Stones of Contention

by Cleveland, Todd

  By the early fifteenth century, Portuguese sailors began to reach points south of the Sahara. Along the West African coast they began interacting and trading with, for example, the rulers of the Senegambia region, offering salt, cloth, and especially horses in exchange for slaves and limited quantities of gold. They also brought back to Lisbon alluring stories about the continent, including the practice of silent barter that al-Masudi had described some centuries earlier. The demonstrable availability of gold, in turn, whetted the appetites of metropolitan Portuguese and helped render commercial voyages less speculative and more assuredly profitable. The greater likelihood of financial success generated significant interest within Portuguese noble and merchant circles, and also among Castilians and Italians, including one Christopher Columbus, prior to his “sailing the ocean blue.”

  Just as this initial commercial activity on the Atlantic shores of the West African coast began to develop, a discovery further south that would transform Europe’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa and, ultimately, with the rest of the world, almost completely obscured it. In the early 1470s, Portuguese merchants sailing along the southern coast of West Africa discovered that they could obtain large quantities of gold from local traders, prompting the birth of the regional moniker: the “Gold Coast.” Predictably, news regarding this new commerce spread rapidly and drove other European nations to attempt to gain access to this lucrative trade.

  The Gold Coast: The Origins of Africa’s Mineral Exodus

  Upon finally reaching the shores of the Gold Coast and, thus, a “back door” to the mineral deposits that featured in this region’s hinterlands, the Portuguese were both excited and disappointed. The realization that they had finally reached their destination, as confirmed by the gold both on display and on offer, heightened their enthusiasm. Yet they were also frustrated by an inability to generate much local interest in the trade goods they were plying in exchange. As a result of centuries of trade with communities to the north, local African elites had developed tastes for items that the Portuguese were not offering, such as Muslim-style textiles and clothing. Consequently, the Europeans found that they could trade their own goods only when they were combined with more desirable North African and, later, Indian items. And, even then, they were forced to offer their African buyers prices that were competitive with those that the experienced Saharan caravan merchants were offering. In short, Africans remained firmly in control of the terms of the trade.

  Despite the limited appeal of the European wares, Portuguese merchants were able to generate interest in at least some of the items they were offering, including copper and brass utensils, woolen and cotton cloth, and even carpets. As word of these exchanges spread into the African interior, regional gold producers and merchants began to redirect to the Gold Coast portions of the output that would have traditionally gone north, across the Sahara.

  In order to further encourage this welcomed development, the Portuguese realized that they would have to devise more commercially creative measures. To this end, the most enterprising merchants calculated that instead of transporting goods all the way from Europe to Africa they could instead buy and then resell commodities that were already available locally, namely slaves. Indeed, in order to satisfy these new consumers’ demand for gold (coupled with the persistent demand for gold on the Mediterranean coast), African producers were forced to secure ever-greater numbers of slaves to work in the mines—a long-standing regional utilization of captive labor. The marriage of these African and Portuguese commercial objectives resulted in European merchants buying Africans on offer at certain points along the West African coast, and then reselling these human commodities elsewhere along the same coast. Soon, a vicious commercial cycle emerged in which African masters required additional slaves to mine increasing quantities of gold that they, in turn, often exchanged for more slaves. Portugal’s Christian merchants, who had started buying slaves, at least in part, “for the good of their souls,” now found themselves selling the “redeemed” men to “heathen” mineowners as the most expedient means of capturing a share in the West African gold market. As has so often happened throughout history, the pursuit of riches once again trumped any moral concerns. After later introducing cowrie shells and luxury cloths derived from the Indian Ocean trade, Europeans were eventually able to capture roughly half of the overall regional gold production, drawing much of it away from the trans-Saharan trade.

  Elmina: Fortifying Access to Africa’s Minerals

  In order to consolidate control of this emerging commerce, in 1481 Portugal’s King Dom João II declared the gold trade a royal monopoly and ordered the construction of a fortified settlement in the center of the Gold Coast, which came to be called São Jorge da Mina, or Elmina (figure 2). Elmina was constructed as a feitoria, or (trading) “factory,” poised to defend and safeguard Lisbon’s regional commercial interests, rather than to serve as a foothold on the African continent from which to launch invasions into the interior. Indeed, Elmina’s cannons pointed outward, toward the sea, aimed at potentially hostile ships dispatched by Portugal’s European rivals instead of inland toward prospective African armies. In contrast to what was to happen when the Castilians discovered gold in the New World a decade later, the Portuguese interacted and traded relatively peacefully with local African communities. Absent in this context was a systematic attempt to conquer or enslave the indigenous population. That subordinative model of human interaction in Africa came only later.

  Figure 2. Elmina Castle. Photograph by Todd Cleveland

  Lisbon’s measured approach, combined with the Portuguese Crown’s campaign of misinformation, secrecy, and obfuscation regarding this source of mineral wealth, proved to be financially prudent. It wasn’t until the last years of the fifteenth century that Portugal’s European rivals would challenge its monopoly on the local trade in gold. Meanwhile, in the decades that followed Elmina’s construction, the Portuguese were able to convince Africans to sell gold and gold dust to them at the fort rather than to send these items in the other direction, across the desert to North Africa. In a rather short time, this commerce transformed a humble fishing village on the West African coast into a major, global supplier of bullion. With exports of more than a half ton of gold annually, the trade integrated the region into an expanding Atlantic commercial system. Ultimately, it was the gold trade, rather than the transatlantic slave traffic, that prompted the proliferation of European fortifications along the West African coast in the 1500s and 1600s, many of which continue to this day to serve as legacies of this early pattern of Euro-African commerce.

  Ever Southward . . .

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the lucrative trade in gold and slaves into which the Portuguese and coastal Africans had entered, the Europeans engaged in further maritime forays, proceeding ever southward via a series of successive expeditions. Although the commercial success in West Africa unquestionably spurred them on, many of the original, nonmineral impetuses outlined above continued to apply. Perhaps the most notable event in the Portuguese procession southward was their arrival on the coast of modern-day Angola, which Lisbon would eventually claim during the nineteenth-century “Scramble for Africa.”

  Early encounters with Africans in Angola led the Portuguese to believe that abundant mineral deposits were present. Their speculation was not predicated on any ostentatious display of precious metals by the indigenous population, but rather the realization that they had stumbled on a powerful political entity: the Kongo kingdom (c. 1400–1914). This polity stretched across present-day Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, and the DRC. Yet, despite its expanse and significant regional power, beyond small quantities of copper and iron, little in the way of precious minerals was available for exchange. Yet the Portuguese remained convinced that African silver and gold mines existed in the region. Lisbon was aware that the Spaniards had encountered bountiful mines in South and Central America (in particular, the Peruvian mines of Potosi in the 1580s) and, thus, Portuguese cosmolog
ists predicted the presence of rich veins of silver at the same latitude in Africa. This conviction precipitated a tragifarcical “silver rush” in the territory. Adventurers from all walks of life sailed for Angola, where for decades they inched their way up the Kwanza River, many perishing in the process, in order to reach the chimerical mountains of silver that had featured in a report by an early Jesuit explorer.[12] This same kind of delusionary thinking would dominate Europe’s approach to Africa for centuries to come.

  Around the Cape of Good Hope

  Although the Portuguese enjoyed largely peaceful relations with the Kongolese rulers, as they rounded the Cape of Good Hope, they jettisoned any semblance of cordiality that might have remained onboard. Along Africa’s southeastern coast, the Portuguese encountered communities largely uninterested in commercial engagement; in response, the Iberians unleashed the full firepower of their cannons. Committed to gaining access to additional mineral deposits, the Portuguese attempted to achieve their commercial objectives by violently imposing themselves in the region. In the process, household names, such as Vasco da Gama, acted as little more than “state-registered pirates,” employing the artillery at their disposal to bombard ports along the southern Indian Ocean coast in an attempt to disrupt, and consequently dictate, local trade.[13]The Portuguese were just as ruthless and relentless further up the Swahili coast, sacking a series of city-states in an attempt to compel the local rulers to submit to their commercial demands. Their hostility toward the Muslim identity of many of the coastal inhabitants certainly played a role in this aggression. Yet for all of the destruction that the Portuguese sowed, they did little to disrupt the flow of African gold to India, as well as to other points in the Middle East and Asia, that traveled along the well-established Indian Ocean trade networks.

  Centuries prior to the appearance of the Portuguese along this coast, ethnic Shirazi had arrived from the Middle East (most likely Persia), established the island city-state of Kilwa, and broken the hold on the gold trade that the Muslim merchants of Mogadishu had formerly enjoyed. The creation of Kilwa as a commercial center was strategically practical, as it was located at the furthest point south that ships could reach in a single season. From Kilwa, local merchants ventured south to found a commercial post at Sofala, on the proximate coast of present-day Mozambique. “Golden Sofala” became the terminus for gold that emanated from the Zimbabwe plateau and was transported down through the Limpopo valley, thereby redirecting the flow of this precious metal away from points further north. By at least 1200 a.d., these Shirazi merchants had supplanted their rivals from Mogadishu and were commanding the gold trade of southeastern Africa.

  Not content with carrying out artillery bombardments from their ships in order to realize their commercial objectives, the Portuguese journeyed inland in order reach the regional source of gold: the famed mines of Monomotapa. Europeans had initially been inspired to reach this fabled site after consuming a series of Arab accounts. Tales of their own perpetuated and further fueled these illusions, typically by rekindling the myth of Ophir and King Solomon’s mines. For example, João dos Santos, a missionary working in the area in the late 1500s, wrote of the stone settlements found in the region:

  The natives of these lands . . . assert that they have a tradition from their ancestors and that the (stone) houses (here) were anciently a factory of the Queen of Sheba, and that from this place a great quantity of gold was brought to her, it being conveyed down the rivers . . . to the Indian Ocean. . . . Others say that these are the ruins of the factory of Solomon, where he had his factors who procured a great quantity of gold from these lands conveying it down the same rivers to the Indian Ocean. They say further that the gold of Ophir which was brought to Solomon was from a place called Fura or Afura, and that there is little difference between Afura and Ophir, which name has been corrupted by the changes in time in the ages between that period and the present.[14]

  Propelled by such accounts, the Portuguese built fortresses at Sofala and Mozambique Island and tried repeatedly to reach the sources of the gold on the Zambezi plateau. Due in great part to Swahili merchants’ simple diversion of this trade to the coastal port of Angoche, though, these endeavors proved unsuccessful. Beginning in the 1530s and continuing over the ensuing decades, Portuguese soldiers and sailors moved up the Zambezi River, assaulting the series of Muslim trading centers that they encountered. On finally reaching their inland target, the Portuguese had been prepared to pay tribute to the Monomotapa king for permission to trade within his territory. Dissatisfied with the small amount of gold that was on offer, they instead sought direct access to the local gold mines. For all of their determination and firepower, though, their incursions never seriously threatened the main gold-bearing region that lay further to the west. Although the Portuguese had been willing to leave their ships and trek into the interior in an attempt to secure direct access to the continent’s mineral wealth, Africans again stymied their commercial designs.

  For all of the frustration it experienced, Portugal never abandoned its efforts in this area. For centuries, the country’s rulers remained captivated by a mineral-driven fantasy that disregarded economic prudence, or even reality, in an attempt to revive the golden years of the empire—Sofala as Ophir had become an integral part of Lisbon’s plan for its eastern realm. In practice, Sofala was often perceived not as it was, but as the Portuguese envisioned it: a gateway to fabled lands of gold and glory. It existed not merely as a place, but as a state of mind.[15]Much the same could be said for Europeans’ imaginative approach to the rest of the continent.

  Africa’s Mineral Wealth: Durable Popular Appeal

  Tangible commercial success, combined with powerful, durable misperceptions and myths, continued to drive outsiders to Africa’s shores in search of mineral treasure long after the initial Portuguese encounters and the subsequent arrival of more powerful European nations. The notion of and attendant quests for an “African Eldorado” persisted for hundreds of years, but would have to wait for fruition until the subjugation of the continent at the end of the 1800s. Only after a series of epidemiological, technological, and military advances were European armies able to finally pry open the door to the African interior and realize unobstructed access to the continent’s mineral wealth.

  At about this same time, the European “discovery” of the massive ruins of Great Zimbabwe reinvigorated the myth of Ophir. Although biblical accounts of King Solomon’s wealth had motivated the Portuguese to penetrate the Zambezia plain centuries earlier, the European “rediscovery” of the Zimbabwean ruins and mining sites in the nineteenth century seemed to finally confirm the enduring notions. To the Victorian mind, the impressive stone workings resembled nothing less than Solomon’s legendary temple.

  Although this (mis)perception was amateur archaeology at its very worst, the resultant delusional fervor spawned dozens of books claiming that the riddle of Ophir had at last been solved. Following both the Kimberley and Great Zimbabwe “discoveries,” external writers once again raced to depict Africa as an untapped treasure trove, flush with mineral endowments that were simply waiting their heroic (European) discoverer. In 1885, for example, H. Rider Haggard’s famous novel King Solomon’s Mines was published. The book featured diamond mines, rather than the biblical gold mines, and was set not in Zimbabwe but in South Africa, where Haggard had spent time in the colonial service. On into the twentieth century, innumerable authors, including perhaps most notably Wilbur Smith, have continued to echo Haggard’s romantic approach to Africa’s mysterious, often-mythical mineral treasures.

  The film industry has also attempted to capitalize on popular notions of Africa as a land of “mystical” mineral endowments. The diamond has powerfully come to life on the silver screen, just as it has on the pages of books, and this trend shows no sign of abating. From Star of the South (1911), the first feature film made in South Africa, to the box-office hit Blood Diamond (2006), the film industry has portrayed diamonds as symbols of romance and
adventure, assuming a role that fiction writers had earlier pioneered. Given the general public’s deeply entrenched appetite for Africa as a place of undiscovered treasure and latent wealth, which both authors and screenwriters alike have helped cultivate and reinforce, Hollywood’s involvement is unlikely to subside. Meanwhile, ongoing, sensational mineral discoveries in Africa continue to provide fodder for the creators and purveyors of mass entertainment, reaching audiences eager to believe in the continent’s seemingly inexhaustible mineral endowments—a conviction that outsiders have long held.

  For centuries prior to the Kimberley discoveries, Africans had been both utilizing and exporting the continent’s minerals. The highly speculative, or at least limited, nature of Europeans’ knowledge of the sources of these coveted metals precipitated the generation of a multitude of outlandish legends. Notwithstanding the geographic inaccuracies and geological falsities that these tales fostered, their grandiosity helped prompt the first interactions between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Soon after the Portuguese began generating revenue for Lisbon, crews and ships from other European nations traced the Iberians’ nautical footsteps, experiencing some success but also fruitlessly chasing the same myths and misperceptions. Financial disappointments rarely discouraged European fortune seekers for long, though, and the ongoing circulation of dubious accounts of untouched, colossal treasures continued to spur quests to unlock Africa’s mineral wealth. Into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, British and French explorer-merchants maintained a belief that Timbuktu was situated in the heart of the West African goldfields, prompting repeated attempts to reach that legendary city. Yet Africans were able to protect their mineral wealth with little trouble due to an array of factors, including their military prowess, the inland location of the deposits, and an assortment of local diseases that rendered the continent “the white man’s grave.” Only in the nineteenth century would Africa finally succumb to the external hunger for direct access to its mineral wealth.