The Sahara by Eamonn Gearon Read Free Book Online

date palms, In Salah was always an agricultural oasis, as well as being on a trade route. Africans and Arabs exchanged slaves and gold for European products here. Although the town sees small numbers of desert tourists, the majority of today’s European visitors come to the region for black gold. The centre of Algeria’s hugely important energy industry, In Salah finds itself sitting on top of some of the world’s biggest oil and gas fields, attracting hundreds of engineers and others involved in its extraction and processing.
    On a much smaller scale than Arlit or In Salah, industry is present in many other, otherwise agricultural Saharan oasis-towns. Tessalit, an unremarkable town of a few thousand in the Adrar Mountains in northern Mali, has deposits of gypsum that have pushed the growth of a local plaster industry. Famous for dates, olives and Alexander the Great, Siwa, a town of 20,000 on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, is not the only oasis to host a water bottling plant, in this case taking un-carbonated Siwa Water to the tables of Cairenes who demand a purity not found in their stretch of the Nile. On the banks of the Nile in Sudan, Dongola, where Kitchener enjoyed a famous victory over the Mahdi’s forces in 1896, has also embraced engineering plants, even while it continues to be an important local centre of farming, both agrarian and livestock.
     

    Goat market, Nouakchott
     
    As far from Dongola as it is possible to get in Saharan terms, Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, is probably the desert’s largest city, with a population between 800,00 and two million, and host to the country’s sole university. Such a gap between high and low estimates is mainly due to the large migrant population that comes and goes, from the desert’s interior to the shores of the Atlantic. Since becoming the nation’s capital upon independence, when it was home to some 9,000, the city has grown massively, if not carefully. Today, any further growth in Nouakchott, a Berber name meaning “place of the winds”, faces a unique dual challenge. The sprawling city is hemmed in by both ocean and desert, the Atlantic offering a barrier to any westward expansion, while its eastern borders are steadily being overrun by advancing dunes, a problem that has attracted international attention with, as yet, no permanent solution.

Oasis-Towns
     
    Once centres of trans-Saharan trade, many oasis-towns have been stuck in obscurity for centuries now with their inhabitants making what money they can through trading dates, olives and livestock with poorer oases in the area. The old town of Ghadames in Libya is one such place, and another Saharan town designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Its ingenious architecture consists of hundreds of whitewashed palm tree trunks, filled in with lime, stretching between the rows of similarly whitewashed houses that face each other, forming a series of dark, cool alleyways that give the impression that the town is actually underground. Hundreds of concrete houses were built by the government in the 1970s that, while better equipped to keep the desert sand out, were inevitably inferior to the old buildings when it came to keeping those inside cool.
    As the last town in south-western Algeria before one enters Morocco and/or the Western Sahara, Tindouf enjoys an importance out of all proportion to its natural resources. Algeria’s 1977 census found the town’s population to number 6,000. A 2006 estimate puts it at 45,000. These swollen numbers are thanks to an influx of refugees from the Western Sahara who live in seemingly permanent camps, waiting for independence and surviving on aid and water, both of which are brought in by road to this otherwise desiccated spot on the map.
     

    Ghadames
     
    One of these camps, Smara, has its namesake town over the border, in that part of the Western Sahara that is either occupied or integral to Morocco depending on one’s position. Only founded in the