The trans-Saharan routes

node · earth · Sahara — North Africa to the Sahel

The caravan corridors linking the Mediterranean and North African coast to the Sahelian cities of the Niger bend and Lake Chad, in continuous use for gold, salt, books, enslaved people and ideas for well over a millennium. They belong in a Journey about Atlantic music because they are the mechanism by which the Arab-Islamic musical world — the world of the ʿūd, of Arabic music theory, of the long-breathed melismatic call and the ornamented solo line — reached the West African savannah centuries before any European ship did. That contact is the reason the interior sounds different from the coast, and it is the reason the two corridors in this Journey are not independent. The same broad musical culture that reached Iberia across the strait and became the lute reached the Sahel across the desert, and it is the Sahelian version that Kubik identifies as one of the two strands feeding the blues. A listener who hears something Saharan in a solo Delta vocal is not imagining a resemblance without a route; the route runs through Timbuktu, not through Andalusia.