PEOPLE OF THE SAHARA DESERT

Tassili N’agger and M’zab Valley, Algeria. 2021.

Far from Algeria’s Mediterranean coastline, fertile land gives way to the great Sahara Desert. In this vastness, cultures have learnt to survive for centuries, some living in the desert by choice, and others to avoid mingling with the outside world.

The M’zab Valley, including the main town of Ghardaia, on the northern edges of the Algerian Sahara, is home to the Mzabite people. This ancient group follows the Ibadi sect of Islam, otherwise only present in Oman, and has existed in fortified walled cities in the desert for hundreds of years. They are highly collective and insular, and access to their ceremonies and festivities is severely restricted for outsiders to allow the local community to safeguard their long-held traditions.

Continuing further south, the rocky desert gives way to massive ergs, rolling dune fields. This is the home of the Tuareg people, who have inhabited the most remote and desolate parts of the Sahara for centuries, between today’s Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Libya. The Tuareg are experts of desert survival and caravaning, but are also insular and wary of outsiders. The rock art present in the deep Sahara shows evidence of a very different time, when the dunes were instead grasslands and home to buffalo, giraffes, and tribes of hunter-gatherers.