Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara

Judith Scheele is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. She is a social anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork in North Africa and the Sahel. She is the author of Village Matters: Knowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia, Algeria (2009).

• 1. Founding saints and moneylenders: regional ecologies and oasis settlement; 2. Saints on trucks: Algerian traders and settlement in the biblād al-sūdān; 3. Dates, cocaine, and AK 47s: moral conundrums on the Algero–Malian border; 4. Struggles over encompassment: hierarchy, genealogies, and their contemporary use; 5. Universal law and local containment: assemblies, qudāh and the quest for civilisation; 6. Settlement, mobility, and the daily pitfalls of Saharan cosmopolitanism; Conclusion: Saharan connectivity and the 'swamp of terror'; Glossary; References; Index.

'The Sahara is neither a romantic land of luxury-laden camel caravans nor a vast empty darkness hiding the likes of al-Qa'ida. Judith Scheele's Sahara is the most dynamic 'space' in today's Africa, one brought alive by ceaselessly expanding and contracting human networks that invest in 'place' even as mobility defines 'community'. Scheele brings us into al-Khalil, the infamous Malian-Algerian-frontier trans-shipment centre where 'men are men', virtue non-existent and 'family-loyalty' the definition of survival. She introduces us to the multi-national work teams of enormous transport trucks that criss-cross the desert with foodstuffs, cigarettes and cocaine, licit and illicit loads side-by-side, protected by always-present AK-47s. During sixteen months, Scheele … observed, questioned, interviewed … [and] accessed family-held Arabic documents … Scholarship is impressive, arguments convincing; this is the book many who know the Sahara will wish they had written.' E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta