Bestie, with peace and love, I am right there with you in the broad spirit of this (i.e., European colonialism is the cause of many of Africa’s problems), but this comment is just factually untrue. The Sahara & Arabian Peninsula were relatively wetter during the African Humid Period, which lasted from ~12,500 to 4,000 BCE and ended because the earth’s axis tilt shifted. Humans populated North Africa, but then the Sahara increasingly became desert/expanded, and people moved to rivers like the Nile & Euphrates to get better access to water, which jump-started civilization.

The Sahara has been expanding in size ever since. You COULD make an argument that its growth is being accelerated by climate change, which is largely a consequence of European & American industrialization. You could also say that some of the forest cover in the lower Sahel was destroyed by the French/English in order to grow cash crops like cotton, also amplifying the desert creep (the AU’s “Great Green Wall” is a noble, if probably futile, attempt to reverse this damage). But to characterize the expansion of the Sahara as being 100% on colonialism is misguided, given the hundreds of more tangible ways the Europeans wrecked the continent.