What is the Sahel?

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Barbara Cooper is professor of African History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA. Her research focuses on gender, family life, religion, reproductive health and family law, particularly in the Sahel. She is the author of Countless Blessings: A History of Childbirth and Reproduction in the Sahel (Indiana, 2019), Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Indiana, 2006) and Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989 (Heinemann, 1997). She is co-editor with Catherine Baroin of the collection La Honte au Sahel (Sépia, 2018). Her current project offers case studies of historical debates on Christianity in Africa, provisionally entitled Conversations chrétiennes.

Presentation of the project

"The Sahel is at once an ecological category and a complex socio-political reality for those who live there.  Conceived historically as the southerly "coast" of the Sahara desert, it has a profound link to the peoples, languages, and lifeways of the Sahara. Over many centuries it has become profoundly Islamicized, yet Arabic speaking travelers referred to it as the Sudan, the land of the Blacks. It sits uneasily within an Arabic cultural frame. While it has always been a space of "brassage" of different cultures and peoples,  the lifeways and political interests of different ethnic formations have produced longstanding frictions. In the 20th century the Sahel has developed a strong "French accent" after French military conquest and administration within French West Africa. Yet it is most readily identifiable as a specific climate zone with distinctive plant life, rainfall patterns, and landscapes, defined by contrast with both the desert to the north and the more forested zones to the south. It is in effect a liminal space. With the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, the Sahel came increasingly to be cast as a space of environmental fragility. That perception has hardened with growing attention to climate change. Today the Sahel is perceived to be the site of terrorism.  The question left unanswered in these shifting modes of thinking about a spatial abstraction is how the peoples of the region have perceived of themselves and experienced their landscape over time."

Speaker

• Barbara Cooper is professor of African History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA.