| Abstrakt: |
The entry focuses on Sahel which refers specifically to the southern land shore of the western Sahara, a narrow band of territory of a few hundred kilometers in width that extends along an east-west axis from the Atlantic Ocean approximately 1,000 kilometers to the inland delta of the Niger River. The Sahel is thus situated between the fuller aridity of the Sahara, which lies to the north, and the greater humidity of the grassland savanna, which lies to the south. In a broad ecological sense, the entire Sahel is a transitional zone that by dint of oscillations in historical climate has been endowed with floral and faunal elements from both the Saharan and savanna ecological zones. The biotic composition of the Sahel has also been profoundly changed by millennia of human land-use practices, including the introduction of domesticated livestock and the use of fire for clearing agricultural fields and for eliminating the bush habitat of the tsetse fly, bearer of the parasite that carries sleeping sickness. At least since the introduction of the camel sometime in the second half of the first millennium Common Era, which allowed for mixed (camel, cattle, sheep, goat) pastoralism under and conditions, the Sahel has evolved as a transitional cultural zone between the largely pastoral livestock economies of the western Saharan peoples and the largely agricultural (millet, sorghum, and indigenous rice) economies of the African savanna peoples. During the last decades of the twentieth century, some of the postcolonial sahelian states have undertaken the controversial construction of dams along the Senegal and Niger Rivers in order to harness water resources in the service of irrigated agriculture and hydropower production. |
