THE LEGENDARY EMPIRES OF THE MEDIEVAL SAVANNAH

MODERN GHANA AND MALI TAKE THEIR NAMES FROM THE STATES THAT CONTROLLED THE TRANS-SAHARAN TRADE 

(FROM THE 4TH TO THE 16TH CENTURIES) 

The modern story suggests complex, developed economies, which medieval European maps and iconography seem to confirm:

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                                                                       Andalusian map of the 14th century / zoom (click to enlarge.)

Mansa Musa (d.1388), ruler of the empire of Mali, dominates trade in the Western Sahara.

 

       By Taddeo Gaddi, Florence, toward 1330 / zoom                 By Jan de Beer, Belgium, toward 1510 / zoom

Images that begin in the 14th century show the youngest of the Three Kings as handsome, elegant and Black. He vanishes in the 16th century, when the Atlantic slave trade begins.

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The last of those empires, that of Songhay in modern Mali, succumbs to a Moroccan attack in 1591. No comparable empire replaces it, and the area is thought to "decline."

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But:  

• The famous "silent trade" of the kingdom of Ghana, where Blacks and Arabs exchange salt for gold to the sound of drumbeats but without speech, suggests simple transactions that concern a small number of people, which a rudimentary  oligarchy can control. 

Gone from the web

Arabs who break the silence are beaten, Blacks, who threaten the system more directly, impaled.

 -- Histoire des conquêtes de Moulay Archy by Germain Mouëtte, Paris, 1683, pp. 316-17.

• By the 16th century that system is gone. Timbuktu is a flourishing center production, trade and Islam. The oligarchy has a currency of gold, but cowrie shells allow ordinary people to sell everyday wares (for the implications please click here).  

-- Jean-Léon l'Africain, Description de l'Afrique, trad. Epaulard, 1956, II, pp. 465-471:

 First published in 1526.

• The most moderate estimate for the population of Gao, capital of the 16th-century empire of Songhay, is 75,000 people.

-- Tableau géographique de l'Ouest Africain au Moyen Age by Raymond Mauny, Dakar, 1961, pp. 487, 499.

 The estimate is based on the report of 7,626 stone houses. But estimates in traditional sources are meant 

to show importance, and are usually greatly exaggerated.

A town of such importance, about that of London at the same time, supposes considerable development in the surrounding region. Around London were a multitude of burgs of 600-2,000, but there is no reason to think there were such agglomerations around Gao. 

-- The Marketing of Agricultural Produce by Alan Everett in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Joan Thirsk, IV (1500-1600), London, 1967, pp. 478-479. Archeological digs have discovered the remains of villages dating from very distant times, but since a 19th-century explorer states that he found none of the villages mentioned by a predecessor 40 years before, one can surmise that villages often move. (Archeology, The Inland Niger Delta before the Empire of Mali Evidence from Djenne-Jeno by Susan Keech and Roderick J. McIntosh, "Journal of African History," 1981, 22, pp. 1-22. Explorer, Anne Raffenel, Voyage dans l'Afrique occidentale en 1843 et 1844, Paris, 1846, I, p.  218). 

 

• But the currency of Djenne is iron, which obstructs such exchanges. The area remains primitive: The population is unclothed, houses are thatched, river transportation is by canoe and armed troops accompany caravans. 

• Nineteenth-century explorers show that people are clothed, houses built of baked clay, boats are made by sewing boards together and that traders travel alone or in small groups* and the currency is cowries. 

*Heinrich Barth enlivens his narrative by stressing danger, but nothing happens to him or to other explorers. In the region where I did field work, traders were left alone unless they were a threat: please read on.

-- Houses and boats: 

Journal d'un voyage à Tombouctou et à Djenne, by René Caillé, 1830, Paris, pp. 342 and  241;

 Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa by Heinrich Barth, London, 1965 (first ed. 1855).

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Only a power ruler could demand a tomb like this...

Grégoire Lyon

A royal Songhay tomb in its capital of Gao (in modern Mali).

But a "revolted slave" challenges his master by ostentatiously distributing wealth:

Misakullah, a slave of the ruler, must send him 4000 bags of grain each year, of which he himself must furnish 1000. But one day he gives as many bags from his own stock to the producers themselves as alms, plus 50 to the men who carry them. Then he organizes a public presentation of these gifts. The ruler can vie with him only until he inherits the wealth of another subordinate. 

The chronicle says this is an hommage to the king, but an oral tradition calls Misakullah a "revolted slave" and that he proclaims himself king.

-- Story, Mahmud Kati, Tarikh-el-Fettach, trad. Houdas and Delafosse, Paris, 1913, pp. 179-187. This passage is not among those added later (Levtzion, 1971). Oral tradition:  Dakar archives AOF  1 G 194/31, 1896

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The Songhay Empire falls under Moroccan attack in 1591. Did that liberate the sudden expansion of commercial energy? 

• The first effect is social: "The lowest class of the population has become the highest. The worst rabble has taken the place of the nobility." 

-- Kati, p. 308.

• But then, "God spread his benediction over the lands and waters [...] and so augmented the wealth of Timbuktu that the inhabitants almost forgot the government of Songhay."

• That prosperity takes place in spite of the region drying up, bringing famines and epidemics. By the 19th century Timbuktu is a center for commerce not production, but Segu on the Middle Niger and Kano in what is now Northern Nigeria take its place.

 Merchants go south for kola.

 

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Next,

Trade strengthens social systems,

then transforms them