Camels and salt mines stitched Africa across the Sahara
Trans-Saharan trade linked North Africa to the Sahel from prehistory and peaked between the eighth and early seventeenth centuries. Fernand Braudel argued that only outsized profits could justify crossing a desert that otherwise sealed Mediterranean markets off from the Niger basin, and gold, salt, and captives supplied them.
Commerce at the Sahara’s northeastern corner is ancient: Naqada I Egyptians traded with Nubia and the western oases, reed-boat drawings from about 4000 BCE line the Wadi Hammamat route to the Red Sea, and the Darb El Arba’īn through Kharga and Asyut carried gold, ivory, and spices from Old Kingdom times, later guarded by Roman forts.
Farther west, routes hopped between oases. The Walata Road ran from the Senegal and the Taghaza salt trail to Moroccan Sijilmasa; in Libya the Ghadames Road linked Gao to Tripoli and the easier Bilma Trail passed Murzuk toward Kawar, while another path ran from Benghazi via Kufra to the Wadai lands between Lake Chad and Darfur. The Garamantes of Fezzan held central corridors from Germa by 1500 BCE and used enslaved labour to dig foggara channels; Herodotus describes them hunting people from chariots, a story linked to chariot rock art.
Camels appear in the region from the third century, but regular caravans came only with the spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries. Muslim traders reached the Ghana Empire by the eighth century; Mali, Muslim from its founding, kept the gold–salt exchange going alongside kola nuts, beads, and cowrie-shell money, and Niger-bend cities such as Gao and Djenné flourished. An eastern route fed the long-lived Kanem–Bornu Empire around Lake Chad.
The slave trade ran throughout. Roman Lepcis taxed a market in captives from the interior, and fifth-century Carthage sold Black slaves brought across the sand. In later centuries most served wealthy households, though some joined the armies of Egypt and Morocco; the seventeenth-century sultan Moulay Ismail was himself a slave’s son. Historian John Wright estimates an average of about 5,000 people a year over 1,250 years.
Source: Trans-Saharan trade
