African Deserts
Africa has more desert than any other continent. Roughly 38% of all African land is desert. The Sahara in the north is the biggest hot desert on Earth, the Kalahari and Namib in the south are vast and famous, and there are smaller deserts in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. African deserts shaped the development of ancient civilisations along their edges and remain home to remarkable wildlife and ancient cultures today.
- % of Africa that is desertapprox. 38%The most of any continent
- Biggest African desertSahara9.2 million km², the world's biggest hot desert
- Number of major deserts6+Sahara, Kalahari, Namib, Danakil, Karoo, Chalbi
- Famous peopleTuareg, Bedouin, San, BerbersLong-standing desert cultures
- Driest placeWadi Halfa, SudanLess than 3 mm of rain a year
- Hottest placeDallol, EthiopiaAverage temperature approx. 34 °C all year
The African deserts compared
The Sahara dwarfs the other African deserts. Together, African deserts cover over 11 million km², about the size of Canada.
What are the African deserts?
Africa has several distinct desert regions:
- The Sahara in the north (Africa's largest, the largest hot desert in the world).
- The Kalahari in the south, mostly in Botswana (a semi-desert with more rain than most).
- The Namib on the southwest coast (the oldest desert on Earth).
- The Danakil Depression in the Horn of Africa (one of the hottest places on the planet).
- The Karoo in South Africa (a semi-desert plateau).
- The Chalbi Desert in northern Kenya (a small but striking salt and sand desert).
Why so much African desert?
Africa has so much desert for several reasons:
- Latitude. Northern and southern Africa lie at around 30 degrees from the equator, where global atmospheric circulation creates two great belts of dry air descending from above. These bands explain why the Sahara, Kalahari and most other major deserts of the world are at similar latitudes.
- Cold ocean currents. The Benguela Current along the southwest coast and the Canary Current along the northwest coast cool the air over the ocean, reducing the moisture it can carry inland.
- Size. Africa is so vast that interior regions are very far from any ocean, and the moisture in the air runs out before reaching them.
- Mountain shadows. The Atlas Mountains in the north and the Drakensberg in the south create rain shadows on their leeward sides.
People of African deserts
African deserts have been home to many remarkable cultures.
- The Tuareg are camel-riding traders sometimes called the "blue people" because of the deep indigo veils the men traditionally wear. They live across the central Sahara.
- The Bedouin are Arab nomadic peoples of the northern Sahara and Arabian deserts.
- The Berbers (Amazigh) are the original inhabitants of North Africa, with a culture going back thousands of years.
- The San (or Bushmen) are the indigenous people of southern Africa and possibly the oldest continuous human culture on Earth.
- The Toubou are nomadic people of the central Sahara around the Tibesti Mountains.
- The Himba are a striking people of the northern Namib, famous for the red ochre paste women apply to their skin and hair.
Wildlife of African deserts
African deserts support unique wildlife. The desert elephant of Namibia and Mali has adapted to long journeys between waterholes. The fennec fox with its giant ears lives in the Sahara. Oryx antelope can survive on the moisture in plants alone. Camels (introduced from Arabia thousands of years ago) are the iconic Saharan transport animal. The meerkat, sand cat, jerboa, addax antelope, aardvark and desert hedgehog all call African deserts home.
Deeper dive: Saharan climate cycles, desertification and the Great Green Wall
The Sahara has cycled between green and dry many times over the past few million years, driven by slow changes in the Earth's orbit and tilt called Milankovitch cycles. The cycles affect how much sunlight reaches the northern tropics in summer, which in turn affects the strength of the West African monsoon. When the monsoon is strong, it pushes deep into the Sahara and turns much of it into savanna and lake-dotted grassland. When the monsoon weakens, the desert returns. The most recent "Green Sahara" lasted from approx. 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, when much of the desert was lake and grassland with abundant wildlife and human populations. The shift back to desert was probably driven by gradual cooling and the weakening of the monsoon as Earth's northern summer sunlight slowly decreased.
Desertification (the gradual conversion of productive land into desert) is a serious problem along the southern edge of the Sahara, in the region called the Sahel. The Sahel is a band of dry grassland stretching across Africa from Senegal to Sudan, between the desert proper and the wetter tropical regions further south. Climate change, overgrazing, deforestation and unsustainable farming are all causing the desert edge to advance southward, swallowing villages and farmland. Major droughts in the 1970s and 1980s killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Modern droughts continue to drive migration from rural Sahelian areas to coastal cities and across the Mediterranean to Europe.
The most ambitious response to Saharan desertification is the African Great Green Wall, an initiative launched by African Union countries in 2007. The original idea was to plant an 8,000 km long band of trees across the southern edge of the Sahara from Senegal to Djibouti. Implementation has been more nuanced: tree-planting in the most arid areas has often failed, but smaller-scale techniques like building stone barriers to capture water, restoring traditional Sahelian farming practices, and protecting natural regrowth have been more successful. Niger has restored over 5 million hectares of degraded land using farmer-led techniques, the largest land-restoration success story in Africa. The Great Green Wall continues to be a major focus of international climate finance.
The continent is Africa. The biggest individual African desert is the Sahara.