Sahara

For France, the eastern Sudan and Abyssinia would provide the keystone of the edifice which bold-visioned architects of empire had been patiently constructing.

In West Africa, as we have seen, isolated coast colonies had been made to serve as portals to a vast inland dominion in the western Sudan, which in turn could be connected through the Sahara, at least in appearance on the map, with the French colonies of Algeria and Tunis on the Mediterranean coast.

To complete the realization of their dream, French imperialists needed only a few million square miles in the eastern Sudan, the Nile Valley, and Abyssinia.

These secured, the French empire would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea.

Though a Gladstone might have promised to evacuate Egypt, imperialists from eighteen eighty-two onward considered the Nile Valley one, and ambitious empire builders dreamed of connecting Cairo in Egypt with Cape Colony in South Africa by a railway system running through a solid band of British territory.

In such a system, the upper valley of the Nile, that is, the eastern or Egyptian Sudan, would be an indispensable link.

The Sudan, it may be recalled, is a vast belt of African territory stretching from east to west between the Sahara and the equatorial jungle region.

The eastern part of the Sudan includes not only the swamp-bordered reaches of the upper Nile and its tributaries, but great areas of fertile upland, dense forests, and by contrast, the steppe countries of Kordofan and Darfur, and the Nubian and Libyan deserts, in all nearly a million square miles.

Yeah, probably.

The Sahara was green at one point.

But the Rashad structure is not Atlantis at all.

We're looking in the wrong place.

Yeah.

Asians in Asia, where the diet is a lot more focused on things like rice and fish, they're shorter.

Africans, whose diet is very heavily reliant, sorry, Sub-Saharan Africans, whose diet is very heavily reliant on meats and potatoes, sorry, yams, but things like that, and the grains are not nearly as prominent, they're taller.

Your Africans are six foot, six two.

Yes, I know your liberal friend is saying, well, everybody eats under a communist government because the communists are fair and they give everybody food.

Yeah, well, tell that to the Ethiopians who were hidden in the Sahara Desert, the tribal people who were starved to death.

The mass famine.

It took Sally Struthers and Bob Geldof to get food over that way, or so they thought.

I believe that they were refugees from this North American civilization that reestablished themselves in Europe and upper Africa, and they started to build these structures, like Newgrange, and we'll talk about Newgrange and the passage chamber structures of Ireland here in just a moment, as infrastructure projects to reestablish their civilization.

And there's a time period in the Sahara from 8500 BC to 5300 BC called the Saharan Wet Period, and this was a time of prolific rainfall, agricultural development, and the domestication of cattle in the upper eastern Sahara.

And this is the timeframe that I propose the Egyptian pyramids were built and in operation.

So it's approximately 3,000 years, and at the end of this 3,000-year period, this is where we see the desiccation of the Sahara, right? It transforms from this rainy, lush agriculture environment back into a desert, and that is where we see the Narmer palette and the reunification of upper and lower Egypt, the beginning of dynastic Egyptian civilization circa 3500 BC, because they were coming in from all of these areas that were spread out around the upper Sahara and they were moving back to the Nile River because it was a desert again, and that was the only area where there was water.

So they had to relocate the ci- civilization back to the Nile River.

They began repurposing these ancient structures.

Ammonia is a fertilizer.

It literally transformed our modern civilization and allowed us to have the population explosion that we've had in the 1900s was due to ammonia.

So big shout out to my colleagues who covered for me while I was away.

And three of the five guys on the boat had done the Marathon de Sable, which is the 270 kilometre running race in the Sahara.

So they had peer pressured me into signing up for that when I got back.

So that's my next adventure is in April.

And it's like, I'm not a natural runner.

And doing the Marathon de Sables is something I was really goaded into and peer pressured into.

And it's 270 kilometers through the Sahara and I prefer the cold.

So it's not something I'm particularly looking forward to, but it is something I know that I'm going to be able to do because I know that if you just keep at it, avoid injury, avoid burning out and...

It's not.

It's green for about 400 kilometers down to the Sahara, and it's fabulously rich.

And just as you have your- ... chronological layer cake in Italy with a Roman slice and, uh, so, and so on.

You have exactly the same happening in North Africa, where you have originally the Berbers.

[laughs]

... have any sort of, uh, records that tell you how they were used.

Now, the key point about, uh, Hannibal's elephants, they're not big Indian and sub-Saharan African elephants.

Mm.

Sahel State's rapid transformation is amazing, a feat no civilian government can never achieve, even for decades.

And then we have King Arthur who says that the Sahara states are doing great, that they are there progressing and they are delivering.

Am I reading that correctly, Judge?

Yes, yes, you've said it right.

Those are the comments that we are setting some sort of setting the pace to perfectly move to the next part of this conversation.

to look at, you know, what the failures of the multinational joint tax falls actually portend for the wider West Africa and regional, you know, not just West Africa, but the whole Sahara region.

Yes, and to contextualize, the structural collapse of the multinational joint security tax force didn't just leave a security vacuum.

It, you know, triggered a regional domino effect.

called

that's I'm saying it wrong but that's definitely my to do list and I've also I like the look of that see the Marathon the 270k in the Sahara Desert I like the look of that as well that's they two are definitely the top two races I would love to end day or places to do because some of the views will be brilliant the desert probably will be good views but that one and the UTMB one that will be brilliant man

I listened to a book about the MDS and I think there's more hills in it than you think there is in my head I think you run across the desert but there's some kind of you've got the dunes but there's also some hills and mountains that are floating around in certain stages of it so it's not completely flat

Like a