How Did The Sahara Desert Contribute To The Isolation Of Africa

Africa is a continent cloaked in ambiguity. Outsiders have viewed it with disdain in the past mostly due to a lack of a fundamental understanding of the continent and its people. Once seen as a backwards place that couldn’t get things right or every truly be civilized due to inferior genetics. In the next few paragraphs I would like to discuss this concept and reasons it could be true and more importantly why it is not true. Vast portions of this continent were truly a dark isolated place until very recent history.

Firstly we must realize that there are Internal and External forces at play that all contribute to this isolation. The external factors include weather patterns; the Sahara Desert and exotic rivers to only name a few. The Internal factors include distance between communities, Difficulty of transportation and variances in communication. All of these factors played a …show more content…
How is this possible? Well, before the advent of modern Sails that could tack into the wind there was no way for a naval vessel to sail to the majority of the continent and ever return. Therefore vessels were rendered nearly useless for exploration of more than half of the southern portion of Africa. This kept the continent inaccessible for the most part well into the later portion of the fifteenth century.

The Sahara desert played an important role in the isolation of the rest of the African Continent. The desert was simply so large that it was virtually impassable with large groups of people or any army what so ever. Due to the fact that neither man nor beast could carry enough supplies in order to subsist for a complete passage. Only small groups could effectively cross and they were incapable of brining but so much technology and culture across the desert the people south of it. Basically the western route by sea was blocked off and the direct route over land was