Knut S. Vikør:

The Oasis of Salt

The History of Kawar, a Saharan Centre of Salt Production

While the Sahara may be an ocean, Kawar is thus no isolated island. It is rather a cross-roads in the desert. This is the place where Berber traders from the north settled to exchange goods with Kanem people from the south, it is where the Tuareg from the west slogged it out with the Teda from the east and where caravans of thousands of camels came every year for a cargo they distributed all over the Central Sudan. It was only because of this integration into a regional and inter-regional structure that the Kawar people could survive. Without it, the oasis could never have supported a population even of its small size, a fact they felt bitterly when war or droughts made those structures falter. It was an oasis built on trade, and what happened in Bornu, in Agades or even in distant Kano or Tripoli directly affected life in the oasis. Thus, the history of Kawar can only be seen through the history of the Central Sahara.

This history is dominated by a number of bipolarities, changes of focus and emphasis that drew the oasis into different contexts. One is that between the north and the south. Kawar is almost precisely midway between the northern and southern shore of the Sahara, and the map does not tell us whether we should consider it an outpost of the Maghreb into the south, or the tip of Sudanic civilization into the north.

And in fact, it seems to have been both at various times in its history. While the majority of the population has probably always been Sudanic, Kawar was in the medieval period, at least from the ninth to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, marked more by the expanding Islamic civilization of the Maghreb than by the kingdoms of the south. That is at least what the Arabic sources passed down to us indicate, but the existence on the ground of Arabic place-names stemming from a time when even Kanem had not yet turned to Islam, indicates that the description of Kawar as an early Islamic centre is based in reality. After the medieval period, however, the political and cultural links to the north were broken, and Kawar came under the domination of various players of the south; thus it moved from being a Maghrebi to a Sudanic centre, and has remained so. This change from a northern to a southern context then neatly divides its historical time-line in two.

This north-south dimension links to another basic bipolarity, between the regional and inter-regional (or 'international') trading networks of the Sahara. Kawar was involved in both types of trade network, but its role in either was quite different in nature. The inter-regional, trans-Saharan, network was one between Kanem-Bornu (and other states and peoples around Lake Chad) in the south and the Fezzan - and beyond it Tripoli and the Mediterranean - in the north. In this network of slaves, gold, ivory, ostrich feathers and other luxury items, Kawar was a stop-over where traders and their animals could restore energy and draw on what provisions the oasis could provide, in particular water. It was important, but Kawarians were for the most part only marginally involved in the trade taking place.

The other, regional and Saharan network on the other hand, had Kawar as its north-eastern endpoint and traded in what Kawar did produce and the south sorely needed: salt - with dates as an auxiliary export item. This regional network was quite distinct from the trans-Saharan one. It went along different routes, had different actors and was differently structured than the trans-Saharan trade. Given the northern bias of our early written sources, we know less about the beginnings of this trade network than we do of the trans-Saharan one, but for Kawar itself it was of far greater importance economically, and some times also politically. Thus, each kind of trade network inserted Kawar into a different structure, each partly 'invisible' to the other, but still related in the sense that both depended on, and in its way helped to sustain, Kawar as a populated region.

Politically, the main bipolarity of the 'southern' period after about 1400 was between the Kanem-Bornu kingdom in the south-east and the increasingly dominant Tuareg of Air in the west. These two poles were far from 'invisible' to each other, they were rivals in their own right, and some of the battles between them took place in Kawar itself. But given the differential nature of on the one hand a Sudanic kingdom of great longevity and wide interests to the south as well as north; and on the other a basically state-less Saharan power with only a nominal sultan at its head, the nature of Kawar's insertion into each political entity must have been different. However, Kawar's great distance from either political centre mitigated this difference. Most important for Kawar was no doubt the effect any shift of power had on the trading structures of the region.

Even inside Kawar, we find numerous bipolarities that dominate the oasis. The most basic one is the ethnic and linguistic divide between the Teda and the Kanuri population. This division is reflected both in the political and economic structures of the oasis: Of its two main export goods, the production and trade of salt was wholly in the hands of the Kanuri, while the other, in dates, was mostly carried out by Teda. They also took part in the trans-Saharan trade. The bipolarity is also geographic, in that Kawar had two 'capitals' or dominant villages, Bilma and Anay. The former (and larger) is the centre of the Kanuri, of the salt trade and of the links to the west. It was also the location of the French garrison on colonization, and thus gave its name to the cercle. Anay is the dominant town of the Teda, although the mai, the symbolic or real ruler of Kawar, lives in other villages. More dependent on the date trade, its economic links are rather to the north-east, to the Teda territories of Tibesti.

This internal dichotomy is also written into the other bipolarities; the Kanuri are mostly involved in the regional trade, while the Teda drew more influence from the trans-saharan exchange. Politically, while the Teda of Kawar are considered to be distinguishable from and sometimes not as 'pure' Teda as those of Tibesti - being sedentary for one thing - they are still part of the world to Kawar's east, while the Kanuris' insertion into the salt trade make them more turned westwards and concerned with the developments of the Tuareg world.

This study, a revised and expanded version of a thesis first written in 1979, thus starts with an analysis of the Kawar salt trade as it was observed around the time of the colonial occupation, and then presents the political history of the oasis in the context of the wider Central Saharan developments from the first references to trans-Saharan contacts in the Graeco-Roman period, through the various phases down to the arrival of the French in around 1906. A new postscript brings the developments up to 1999.

(From the Introduction)

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Publication date: Already published (1999)
xii, 342 pp.; £ 25. ISBN 185065-308-9