by Andrew Marr
There were fewer plants or animals that could be easily domesticated, as well as an abundance of game and berries that would have delayed the urge to farm. Archaeology can help fill in some gaps, and it is clear that human societies were developing quite fast in Africa too. By around 2000 BC, it is likely that the farming revolution had reached the then wetter lands of West Africa on the edge of the Sahara, around Lake Chad, and the Senegal and Niger rivers. Ironwork and sculpture were being made from around 800 BC, so although this part of the world moved from hunter-gathering later than Eurasia did, the familiar developmental steps were as clear here as in, say, France or Turkey. Knowledge of the new skills may have come from the Nubians, on the edge of the Egyptian territories; or from Mediterranean cities, such as Carthage. Though they left no written record, farmers were moving herds across the desert and small numbers of traders continued to risk the heat and aridity, using caravans of horses from around 1500 BC.
There are ancient Greek accounts of chariot-using warriors from West Africa, and desert drawings of chariots pulled by horses. Hanno the Carthaginian may even have tried to establish African coastal seaports so as to make trade easier; but with oared galleys, rather than the later European sailing ships, it would have been difficult to get very far south. The Romans did not try to; but they heard stories of gold-rich people living down there.14 The earliest evidence of city life in Africa south of Egypt comes from the upper reaches of the Nile, in today’s Sudan and Ethiopia. There, a series of half-remembered kingdoms and empires – including Kush, then the Christian Aksum – flourished between ancient times and the mid-900s. The use of iron had spread across the continent within two hundred years of Aksum’s fall, reaching everywhere except deep forests where the pygmy people lived without metal, and the more arid savannahs of the Bushmen in the south-west.
After this, most African farming did not advance very far compared with Europe and Asia. Why not? One theory is the lack of strong draught animals to pull ploughs. The climate and the diseases were too much, it is argued, for horses or oxen to cope with – though today they seem to survive, perhaps better protected by man against microbes and carnivore predators. Most of Africa was left to herding, grazing and small-scale farming of root crops, which rarely produced enough surplus wealth for large societies. There were exceptions. One was Zimbabwe, an East African civilization using huge dry-stone walls for its palaces and towns, at its zenith between 1250 and 1450. These people had probably come from Mapungubwe, a kingdom of cattle-herders and gold and ivory merchants in today’s South Africa, who were already living in stone-walled townships. The Zimbabwean kingdom was built on a far greater scale, so great, indeed, that later European explorers refused to believe mere Africans could have been responsible.
Zimbabwe had been a participant in a thriving coastal trade, dominated by Islam, the religion and culture that most influenced pre-colonial Africa. There is evidence of a network along the East African coast going back earlier, to classical times: Greek, Byzantine and Persian coins have turned up in Zanzibar and Tanzania.15 The Africans with whom outsiders traded may have been Kushites who had moved south. But it was really Muslims who first opened up (and exploited) the wealth of sub-Saharan Africa. From the 700s Arabs had been raiding and trading south through the Sahara and down along the Indian Ocean coast of the continent, setting up enclaves and taking away with them the three things the Europeans would also later come after – slaves, gold and ivory. The written history of sub-Saharan Africa begins only when Arab traders start to record it; and it is thanks to them that we know about the other great exceptions, the empires in the sub-Saharan west.
There, the breakthrough had been the domestication of camels. Like horses, they had come originally from America, though there they died out. In Asia they had grown in size, and were probably first domesticated in Arabia around 2000 BC. Archaeological evidence suggests they had arrived in Egypt by 700 BC. Camels were being used by armies in classical times for transport, and by the Tuareg people to cross the Sahara by around the year AD 200. Excellent carriers of both men and cargo across desert, camels are also hard to tame and to manage. Though they mate all the year round, in the wild they reproduce slowly. A key breakthrough for early camel-using humans was learning how to artificially inseminate the beasts, to boost the size of their herds. Assisted in their reproductive duties, camels became the vital transport system that opened up the Sahara. Able to travel for up to nine days without water and to carry twice as much as an ox, they were soon bringing huge quantities of metal and cloth to the African peoples of the south.
The caravans were also bringing something humdrum, but rare in the south and essential to life – salt. Hunter-gatherers can get enough salt in the flesh of their kill, but once humans settled down to agriculture they needed extra salt, both for themselves and for their cattle. Salt was found in underground deposits in the Sahara, where it was mined in horrific conditions, often by slaves. By the AD 700s, the town of Timbuktu had emerged as a seasonal centre for the trade, where the salt was loaded onto large river canoes (of a kind still being used) and taken deeper into Africa. In return, the Muslims of North Africa were bringing back gold, as either ingots or gold-dust. The gold came from an empire now called Ghana (though this was almost certainly not its original name) and from smaller, more mysterious kingdoms to its south. It is only thanks to this gold-for-salt exchange that the Muslim world came to notice West Africa, and recorded what happened there.
Ghana collapsed as a political entity when it dared to confront the Berber traders and herders of North Africa. The Berbers produced a formidable empire of their own, the Almoravids, whom we have already come across in Spain. In around 1076 they turned south and moved against Ghana. Though they could not hold onto the area for long, they brought their religion into West Africa and created an opening for a new empire, built by Mande-speaking Africans who would call their kingdom ‘Mali’, or ‘Mallel’. It would turn out to be the most formidable kingdom of sub-Saharan Africa so far. Even now, the area is agriculturally blessed compared with much of the rest of the continent. It lacks the near-impenetrable forests of further south. The great River Niger and its tributaries provide a lush belt of irrigated soil, where farming flourishes. The rivers were always an excellent transport and fishing resource. On the edge of Mali are rich goldfields, and across much of the terrain mounted cavalry could police and extend the empire. By the end of the 1200s an African kingdom of Muslim converts was well established. Its influence reached far west, towards the coastal Africans in one direction, and deep into the heart of the continent, where today’s Nigeria is, in the other.
The former oasis trading camp of Timbuktu now rose to become a royal city; so did riverside Djenne to the south, which today possesses the world’s largest mud structure, its formidable mosque. In the 1260s one king, Mansa Uli, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and in 1324 the famous Mansa Musa did the same. It took him and his baggage train a year to cross the desert to Egypt. As soon as he arrived in Cairo with his royal standards, his parasols, his wealth, his open-handedness and his tall stories, he attracted the admiring attention of Arab writers. King Musa had apparently brought with him to Egypt eight thousand servants, many of them slaves. His army is said to have been 100,000-strong. Apart from being a religious duty, pilgrimage was a way of broadcasting the glory of the pilgrim and his country; and this certainly worked for Mansa Musa, whose fame reverberated very quickly.
Among the many Arab writers who described him, al-Umari from Damascus leaves a vivid portrait. ‘This man,’ he says, ‘flooded Cairo with his benefactions . . . The Cairenes made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.’ Musa was not averse to telling tall tales of his own. He told his host in Cairo that he had conquered twenty-four cities and that he ruled a country rich in cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules, geese, doves and chickens – which may well have been
true. But he also claimed his gold came from a ‘gold plant’, which blossomed in springtime after the rain, and had gold roots. It is possible Musa was ignorant about the origins of his wealth, since he added that another kind of gold plant left its roots in holes by the river where they could be gathered up like stones or gravel. Musa confided to his host that anyone in his kingdom who had a beautiful daughter would offer her to him, ‘and he possessed her without a marriage ceremony, as slaves are possessed’. His host protested that this was not acceptable behaviour for a Muslim: ‘And he said: “Not even for kings?” and I replied, “No! Not even for kings! Ask the scholars!” He said: “By God, I did not know that. I hereby leave it and abandon it utterly!” ’16
Whether he really reformed we do not know, but during his reign (from around 1312 to 1337) Mansa Musa certainly reached out to the rest of the Muslim world in other ways, importing scholars and architects, and building mosques at home. After his death, in 1352/3, the greatest of the Arab travel-writers, Ibn Battuta from Tangier, visited Mali and recorded his impressions. He found it a place of reliable justice, safe and welcoming to travellers. Battuta had arrived after a long desert journey which even this hardened world-traveller remembered as particularly gruelling. Once, he recalled, he came upon a man who had lost his way and died of thirst, lying ‘with his clothes on him and a whip in hand, under a little tree . . . There was water a mile or so away from him.’17 Another time he had gone to defecate (‘to accomplish a need’) by the river and was offended by a local man coming to stand near by and observe him: it turned out that the man was worried that a crocodile he had spotted was likely to attack, and had nobly placed himself between them.
While in Mali, he was again offended. (Arabs seem to have found African customs as uncouth as European explorers would, a few centuries later.) As what would have been a welcome gift Ibn Battuta had been hoping for fine robes and money, but instead was presented by the new king with three loaves of bread and a piece of fried beef, plus some yoghurt. He soon cheered up, though, and goggled at the magnificence of the ‘Sultan’s’ court, with its gorgeously dressed and armed bodyguard, musicians, acrobats and dancers.
Like Christian missionaries, Ibn Battuta could not come to terms with the nakedness of African women – ‘their female servants and slave girls and little girls appear before men naked, with their privy parts uncovered’ – nor with the African habit of eating carrion, dogs and donkeys. But he was pleased to find a national obsession with the Koran, and that Malian citizens dressed in clean white clothes for Friday prayers. He noted a general lack of ‘oppression’ and found the country remarkably safe – though slaves and women might have disagreed. In the words of a later historian, ‘The general picture . . . is of a rich, prosperous, peaceful and well-ordered empire, in which effective government and organised communications and trade ran all the way from the Atlantic in the west to the borders of modern Nigeria in the east, and from the fringes of the forests in the south northwards into the desert.’18
Inside that empire most people were still farmers, growing millet and rice, breeding cattle and fishing. Trade in copper, salt and other goods brought in taxes for the government, and there was a currency of cowrie shells. Ibn Battuta recorded problems with locusts, while wild animals were a perpetual danger – he noted beasts like huge horses which lived in the river – presumably, hippopotami. But Mali is portrayed as a haven. Beyond its borders were cannibals who devoured slave-girls, horrific salt- and copper-mines, and many great dangers. Overall his verdict is positive, but we must take it cautiously. It is impossible to verify the accounts of Muslim travellers and historians, who often plagiarized one another.19
It may be that Ghana did not really ‘fall’ to Mali, nor Mali to the next empire-on-the-block, Songhai. Perhaps each of them simply expanded its population beyond their ability to feed them, then collapsed. It does, however, seem likely that among Mali’s problems was one familiar to royal houses everywhere – the problem of succession. African tradition deployed a council of elders, or sometimes a matriarch, to decide succession. This might seem an advantage over automatic lineage succession, since it excluded the most stupid and weakest contenders. But it also produced feuds, which proved impossible to resolve over the large territory of an empire. Nor, according to another Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun, did it always result in good kings. One of Musa’s predecessors ‘was weak-minded and used to shoot arrows at his people and to kill them for sport. So they rose against him and killed him.’20 (This seems fair enough.) After Mansa Musa came a series of usurpers, and rebellions too, so that Mali began to lose territory to the desert Tuaregs and to the Songhai of the River Niger.
Despite their pilgrimages and their grand mosques, the rulers of Mali had never been able to create the kind of united Islamic society the Arabs had forged and had then exported to North Africa and Spain. This was partly because of the powerful hold of native religion in Africa. Nature worship, and animism, still so popular today, were too strongly rooted to be overthrown, particularly outside the main towns. To his great irritation Ibn Battuta found that, even at court, alongside Muslim prayers figured mask dancers and the reciting of tribal stories (which he found tedious). Women still had to appear naked before the king, and all subjects had to sprinkle ash on their heads when they met him,21 none of which was very Muslim. The Songhai, who came next, were outright animists. According to the Arab chroniclers, they, in turn, were defeated by a Muslim warrior, Muhammad Toure, who was re-establishing aspects of the original Mali empire at much the same time as Christopher Columbus was setting sail for ‘the Indies’.
A long period of feuding and division weakened this empire, too, and it fell in 1590 to a Moroccan army, supplemented by Christian mercenaries under a Spanish captain, who had carried cannon on the backs of camels all the way across the desert. This was a land adventure comparable to any voyage across the Atlantic; and, like the Spanish in America, the Moroccans set up a colony of around twenty thousand settlers.22 Their influence persists today in Malian architecture. But the Moroccans could not occupy this huge swathe of West Africa for very long. Their invasion contributed to mounting political disintegration, during which many far smaller states were vying with each other for supremacy, including some states ruled by peoples of more mysterious origin such as the Hausa – whose language is not West African – and the taller, lighter-skinned, cattle-herding Fulani. Again as in the Americas, invasion triggered further disruptions and convulsions among local nations. By then, a complicated profusion of mini-states had evolved – and plenty of European ocean-going ships were prowling the coast.
This takes us leaping ahead towards the history of the European trade in African slaves. But it is important to remember how large and vigorous the slave trade was in Africa long before the Portuguese and their fellow Christians arrived. The Arab writers already quoted took slavery for granted, and bought their own slaves as they needed them while they travelled. Black Africans were taken north to perform menial jobs for the Muslim world, then imported later in large numbers as agricultural labourers when sugar cultivation began, in plantations in Morocco and Iraq. When Mansa Musa returned from his famous pilgrimage, one historian points out, there was ‘a great demand of the Mali people for Turkish, Ethiopian and other slave-girls, and also for eunuchs and Turkish slave-boys. The slave trade thus went in both directions.’23 Slaves were taken in raids, in countless small wars, and sold on. The Atlantic slave trade could not have happened without a strong previous tradition of slavery, as much part of Muslim history as the slave ships are of Christian history.
Though Ghana, Mali, the Songhai and the Zimbabwean kingdoms are the most remembered of the pre-colonial African societies, there were other kingdoms that have left no written record. They have often left superb art behind them, hinting at rich cultures, now forgotten. The Ife culture of today’s Nigeria dates back to the 700s, when it emerged out of the earlier Nok culture, which had produced stunning pottery sculptures. The Ife, a Yoruba peop
le, are most celebrated for their sculpted bronze heads; they in turn were replaced by the Benin empire, which survived from the 1100s until the very end of the nineteenth century. During what Europeans call the Renaissance, superb brass panels were being created for the court of the Oba, the king of Benin. Of a workmanship that the great Italian and German craftsmen would have envied, these carved scenes were made from brass imported from Europe in return for the inevitable gold and ivory.
The court of Benin allowed carved ivory scenes to be sent abroad, but kept their greatest brass treasures at home. When hundreds of these reached the outside world after a British military takeover of Benin in 1897, Europeans and Americans struggled to take in their skill and beauty. The then curator of the British Museum wrote that, at first sight, ‘we were at once astounded at such an unexpected find, and puzzled to account for so highly developed an art among a race so entirely barbarous’.24 But anyone who looks at the tiny quantities of wood-carving from African societies that have survived from before the age of European colonization can see that the skill and flair were not confined to the parts of West Africa where these empires rose and fell.
Around the year 1400, there existed powerful African states on both sides of the continent, as well as in Christian Ethiopia; plus a multitude of smaller kingdoms where agriculture and trade were less well developed. It was clearly a land of migrations, wars and politics long before outsiders arrived. The more challenging African climate is part of the reason that city-based civilizations did not make more headway, and the bad luck of possessing gold, ivory and a slaving tradition made Africa dangerously tempting for Muslim and Christian adventurers in possession of better metallurgy and sailing-ships. Yet had Europeans not learned how to protect themselves against Africa’s formidable diseases so that they could invade it, and divide it up, then a different Africa would surely have evolved, one more closely tailored to that continent’s own traditions and history. Mansa Musa might have been just one of many well known leaders, an African Charlemagne or a Henry VIII, rather than a fleeting glimpse of a lost tomorrow caught briefly in a passing mirror.