YouTube - World's Toughest Jobs: Salt Miner

YouTube - World's Toughest Jobs: Salt Miner

In this link it shows a video of the process of minning salt and transporting the salt across the desert. In the readings from the book "Africa A Short History" it tells the readers how important trade was to the natives. Africa is rich in gold and would use the exportation of gold in exchange for salt. Africans then used the salt for cooking and medicines. The book comments on how people can live with out gold but not without salt. This is why salt is so valuable. Infact salt is just as vuluble as gold itself. It also talks about how difficult it is to travel through the Sahara desert with little water and little direction as to where you are going. Cammels are interesting animals for they can store fat in their humps along with storing water in their bellies going up to ten days with out water.

I thought that this video is interesting and it relates to this weeks readings well. Trade among the state were very important for survival and for the economy. This video goes into more depth than the readings did and I thought that it was good to see the salt being processed than to just read about it. The video points out that the caravan would use the markings in the sands to tell the direction of the wind blowing as a reference to where they were heading.

World's Toughest Job: Salt Miner. Youtube.com. National Geographic. Web. 27 Feb. 2010
http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi9bJhRZtKA&feature=related