The Salt Mines of Taghaza

Taghaza was a salt-mining settlement in the midst of the western Sahara, in the empty desert north of the Niger lands, and one of the strangest and most desolate inhabited places of the medieval world. Here, in a region without trees, grass or running water, rich beds of rock-salt lay near the surface, and the salt was dug out in great slabs and loaded onto camels to be carried hundreds of miles southward across the desert to the trading-cities of the Sudan. Salt was scarce and precious in the lands of West Africa and was prized almost as highly as gold; and the trans-Saharan trade turned upon the exchange of the two, the salt of the desert mines passing south and the gold of the Mali goldfields passing north, with Taghaza as the northern pole of that commerce. The place was so barren that the very houses and the mosque were built of blocks of salt, roofed with camel-hides, and the labourers who worked the mines, often slaves, depended wholly on the caravans to bring them food, for nothing could be grown there. The great traveller Ibn Battuta passed through Taghaza about 1352 on his way to the empire of Mali and left a famous description of it, marvelling that so wretched a spot should be the source of such wealth. This scene depicts the salt-town of Taghaza and a caravan loading for the southward crossing. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.