Released 06.03.26

The Conversation

Finally, a guest who has actually been to the city of Timbuktu.

Dr Judith Scheele is a professor of Social Anthropology, and fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara — a new classic on a complicated region packed with natural resources, including huge underground reserves of sweet water.

In a fascinating, cliché-busting conversatoin, Judith dispels some of the ‘Western’ romance of the Sahara with her highly nuanced perspective. "The purpose", writes Judith in her book "is to escape long-standing external perceptions of the Sahara – and of other ‘wastelands’ like it – as timeless, unchanging, empty and passive." 

She starts by telling us how her relationship with this part of the world began. In 2001, she was hitchhiking from Cote D’Ivoire to Marseilles across the Sahara when the news broke of the September 11th  terrorist attacks in New York. She has since spent nearly two decades visiting the region, including Southern Algeria, Mali and Northern Chad.

She talks about mobility in the Sahara, how it’s navigated, and the nodes that connect families and communities across vast distances. Her conversation is rich with anecdotes, of accessing the women’s gossip (long siestas), of riding the long-distance trading trucks (friends in the right places), and the disbelief some of the smugglers reveal when she says she is writing a book: why work so hard for something that pays so little?

Fluent, eloquent, insightful, Judith gives voice to a lesser-known part of the world with the rigour of an academic, and the passion of a traveller.

Image: Sophy Roberts

Books discussed:

Judith Scheele
— Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
— The Little Prince

Paul Bowles
— The Sheltering Sky