AFTER SONGHAY SUCCUMBS TO A MOROCCAN ATTACK IN 1591. THE AREA IS THOUGHT TO "DECLINE."
Not emphasized: the region's economic transformation
The "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.
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| 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 of 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.
Only a powerful ruler could demand a tomb like this...
Grégoire Lyon
A royal Songhay tomb in its capital of Gao (in modern Mali).
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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Did the empire's defeat destroy an elite that had become archaic, liberating the economic energies it had held back?
- The immediate effect was social: "The lowest class of the population had become the highest. Now base and ugly monkeys took the place of kings."
-- 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 took place in spite of the region drying up. By the 19th century Timbuktu had become a center for commerce but not for production, but Segu on the Middle Niger and Kano in what is now Northern Nigeria had taken its place.
- The 16th-century account shows the population unclothed, houses thatched and river transportation by canoe and the currency of Djenne (another important town on the Niger) made of iron, which, heavy and unwieldy, is inappropriate for everyday exchanges.
- Nineteenth-century explorers show that people are clothed, houses built of baked clay, boats are made by sewing boards together, 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.
Merchants go south for kola.
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