Sahel

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sahel takes its name from an Arabic word, al-sahil, which means coast or shore. That is a strange label for a place with no sea, and it makes sense only from the north. Picture the vast Sahara as an ocean of sand, and this is the shoreline where it ends. The Sahel is a biogeographical region of Africa, a belt of hot semi-arid land that runs 5900 kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. It covers about 3,053,200 square kilometres, and in places it is anywhere from several hundred to a thousand kilometres wide. It sits between the drier Sahara to the north and the wetter Sudanian savannas to the south. Though it lies in the tropics, it does not have a tropical climate. What does it feel like to live where the desert meets the grassland? Why have droughts here repeatedly turned into famines? And how did a region of trees, herders and old trading cities come to shape American music, the French language and the modern politics of violence?

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• 2. Heat, Light and Rain

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  In Timbuktu, the sun shines for about 3,409 hours in a typical year. Gao in Mali is not far behind with nearly 3,385, while N'Djamena in Chad gets 3,205 and Niamey in Niger gets 3,082. Across the Sahel, sunshine runs from about 2,400 hours a year, roughly 55 percent of daylight, to 3,600 hours, more than 80 percent. That approaches the levels of a true desert such as the Arabian Desert, even though the Sahel is only a steppe. Cloud cover is low to very low, and the climate is hot, sunny and dry through the year.

  The hottest months bring average highs of 36 to 42 degrees Celsius, often for more than three months running. Nights in that season still hover around 25 to 31 degrees. Even in the so-called coldest period, daytime highs sit between 27 and 33 degrees. The average mean temperature stays above 18 degrees everywhere in the region.

  Rain is the scarce part of the picture. Most of it falls in four to six months in the middle of the year, and other months may stay completely dry. It is also erratic, and it can vary a great deal from one season to the next. Geographers often split the region into three bands by annual rainfall. Khartoum in Sudan represents the driest band, with around 100 to 200 millimetres. Niamey sits in the strict Sahelian band with 200 to 700 millimetres. Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, with 700 to 900 millimetres, marks the wetter edge. Humidity swings too, often falling to between 10 and 25 percent in the dry season. What can actually grow under such a sun, and survive the long dry months, is the question for the plants and animals of the region.

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• 3. Acacia Country

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  Acacia tortilis is the most common tree in a landscape that botanists call the Sahelian acacia savanna. Other acacia relatives, Senegalia senegal and Senegalia laeta, share the work of providing shade. Most of the ground is covered by fairly continuous grass, much of it annual species such as Cenchrus biflorus. The baobab, known to science as Adansonia digitata, also grows here, along with Balanites aegyptiaca and Faidherbia albida. When the long dry season arrives, many trees drop their leaves and the annual grasses die back. In the drier north, patches of desert shrub alternate with grassland.

  The land is mostly flat, with most of it lying between 200 and 400 metres above sea level. A few isolated highlands rise out of it, including the Marrah Mountains, the Aïr Mountains and the Ennedi Plateau. Ecologists treat these as separate ecoregions because their plants and animals differ from those of the surrounding lowlands. Rainfall climbs from around 100 to 200 millimetres in the northern Sahel to 700 to 1,000 millimetres in the south.

  The Sahel once supported great herds of grazing mammals. Scimitar-horned oryx, dama gazelles, Dorcas gazelles and red-fronted gazelles roamed here, along with the giant prehistoric buffalo Pelorovis and the Bubal hartebeest. Predators included the African wild dog, two subspecies of cheetah and the lion. Over-hunting, and competition with livestock for grass, cut the larger species back sharply. The Bubal hartebeest and Pelorovis are now extinct, and the scimitar-horned oryx is probably extinct in the wild. The dama gazelle and the African wild dog are endangered. Seasonal wetlands still matter to migratory birds moving within Africa and along the African-Eurasian flyways.

  Some habitat is now formally protected, including Waza National Park in Cameroon and the Ferlo Nord Wildlife Reserve in Senegal.

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• 4. Drought and Sand

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  The year 1450 marks the start of a megadrought that lasted until 1700, a stretch of 250 years. Droughts like it are not new in the Sahel, which has seen them for hundreds of years. In 1914, annual rains fell far below average, and large-scale famine followed. Between 1951 and 2004 the region endured some of the most consistent and severe dry spells anywhere in Africa.

  The 1960s opened with a surge of rain. It made the drier north look inviting, and governments encouraged people to move there. Then the drought of 1968 to 1974 began. Grazing quickly became unsustainable, and the terrain was stripped bare across large areas. Famine followed again, but this time international attention brought a flood of aid that softened the blow. The catastrophe led directly to the founding of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

  In June 2010, famine struck again. Niger's crops failed to mature in the heat. About 350,000 people faced starvation, and 1,200,000 more were at risk. On the 22nd of June, Faya-Largeau in Chad reached 47.6 degrees Celsius, beating a record set there in 1961. The same day, Bilma in Niger tied its 1998 record of 47.1 degrees. The next day Bilma hit 48.2. On the 25th of June, Dongola in Sudan recorded 49.6 degrees, the hottest temperature ever measured in that country. By mid-July, Niger reported that diarrhoea, malnutrition and respiratory diseases had sickened or killed many children. Niger's new military junta appealed for international food aid.

  Human pressure on the land makes each dry spell worse. Over-farming, over-grazing, crowding onto marginal land and natural soil erosion have driven serious desertification. Builders have had to change their materials, and the Woodless Construction project, introduced by the Development Workshop in 1980, responded to that. A larger effort, the Great Green Wall, aims to fight desertification through reforestation and other measures.

  The wind adds its own damage. The Bodélé Depression in Chad produces dust storms on about 100 days in an average year, and several major storms hit Chad in November 2004. On the 23rd of March 2010, one sandstorm swept across Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, while another struck southern Algeria and northern Ivory Coast at the same time. After the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, rainfall began to rise again. Researchers suggest a warmer Atlantic Ocean and stronger monsoons may be behind it.

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• 5. Kingdoms and Colonies

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  About 4000 BC, the Sahara and the Sahel began to dry out at a remarkably fast pace. Lakes and rivers shrank, and land fit for settlement dwindled. Farming communities drifted toward the wetter climate of West Africa.

  The larger Sahelian kingdoms emerged from 750 AD. They raised major cities in the Niger valley, among them Timbuktu, Gao and Djenné. Far to the east, the Christian Nubian kingdom of Alodia, also called Alwa, reached its height between the 9th and 12th centuries. It was first mentioned in the year 569. Its capital, Soba, stood near modern Khartoum, and a description of it survives that speaks of extensive dwellings and churches full of gold and gardens.

  Geography set limits on these states. To their south lay a mosaic of forest and savanna where mounted warriors were nearly useless. Horses and camels also suffered from the humidity and diseases of the tropics. Because of this, the Sahelian states could not expand into the lands of the Bono state of the Akan, or into Yoruba territory.

  The colonial era came from two directions. Chad was added in 1900 as part of French Equatorial Africa, and the French territories of the Sahel were decolonised in 1960. The easternmost Sahel never fell to a European power at first. It was conquered by the Khedivate of Egypt under Muhammad Ali in the 1820s. By 1899 it was under British rule, and it was granted independence in 1956 at Egypt's behest.

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• 6. French Words, Sahel Voices

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  General Louis Faidherbe is the name tied to the arrival of French in the Sahel. In the mid-19th century, after French culture took hold in northern Senegal, colonial governors like him pushed deeper into the interior, against the opposition of regional leaders. In 1895 the French organised the territory into French West Africa, a vast entity noted for its linguistic diversity.

  The language outlived the empire, though not entirely. Since French military intervention ended in 2022, the governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have each stripped French of its official status. Observers read this as part of a wider turn away from Paris. Research also suggests that French in the Sahel serves more often as a business language among elites and the educated than as the language of everyday talk.

  Local speech has reshaped it all the same. In Burkina Faso, ligidi, a word from Mooré, means money. In Senegal, the phrase c' nekh swaps the French word bon for the Wolof nekh, so that it carries the sense of good or pleasant. Burkinabè French has also taken in English and even Chinese words, such as enjoy for taking pleasure and chao or mao for old. Some of these loanwords have travelled back to France with African migrants, where they enter slang and challenge the rigidity of the standard language.

  Pronunciation preserves an older France too. Across West Africa, speakers still use the rolled, tongue-tip r that was once common in metropolitan France but has since given way to a throatier version there.

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• 7. Roots of the Blues

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  Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters, historians of African-American music, argued that the essential elements of the blues began in the Sahel. Their reasoning starts with who was taken across the Atlantic. Enslaved people sent to South America and the Caribbean came largely from percussion-based cultures in southern, coastal West Africa and from Central Africa. Many of those brought to North America came instead from the Sahel, where stringed instruments were familiar. The banjo evolved from Sahelian instruments such as the akonting.

  Charters also found that many Sahelian captives came from Muslim cultures. Those cultures favoured melodic, solo singing with long, winding runs of notes, rather than drumming and group chants. Plantation owners who feared drums sometimes permitted these traditions, and they grew into tools of rebellion and then into the blues.

  Sylviane Diouf and Gerhard Kubik add the influence of Islamic music. Diouf points to a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer and 19th-century field hollers. The call traces back to Bilal ibn Rabah, an Abyssinian African Muslim of the early 7th century. Both share a melody, lyrics of praise, quivering voices, and nasal tone. She links the origin of the field holler to African Muslim slaves, who made up an estimated 30 percent of enslaved Africans in America. Kubik traces the wavy intonation of many blues singers to the western Sahel's contact with the Islamic world through the Maghreb from the seventh and eighth centuries.

  The blue note, a hallmark of the blues built on flattened thirds, fifths or sevenths, is also tied to Sahelian roots. Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban music, which draw from coastal and Central Africa, lack it. The Sahel's griot tradition may also have influenced talking blues and, through it, hip hop.

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• 8. The Epicenter

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  By 2021, according to The Economist, the Sahel accounted for 35 percent of all global deaths from terrorism. Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, was identified as the fastest-growing terrorist organization in the world. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project reported that conflict deaths in the central Sahel rose by 38 percent in 2023.

  The Libyan Crisis, beginning in 2011, made matters worse. Boko Haram, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb all intensified the region's violence and instability. In March 2020 the United States sent a special envoy for the Sahel. The Global Terrorism Index later put the region at the global centre of terrorism, with 3,885 deaths out of a global total of 7,555 in 2023. That was nearly ten times the toll of 2019.

  The groups fund themselves through ransom kidnappings, illicit gold mining and drug trafficking. The Sahel has become a major route for cocaine travelling from South America to Europe. Military juntas that took power after coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger turned from Western partners toward Russia and China, relying on paramilitary groups such as the Africa Corps, formerly Wagner. Results were limited. When the regimes of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali withdrew from the G5 Sahel, an anti-terrorism alliance, Mauritania and Chad disbanded it.

  Human rights concerns grew alongside. On the 9th of July 2020, the United States voiced alarm over alleged abuses by state security forces, following documents released by Human Rights Watch on the 1st of July. Violent clashes between herders and farmers in Nigeria, Mali and Sudan have been worsened by climate change, land degradation and rapid population growth. Droughts and food shortages have also been linked to the Mali War. Violence is now spilling into Togo and Benin.

  Climate pressure continues to build. In March and April 2024, an extreme heatwave struck Burkina Faso and Mali. It was intensified by a 1.2 degree rise in global temperature caused by human activity.

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