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

by Martin Meredith

  8

  HIGHWAYS OF THE DESERT

  From their base on the desert edge in north Africa, Muslim merchants began to develop routes across the Sahara to link them to the trading centres of Bilad as-Sudan – the ‘Land of the Blacks’ – a thousand miles to the south. The Sahara had hitherto presented a formidable barrier to contact between the two regions. But with the advent of camel caravans in the eighth century the Sahara became one of the world’s great commercial highways. Two commodities were prized above all: gold and slaves.

  The trading centres of the Sudan – an Arabic term for the vast stretch of savanna lands south of the Sahara – had prospered with their own commercial networks for centuries. Among the oldest settlements were communities living on the floodplains of the Middle Niger, a river that rises in the Guinea highlands, flows eastwards through an inner delta of channels before curving in a great bend towards the south-west to join the Atlantic. Like the floods that brought life to Nile Valley villages, seasonal rains in the Guinea highlands enabled Niger Delta communities to develop their own system of agriculture based on indigenous cereal crops. The river also served as an artery for trading networks.

  The first urban societies in the Niger Delta such as Jenne-jeno emerged as far back as the third century BCE. The surpluses of cereal crops and dried fish they produced were traded for salt and copper brought from mines deep in the Sahara. By the eighth century, Jenne-jeno had grown into a substantial town of mud-brick buildings, housing its own specialist groups of potters, metalworkers and rice-growers and playing a vital role in an extensive west African trading network. Further downstream, beyond the fertile floodplain, at the northern bend of the Niger, lay Timbuktu, another key link in the network that served as a transshipment point for traffic between the desert and the river.

  Two other regions of the Sudan gained similar importance. To the north of the Upper Niger, a kingdom of the Soninke people known as Wagadu developed control of the gold trade emanating from the alluvial goldfields of Bambuk at the confluence of the Senegal and Faleme rivers. Wagadu was ruled by a king with the title of ghana, a name that became attached to the empire that Wagadu’s rulers managed to establish over Soninke trading centres.

  In the central Sudan, in the barren region north of Lake Chad, a Kanuri-speaking dynasty, the Saifawas, gained control of Kanem in the ninth century, displacing nomadic pastoralists known as Zaghawa and taking over their trade links with salt-producing mines in the central Sahara such as Bilma. Beyond Bilma lay a desert route with well-spaced wells and oases leading to the Fezzan, the land of the ancient Garamantes, and from there to the Tripolitanian coast. Kanem had no gold to trade; its principal commodity was slaves.

  The first merchants to organise regular camel caravans across the western Sahara were Ibadi merchants based in the oasis towns of Sijilmasa in southern Morocco and Wargla in southern Algeria, where they hired nomadic Berbers as cameleers for the journey. Originally domesticated in southern Arabia, camels had been introduced to Egypt in Ptolemaic times. By the third century CE, camel caravans were travelling within Egypt and along the north African coast in large numbers. Nomadic Berbers in the Sahara took up camels during the same period, giving them advantages of mobility and an effective means of transport. Camels could carry heavier loads than horses or donkeys, and they could travel for long distances without water – for up to ten days. Arab poets described camels as ‘the ships of the desert’.

  The journey across the desert was fraught with peril. To avoid the extreme heat of the Sahara, caravans set out only in winter months and confined their travel to the cooler parts of the day or night. Caravan leaders needed expert knowledge of the desert landscape and climate to cope with shifts in sand dunes and to survive sandstorms. Even a temporary loss of direction could prove fatal: in order to leave as much space as possible for cargo, caravans carried a minimum of food and water. The need for water was an abiding concern. Travel routes were planned with the aim of providing a safe distance between desert wells, but there was always a risk that they had run dry or become poisonous. It took as long as seventy days for caravans to reach the Sahel, the ‘shore’ of the desert and the trading centres of the Bilad as-Sudan.

  Caravans in search of gold headed for Wagadu. It became renowned for its hold on the gold trade of west Africa, with legends of its great wealth spreading throughout north Africa and beyond. Within Wagadu, a merchant class known as Wangara came to dominate the trade. The main exchange for their gold was salt that caravan traders acquired en route from the salt mines of the Sahara. For the Wangara, salt, sold through the trading networks of west Africa, was worth its weight in gold. The demand for salt there was insatiable. Blocks of salt were passed on in stages from camel caravans to donkeys and taken to the edge of the tsetse-fly belt, where transport animals could no longer be used. Human porters then carried salt into the rainforest. Along the way, its price could increase by as much as one hundredfold.

  From taxes levied on gold and salt, Wagadu’s rulers were able to support an army and expand the realm of their kingdom to surrounding towns. Their authority extended as far as the Saharan trading town of Awdaghust, a terminus of the desert crossing. An eleventh-century Arab geographer, Abu Ubayd Abd Allah al-Bakri, compiled an extensive portrait of the Wagadu kingdom based on accounts given to him by travellers returning from journeys there. The capital, Koumbi Saleh, he said, consisted of two separate towns about six miles apart: one served the Muslim community and contained twelve mosques; the other was ‘the king’s town’ where ‘the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult’ were to be found, along with the king’s court.

  The king has a palace and a number of domed dwellings all surrounded with an enclosure like a city wall . . . The king adorns himself like a woman round his neck and on his forearms, and he puts on a high cap decorated with gold and wrapped in a turban of fine cotton. He sits in audience or to hear grievances against officials in a domed pavilion around which stand ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials. Behind the king stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the [vassal] kings of his country wearing splendid garments and their hair plaited with gold.

  According to al-Bakri, Muslims not only played a central role in commerce but held many court appointments. The ghana, however, and his subjects continued to practise traditional religion.

  Their religion is paganism and the cult of idols. When the king dies they construct a large hut of wood over the place of burial. His body is brought on a scantily furnished bier and placed in the hut. With it they put his eating and drinking utensils, food and drink, and those who used to serve him with these, and then the entrance is secured. They cover the hut with mats and clothing and all the assembled people pile earth over until it resembles a considerable hill, then they dig a ditch around it allowing a means of access to the heap. They sacrifice the victims to their dead and offer them fermented drinks.

  But Wagadu’s control of the southern end of the gold trade was eventually supplanted by an uprising of Berber-speaking Sanhaja nomads based in the western Sahara. Known collectively as al-mulath-thamun because of their custom of wearing the litham mouth veil, the Sanhaja had been galvanised into action by a zealous Muslim missionary, Abdullah ibn Yasin, whose ambition was to establish a universal Islamic empire based on a rigid version of the Malikite law code of orthodox Islam. Ibn Yasin started by leading a small group of disciples to the Atlantic shore of the western Sahara where they established a ribat – a fortress of the faith. His followers became known as al-murabitun, the people of the ribat, a word that was changed by Spanish usage into Almoravid. In 1053, the Almoravids struck north, seizing control of Sijilmasa; the following year, they took Awdaghust, thus securing both ends of the trans-Sahara trade.

  Bolstered by revenues from the gold trade, the Almoravids went on to conquer the whole of the Maghreb al-Aqsa, founding a new capital at Marrakesh (from which the name of Morocco is de
rived). At its height, in the early twelfth century, the Almoravid empire encompassed Morocco, Mauritania, western Algeria and the southern half of Spain.

  But their rule was eventually challenged by another Berber religious movement that had taken root in the High Atlas mountains: the Almohads. The Almohads were inspired by a Muslim scholar named Mohamed ibn Tumert who rejected Almoravid orthodoxy and established the core of a highland state incorporating the principles of a new form of mystical thought and practice emerging in the Islamic world called Sufism, first introduced to the Maghreb by the Banu Hilal and other Arab immigrants. It centred largely on the cult of holy men – marabouts – who attracted disciples during their lifetime and whose tombs became places of pilgrimage and spiritual revival after their death. Through Sufi learning and practice, followers sought personal communion with God. Ibn Tumert’s followers became known as al-Muwah-hidun, ‘the people of unity’, a term which European usage turned into Almohad. In 1147, the Almohads swept down on to the plains and captured Marrakesh, making it their capital. The empire they went on to establish extended even further than the Almoravids’, covering all of the Maghreb as far east as Tripolitania, as well as Muslim Spain. But in the thirteenth century, Almohad rule too collapsed.

  In the aftermath, three new dynastic states emerged in the Maghreb, establishing a tripartite pattern that was to endure into modern times. Hafsid kings based in Tunis ruled over Ifriqiya, Tripolitania and eastern Algeria; Ziyanid kings based in Tlemcen ruled over western Algeria; and Marinid kings based in Fez ruled over much of Morocco.

  Amid the turmoil, the trans-Sahara highways continued to thrive. By the twelfth century, caravans as large as 12,000 camels were making the crossing. At the southern terminus, following the demise of Wagadu, a new Sudanic empire – Mali – came to dominate the gold trade. Its origins lay among the Mande-speaking people of the Upper Niger region where new goldfields in the Bure district were opened in the thirteenth century. The Mali empire stretched for more than a thousand miles from the Atlantic coast of the Gambia and Senegal in the west to the trading centres of Timbuktu and Gao in the east and encompassed the territory of the old Wagadu kingdom to the north. Its domain included not only the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure but gold trade routes coming from Akan lands of the Volta region far to the south.

  The empire’s trade was handled by a merchant class commonly known as dyula, successors to the Wangara of Wagadu, whose networks extended in every direction. Their principal port on the shores of the Sahara became Timbuktu, where they exchanged gold for salt and Mediterranean goods with Arab and Berber caravaneers. Another commodity traded at Timbuktu was the kola nut, which grew in the forests of west Africa and fetched a high price throughout the Sahara and the Maghreb. When chewed, it provides a mild narcotic, acceptable to Islam, and forms part of the etiquette of everyday hospitality. Modern consumers know it as an ingredient of the soft drink Coca-Cola.

  The trans-Sahara highways also became a conduit for the spread of Islam across west Africa. It was taken up not just as a religion but as a vehicle of literacy and cosmopolitan knowledge. Islamic instruction taught followers to read Arabic scripts, opening the way for the keeping of written records. Dyula merchants were among the early converts, spreading Islam southwards along their trading networks to the tropical forest zones. It became a court religion used by local rulers to enhance their power and legitimacy. Becoming Muslim in west Africa did not involve full ‘submission’ to the new faith; it was adopted rather as an extension to the existing spiritual and cultural repertoire. Traditional deities, rituals and festivities remained a central feature of public life.

  The kings of Mali – mansas – became devout Muslims. At their capital Niani on the Upper Niger, they incorporated Islamic rituals into their royal proceedings, they used Arabic to some extent as a language of administration and they retained the services of numerous Muslim scribes, treasurers and jurists, some of whom were expatriates from north Africa.

  Mali came to international attention in 1324 when Mansa Musa, the ninth king, stopped off in Cairo while making the holy pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. He arrived in style with an advance guard of 500 slaves, a large entourage and a hundred camels carrying gold. A government official who met him recalled:

  This man spread upon Cairo the flood of his generosity: there was no person, officer of the [Cairo] court or holder of any office of the [Cairo] Sultanate who did not receive a sum of gold from him. The people of Cairo earned incalculable sums from him, whether by buying or selling or by gifts. So much gold was current in Cairo that it ruined the value of money.

  Ten years later, as the Arab writer Ibn Fadl Allah al-Omari recorded, the market had still not recovered and the population were still amazed at such a display of wealth.

  European cartographers also took note. A picture of Mansa Musa decorates the Catalan Atlas of 1375, one of the first sets of European maps to provide valid information about Africa. Wearing royal robes and a crown, he is shown seated on a throne, holding a sceptre in one hand and a nugget of gold in the other; approaching him is a veiled man riding a camel. A caption on the map remarks: ‘So abundant is the gold which is found in his country that he is the richest and most noble king in all the land.’

  European demand for gold was increasing at the time as it replaced silver as the principal hard currency. Gold was used by governments, princes and the Christian Church to finance wars and settle disputes; it was fashioned into jewellery, hoarded as treasure and exchanged for merchandise from India. It has been estimated that as much as two-thirds of Europe’s requirements of gold came by camel caravans crossing the Sahara desert. European sea merchants trading with ports in north Africa offered higher and higher prices for gold and were keen to find out more about its sources.

  On his last recorded adventure, the veteran Berber traveller Abu Abdallah Ibn Battuta decided to visit the Mali empire to see it for himself. Born in Tangier in 1304, he had spent most of his adult life exploring the Muslim world, travelling as far as China and Indonesia, finding intermittent employment as judge, ambassador and law consultant. Setting out from Tangier in 1352, he took the road to Sijilmasa where he bought camels and four months’ fodder and joined a caravan heading southwards into the Sahara. ‘There are many demons in that desert,’ he wrote. After twenty-five days, the caravan reached the salt mine at Taghaza, where slaves were used as labour and where houses and mosques were built of blocks of salt. Two months after leaving Sijilmasa, they arrived at Wallata, a northern outpost of Mali.

  Ibn Battuta gained mixed impressions of the king, Mansa Sulaiman, and his court during his eight-month stay. In his account of ‘The Country of the Blacks’ he drew up a balance sheet of ‘what I found good and what I found bad in the conduct of the Blacks’.

  Among their good practices are their avoidance of injustice, for there is no people more averse to it, and their sultan does not allow anyone to practise it in any manner; the universal security of the country, for neither the traveller nor the resident has to fear thieves or bandits; and their punctiliousness in praying and compelling their children to do so . . .

  Among their bad practices are that the woman servants, slave girls and young daughters appear naked before people, exposing their genitals. Women who come before the sultan are naked and unveiled, and so are his daughters. On the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan I saw about a hundred naked slave girls come out of his palace with food; with them were two daughters of the sultan with full breasts and they had no veil.

  Later in the fourteenth century, the Mali empire, weakened by dynastic quarrels, began to disintegrate; tributary states asserted their independence; Tuareg nomads invaded from the north; Fulbe cattlemen infiltrated from the west; Mossi horsemen raided from the south. By the sixteenth century, Mali had fragmented into petty chiefdoms.

  While traffic in slaves formed only a minor part of the merchandise crossing the western Sahara, in the central Sahara it was the mainstay of trade. The Saifawa dynasty that rul
ed Kanem had no other commodity with which to trade. Black tribes to the south of Lake Chad were regularly raided for slaves. Under Islamic law, they were defined as kafirun – pagans practising traditional religions with many gods and not the one God of Islam – and therefore a legitimate target for slavery; slavery and the slave trade were both sanctioned by Islam. Slaves were marched across the desert to Zawila, a trading base in the Fezzan, and from there sent on to Tunis, Tripoli, Cyrenaica, Egypt and beyond to western Asia. The demand for black slaves remained high. Eunuchs were the most highly prized and gained the highest price. Their value was enhanced all the more by the casualty rate from castration: as many as nine out of every ten boys did not survive the operation. Some slaves served in the military forces of Muslim rulers; some worked in mines or agriculture. The majority were female slaves who were bought by prosperous urban households for use as servants and concubines. The average ‘service life’ of a slave – the time between final purchase and manumission or death – was no more than about seven years, so the need for replacements kept demand high. In exchange, the Kanemis purchased horses and weapons with which to continue their raids. A good horse could cost between ten and thirty slaves.