The desert lies in wait for arable land and never lets go.

I think, if I may say so, we have been considering the Sahara rather from the wrong point of view. All the stress has been laid on “the encroachment” of the Sahara, but I would rather like to put it that the Sahara has seized the opportunity of man's stupidity.

Our land, compared by what it was, is like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease. The plump soft parts have vanished and all that remains is the bare carcass.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways … He treats his mother, the earth and his brother, the sky as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

… everybody knows that the using up still goes on, perhaps not so fast nor so recklessly as it once did, but unmistakably nevertheless. And there is nowhere that it goes on more nakedly, more persistently or with a fuller realization of what is happening than in the desert regions where the margin to be used up is narrower.