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

by Martin Meredith

  Year after year, Henry sent expeditions southwards along the African coast. His aim by now was not only to outflank the trans-Saharan routes and gain direct access to the goldfields but to search beyond for the land of Prester John, said to be cut off from the rest of Christendom by the Muslim powers that controlled north Africa.

  The exploration of the west African coast was swift and dramatic. In 1434, a Portuguese crew sailed around Cape Bojador and returned safely against the wind. In 1436, Portuguese mariners reached an inlet 250 miles beyond Cape Bojador, naming it Rio d’Oro in the mistaken belief that they had discovered the River of Gold. Finding only colonies of seals basking in huge numbers on the sandbanks and islands in the estuary, they sailed further southwards, keeping within sight of the surf that continuously broke on the desert shores. In 1441, they reached Cape Blanco and erected there a tall wooden cross – a padrão – marking their arrival in the name of Christianity, a tradition followed by other Portuguese seafarers exploring the coast of Africa. Further south, they encountered Idzagen Berber fishermen on Arguin Island where a perennial spring provided supplies of fresh water. Discovering that Arguin was located only six days’ travel from the most westerly of the trans-Saharan caravan routes, they set up a permanent trading post there, hoping to outflank desert traffic with a sea route to the north. In 1445, Portuguese mariners reached the mouth of the Senegal River which traditionally marked the boundary between the Berber and Arab tribes of the Sahara and ‘the Land of the Blacks’. They called the local inhabitants there ‘Guineus’ after the Moroccan Berber word for ‘blacks’.

  The volume of trade that the Portuguese managed to pick up was initially meagre. In their dealings with Arab and Sanhaja merchants, they bartered textiles, clothing and wheat in exchange for luxury items such as antelope skins, ostrich eggs, civet musk, gum Arabic and small quantities of gold dust. They loaded up large quantities of seal skins and seal oil. And they also dabbled in the slave trade, acquiring some slaves through barter and others in clashes and raids on the local population.

  The trade in slaves soon turned out to be the most profitable part of their business. In 1444, a Portuguese official, Lançarote de Freitas, backed by a consortium of merchant-adventurers from the Algarve port of Lagos, mounted an expedition of six caravels to islands on the Arguin Bank with the express purpose of capturing slaves. In a ruthless attack, armed mariners seized some 235 men, women and children, most of them from poor Idzagen fishing families, killing those who resisted. The captives were crammed on board the caravels and kept bound in filth and stench for six weeks on the return voyage to Lagos.

  Their arrival onshore on 8 August 1444 became a public spectacle, watched by crowds of Lagos residents. Prince Henry himself was on hand to supervise the proceedings, mounted on a horse. The captives were marched to an open space outside one of the town gates and divided into five groups. One group of forty-six of the best slaves was set aside for Henry for his share of the booty. The remainder were either retained by their new owners or put up for auction. The event was described by a court chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, in the Chronicle of Guinea:

  These people, assembled together on that open place, were an astonishing sight to behold . . . Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards the heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw themselves full length on the ground; yet others lamented in the form of a chant, according to the custom of their native land, and though the words of the language in which they sang could not be understood by our people, the chant revealed clearly enough the degree of their grief. To increase their anguish still more, those who had charge of the division then arrived and began to separate them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their husbands and brother from brother. No account was taken of friendship or relationship, but each one ending up where chance placed him . . .

  Dividing them up proved difficult:

  For as soon as the children who had been assigned to one group saw the parents in another they jumped up and ran towards them; mothers clasped their other children in their arms and lay face down on the ground, accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let their children be torn from them . . .

  According to Zurara, a total of 927 ‘infidels’ were shipped to Portugal from west Africa between 1441 and 1447. Henry justified the trade by claiming that its only purpose was to make Christians of infidels and pagans; any ‘inconvenience’ suffered by a converted slave in this life, he argued, was insignificant compared to the benefits of eternal salvation that conversion to Christianity brought.

  On many occasions, however, the Portuguese encountered local African rulers only too willing to act as business partners in the slave trade. Slavery formed an integral part of African societies on the west coast. Slaves owned by rulers, state officials and wealthy merchants were commonly used as porters, agricultural labourers and domestic servants. In the absence of land ownership, they represented a major source of wealth. They were also a principal commodity in trade, regularly exchanged for gold, ivory or copper, an essential medium of transaction. They served in effect as a form of convertible currency, preferred to any other. Indeed, the development of commerce was partly a function of the growth of the slave trade.

  Enslavement was an organised activity. It was frequently the result of wars of expansion or civil wars. In some cases, rulers of an expanding state regarded enslavement of a conquered population as a useful means of increasing their wealth and status and building armies; in other cases, slaves were simply a by-product of political conflict which could be turned to profit. There was consequently a large market in slaves readily available to passing seafarers with goods to exchange.

  On their voyages exploring the Senegal River in the 1440s, the Portuguese established regular trading links with two Wolof kingdoms, Walo and Cayor, long accustomed to dealing in slaves and other commodities with Arab and Sanhaja merchants, exchanging them for Barbary horses which had survived the journey across the Sahara.

  ‘The King,’ wrote the Venetian adventurer, Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, ‘supports himself by raids, which result in many slaves from his own as well as neighbouring countries. He employs these slaves . . . in cultivating the land . . . but he also sells many to the [Moors] in return for horses and other goods.’ Horses were highly prized. According to da Mosto, the Wolofs would offer from nine to fourteen slaves for a single horse.

  Hired by Henry to help in the exploration of Africa, da Mosto made two voyages to the coast of ‘Guinea’, as the west African coast was known, in 1455 and 1456, recording his experiences in Le Navigazioni atlantiche. On his first voyage he was invited by the damel of Cayor, a Muslim, to visit his capital about twenty miles inland from the mouth of the Senegal River. The damel’s kingdom was little more than a collection of villages, but da Mosto was impressed by his retinue of 200 attendants and the elaborate ceremonies of his court.

  . . . it cannot be doubted that rulers like him are not there because they are rich in treasure or money since they possess neither, nor do they have any income to spend. Nevertheless, in terms of the ceremonial which surrounds them and the size of their retinues, they may truly be regarded as lords and rulers [signori] like any lords anywhere else. To speak the truth, they are more revered and feared by their subjects and better accompanied by more people than are our lords [in Italy] by theirs.

  On his second voyage, da Mosto ventured up the Gambia River to the capital of the king of Bati where, once again, the most valuable commodity on offer was slaves. Between 1450 and 1458 a dozen ships left Portugal each year for the Guinea coast, some making a profit as high as 800 per cent.

  The Portuguese soon replaced their early strategy of raid-and-trade with straightforward commerce. African
s were recruited to serve as interpreters and intermediaries. In 1456, the Portuguese crown dispatched Diogo Gomes to negotiate treaties of peace with African rulers on the coast, enabling Portuguese traders to travel freely under their protection.

  Trade with the Guinea coast became sufficiently lucrative to attract a prominent Lisbon merchant, Fernão Gomes, in 1469 to acquire a five-year monopoly on trade beyond the Cape Verde Islands; in exchange, Gomes was required to pay an annual rent, commit his ships to explore 400 miles of new coastline each year, and sell to the Portuguese crown all the ivory he could obtain from local Africans at a fixed price.

  Gomes’s ships advanced rapidly around the great bulge of west Africa. Along the coast of what became Liberia, his agents developed a profitable trade in malaguetta pepper – ‘grains of paradise’, as they were called in Europe. The coastline there became known as the ‘Grain Coast’. Further east, along the surf-bound shore, where there were no good harbours and where dense forests lined the coast and the local population was thinly scattered, the main trade was in ivory; and here the coast became known as the Tooth Coast or the Ivory Coast.

  Then in 1472, after dropping anchor off the estuary of the Pra River, Gomes’s captains finally located a hinterland of alluvial goldfields, 100 miles from the coast, an area which European mariners later called the Gold Coast.

  The Akan goldfields proved to be a source of such wealth that the Portuguese crown decided to place the gold trade under direct royal control and to construct a fortified base on the coast to fend off rival European traders. In 1482, an expedition was sent out to choose a suitable site and gained permission from the local ruler to build a fortress on a rocky promontory midway along the Gold Coast. A flotilla of caravels was assembled in Portugal to ferry masons, carpenters and building materials to the site. Within three weeks, they completed construction, naming it São Jorge da Mina. The fortress was acclaimed to be ‘the first stone building in the region of the Ethiopians of Guinea since the creation of the world’. By 1487, El Mina, ‘the Mine’, as it became known, was sending an estimated 8,000 ounces a year to the royal treasury in Lisbon. By 1500, the annual trade had reached about 25,000 ounces, a significant proportion of the world’s supply.

  To finance their purchase of gold, the Portuguese began to participate in the domestic slave trade of west Africa. Their usual trade goods such as cloth had limited value in an equatorial climate; horses could not survive the trypanosomiasis virus carried by the tsetse fly in the rainforest belt. Firearms were in great demand, but selling them was banned by Papal bulls to prevent them from reaching Muslim adversaries. The Portuguese solution was to act as middlemen in the slave trade, acquiring slaves in the ‘slave rivers’ of the Benin coast and selling them to Akan merchants at El Mina for use as porters to carry imports inland and as agricultural labourers. By 1500, the Portuguese were shipping on average about 500 slaves each year to El Mina in exchange for gold.

  Venturing into the interior in 1486, the Portuguese encountered the Edo kingdom of Benin. In recent years, Benin had been transformed by its warrior king Ewuare into a major state in the rainforest region of what is now southern Nigeria. From his capital at Benin City, Ewuare was said to have conquered more than 200 towns and villages, building a small empire that extended for seventy miles. His palace grounds included a spacious compound for courtiers, craftsmen and artisans. He sponsored ivory carving and sophisticated brasswork, carried out by specialist guilds with high skill, part of a tradition that could be traced back to the Nok Culture of central Nigeria of the first millennium BCE. As well as producing regalia for the royal court, the ivory carvers’ guild, the Igbesanmwan, turned out a variety of other ivory carvings for the wealthy elite – bowls, boxes, combs and bracelets, sometimes inlaid with copper or gilt-work. The Portuguese were so impressed by the quality that they commissioned merchandise that they could take back to Europe: salt-cellars, forks, spoons and hunting horns made of ivory and sculptures and plaques made of brass.

  Probing further south, beyond the equator, on a pioneering voyage in 1482, a Portuguese captain named Diogo Cão came across the estuary of an enormous river that surged into the Atlantic at the rate of eight to nine knots. So strong was the current that it pushed on into the ocean for some fifty miles. A contemporary chronicler wrote that it was ‘as if this noble river had determined to try its strength in pitched battle with the ocean itself, and alone deny it the tribute which all mother rivers in the world pay without resistance’. Beneath the ocean surface, modern oceanographers have discovered a 100-mile-long canyon, in places 4,000 feet deep, carved by the flow of the river in the sea floor.

  Cão went ashore at the river’s mouth and erected a seven-foot limestone padrão, topped by an iron cross and inscribed with the royal coat of arms and a few words recording his visit.

  In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and potent prince, King João II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered and these padrões to be erected by Diogo Cão, an esquire in his household.

  From local villagers, he gathered that the name of the river was Nzadi, meaning ‘the great river’ and that he had arrived in the territory of a powerful ruler, the Mani-Kongo, whose capital lay far inland. Before continuing his journey southwards, Cão made arrangements to contact the Mani-Kongo, sending four messengers to his capital, expecting to pick them up on his way home.

  For several weeks more, Cão probed further south for nearly 500 miles, erecting another limestone padrão on a promontory he named Cape Santa Maria on what is now Angola’s coast. But on his return to ‘the great river’, to his annoyance he learned that his four emissaries had been detained at the Mani-Kongo’s court. In retaliation, he seized four Africans as hostages, sending a message to the Mani-Kongo saying that they would be released only in exchange for his own men on his next trip, and then headed back with them to Portugal.

  In Lisbon, King João reacted enthusiastically to the news of the existence of a great African river, believing that it might offer an overland route to the land of Prester John; he hoped furthermore that the Mani-Kongo might be enlisted as an ally in the enterprise. Accordingly, Cão’s hostages were treated as honoured guests, provided with apartments at the palace, fitted out with the wardrobes of courtiers, set to studying Portuguese and Christianity and given tours of the realm, on the assumption that when they were returned to the Mani-Kongo they would speak approvingly of the wonders of Portuguese civilisation.

  On his second voyage along the African coast in 1486, Cão landed the four hostages at the mouth of the great river and then proceeded to sail inland for 100 miles. Although the river narrowed, it remained navigable. But at a point near modern Matadi he encountered the Yellala Falls where the river plunges through a narrow gorge in the Crystal Mountains into a maelstrom of churning water that came to be known as ‘the Cauldron of Hell’. Unable to travel further into the interior, Cão and his companions carved their names and the royal coat of arms on rocks overlooking the falls and turned their caravel back towards the sea. Resuming his journey southwards, he planted two more padrões, one at Cape Negro, just north of the border between modern Angola and Namibia, and another at Cape Cross, on the southern fringe of the Skeleton Coast.

  After their initial difficulties, the Portuguese struck up an amicable relationship with the Mani-Kongo. King João saw an opportunity to establish a Christian state in black Africa under the protection of Portugal. The Mani-Kongo, Nzinga a Nkuwu, looked on the Portuguese as potential allies, bolstering his hold on power, and welcomed their offers of assistance. In 1490, a full-scale mission was dispatched from Lisbon in a fleet of three caravels: a dozen priests, a contingent of soldiers, masons, carpenters, printers and farmers, even a few women skilled in bread-baking and sewing.

  Dropping anchor in March 1491 at Mpinda, a village not far from the spot where Diogo Cão had erected his padrão, the Portuguese were given a spectacular recepti
on. As they landed, a throng of 3,000 warriors, armed with bows and arrows, naked to the waist, painted in various colours and wearing headdresses of parrot feathers, danced in celebration to the sound of drums, ivory trumpets and stringed instruments. After three days of revelry and feasting, they were accompanied to the Mani-Kongo’s capital at Mbanza, following paths through dense forests, marshes and swamps, met by crowds of jubilant villagers along the way, ascending to a plateau in the Crystal Mountains some 1,700 feet above sea level. Their journey took three weeks.

  The kingdom of Kongo had been formed in the fourteenth century by a group of clan chiefs, known as Mwissikongo, who unified several small chiefdoms through conquest. Its territory ran inland for several hundred miles and included a long stretch of the ‘great river’ which European geographers henceforth called the Congo. From their capital at Mbanza, Kongo’s kings presided over a network of royal kinsmen and officials who administered the provinces of the state, collecting tribute in copper, iron and slaves. The Mani-Kongo was all-powerful, surrounded by elaborate ceremonies. On public occasions, he sat on a throne receiving homage, dispensing justice and reviewing troops. Those who wanted to approach him had to prostrate themselves and crawl forward on all fours. On pain of death, no one was allowed to watch him eat or drink. Whenever he travelled, he was carried on a litter.

  Ushered into the presence of the Mani-Kongo, the expedition’s leader, Rui de Sousa, presented an array of gifts: lengths of satin, silk and linen, brocade and velvet fabrics, silver and gold jewellery, trinkets and plate and a flock of red pigeons. De Sousa explained that the king of Portugal hoped that the Mani-Kongo and his people would accept the Christian faith and enter into an alliance with him. Impressed by the presentation, the Mani-Kongo agreed to prepare himself for baptism and sanctioned the construction of a church in Mbanza. In May 1491, Nzinga a Nkuwu was duly baptised as King João I. His son, Nzinga a Mbemba, a provincial governor, followed suit, taking the name of Afonso. Several other chiefs were converted to Christianity at the same time. The foundations of a stone church were laid in May 1491 and the building was completed two months later.