Desert Divers

Lindqvist's personal journey into the Sahara and the racist assumptions of those writers who have gone before him, dragging to the surface stories of colonial slaughter and sexual exploitation which contaminate his boyhood idols.

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In the first half of the twentieth centruy, European writers plunged into the stony, baking expanse of the Sahara, drawn by their own strange dreams. What did they hope to find? And what was really there?

In Desert Divers - part travel book, part literary history and part confession - Sven Lindqvist follows their paths into the Sahara and drags to the surface the history of colonial slaughter and exploitation that enabled Europeans to conduct their one-sided affair with the desert.