Africa
South Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa forms the largest area of the globe for which evidence is either ambiguous or absent concerning the impact of climatic change in the mid-seventeenth century on economic, social and political structures. We know that both extreme climatic events and important structural changes occurred there, but it is extremely difficult to link them.
The Cape of Good Hope, where in 1652 Dutch settlers established a small fort to guard the stores to refit and replenish the ships sailing between Southeast Asia and the Netherlands, offers a good example of the limitations of the available evidence. As soon as the Dutch began to establish farms beyond the walls of their fort, the Khoekhoen (whom the Dutch pejoratively called ‘Hottentots’) complained to Governor Jan van Riebeeck that the newcomers ‘were living upon their land, and they perceived that we were rapidly building more and more as if we intended never to leave’. They then ‘declared boldly that this was not our land but theirs’.74 Since mere words appeared to make no impression, the Khoekhoen tried to halt the colonists' expansion by force, but after about a year of indecisive fighting they resumed negotiations. In 1660 their leaders once again ‘strongly insisted’ that the Dutch ‘had been appropriating more and more of their land, which had been theirs all these centuries, and on which they had been accustomed to letting their cattle graze etc. They asked if they would be allowed to do such a thing supposing they went to Holland’ – a telling point indeed – ‘and they added: “It would be of little consequence if you people stayed here at the fort, but you come right into the interior and select the best land for yourselves, without even asking whether we mind or whether it will cause us any inconvenience”’. To this, van Riebeeck retorted:
There was not enough grass for their cattle as well as ours; to which they replied: ‘Have we then not reason to prevent you from getting cattle, since, if you have a large number, you will take up all our grazing grounds with them? As for your claim that the land is not big enough for us both, who should rather in justice give way, the rightful owner or the foreign intruder?’ They thus remained adamant in their claim of old-established natural ownership.
Since the Khoekhoen were evidently getting the better of the argument, ‘eventually’ (van Riebeeck recorded dryly in his Journal) ‘they had to be told that they had now lost the land as the result of the war and had no alternative but to admit that it was no longer theirs… Their land had thus fallen to us in a defensive war won by the sword, as it were, and we intended to keep it.’ When the Khoekhoen leaders ‘complained bitterly’ that the colonists ‘had done them much mischief’ by stealing from them and ‘by beating and striking them’, van Riebeeck admitted (at least in his Journal) that ‘there is some truth in this’ but warned them that they should lodge formal complaints and not ‘take their revenge by means of robberies and thefts’ because then ‘peace could never be maintained between us, and then by right of conquest we should take still more of their land from them’.75 Later the Khoekhoen gave ground and agreed that they would graze their herds only on lands unoccupied by Dutch farmers; and before long, the influx of colonists and the ravages of European diseases (above all smallpox) among the native population tipped the balance permanently in favour of the newcomers. A century later, Cape Colony was the largest Dutch outpost overseas.
These developments at the Cape of Good Hope thus had effects that were both important and long-lasting – but can they be linked to the Little Ice Age? It would be reasonable to suppose that the adverse climate of the 1640s and 1650s affected the crops of southern Africa as it did elsewhere, thus reducing the available grazing and food resources of the region just as a new group of consumers (the Dutch) arrived, and that this scarcely contributed to the confrontation between them and the native inhabitants – but without a ‘natural archive’ for the period to reveal the prevailing climate, no such connection can be drawn. In addition, generalization would be doubly hazardous because in three important respects the Cape was not typical of Africa. First, the Dutch newcomers found the sole concentration of temperate land in an almost entirely tropical continent. Second, they encountered only herders and gatherers who (unlike other indigenous peoples in the region) lacked iron, and above all iron weapons, and who could therefore be either expelled or enslaved with relative ease. Finally, the Cape boasts a safe anchorage (except in winter) and relatively easy access to the interior, whereas most of sub-Saharan Africa lacks both the profusion of natural harbours and navigable rivers leading far inland that mark other continents. Instead, less than 100 miles inland, most African rivers descend precipitately from the central plateaux to the sea over powerful waterfalls virtually impenetrable to ships.
East Africa
Ethiopia and some adjacent regions normally suffer drought during episodes of El Niño – and the increased frequency of episodes in the mid-seventeenth century is reflected in the flood waters of the Nile in Egypt, which in 1641–3, in 1650 and again in 1694–5 fell to some of the lowest levels ever recorded.76 This suggests that severe drought periodically afflicted the Ethiopian highlands, where the Nile rises, in the seventeenth century; yet the surviving records of the area, and of other regions of East Africa, mention no political unrest, social upheavals, or economic depression. Of course, this may merely reflect absence of evidence. Attempts to reconstruct the experience of the Iteso (or Teso) people, whose hereditary lands lie between the great lakes of East Africa, have so far failed because (according to James B. Webster, a modern researcher) the Iteso are ‘a people whose ethnic identity and community depend on the art of forgetting’. He continued sourly: ‘The field researcher has listened to a coherent and detailed account of an historical episode with exciting analytical possibilities. The elders have stopped speaking. There is a pause pregnant with expectation’:
Researcher: ‘When did that happen?’
Elders: ‘Noi!’
Interpreter: ‘Long ago’.
Researcher: ‘How long ago?’
Elders: ‘Noi! Noi!’
Interpreter: ‘Long, long ago’.
‘During research into Iteso history “Noi! Noi!” becomes the most often heard and, to the researcher, most depressing expression in the language.’ It is the one ‘he learns first and forgets last’.77 Nevertheless the silence of seventeenth-century sources from East Africa may constitute evidence of absence rather than absence of evidence, because two factors probably rendered the region ‘underpopulated’ when the Little Ice Age struck. First, in modern Uganda (the Iteso homeland), a protracted rainfall deficit in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries culminated in a total crop failure and famine between 1617 and 1622, which apparently caused mass migration and (presumably) heavy mortality. This may have created a more sustainable balance between food supply and demand a generation later, despite climatic adversity. Second, throughout the seventeenth century, two slave caravans assembled in Sudan, one in the city of Sennar on the Nile and the other in Darfur, which brought at least 5,000 men and women every year to Cairo, to be sold as slaves to toil in various parts of the Ottoman empire. This forced migration may also have relieved the demographic pressure at times of climatic adversity.78
West Africa
In West Africa, for which somewhat better records survive, water dominates both the ecology and the economy: climatic change is therefore registered primarily in changes in the rainfall regime. Sahara means ‘wilderness’ or ‘desert’ in Arabic, and even on its southern margins in most years only 4 inches of rain falls. This meagre precipitation in the Sahel, the semi-arid tropical savannah belt south of the Sahara that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, is sufficient to sustain only small nomadic groups that herd camels, sheep and goats on seasonal grasses and other hardy vegetation. Just south of the Sahel, the land receives between 4 to 16 inches of rain per year, which make it possible to breed and raise cattle, sheep and goats – provided the herders move south in winter (the dry season) and north in summer (the rainy sea
son) to find water for themselves and their herds. Further south still, annual precipitation of between 16 and 24 inches allows the cultivation of millet, the hardiest of cereal crops; and where annual rainfall exceeds 24 inches and produces the rolling tropical grassland known as savannas, farmers can grow sorghum and other rain-dependent crops. The majority of West Africa's people lived in these ‘savannas’, which stretch from latitude 15° North to latitude 30° South.
It is important to note both the vulnerability and the incompatibility of these three farming strategies. Small variations in rainfall can produce major consequences. If the rains fail in an area that normally receives 16 inches of precipitation, all agriculture ceases and its cultivators must either migrate or become pastoralists – and those who opt for the latter course will soon encounter nomads forced by the same desiccation to migrate south in search of grazing for their herds and flocks. Farmers and herders who previously traded grain and textiles for milk, meat and animals, therefore begin to compete directly for land that has become marginal, and to this end both sides may deploy either force or the threat of force. It is also important to note that all these rainfall levels are averages. Thus at Podor, in northern Senegal, between 1887 and 1927 the annual rainfall averaged 12.5 inches, but this included one year with over 20 inches and another with only 5; while at Ziguinchor in southern Senegal over the same period the annual rainfall averaged 60 inches, which included one year with over 80 inches and another with scarcely 28. These variations were crucial for the survival of crops, herds and humans. Significantly, Ziguinchor's worst year was better than Podor's best, and enough rain fell to sustain cereal crops in every year; moreover, Ziguinchor enjoyed not only five times the mean rainfall but also a growing season twice as long as Podor (five months as against barely two). Farmers in Podor therefore faced permanent insecurity – and yet the distance between the two location s is only 300 miles: less than the distance that separates Boston from Baltimore, or London from Newcastle (Fig. 43).79
Vulnerability and insecurity in the Sahel also arise from oscillations in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ): the point where the rain-bearing winds from the South Atlantic meet the dry trade winds that prevail further north. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the ITCZ lay further north than today, allowing an expansion of cultivable land in the Sahel. After 1630, however, it moved southwards, probably because of the cooler temperatures in northerly latitudes associated with the Little Ice Age, and this movement produced a southward advance of the deserts, prolonged droughts and political instability. The surviving records from Senegambia, the region between the Senegal and Gambia rivers, mention ‘famine’ 15 times during the seventeenth century, with especially intense events in 1639–41, 1666–8, 1674–6 and 1681. Visiting Gorée (an island just off modern Dakar) during the last of these great famines, the French trader Jean Barbot reported that ‘several thousand persons have lost their lives and a greater number their liberty’ and that the survivors ‘looked like perfect skeletons, especially the poor slaves’. Barbot also stated (presumably on the basis of local information) that ‘there were even worse famines in 1641 and 1642’ – years of unusual cold in northerly latitudes.80 In the interior, Timbuktu and the region around the Niger Bend also suffered their greatest ‘famine of the seventeenth century’ at this time, with ‘1639 and 1643 virtually without rain, and low rainfall in the intervening years’; and they experienced famine again in 1669–70, after two years of drought. Meanwhile lands further east evidently experienced an epic drought in the 1680s (also a time of unusual cold in the northern hemisphere) because Lake Chad fell to the lowest level ever recorded (Figs 44 and 45).81
These landmark famines of West Africa did not all arise solely through drought: two forms of political disruption exacerbated the situation. First, an essential skill for successful West African rulers was ‘rainmaking’. Naturally a prolonged drought called this ability into question and might lead to a challenge from someone, such as a religious leader (in Muslim areas often a sufi Sheikh: marabout in many West African languages) who claimed supernatural powers. Second, a ruler of pastoral communities whose rainmaking skills failed during a drought might still retain his authority through a successful war, using surprise and mobility to expel or subjugate neighbouring populations, and thus provide his followers with access to adequate water and grazing grounds. The latter no doubt explains the migration of nomads from what would soon be called ‘the Empty Quarter’ of the Sahel to prey upon the farmers immediately to the south, which in turn led those displaced to attack their own southern neighbours in a tragic domino effect. The ‘war of the Marabouts’ exemplifies the former.
43. The southward advance of the Sahara from 1630.
Rainfall patterns in West Africa range from an annual average of 4 inches in the ‘Sahel’ on the fringe of the Sahara desert to almost 60 inches in the rain forests along the coast, with several critical thresholds that determine what types of agricultural endeavour are viable. After about 1630, each of these thresholds moved southwards, forcing farmers to migrate.
44. Drought and disease in west-central Africa, 1560–1710.
Although the surviving records show that several droughts afflicted the areas occupied today by Congo and Angola, the mid-seventeenth century saw an unparalleled combination of natural catastrophes, with drought, locusts, and epidemics.
45. Famine and drought in Chad, Senegambia, and the Niger Bend, 1500–1710.
After a period of general prosperity in the sixteenth century, the states of Saharan Africa experienced frequent famines and draughts in the 1640s and, even more severely, in the 1680s – when Lake Chad fell to the lowest level ever recorded.
Louis Moheau de Chambonneau, a French trader in Senegal, attributed the famine of 1674–6 largely to a civil war caused by a charismatic Muslim sheikh, aged about 30, who ‘claimed that he was sent by God’ and who attracted many adherents in the various Wolof kingdoms along the Senegal river by ‘preaching penitence entirely naked, disdaining clothes, with his head entirely shaved. He spoke only of the law of God and of welfare and freedom.’82 While Chambonneau called the sheikh Toubenan (from the Arab and Wolof word tuub, meaning ‘Convert to Islam’), and Arabic sources called him Nasir al-Din (and claimed he came from Mauritania), everyone agreed that ‘the war of the Marabouts’ targeted those whom the sheikh deemed insufficiently Islamized. Chambonneau reported that in 1674 the new French base at St Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal river, already suffered a ‘scarcity of foodstuffs because of these wars’, but the situation soon became far worse when one of the Wolof rulers counter-attacked, and ‘for the entire year 1676 he did nothing but kill, take captives, pillage and burn the countryside’ belonging to Muslim zealots, ‘destroying the millet harvest and cutting it down while still green, forcing the local population to eat boiled grass’. When Chambonneau sailed up the river to trade, ‘whole families offered themselves to me as prisoners, provided they were fed, having reached the extremity of killing each other in order to steal some food’.83
Worse followed. Nasir al-Din's version of Islam enjoined, among other things, a shift from agriculture to herding, and he therefore required his disciples to cease sowing crops. This shift left them totally unprepared when severe drought returned in the 1680s. Desperate for food, Toubenan's converts killed their animals to stay alive, but having done so, they either fled or starved. The number of slaves known to have been transported by sea from the states of Senegambia reflect these changes, almost doubling from over 8,000 in the 1670s, the decade of the ‘war of the Marabouts’, to over 14,000 in the 1680s. Even a century later, visitors found no farmers at all in the region.84
Similar instability, caused by a combination of human and natural agency, prevailed further south. After visiting the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1678–9 and 1681–2, Jean Barbot asserted that the local states were ‘ruined by the continual wars which have caused continual famines’. According to historian John Thornton, ‘probably more t
han half of the people of Atlantic Africa lived in polities that measured around 50 kilometres [30 miles] across and had only a few thousand inhabitants, comparable in size to an American county or perhaps to a parish’ in western Europe. Unlike Americans and Europeans, however, African states did not engage in their ‘continual wars’ for land, but for people: African legal systems did not regard land as private property, so that ‘ownership of slaves in Africa was virtually equivalent to owning land in western Europe or China’.85 Until the mid-seventeenth century, when the ITCZ migrated southwards and the climate of West Africa deteriorated, most of these conflicts for slaves remained small scale and involved elite warriors who fought with javelins and clubs; but thereafter, rulers began to create much larger armies of slaves and mercenaries, armed first with bows and then with muskets, who fought over far larger areas and took far more captives. This change, seen by some subsequent historians as a ‘military revolution’, triggered an arms race in which rulers eager to acquire firearms for their defence traded them for slaves, feeding the dramatic expansion in the transatlantic slave trade as European demand for slaves to work their American sugar plantations escalated.
Forced Migration: The African Slave Trade
Global Crisis Page 78