The Sahara

Single spreading tree on the golden African savanna.

Corbis. Reproduced by permission.

A continent of extraordinary physical contrasts, Africa has mountains, deserts, tropical rainforests, and, savanna (grasslands). Yet except for the savanna and a few other areas, the majority of the African continent offers its inhabitants a meager living at best. This is particularly true of North Africa, which except for a fertile strip along the Mediterranean coast and Nile River, is covered by the Sahara (suh-HAIR-uh) and other deserts.

The Sahara is one of the central facts of life in Africa. It divides the continent as virtually no other physical feature in the world does, and it provides the reason for the great differences between North African and subSaharan cultures. Quite simply, Egyptian civilization had little influence on areas from which it was separated by the Sahara. Thus Egypt had much effect on Kush and Aksum in East Africa, but little at all on the Bantu peoples and other groups in southern and western Africa.

By far the world's largest desert, the Sahara today covers some 3.5 million square miles (9.07 thousand square kilometers), an area larger than the continental United States; yet only 780 acres (316 hectares) of it, a little more than one square mile (2.6 square kilometers), is fertile. The rest is mostly stone and dry earth with scattered shrubs. Contrary to the way it is usually presented in movies, only a very small portion of the Sahara consists of sand dunes.