The trans-Saharan trade routes were caravan roads across the Sahara, linking North Africa and the Mediterranean with the gold-producing kingdoms of West Africa. They flourished for roughly a thousand years, from about the eighth century to the sixteenth. Camel caravans carried gold, enslaved people, ivory and kola nuts north, and salt, textiles, horses, copper and books south, on journeys of 1,500 km or more that took one to two months. The trade made cities such as Timbuktu, Gao and Sijilmasa rich, supported the great West African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, and carried Islam and Arabic learning south of the desert.
The Camel Made It Possible
People had crossed the Sahara long before the great caravan era, but on a small scale. In what is now south-western Libya, the Garamantes built a kingdom in the Fezzan from around 500 BCE, irrigating their oases with underground channels and trading with the Roman world. What turned occasional crossings into regular trade was the camel. Camels spread across North Africa in the first centuries CE, and by late Roman times they were common. A camel can carry around 150 kg, walk for days between wells, and cope with heat and sand far better than horses or donkeys. The route network that grew up was mapped by its oases, where caravans could water their animals, and by the knowledge of Saharan peoples such as the Berbers and the Tuareg, who guided and protected the caravans for a price.
Gold for Salt
The heart of the trade was a simple exchange. The forests and river valleys of West Africa had gold, mined in fields such as Bambuk and Bure near the upper Senegal and Niger rivers, and later in the Akan lands of today's Ghana. For centuries West Africa supplied a large share of the gold used in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. What West Africa lacked was salt, essential for people and animals in a hot climate. The Sahara had salt in abundance, in dry lake beds where it could be cut out in slabs.
The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited the salt-mining settlement of Taghaza, deep in the desert, in 1352. He wrote that its houses and mosque were built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins, and that the miners ate food brought in from far away because nothing grew there. When Taghaza was abandoned in the late sixteenth century, mining moved to Taoudenni, in what is now northern Mali. Salt is still cut there and carried to Timbuktu, and caravans called azalai still carry salt from Bilma in Niger.
Life on the Caravan
A crossing was slow and dangerous. Caravans often travelled in the cool of the night and early morning and rested through the hottest hours, covering perhaps 30 to 40 km a day. They depended on professional guides who read the shape of dunes, the colour of the ground and the stars, and on wells that could be several days apart. Ibn Battuta's own crossing, from Sijilmasa to Walata in 1352, took about two months. Caravans could be large, with hundreds or even thousands of camels, travelling together for protection. Sandstorms, wells found dry or poisoned, and raids were constant risks. One account from 1805 describes a caravan of about 2,000 people and 1,800 camels that died of thirst when it could not find water.
Ghana: The First Great Trading Empire
The first great beneficiary was the empire of Ghana, known to its people as Wagadu, which lay far to the north-west of modern Ghana, in parts of today's Mauritania and Mali. Its kings controlled the flow of gold from the south and taxed goods passing through. In 1068 the Andalusian geographer al-Bakri described its capital, usually identified with Koumbi Saleh in Mauritania, as twin towns, one for the Muslim merchants with twelve mosques and one for the king. Ghana declined in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its place was taken by a new power.
Mali and the Pilgrimage of Mansa Musa
The empire of Mali, founded by Sundiata Keita in the thirteenth century, grew rich from the same trade and extended from the Atlantic coast deep into the interior. Its best-known ruler, Mansa Musa, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324–25. His caravan passed through Cairo with so much gold, handed out in gifts and spent in its markets, that according to the Egyptian writer al-Umari the value of gold there fell and took years to recover. News of Mali's wealth reached Europe. On the Catalan Atlas of 1375, a Mansa of Mali is shown seated on a throne in the western Sahara, holding a large gold nugget. The empire is described further in our guide to the Mali Empire.
Timbuktu: Learning at the Desert's Edge
Timbuktu, near the northern bend of the Niger River, grew from a seasonal camp into one of the most important cities of the trade. It stood where the desert routes met the river, so goods could move between camel and boat. Under Mali and then Songhai it became a centre of Islamic scholarship, with mosques such as Djinguereber, built in the early fourteenth century, and Sankore, whose scholars taught law, theology, astronomy and medicine. Families in the city kept collections of manuscripts, many of them bought from traders who brought books across the desert. Its legend of wealth drew European explorers for centuries. The first known to reach it and return alive, the Frenchman René Caillié, arrived in 1828 disguised as a Muslim traveller, and found a modest mud-brick town.
Those manuscripts faced a modern threat in 2012, when armed Islamist groups occupied Timbuktu, destroyed several of its saints' mausoleums and set fire to part of a library. Local librarians had already smuggled most of the city's manuscripts, hundreds of thousands of them, south to Bamako in trunks and on boats. More about the city is in our guide to Timbuktu.
The Routes and Their Ports
There was no single road across the Sahara, but a network of routes whose importance shifted over time. In the west, caravans left from Sijilmasa, on the edge of the desert in southern Morocco, and crossed to Walata, Timbuktu or the Senegal River. In the centre, routes ran from Tunis and Tripoli through oases such as Ghadames and Ghat to Gao and the Hausa cities of what is now northern Nigeria, such as Kano. In the east, routes linked the Lake Chad region with the Fezzan and Libya, and Darfur with Egypt along the Forty Days Road. Southern terminal cities such as Agadez in Niger, whose mud-brick minaret is about 27 m tall, grew up where the desert met the Sahel, the semi-arid belt that the word sahel, Arabic for "shore", describes as the coast of the sand sea.
What Else Crossed: Faith, Writing and Buildings
The caravans carried ideas as well as goods. Islam spread south mainly through merchants, and West African rulers often converted first, while much of the population kept older beliefs for centuries. Arabic writing came with it. Scholars adapted the Arabic script to write local languages such as Hausa and Fula, a tradition called Ajami. The trade also shaped architecture. The Sudano-Sahelian style of mud-brick mosques, with wooden beams jutting from the walls to hold scaffolding for the yearly replastering, spread along the trade routes. The Great Mosque of Djenné, rebuilt in 1907, is the largest mud-brick building in the world. Horses, bred in North Africa and traded south, allowed West African kingdoms to build cavalry armies, and kola nuts, a prized stimulant, went north.
The People Who Were Traded
The trade also carried enslaved people north across the desert, in large numbers and over many centuries. Historians estimate that several million Africans were taken across the Sahara between the seventh and the nineteenth centuries, destined for households, armies and plantations in North Africa and the Middle East. Many died on the crossing. This trade continued well into the nineteenth century, long after the Atlantic slave trade had been banned.
Songhai, the Moroccan Invasion and the Decline
In the fifteenth century the Songhai Empire, based at Gao on the Niger, replaced Mali as the dominant power, reaching its height under Askia Muhammad around 1500. Its wealth tempted Morocco. In 1591 an army sent by the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur crossed the desert and, using firearms, defeated the Songhai at the Battle of Tondibi. Songhai broke up, and Timbuktu declined.
Just as important was competition from the sea. From the fifteenth century Portuguese ships sailed down the Atlantic coast of Africa and began buying gold directly, building the fortress of Elmina on the Gold Coast in 1482. Over the following centuries more and more West African trade went to the coast rather than across the desert. Caravans kept running, especially for salt, but the golden age had passed. Today trucks follow some of the old routes, and Agadez is a staging point for migrants crossing the desert towards Libya and the Mediterranean. The route network is often compared with the silk routes of Asia, described in our overview of the Silk Road.