The Conquest of the Sahara

An elucidating study of France’s colonial occupation in the central Sahara in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“Everything a book should be—an adornment for your home, a blitz of information for your brain, a diversion and a hoot, and, finally, balm for your soul.” —The Los Angeles Times

“A bravura account . . . Readers with a taste for exotic popular history will savor Porch’s wry sense of irony.” —Newsweek

in The Conquest of the Sahara, Douglas Porch tells the story of France’s struggle to explore and dominate the great African desert at the turn of the century. Focusing on the conquest of the Ahaggar Tuareg, a Berber people living in a mountain area in central Sahara, he goes on to describe the bizarre exploits of the desert's explorers and conquerors and the incompetence of the French military establishment. Porch summons up a world of oases, desert forts and cafés where customers paid the dancer by licking a one-franc piece and sticking it on her forehead.

The Conquest of the Sahara reveals the dark side of France's “civilizing mission” into this vast terrain, and at the same time, weaves a rich tale of extravagant hopes, genius and foolhardiness.

“Porch is knowledgeable . . . and a fine writer with a dramatic style . . . [he] has done a superb job.” -The Boston Globe

“[Porch] presents a vivid blow-by-blow account of how this arid, inhospitable land was penetrated at a terrible cost.” -The San Francisco Chronicle