sahara, it was also the period that saw the proliferation of portrayals of the GreatDesert. The artists we mentioned above; these were soon followed by poets and writers of prose.

In the same way that Roberts dominated Nineteenth century painterly portrayals of the desert, soBeau Geste and the French Foreign Legion loom large on the early Twentieth century literary landscape. Akepi-clad bugler and a deserted fort was, for decades, all that most people knew about the Sahara, or caredto.

With the dawn of cinema, the literary visions were added to and exploited mercilessly by filmmakerswho understood the instinctive attraction of a shot of sand dunes stretching as far as the eye could see.

One of the best-known writers on the Sahara, Paul Bowles of “The Sheltering Sky” fame, very publiclyannounced that he wished the film of his novel had never been made. Others were less chary.

And in spite of the critics, famous and anonymous, the Sahara continues to attract visitors; to awestrangers and residents; to prove most alluring when revealing itself to those who have the desire to know it,over time.

For my own part, the journey that began on my father’s knee reached fruition 20 years later, when Ifirst entered the Sahara. And now, after nearly another two decades, I am delighted to have sanctified mylove for the world’s greatest desert in my book.

The Sahara in which I roamed, first with the Bedu and later alone, but in the company of my camels –Osama, Ibn Kelb, and Baby – was physically demanding. The journeys were tough. They built characterand left scars. Today, I look back on those sacred days and nights with love without compare.

Whilst resident of the oasis of Siwa, Egypt, recovering from amoebic dysentery after one of my moreadventurous travails, I met my now wife. Such a priceless find, in the midst of the seeming wasteland, dailyreminds me of the importance of the Sahara in my life. In this world, it pays to be alive to both one’sphysical and imaginary landscapes.

Eamonn Gearon is an Arabist, analyst and author who has lived and worked in the Greater Middle East –

from Kabul to Casablanca – for the past twenty years.

Tags: afghanistan, arabist, Arabs, Beau Geste, cultural desert, david roberts, desert, eamonn gearon, egypt,French Foreign Legion, greater middle east, Greeks, Kabul, napolean bonaparte, Paul Bowles, paul klee,Persians, Phoenicians, rock carvings, rock paintings, romans, sahara, sahara desert, Siwa Oasis, Vandals

Eamonn’s life in the region started in the Sahara, where he lived and travelled with the Bedu, learning a

vast amount of desert lore from them before engaging on a number of lengthy solo, camel-powered

expeditions in the Great Desert.

His book “The Sahara: A Cultural History” came out in the UK in June 2011 (Signal Books), and is being

published by Oxford University Press in the USA in October.

Eamonn is now writing a cultural history of Kabul, to which city he took his wife for their honeymoon, in

2008, during the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan.

Please visit my sponsors Termo who are makingit possible for me to write 2 blog reports perweek. Just click the logo to find the bestunderwear on earth.

Written by mikael

More posts by: mikael

2 Comments for this entry

1. Alicia says:July 10, 2011 at 11:41 pm

Thank you for such an interesting introductory article. I really enjoyed reading it.

2. Rita says:July 14, 2011 at 1:21 am

I really loved this article! It’s a dream to do a trip across the Sahara desert!It fascinates me since i wasa child..it’s magic!!

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