People Empires Trade Islam Slavery
"Kingdoms of the Medieval Sudan"African states of Mali, Ghana, Songhay, Kanem-Bornu, and Hausaland
Senegambia,
Cities of Timbuktu, Djenné, Gao
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An economy of buying and selling was the driving force in the development of Sudanic states from as early as A.D. 500 onward. Trade led to the rise of the cities of the Sahel, greatly centralized power for kings and governments, and gave traders a pivotal role to play in the exercise of influence and power in these Sudanic states. Trade actively shaped political development. But why? Why, that is, was trade so important for African history? Perhaps issues of landscape and environment can provide a starting point to attempt to answer this question.
In Africa, regional variations of the most extreme kind – from desert to grassland to forest – means both that natural resources varies widely according to region, and that interregional demand for commodities not locally available would be high. Therefore, despite the importance of agriculture in the savanna zones, commercial wealth would take priority over agrarian wealth.
While in medieval Europe, for example, the rise of trade sprang from agricultural productivity and then had to be incorporated deliberately into the conceptual framework of a profoundly agrarian society, agriculture in Africa was only one player on the wider stage of the drama of trade in goods and resources. Between Sudanic regions, mutual needs for commodities such as salt and metals were happily matched by a corresponding rich diversity of natural resources in different regions. The salt of the desert, the copper of the savanna, and the gold of the forests did not eliminate trade in agricultural and pastoral goods, but they certainly overshadowed it, at least in the historical record. In the Sudan, the merchant was not seen as a menace to the traditional hierarchies of governmental authority; rather, he was the key to their remarkable growth and prosperity. Trade in Africa did not threaten power structures. It sustained them.
Which was the most important item of trade a thousand years ago in west Africa?
From the perspective of the peoples of the hot climate of the Sudan and further south, salt from the mines of the Sahara was immensely valuable; chunks of salt broken from large salt bars were even used as currency.
Gold exports received much attention from Arab geographers and travelers writing about the Sudan, and so likewise have been emphasized by historians relying on the Arabic sources.
As important as gold was for the trans-Saharan trade, it was not, however, the only valuable metal which changed hands in Sudanic Africa. Iron seems to have been a critical factor in the early development of trade in the region, and copper mined in savanna kingdoms such as Mali came to be a crucial element in trade patterns, for it could be exchanged with the peoples to the south who actually controlled the major sources of gold.
Writing in the fourteenth century, Al-Umari has left us vivid descriptions of such traffic in both salt and valuable metals. Kola nuts, animal skins, slaves, grain, meat, and even dairy products were also transported by trading networks.
How did these networks operate for the medieval Sudan? Certainly over long distances, involving voyages of epic proportions–and many weeks–across the Saharan "ocean" of sand. The image of camel caravans bearing salt from the Sahara to the Sudan and returning to north Africa laden with gold has been heavily romanticized, perhaps, but does have a basis in reality.
Long-distance trade across the desert gave rise not only to endless rivalry and hostilities between Berber factions who sought to control the flow of goods, but also between larger zones of interest whose termini in north Africa ranged from Morocco in the west to Egypt in the east.
Murray Last has proposed a model in which trading routes crisscrossed five "horizontal" zones stretching from west to east across Africa: north African coastal regions, oases north of the Sahara, the desert itself, the Sudanic Sahel, and the sub-Saharan savanna.
In time, according to Last, two "vertical" trading networks, running respectively from northwest Africa to the Niger and from Egypt to the central Sudan, came to vie for control over the lucrative trans-Saharan routes. Such rivalry between "western" and "eastern" networks not only led north African powers to compete with one another, but also profoundly influenced the development of states in west and central Africa south of the Sahara. This competition also altered the relationship between Sahelian and savanna kingdoms in the Sudan itself.
The merchant was a key figure in the development of trading networks. Before roughly A.D. 1000, traders heading south across the Sahara tended to establish contact chiefly with the states they first encountered after their desert journey, that is, the kingdoms of the Sahel, such as Ghana and Kanem. These states did not, however, themselves produce the gold so eagerly sought by merchants from the north, but rather procured it from regions to the south.
By 1100, merchants were traveling yet further south, not all the way to the gold-producing regions of the forests, to be sure, but to the "savanna kingdoms" which had previously played a secondary role to states such as Ghana. These kingdoms, closer to the sources of the gold supply, struck cartel-like agreements with the merchants, who enjoyed the favor of local rulers eager to increase their royal treasuries by taxing the growing trade. Merchant settlements sprang up, close by but separate from royal capitals. The process by which savanna kingdoms would become vast empires was underway. It is no accident that Mali would eclipse Ghana, or that the focus of political power around Lake Chad would shift southward from Kanem to Bornu.
It would be too simplistic, however, to view these networks and resultant empires as monolithic structures concerned solely with the transportation of gold and salt. Shepherds and farmers produced goods which underpinned the more spectacularly visible trade discussed so far. Merchants had to eat, after all, and whatever supplies they did not bring with them had to be purchased from local peoples whose regions the merchants traversed. Local nomads were also valuable as guides for the caravans. Temporary market-places in regional produce could attract caravans in need of food or simply wanting to trade; several of these markets would eventually become major trading cities. Complex and symbiotic webs of local exchange operated within the context of the great trading networks, and upheld them.
Trade in Saharan and Sudanic Africa brought many societies into contact with each other. It also transformed them. Exchange was not, after all, a "one-dimensional" activity linking various parties simply interested in making a profit. For inherent in trade is competition: for resources, for markets, for wealth. This was no less true of the Sudan a thousand years ago than it is today. In medieval west Africa, however, competition linked to trade would be a driving force in changing society itself, in fundamental ways. What kinds of changes took place, and how did they come about?
Ann McDougall has argued that competition, especially in the form of war, led to an increasingly specialized social structure among the "desert-edge culture" of the Sahel, a key link in the trading systems of medieval Africa.
War was pandemic in and around the Sahara, undertaken with great regularity by various groups of Berber pastoralists. Their motives are usually explained as springing from either a quest for glory, or a desire to spread the truth of Islam through jihad, or both. While these factors undoubtedly contributed to organized warring movements, such as that of the Almoravids after the turn of the millennium, the desire to control the increasingly "high-stakes" patterns of commerce operating within harsh natural environments must be seen as an overriding motive. Intense rivalries for the control of limited resources–which could however bring great wealth to those who had access to them–led war and trade to function as two sides of the same coin. War, for its part, played an "ambiguous role ... as a means of both destruction and accumulation."
According to McDougall, war as a predictable and even regulated phenomenon led to sharply delineated social specialization during the Saharan and Sudanic Middle Ages.
Craftsmen producing arms and materiel enjoyed a growing demand for their wares, in a society where divisions between those who fought, those who taught the message of Islam, and those who herded animals were becoming increasingly clear. Though strongly reminiscent of the "three orders" of medieval Europe ("those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked"), the African model departs from its European counterpart in several ways.
First, a tripartite division of Saharan society may well have owed its very genesis to the phenomenon of trade. Second, in the Sahara and Sudan "those who bought and sold" were valued much more highly by the other "orders" than were European merchants by the aristocracy and clergy of their respective regions. Trade was not a suspicious activity in medieval Africa, in contrast to medieval Europe, where nobles resented wealth they saw as all too easily acquired and clerics constantly reminded their contemporaries of the evils of usury, a seemingly inescapable fact of the trader's life.
In the transitional zone from Sahara to Sudanic kingdoms, however, warriors had a strong interest in preserving the basic structure of a commercial economy from which they drew their own wealth. An "ideology of protection" developed in which merchants regularly handed over wealth to "those who fought" in return for valuable protection in the unpredictable world of the Sahara and Sahel.
Nor did religion condemn trade outright; perhaps the Prophet Muhammad's own early success in business disposed his followers to a more accepting view of trade from the beginnings of Islam. In any case, merchants and clerics found common ground in medieval Africa.
Legal opinions of north African jurists show that Muslim law sought to regulate, but not suppress, commercial activities, and was concerned that stability and order should exist (even in non-Muslim realms) for the protection of Muslim merchants.
Finally, not only did merchants carry Islam across the desert and within the Sudan (the Wangara traders from Mali played an important role in this latter process), but the religious class itself–whose members are termed the zawaya–produced some of the most successful and active merchants. Clerical kin-groups within this order relied on their trading brethren for material blessings, while the latter benefited from the prayers and spiritual protection of the "men of religion."
The lives and economic interests of warriors, clerics,
shepherds, and traders converged on the fringes of the Sahara; every "order" of medieval
African society in these regions depended on trade for its very existence. Accordingly, trade was
readily accepted by the society it came to underpin and transform.
adapted from Kingdoms
of the Western Sudan J. Rotondo-McCord, Xavier University of Louisiana.