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DISTANT SHORES: A HISTORIOGRAPHIC VIEW ON TRANS-SAHARAN SPACE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2015

BAZ LECOCQ
BAZ LECOCQ*
Affiliation:
Humboldt University of Berlin
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Abstract

This article addresses how scholarship has formulated human connections and ruptures over the Sahara. However, these formulations were, and still are, based in both physical and discursive realities that have been developed in Africa itself. The idea of a dividing Sahara is based on historical political divisions – despite a homogenous political culture in the region – and by locally developed notions of race and religion, brought about by trade and justified in Islamic religious discourse. The Saharan divide acquired a new reading in colonial historiography, which, in turn, informed scholarly work until well into the 1960s. I will suggest that both colonial and postcolonial research on the differences and connections between the Saharan shores are suffering from a civilisational bias towards North Africa.

Keywords

SaharaNorth AfricaWest Africahistoriographycolonialismracism
Type
JAH Forum: Trans-Saharan Histories
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 23 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 For reasons of space and expertise, I will focus here on orientalist studies, history, anthropology, and archaeology, largely leaving aside geography and linguistics, despite their relevance. The latter discipline, especially, played a significant role in the construction of an Africa divided over the Sahara between ‘Hamito-Semitic’-speaking North Africans and ‘Sudanic’-speaking inhabitants of the Sahel. Seminal for this historical and, therefore, here significant linguistic classification is Westermann, D., Die Sudansprachen: eine sprachvergleichende Studie (Hamburg, 1911)Google Scholar.

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