The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Though the Church survived, Aksum fell into steep decline. As had happened in the kingdom of Kush to the north-west, Aksum’s forests and woodlands were stripped for fuel for cooking and heating, for smelting iron and for the manufacture of glass, brick and pottery. By the seventh century, much of the land had been denuded, exposing it to erosion and no longer able to support a burgeoning population. With the collapse of the Roman empire and its commercial networks in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, Aksum’s trade with the outside world also suffered. Persians took control of the trade routes to the Persian Gulf and India. Arabs destroyed Adulis.

  The climate also turned for the worse. Hitherto, rain from the South Atlantic would normally reach Aksum in April and May and continue until September, enabling farmers to plant twice and harvest two crops. But in the eighth century, annual rainfall became limited to just the spring rains, restricting farmers to one crop. The ruling elite and much of the population moved to the highland region further south. The capital of Aksum shrank to a small town, revered only for its history. By the ninth century, the kingdom had been reduced to a few monasteries and villages.

  A second outpost of Christendom was established in the Middle Nile region of Nubia. Following the demise of the Kushite state in the fourth century, Nubian-speaking rulers created three kingdoms on its old territory: Nobatia in the north; Makuria in the centre; and Alwa in the south. In 543, a team of pioneer Monophysite missionaries reached Nobatia. According to the chronicler John of Ephesus, they were led by an Egyptian monk named Julian, ‘an old man of great worth . . . who conceived an earnest spiritual desire to bring Christianity to the wandering people who dwell . . . beyond Egypt’. The missionaries were given a warm reception: an army was sent to meet them and they were swiftly granted an audience with the king. During the two years that he spent in Nobatia, Julian baptised the king and many others in the royal circle, but he appeared to suffer greatly from the rigours of the climate. ‘He used to sit from the whole of the third to the tenth hour in caves full of water with the whole people of the region, naked or, better, wearing only a cloth, while he could perspire only with the help of water.’ Julian was followed by Bishop Longinus who built the first church in Nubia, established a clergy, organised the liturgy and set up church institutions.

  Longinus was also invited to travel to Alwa, arriving there in 580. ‘He spake unto the king and to all his nobles the word of God, and they opened their understandings, and listened with joy to what he said; and after a few days’ instruction, both the king himself was baptised and all his nobles; and subsequently, in process of time his people also.’ Makuria then followed as the third kingdom to accept the Monophysite Christian faith.

  The arrival of Christianity brought about profound change in Nubia. Its old religions – a complex mix of local cults and pharaonic culture – had held sway for centuries but put up little resistance. With royal encouragement, Nubians swiftly discarded the gods and symbols of dynastic Egypt and Kush that had prevailed for so long. The Temple of Isis, used for pagan worship, was among the first of many Nubian temples to be converted to church use. The brick temple built by the Kushite pharaoh Taharqa at Qasr Ibrim in the seventh century BCE was remodelled as a church. New chapels were constructed; burial practices changed. By the end of the sixth century, the kingdoms of Nubia had become Christian states.

  The liturgical language of the Nubian church was Greek, but part of the liturgy and the Bible were eventually translated into Nubian, written in the Coptic form of the Greek alphabet. The church also managed to incorporate local traditions, preserving them in a Christian context, thus giving it added legitimacy. A tradition of church painting grew, influenced by examples from the eastern Mediterranean but given a distinct Nubian character.

  By the seventh century, the church in Nubia was sufficiently robust to withstand the advances of another new religion – Islam. An Egyptian envoy, Ibn Salim al-Aswani, who travelled to Alwa in the tenth century, reported that its capital at Soba, near the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, possessed ‘magnificent buildings and churches overflowing with gold, all set in the midst of lush gardens’. A Christian Armenian visiting Dongola, the capital of Makuria, in the eleventh century, described it as ‘a large city on the banks of the blessed Nile’ with ‘many churches and large houses, set on wide streets’. The Christian kingdoms of Nubia remained strong enough to survive Muslim encroachment for seven hundred years.

  7

  THE ARAB CONQUEST

  An Arab army, fighting under the banner of the new religion of Islam, invaded Egypt in 639 and rapidly put an end to six centuries of Roman and Byzantine rule. Since the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, Muslim forces had swept north out of Arabia, capturing the holy city of Jerusalem and seizing control of Syria and Palestine. Egypt fell into their hands with little resistance. Most Egyptians, among a population of about three million, felt no loyalty to their Roman overlords. Alexandria fell in 641. Its opulence astonished the desert invaders. In a letter to the caliph in Mecca, the Arab commander, Amr ibn al-As, described it as ‘a city of 4,000 villas and 4,000 baths, 40,000 poll-tax-paying Jews and 400 places of entertainment for royalty’. Within three years, Amr had overcome all opposition and had set his sights on further conquests in Africa.

  The advent of Arab rule brought not only a new religion and a new language to north Africa but a new social order and code of law. Arab Muslims were zealous in upholding the tenets of the Koran, the series of revelations that Muhammad is said to have received from God and that were written down by his disciples. Supplementing the Koran were the hadith, a collection of sayings and actions ascribed to Muhammad. Together, they governed a whole range of religious, ritual and ethical practices. The ‘five pillars’ of Islam – the central obligations required of Muslims – concerned the creed, daily prayer, alms-giving, fasting and pilgrimage, but there were also prohibitions against alcohol, gambling and usury and codes of conduct for such matters as war, dress and divorce.

  The teachings of the Koran drew considerably on the traditions and experience of the two earlier monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity. But Muhammad believed that they had lost their way and proclaimed Islam – a term meaning ‘submission’ – as the original truth of the word of God. He nevertheless preached tolerance towards Jews and Christians as Ahl-al-Kitab – ‘people of the book’: ‘The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians [an Arabian monotheism] – all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good – will have their rewards with the Lord.’ Islamic law allowed Jews and Christians to practise their faith freely, so long as they accepted their subordinate status as dhimmis – protected peoples.

  As the new rulers of Egypt, the Arabs made few immediate changes. The army commander Amr agreed that there would be no interference with the religion, church, property or land of native Egyptians. In effect, one echelon of foreign administrators and landowners replaced another. The Arabs’ priority was to gain revenue from taxation. Egyptians were required to pay an annual poll tax and another tax levied on the productivity of the land, but Egyptian officials were left in charge of collecting it. Nor was there any overt attempt to convert Christians to Islam. The most significant change made by the Arabs was to move the capital from Alexandria to a new site at Fustat on the east bank of the Nile near the ancient city of Memphis; the first mosque in Egypt was built there.

  Within a century, however, the character of Egypt began to change profoundly. About a million Arab immigrants settled there. Muslims were favoured for posts in the administration. Many Egyptians adopted Islam as a way of avoiding taxes levied on non-Muslims. Others were assimilated through marriage and employment. Official business came to be conducted in Arabic. By about 750, the number of Coptic Christians had fallen to a third of the population. The Coptic language survived for a time in the countryside but eventually became no more than a liturgical language. By the ninth century, Arabs and Egyptians had merged into a homogenous
population, predominantly Muslim.

  After conquering Egypt, Arab armies advanced westwards along the north African coast, occupying the old Roman province of Cyrenaica and the walled cities of Tripolitania. In 670 a veteran Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi founded the city of Kairouan on the southern plains of the old Roman province of Africa, designating it the capital of the new Muslim province of Ifriqiya. As well as using Kairouan as a military headquarters, Uqba built a mosque there to provide a bridgehead for Islam. As the historian En Noveiri noted: ‘When an imam invades Africa, the inhabitants save their lives and their property by professing Islam; but as soon as the imam leaves the country, they revert to their pagan beliefs . . . So it is essential to found a city which can serve both as a camp and as a foothold for Islam until the end of time.’ Arab historians later complained that the indigenous inhabitants of north-west Africa changed their religion as much as twelve times.

  Arab armies also moved south from Egypt, invading the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. In 652, an expeditionary force laid siege to Dongola, the capital of Makuria, now the dominant power in the Middle Nile region. But the Arabs encountered determined resistance and instead of conquest settled for a truce known as the Baqt. The Baqt recognised the independence of Makuria and set out the terms of peace on the frontier between Christian Nubia and the Islamic world. The centrepiece was an annual exchange to be made on the border between Egypt and Makuria. The Arabs agreed to provide Makuria with specific amounts of wheat, barley, jugs, cloth and horses. The Nubian side of the bargain was also specific:

  Each year you [Nubians] are to deliver 360 slaves, whom you will pay to the Imam of the Muslims from the finest slaves of your country, in whom there is no defect. [They are to be] both male and female. Among them [is to be] no decrepit old man or any child who has not reached puberty.

  The Baqt also permitted free passage for merchants and bona-fide travellers. Parties of pilgrims from Nubia and from Abyssinia were allowed to make their way to Jerusalem with drums beating and flags flying, making frequent halts for Christian worship. The Baqt remained in place for six centuries.

  The Arabs also met formidable resistance from Berber tribes in the Maghreb, the lands of the ‘far west’. The first major expedition they launched from Kairouan ended in disaster. In 683, Uqba ibn Nafi led his army on an epic march intending to carry Islam to the shores of the Atlantic – the Maghreb al-Aqsa, the ‘furthest west’. He survived several ferocious encounters along the way and managed to reach the Sous valley in south-western Morocco. Spurring his horse across of the sands of Sidi R’bat, he is said to have ridden out into the Atlantic surf, declaring that he had fought his way to the end of the world in God’s name: ‘O God, I take you to witness that there is no ford here. If there was I would cross it.’ On his return journey, however, with his army now seriously weakened, he fell into an ambush near the old Roman fort of Tahuda, just east of the oasis of Biskra, and perished along with most of his men. His tomb became one of the holiest shrines in the Maghreb.

  Another attempt to subjugate the Maghreb was made in 693 by an Arab army led by Hassan ibn al-Numan. But this campaign too ended in failure when Hassan’s forces were defeated by a legendary Berber warrior queen, al-Kahina, the leader of the nomadic Jawara tribe in eastern Numidia. After a second defeat by a coalition of Berber tribes near the coastal city of Gabes, Hassan retreated altogether to the safety of Cyrenaica.

  It took nearly twenty years for Arab armies to complete their conquest of the Maghreb. After the death of al-Kahina in 702, Berber resistance steadily crumbled. Tribal leaders converted rapidly to Islam and proved their loyalty by assisting in the recruitment of Berber regiments. To protect their new territory, the Arabs established three military bases in the far west – at Tlemcen in western Algeria, at Tangier in northern Morocco and in the Tafilalet oasis in south- eastern Morocco – but they were manned largely by Berber troops. The first governor of the Tangier garrison, Tariq ibn Ziyad, was a Berber.

  The Arab momentum carried on into Europe. In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad led an invasion force composed largely of Berber cavalry across the Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula. He landed on the southern coast of Spain near the Rock of Gibraltar, a name derived from the term the Arabs gave to it: Jebel al Tariq, the mountain of Tariq. Tariq’s foray into Spain marked the start of an Islamic occupation that lasted until the fifteenth century.

  Arab hegemony in the Maghreb now stretched from the Atlantic coast of Morocco, through Ifriqiya, to the cities of Tripolitania. Independent emirs, based in the Arab citadel at Kairouan, wielded wide powers to levy taxes and to trade in slaves captured during raids on the Berber population. Arabic soon became the main medium of communication for the inhabitants of coastal cities, many of whom had previously been Christian and spoke Latin. A new Arab city was founded at Tunis, near Carthage, in 705.

  But Arab control was frequently threatened by revolts, power struggles and sectarian rivalry. For the first century after the initial Arab conquest of the Maghreb, local governors acted as representatives of the Sunni caliphs of Damascus and Baghdad. But dissident Muslim sects gained a popular following among Berber tribes long accustomed to autonomy. The first major challenge to Sunni Islam came from the Kharijite sect which rejected the authority of hereditary caliphs, disdained the corruption of Arab overlords and became a focus of Berber rebellion. Kharijite communities flourished in particular in the central highlands of Algeria where members of the Ibadi branch of Kharijism set up an independent state in 761 based on the town of Tahert. Another challenge came from Shi’ite dissidents. In 789, a Shi’ite Arab prince, Idris ibn Abdullah, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, established a kingdom based on the new city of Fez. Much of the Maghreb resembled a patchwork of independent territories.

  For the next three centuries, a succession of Muslim dynasties played a central role in fashioning the fortunes of north Africa. The Aghlabid Dynasty, founded in 800 by an Arab army officer, Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab, ruled as an independent Sunni power over a vast stretch of the Maghreb, establishing Kairouan as a renowned religious and intellectual centre. Aghlabid emirs built palaces and mosques, oversaw the expansion of agriculture and developed coastal ports. They turned Tunis into a major naval base, launched raids into Italy and seized control of Sicily. But the dynasty eventually passed into the hands of a murderous tyrant and fell into terminal decline.

  The Aghlabids were ousted from Kairouan in 910 by an army of Kutama Berbers from the Kabyle mountains. Their leader, Ubaydalla Said, belonged to the Ismaili branch of Shi’ism, claimed descent from Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and announced himself as the Mahdi, a figure sent by God to prepare the world for Judgement Day. He duly established the Fatimid Dynasty at a new capital on the Tunisian coast called Mahdia.

  The ultimate ambition of the Fatimids was to gain control not just of the Maghreb but of all the lands of Islam. In 969, Fatimid rulers marched their Berber armies eastwards from Ifriqiya into Egypt and set up the headquarters of a caliphate in a new palace-city on the Nile that they called al-Kahira, the Victorious, known in the English-speaking world as Cairo. Under Fatimid rule, Egypt entered a memorable age of prosperity, profiting from a trade network that extended across the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It was also notable as a place of religious tolerance. Christians and Jews as well as Muslims were allowed to hold high posts in government. Jewish merchants described Fatimid Egypt as ‘the land of life’. Cairo flourished both as a centre of commerce and religious study. Among the legacies of the Fatimid era was the Al Azhar mosque and university, which became the foremost centre of learning and scholarship in the Muslim world. But after a hundred years in power in Egypt, the Fatimid Dynasty fell into decline, hastened by a decade of famine in the 1060s and internal strife among its mercenary forces. The end came in 1171 when the Kurdish vizier Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub (Saladin) and his army took control, establishing a hereditary Sunni sultanate. Egypt’s wealth was henceforth used to keep out Christian
crusaders.

  The Fatimids were also ousted from their original homeland in Ifriqiya. On departing for Egypt in 973, they had entrusted their western empire to the Zirid family, Berbers from the Kabyle mountains who had previously served as their military allies. But during the eleventh century, the Zirids decided to set up their own independent kingdom, formally breaking away from Cairo in 1048. The Zirids, in turn, split apart, one branch ruling from Mahdia in Ifriqiya, another branch – the Banu Hammad – founding a separate dynasty in eastern Algeria.

  The Maghreb, however, was soon engulfed by a new phenomenon: an invasion of Arab Bedouin clans which changed the entire character of the region. In 1051, thousands of Arab nomads who had migrated to Egypt after the first Muslim conquest moved westwards with their herds into Cyrenaica and then into the Maghreb, plundering as they went. Known as the Banu Hilal, they had no interest in capturing towns and villages but took possession of vast areas of countryside between the coast and the desert, driving out settled rural communities. Zirid and Hammad leaders retreated to small principalities on the coast. Kairouan was sacked. Within the space of a few years, the agricultural estates, olive orchards and irrigation systems inherited from Carthaginian and Roman times and developed by the first wave of Arab rulers had been wrecked. Cultivators were forced to withdraw into mountain strongholds. The fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis, likened the Banu Hilal to a swarm of locusts. They had, he wrote, ‘gained power over the country and ruined it’.

  The Banu Hilal made a lasting impact on Berber culture. Hitherto, Arab settlers had presided over their Maghreb territories as a ruling class based mainly in towns, holding an urban outlook and allowing the bulk of the Berber population to retain their indigenous culture and language. But with the advance of the Banu Hilal across the Maghreb, Berber communities were gradually absorbed into the customs of the Bedouin. In the towns and coastal plains of the Mediterranean, use of the Berber language began to wither and disappear. In the nomadic hinterland, vernacular Arabic, with a variety of local colloquialisms, became the common language. Another Arab grouping, first known as the Banu Ma‘qil, then as the Banu Hassan, began a similar migration westwards in the thirteenth century, occupying land south and east of the Atlas mountains; by the fifteenth century they had overrun much of the western Sahara. Berber dialects and traditions survived only in pockets of the Kabyle mountains of Algeria and the Atlas highlands of Morocco and oasis outposts on the desert edge.