It contains one of the world’s largest concentrations of prehistoric art, yet is barely known to the rest of the world.
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My eyes lifted up towards a rocky ledge carved into a sandstone cliff in the heart of Chad’s Ennedi Massif. I saw a face, then, as my eyes adjusted to the gloam, another appeared. Painted in bright ochre and white, men were riding camels and giant cows danced over the entire surface of the rock.
Over millions of years, the wind and rain have sculpted the Ennedi Massif in Chad’s remote north-eastern corner into a plateau of inselbergs, lonely spires and towering arches the colour of honeycomb. Meanwhile, primeval people have decorated this landscape, too, painting and carving thousands of images into the rock.
Reaching this region involves a bumpy 1,000km, four-day-drive from the capital N’Djamena through the Sahara. Because of its utter remoteness and the fact that Chad, until recently, has suffered years of fighting – including coups, ethnic bloodshed and a war against Libya – the Ennedi Massif remains largely unknown. So few scientists have been able to reach this inaccessible landscape that it’s believed 75% of the massif has yet to be studied, leading some to characterise it as “less explored than the back of the Moon”.
Ennedi’s obscurity is heightened because the UK advises against travelling to much of Chad (the area around the Ennedi Massif is considered safe, however).
For those who do make the journey, Ennedi has one of the globe’s biggest concentrations of prehistoric rock art. Paintings adorn the walls of almost every cave you step into. Although they are not as old as those in France’s Lascaux or Indonesia’s 45,500-year-old pig painting, many date to the 6th millennium BCE and reveal the shifting history of the world’s largest hot desert.
“These paintings help us to reconnect with our identity, our culture and where we come from. Ennedi is an open book to the history of our ancestors,” said Angèle Aloumbe, who works for African Parks and is based in N’Djamena. “I’m always crying when I go to Ennedi. It’s such a beautiful landscape with very untouched people. No one can go there without feeling a connection. It has something really special.”
Here, deep in the desert, I was alone with the ancient world. There were no buildings or roads for miles; whereas elsewhere, most early art is surrounded by the noise of tourism or shut to the public for protection.
In 2016, Ennedi – roughly the size of Switzerland – was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site. Shortly afterwards, it was classified as a Natural and Cultural Reserve and taken under the protection of the renowned non-profit conservation organisation African Parks. And earlier this year, a long-term archaeological study began that will not only map all the rock art sites, but also investigate the surrounding ground for ancient ceramics, plant pollen and animal bones. “When an Italian archaeologist recently came for a brief visit, he found, within half an hour, a 7,000-year-old piece of pottery,” said my Italian guide, Andrea Bonomo, who works for the company Spazi d’Avventura, which has been running trips to Chad for 30 years. “Imagine what they will find with more time.”
Later, Bonomo explained how in 2001, a seven-million-year-old fossilised skull, nicknamed Toumaï, was discovered west of Ennedi. The remains were far older than Ethiopia’s famous skeleton, “Lucy”, leading some people to believe that Chad could be the origin of humanity, and not Ethiopia’s Rift Valley. According to Dr Baba Mallaye, a team member involved in the discovery, not only has Toumaï’s age been scientifically validated by radio chronological analysis, but the team also found many other fossilised remains of Toumaï’s cousins in the same area, proving that this was not an isolated case.
To reach Ennedi, Bonomo and I drove through savannah with desert roses, yellow grasses and acacia trees gleaming gold. We passed nomadic Wodaabe and Oulad-Rachid people on the move. Women and children rode up on camels, seated inside colourful chariots decorated with vivid fabrics, carved calabashes and rows of bronze bowls. Men walked alongside, leather amulets strapped across their chests like small suitcases to protect them from evil. Then the tarmac road stopped, the land emptied of trees and entering Ennedi was like stepping through a portalinto a place between worlds.
Ennedi’s rock art reveals the changes that have happened over millennia to this land. Like the whole of the Sahara, the area was once green and glittered with lakes. Many people once lived here, but now few do. As I wandered among the red monoliths, I saw images of elephants, rhinos, giraffes and ostriches – all common wild animals in Ennedi until relevantly recently. After the area became drier more than 6,000 years ago, these animals either moved south or died out. Yet, Ennedi remains known as the Eden of the Sahara because it receives more rain than the rest of the desert, creating wadis like green ribbons and permanent water sources fed by crystal-clear springs. Tropical plants bloom and relics of its more temperate times survive, like its desert crocodiles.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230515-ennedi-massif-africas-remote-geological-wonder