Collision of Climate, Cattle, and Culture in Mauritania during the 1970s

Abstract

ADVENT of drought in the Sahel of West Africa aroused enormous interest about an area and its people that were little known previously. Much of that interest and the resulting literature attempt to understand causal factors responsible for what has come to be known as desertification.1 To what extent were long-term, climatic changes reflected in the Sahelian drought, or conversely was the drought one of the short-term, recurring events normal to the arid and semiarid areas of the world? What were the destructive conse-