Beneath the sun of the western Sahara lie slabs of rock salt in the ground like forgotten letters of a dried-up sea, and for centuries it was precisely this salt that was the true foundation of West African trade. Where gold drew the desire of the world, salt kept the body alive, and the people who knew how to travel between those two worlds bore a name of their own: the Imazighen, the free people.
The Free People
The world knows them today by a name that is not theirs, for Berber is a foreign stamp, pressed upon a people that never called itself that. They call themselves Imazighen, in the singular Amazigh: the free. They were there before Rome and Carthage, before the Arab advance along the Maghreb, and they were already there when the Soninke raised their first walls of dry stone on the Senegal. Their territory stretched from the Canary Islands in the west to the oasis of Siwa in the west of Egypt, a world that the modern map has hacked to pieces but that for them was a single whole.
The earliest mention of their ancestors appears in ancient Egyptian papyri, and from about 2000 before the Christian era the Berber languages spread westward from the Nile valley, along the northern rim of the Sahara, deep into the Maghreb. This is not a people with a short memory, but a people with a memory that reaches deeper than most of the empires it would see come and go.
The Sahara as Home
For most people the Sahara is a border, an emptiness that has to be crossed, a punishment; for the Imazighen it was a land, a network of oases, star routes and seasonal winds, fathomed through centuries of lived experience. As pastoralists on the edge of the desert they followed their herds where the grass came and went where the water was, and they tamed the camel and shaped it into what the Arabs would later call the ship of the desert. They improved the saddle and devised the right harness, for they knew how to burden an animal for days without water without breaking it.
A single camel could carry nearly 180 kilos over long distances, over shorter distances even three times as much, but the animal alone explains nothing, for the camel without the Amazigh was a beast that got lost in its own tracks. It was the guides, the route-knowers, the water-finders and the star-readers who steered the ship, and whoever tried to cross the Sahara without them died.
The White Gold
Salt sits on every table today and we hardly think about it, but in the world of pre-Islamic West Africa salt was a matter of life and death, because the human body cannot do without it. In the heat of the savanna, where sweat wiped the salt reserves from the body, shortage was deadly, meat spoiled and food turned bland, and the forests and savannas south of the Sahara had almost no salt, while in the desert it lay in the ground by the load.
Beneath the sandy plains of what is now called Mauritania and northern Mali lay gigantic deposits of rock salt, residue of seas that once lapped here and have been burned away by the sun. For the Amazigh this was no surprise, but the inheritance they had received from their fathers, and in the southern markets this salt could be worth, kilo for kilo, its weight in gold. The salt trader was the equal of the gold trader, sometimes even his superior.
The Testimony of Ibn Battuta ﵀
Of this world we have an eyewitness, for Ibn Battuta ﵀, the great judge and traveller from Tangier, himself crossed the western Sahara in 1352 on his way to the Mali empire, stayed in Taghaza and wrote down what he saw in his Rihla. His description is dry and for that reason all the more convincing: he tells of a village without tree or fruit, only sand and salt mines, of the houses and the mosque, built from blocks of salt and roofed with camel hides, and of the slaves of the Massufa Imazighen who hewed the salt from the earth, while the bread, the millet and the dates came from six weeks’ travel away. In his description surfaces the realization that no one lives here voluntarily; one lives here because the salt that lies beneath one’s feet weighs heavier in the south than gold.
Taghaza, Awlil and Idjil
Three names carry the burden of this trade.
- Awlil lay on the Atlantic coast of present-day Mauritania and was one of the earliest suppliers to the markets of ancient Ghana, the Wagadou empire that from the Sahel spun its spider’s web across the southern caravan roads.
- Idjil, deeper inland in the Sahara, was still supplying its slabs of salt to the same routes into the fifteenth century, and generations kept tearing the salt from the earth here because the southern demand was never sated.
- Taghaza was the heart. The salt pan lies 857 kilometres south of Sijilmasa in Morocco, 787 kilometres north-northwest of Timbuktu and 731 kilometres north-northeast of Oualata, three compass bearings that conceal nothing about the price of the journey. In the middle of the desert, far from any harvest and far from any city, lay a settlement where slaves and labourers hewed rectangular slabs of salt from the desert floor, where the houses were of salt and the mosque of salt, and where the bread was brought in from outside.
Whoever carried the salt of Taghaza to the south asked a transport fee of nearly eighty percent of the value of the goods, a figure that conceals nothing, for no one else could make the journey. The Amazigh held a monopoly that was protected not by a law, but by the Sahara itself.
A Caravan in Motion
Such a caravan numbered a thousand camels, and every camel was laden with bales, jars, leather sacks, slabs of salt and, in season, loads of grain and dried meat for the journey, a line of animals stretching for kilometres along a thin dotted line of trodden sand between the dunes.
At the front walked the guide, an Imazighen who carried the route in his head as a captain carries his sea route, and beside him two or three helpers who had to notice the first signs of deviation, the first dunes that no longer lay at the right angle, the first stars that stood just a little too far to the south. In the middle travelled the traders themselves, some on camelback and some walking beside their animals, men from Sijilmasa, from Fez, from Tahert, from Tlemcen, sometimes an Andalusian merchant who wanted to see for himself where his gold came from, sometimes a scholar travelling along to take up a teaching post or a judgeship south of the desert. At the rear followed the guards, armed and alert, responsible for the weakest links in the chain.
A halt was made in the oases, for there the water skins were refilled, the animals rested, the loads checked and the bread bought, while villagers came up with dates, barley flour and wool. For the space of a night a settlement of forty or fifty houses was transformed into a temporary marketplace, and then the caravan went on again, while the animals groaned under their loads, the sun rose and the guide watched the dunes. A few weeks later, if all went well, a weary group of men was welcomed at a southern city gate by relatives who had long since stopped taking survival for granted.
The Logistics of the Caravan
A trans-Saharan caravan was not an accidental stream of traders, but an organized body with seasons, protocols and silent laws. Caravans departed in the cooler months, from October to March, and they travelled in the coolest hours of the day and lay still in the shade when the sun was at its deadliest. An average caravan numbered, according to Ibn Battuta ﵀ who would see one with his own eyes a century later, about a thousand camels, and some numbered ten thousand.
Runners were sent ahead to the oases, where they prepared the water skins and the local inhabitants rode out with the water to meet the caravan, so that thirst had not yet felled the animals before the well came into sight. This was no nomadic wandering, but logistics at a level that medieval Europe did not know.
The Sanhaja
Not every Amazigh tribe carried the same burden, for within the broad Amazigh world lived dozens of confederations, each with its own pastures, its own route and its own specialization. For the western salt route the Sanhaja were decisive, a confederation of Amazigh tribes who controlled the western Sahara, the territory between Morocco in the north and the Niger bend in the south. They controlled the oases, the salt mines and the gateways of Sijilmasa, Awdaghust and the southern trading cities, and they were the indispensable link between the goldfields of the Soninke and the markets of the Maghreb.
Centuries later the Almoravids would emerge from their midst, a movement that would reshape the Maghreb and Andalusia, but that was the future; in the pre-Islamic period they were above all traders and caravan leaders, masters of a merciless route.
What al-Bakri ﵀ Saw
In the eleventh century al-Bakri ﵀, geographer in Andalusian Córdoba, wrote the most detailed account of this northern world that we possess. He described Awdaghust, the Sanhaja town south of Taghaza, with its markets, its mosques, its houses of clay and the customs of the inhabitants, and he described the palm orchards and the wells. He also described the Sanhaja themselves, their customs, their marriages and their use of the face veil by the men, a custom the Tuareg know to this day. The remarkable thing about al-Bakri ﵀ is that he never saw Awdaghust himself, for he gathered his information in Córdoba, from the mouths of traders who had made the journey, and yet his description is so precise that modern archaeology has been able to confirm it in large part.
That says something about the density of the network, for a scholar at the western end of the Islamic world could, without leaving his library, write an accurate portrait of a Sanhaja town on the southern edge of the Sahara. The Imazighen carried not only salt and gold along their routes, but also words, names, descriptions and knowledge.
Loading map...
Two Worlds, One System
There were two worlds that were each rich in themselves but could not flourish without the other: in the south the Soninke with their gold, their trading cities and their specialized communities along the Niger and the Senegal, and in the north the Imazighen with their salt, their camels and their knowledge of the desert, and between them the Sahara, a wall that was impenetrable to anyone but the Amazigh. Salt from the Sahara was carried south on camelback, and from the Niger and the Senegal it was spread further in canoes and pirogues to Koumbi Saleh, Niani and Timbuktu, and from there deeper into the forests. The customary exchange was salt for gold dust, a weight for a weight, a scarcity for a scarcity, and this system already stood upright long before the name of Allah ﷻ was spoken along these routes, built on mutual need, on complementary riches and on the willingness of a people to make the most dangerous journey in the world time and time again.
When Islam later entered along these routes with its traders and its scholars, it found no empty plain, but a highway that the Imazighen had laid out over centuries, ready to carry a new word.