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ETUSIVULLE Trans-Saharan Trade and the West African Discovery of the Mediterranean © Pekka Masonen [Originally
published in M'hammad Sabour & Knut S. Vikør (eds), Ethnic
Encounter and Culture Change. Papers from the Third
Nordic Conference on Middle Eastern Studies,
Bergen 1997: Nordic Research on the Middle East, vol. 3,
pp. 116-142] IMPORTANT
NOTE: An unedited version of this paper can be
found in the website of the Nordic Society for Middle Eastern
Studies and in
many other websites, too. However, students of African
history should rather use this final version, as the
unedited version does not include the essential footnotes.
Following the good academic manners, I expect that those
who wish to quote the contents of this paper or to create
a hyperlink to this page, should introduce themselves: pekka.masonen@uta.fi «It is often objected by Africans that the very notion of European exploration and discovery of Africa is patronising. ‘There was nothing to discover, we were here all the time’, Dr Hastings Banda is said to have declared. But this is a somewhat specious view of exploration. Whatever their achievements, Africans knew nothing of the wider world and little of their own. Before the coming of the explorers, no one knew how the Zambezi watershed linked with the Congo or the Niger with the Nile. The exploration and discovery of Africa meant integrating the continent, for better or worse, into a general system of knowledge and a world system of economics.» In a certain way McLynn is right. We cannot escape the fact that it was the Arab merchants who first connected sub-Saharan Africa with their vast commercial network, reaching from Spain and Russia to the Far East. And it was the European daredevil navigators who first crossed the wide oceans and finally integrated the entire globe into a single system of knowledge — it was the Portuguese who introduced Africa to the Japanese in the mid-sixteenth century [3]. On the other hand,
McLynn’s view is extremely Eurocentric and biased.
Even if it is true that there never was any black Marco
Polo travelling to the end of the world, or a
black Magellan sailing the seven seas (although
some Afrocentric scholars are willing to attribute the
discovery of America to fourteenth-century black
explorers from Mali [4]),
we cannot simply declare that Africans knew nothing of
the wider world before their first encounter with
Europeans in the fifteenth century [5]. There exists evidence, albeit
tentative, which suggests that some black Africans were
observing the wider world, including Europe, outside
their home villages rather keenly long before Western
geographers knew anything about the true course of the
Niger or the Nile. The purpose of this paper is to
discuss this evidence, and the relations of West Africans
with the wider world mainly before they were integrated
into the Atlantic system of knowledge and economics by
European traders and navigators in the fifteenth century.
In other words, how far did the West Africans discover
the Mediterranean through the trans-Saharan trade? The Prehistory: trans-Saharan contacts in Antiquity The beginning of relatively regular and organized trans-Saharan trade sometime in the eighth century AD was not such a sudden and dramatic event as the coming of the Europeans to America, for the Sahara — despite its vast geographical dimensions and natural extremes — never was a barrier isolating black Africa from other civilisations, in the same sense as the Atlantic Ocean separated the New World from the Old [6]. Before the regular trans-Saharan trade was initiated by the Arabs, following their conquest of Northern Africa, there had already been a long prehistory of sporadic encounters for more than one thousand years; when and how the first contacts across the desert took place is obscure [7]. The earliest references to possible contacts between Western Africa and the Mediterranean civilizations are found in the classical Graeco-Roman literature, although their reliability is often doubtful. The celebrated Greek historian Herodotus, for example, described the Libyan tribe of Garamantes who hunted with their chariots the Ethiopian Troglodytes, or ‘cave-dwellers’, in the desert [8]. This account has been associated with the Saharan rock paintings depicting horse-drawn chariots, the first of which were found in Fezzan in the early 1930s [9]. Afterwards more paintings were discovered in Tassili and southern Morocco, and the paintings seemed to form two tracks leading from the Northern Africa to the Niger Bend. Subsequently, a hypothesis was created, according to which the Garamantes (or alternatively some other Saharan people) had carried West African gold and ivory to the markets of Carthage and Rome along these routes [10]. This hypothesis became soon popular; it is still found in many histories of Africa [11], although the historicity of the Garamantean trans-Saharan enterprise was seriously challenged during the 1970s [12]. Opposers of the routes have correctly pointed out that the existence of mere paintings depicting chariots in the central and southern Sahara is not sufficient proof that the desert was ever crossed with such vehicles [13]. Moreover, all the paintings represent light, two-wheeled chariots, and according to the experimental tests made by French researchers, these tiny vehicles which have hardly enough space even for the driver cannot be used for transporting large quantities of any merchandise [14]. Finally, no remains of chariots, or any other material evidence relating to regular trans-Saharan trade, has been found along the suggested routes — as a matter fact, these rock paintings, which are not stylistically uniform, were created over a long period stretching from 1200 BC to 300 AD, and it seems that they represent nothing but a gradual diffusion of a form of art from the Mediterranean to the central Sahara [15]. However, some individual adventurers may well have crossed the desert by these chariots or other means [16]. Herodotus has another curious account, according to which some youths belonging to the Libyan tribe of Nasamones travelled to the south until they arrived in a swampy area. There they met small-sized black men who took them into their town [17]. This story has been associated both with the ‘little people’, a common element in West African oral tradition describing the original inhabitants of the area, and with the geographical conditions of the Niger inland delta. On these grounds, it has been suggested that the young Nasamones might have reached the Niger [18]. According to a later Greek writer, Marinus of Tyre, a Roman merchant called Julius Maternus travelled with the king of the Garamantes to a land called Agisymba where he saw a lot of rhinoceros. Since no rhinoceros lived in Northern Africa in classical Antiquity, it is widely assumed that Julius Maternus probably visited the northern parts of modern Chad [19]. There is also vague archaeological evidence of these early sporadic trans-Saharan contacts of West Africans with the classical world. Some Roman objects, dated to the third century AD, have been found in Abalessa, in Ahaggar, in the so-called tomb of Queen Tin Hinan [20]. Yet beyond Ahaggar, Roman objects are extremely rare: only four coins have been found in southern Mauritania, although they were not necessarily brought there during Antiquity, since Roman coins were still circulating in Northern Africa during the Islamic period [21]. Nevertheless, some new and interesting objects have recently come to light. In Jenné-Jeno, ‘Old Jenne’, archaeologists have found a glass bead of a composition currently known only from South and South-East Asia and contemporary to the Han dynasty of China (206 BC–220 AD) [22]. Furthermore, a Hellenistic statuette representing a feminine Janus, made in Cyrenaica in the second century AD, was found in 1976 in the Republic of Niger [23]. It is quite probable that more such discoveries may appear in the future, for the excavations in the middle Niger valley—as well as other parts of the Sudanic West Africa—are still at the beginning: the large man-made tumuli around the Niger bend area, for instance, are still intact. The discovery of the above-mentioned objects does not, of course, prove that any Greek or Roman merchant visited the middle Niger valley himself. Contrariwise, it is more likely that these objects ended up south of the Sahara through many intermediaries, the last of whom having hardly had any idea concerning their origins; as the fourteenth-century English bronze ewer which was found in Kumasi in 1896 hardly proves that any Englishman visited Ashanti a century before the arrival of the Portuguese on the Gold Coast in 1471 [24]. But who were these intermediaries? In spite of the fearless Garamantes with their galloping horses, more probable candidates for carriers of the early trans-Saharan contacts are the Berber nomads who were regularly moving in the desert with their camel flocks, following the seasonal changes. The nomads who were residing at the southern edge of the Sahara left for the north in the beginning of the rainy season, returning to the south by the eve of the dry season [25]. While staying in their pastures in the northern or central Sahara, these nomads certainly met people who, for their part, had contacts within the Roman limes. As the nomads learned to know the value of gold in the Mediterranean world, they perhaps started bartering it with the peoples of Western Africa for Saharan rock salt and copper. The gold was brought to the north where it was probably exchanged for dates, corn and such handicrafts as the nomads could not produce themselves. This type of exchange could not have started properly before the adoption of the dromedary by the Saharan peoples, since horses do not survive well in the harsh conditions of the desert. The camels were more important as beasts of burden than as mounts, because they enabled both large quantities of merchandise and the necessary supplies for the crossing of the desert to be transported efficiently — the people usually walked [26]. Customarily the domestication of the dromedary in Northern Africa is dated to the beginning of our era; on grounds of the classical literature its introduction is attributed to the Romans. In the Sahara, the dromedary had been adopted at least by the third century AD, although some scholars suggest that the first domestication may have taken place long before the Roman period. Originally the dromedary spread into Egypt from the Middle East perhaps in the eighth and seventh centuries BC [27]. In any case, these sporadic contacts in Antiquity had no significant consequences [28]. They did not increase the knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa amongst the Mediterranean peoples. According to surviving classical sources, ancient geographers believed that beyond the fertile North African littoral lay nothing but a vast, arid, hot and uninhabited desert, Terra Incognita, full of monsters and miracles [29]. The same can be said of West Africans who were certainly not aware of the existence of Mediterranean peoples either. Moreover, the volume of the exchange must have been very restricted, for the Roman Empire made no effective efforts to expand her political dominance in the Sahara or beyond. Neither had the Romans any reason to develop closer commercial contacts with the unknown lands in the desert, because they were able to obtain all the merchandise Western Africa could offer them — namely gold, ivory, exotic beasts and slaves — more easily within their own borders or from the nearby frontier areas in Central Europe and the Middle East [30]. Similarly, the ancient Mediterranean had few products which could have encouraged the West Africans to increase their volume of trade to the north. In fact, the regional trade in the Niger valley was directed more to the southern savanna and the Atlantic coast than the Sahara [31]. Finally, no important
cultural influences spread through these early contacts:
urbanisation and state-formation started in the middle
Niger valley independently without any impulses from the
Mediterranean civilizations, contrary to the claims of
colonial historians [32].
The earliest known settlement in Jenné-Jeno is dated to
250 BC; it shows no northern influence and definitely
anticipates any possible trans-Saharan commerce [33]. By AD 500 there already
existed large communities organised in complex societies
which were engaged both in regional and long-distance
trade with the southern savanna and the desert edge. This
development correlates with the proposed date for
adoption of the dromedary by the Saharan nomads,
suggesting that the increased political centralization
was at least partially affected by an external stimulus,
since the maintenance of regular long-distance trade
requires close cooperation between the different groups
which are involved in it. However, there are no signs of
any alien conquest of the middle Niger valley, and it is
more likely the accumulation of wealth produced by the
regional trade, rather than the still vague trans-Saharan
trade, which gave birth to the first states in the Sudanic West Africa [34]. The preconditions for large-scale trans-Saharan trade changed radically after Northern Africa became part of the Islamic world in the late seventh century AD. The vast Umayyad caliphate, reaching from the slopes of the Pyrenees to the banks of the Indus, formed a solid market area, the monetary system of which was based on gold. It meant that this precious metal was in great demand throughout the Islamic world. In the eastern parts of the caliphate, sufficient gold was obtained from local mines or by recycling ancient hoards. In the western parts, the situation was more difficult, for there are no gold mines in Northern Africa. However, the Muslim rulers in the west had begun striking their own gold dinars as early as the eighth century. Since there is no evidence that they had imported gold from Egypt or the Middle East, they must have obtained it from other sources. Plausible alternatives are the mines of Sicily and southern Spain, which were already known in ancient times, and the existing Roman and Byzantine treasures. Yet part of the gold was inevitably brought from Western Africa [35]. In fact, it seems that regular and intensive trade across the desert was organized by the Arabs quite soon after they had consolidated their power in Northern Africa. The Arabs most probably obtained information concerning West African gold from the Berber nomads during the conquest: the Arabs launched their first campaigns in the central Sahara in 46/666–7 and southern Morocco in 62/682 [36]. Yet the Arabs succeeded only because they managed to conjoin the trans-Saharan trade to the internal West African commercial network. As described above, peoples of the Sudanic West Africa had already established both complex states, such as Ghana and Gao [37], and cities like Old Jenne with some twenty thousand inhabitants [38], by the arrival of the first North African traders perhaps in the mid-eighth century. But new cities were also born at the desert edge, such as Awdaghust, Kumbi Saleh and Tadamakka, the existence of which were closely tied in with uninterrupted continuity of the caravan trade: when the trade routes later changed and the volume of commerce decreased, these towns were soon abandoned [39]. Before the decline of the trans-Saharan trade in the seventeenth century, there were three main routes across the desert: the ‘western’, leading from southern Morocco to the western Sahel; the ‘central’, and the most important, from Tunisia to the Niger bend; and the ‘Egyptian’, from Lower Egypt to the Niger bend via the oases of Siwa and Kufra, which had, however, been abandoned in the late tenth century as it was too dangerous [40]. Very little is known about the volume of trans-Saharan trade during the first Islamic centuries [41]. According to the Arabic sources of that time, the caravans brought huge amounts of gold to the north annually, but modern estimates range from 1,000 to 3,000 kilograms per year [42]. Nevertheless, a real boom in the trade started in the tenth century with the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in Northern Africa in 909 which put an end to the earlier Berber states in the area: the Aghlabids, Rustamids, Idrisids and Banu Midrar. The reason for this increase in the caravan trade was that the Shiite Fatimids, who were rivals both of the Umayyads of Spain and of the Abbasids of Baghdad, constantly needed a lot of gold to finance their never-ending wars and extensive religious propaganda. The emergence of the Fatimids made the western route the most important one, since their access to the central route was blocked by their enemies who still occupied important oases in the northern Sahara [43]. Yet the transfer of the Fatimid capital from Tunisia to Egypt in 971 caused a brief period of stagnation in the trade. Residing now in Cairo, the Fatimid caliphs were less interested in North African affairs, and they could obtain gold more easily from Nubian mines [44]. Another boom took place in the late eleventh century, when the Almoravids, originally a group of Berber nomads from the western Sahara, united Morocco and Andalusia into a single empire. Like the Fatimids, the Almoravids also needed plenty of gold to finance their wars against both the Christians in Spain and the rebelling Muslims in Northern Africa [45]. During the Almoravid period, gold seems to have flowed to the north in great amounts, for the Almoravid gold dinars, the marabotins, became common and highly esteemed currency in the Mediterranean area, including the Christian parts [46]. A brief period of stagnation in the caravan trade followed the downfall of Almoravids in 1147, but the trade continued to grow steadily again from the mid-thirteenth century until its violent interruption by the Moroccan invasion in Timbuktu in 1591 [47]. The encounter of Islamic and West African cultures was basically peaceful, and it resembled the 'controlled relationship'. This concept is usually applied to the European encounter with China, where foreign traders were forced to obey the rules set by the Chinese government which decided unilaterally on the location of trade, the number of traders, as well as type and character of the goods. If the Europeans were not willing to accept these rules, they were not permitted to continue their trade. Before the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839, the Chinese Empire was powerful enough to reject all military threats on the part of European naval powers [48]. In Western Africa, the contact zone was limited to the desert-edge cities, where North African traders isolated themselves in their own quarters, usually lying outside the local settlement [49]. Yet there was no strict racial discrimination: since the traders seldom mastered West African languages, they were dependent on local interpreters and brokers [50]. Moreover, many of the Arabs took local concubines, as no women of their own society were available. This behaviour is understandable, for the traders often had to spend several years in the south, where permanent agents of North African trading companies also lived [51]. Afterwards twin cities, with separate quarters for the Muslim and non-Muslim population, became a common structure for urban settlements throughout the Sudanic Western Africa. On the other hand, the isolation of North African traders was partly voluntary as it offered them several advantages. First, the West African interior was as unhealthy for Arabs as the coastal area was for Europeans, and thus the traders were not willing to leave the Sahelian cities where the risk of becoming ill was lower [52]. Secondly, by isolating themselves, the traders were able to maintain their own culture and practise their own religion. Thirdly, the enclavement increased the security of the traders, as they could set their own rules and elect their own leader to represent them collectively in relation to the local ruler and to look after the property of those traders who were absent or had died. In some cases, the Arab trading colony, if large enough, could even become a sort of power base for pressing the local ruler to adopt pro-Muslim policy [53]. Nevertheless, outside their trading colonies, the Arab merchants had to follow local laws and customs, even when they were against the Quranic law. But the cultural difference was recognized, and the traders were not intentionally forced to do such things which they might feel offensive. In China, Europeans were obliged to perform the kowtow in front of the high mandarins, which they regarded as extremely humiliating; in Western Africa, the Arab traders were exempted from performing the common gesture of submission in front of the kings, which was to sprinkle dust over one’s head [54]. The principal reason why the North African traders were willing to accommodate to local conditions in Western Africa, was certainly the same as in the case of Europeans in China: it was the only way to carry on the profitable trade [55]. Before the European discovery of America, West African mines were the most important single source of gold for both Northern Africa and Europe; it is estimated that as much as two-thirds of all the gold circulating in the Mediterranean area in the Middle Ages had been imported across the Sahara [56]. This made the uninterrupted continuity of caravan trade more important for North African rulers than it was for their West African counterparts. The demand for Saharan rock salt, which the Arabs bartered for gold in the Sahelian markets, is usually overemphasized in African historiography, as Western scholars have taken literally the claims in Arabic sources, according to which ‘the salt was sold at one weight for one weight of gold’ [57]. Yet the Saharan rock salt was an expensive luxury product and available to the wealthy only. Moreover, it could be substituted by locally-produced salt from plants and soil, and sea salt imported from the Atlantic coast, whereas the North African rulers could not easily obtain gold for their coins from other sources [58]. The position of the powerful states of the Sudanic Western Africa was not, however, based on the possession of the actual gold reserves but on the control over the trade routes leading from the Sahelian terminals to the gold fields in the south. In this way, the rulers of the northern savanna could monopolize the trade, and they strictly prevented the Arabs from establishing any direct contact with the actual producers of gold. Inside Western Africa, the trade was carried on by local brokers [59]. Another reason for the conciliatory attitude was that the North African traders were without the physical protection provided by their own civilization, while staying in sub-Saharan Africa. Before the wider introduction of firearms in the sixteenth century, the Arab rulers of Northern Africa had no real capability to threaten their West African counterparts with war, as there were no such differences in military technology which could have guaranteed them absolute superiority [60]. Even thereafter there was no significant difference in strength between North and West African armies, as the West Africans too started obtaining firearms from the Turks and the Europeans [61]. Furthermore, the West African armies were large, although the claims in Arabic sources, such as the ruler of Ghana having an army of 200,000 warriors, are certainly exaggerated. Yet, in any case, we can speak of tens of thousands [62]. To send an army of this size across the Sahara was extremely hazardous, and the success of the Moroccan invasion in Timbuktu in 1591 is rather an exception which reinforces the general rule: the ruler of Songhay Empire considered it unnecessary to poison the wells in the desert or to organize any effective counter-attack, because he was convinced that the Moroccans would perish in the desert anyway. In fact, the Moroccan commander Judar Pasha did lose a great many of his men during the deadly march across the western Sahara [63]. Besides the desert, another natural advantage which protected the West Africans was the unhealthy environment. Besides malaria, the savanna is infected by trypanosomiasis, which is lethal especially for quadrupeds, thus preventing the large-scale use of cavalry forces in this area [64]. A curious example of the military encounter between North and West African states is the dispute over the possession of the important salt mine of Taghaza in the central Sahara. At first Taghaza had been controlled by the Saharan nomads, but in the early fourteenth century the rulers of Mali managed to maintain some control over the routes leading to these mines from the south. By the end of the fifteenth century, the rulers of Songhay, which had superseded Mali as the dominant power in Sudanic West Africa, extended their rule even further into the desert and appointed a governor in Taghaza. However, after taking Marrakesh in 1544 sultan Muhammad al-Mahdi, the real founder of Sadid power in Morocco, demanded that Askia Ishaq I of Songhay hand over to him the mines. Askia Ishaq refused and, to demonstrate his own power, he launched an expedition which invaded southern Morocco, forcing sultan Muhammad to flee from Marrakesh [65]. Similarly, the rulers of Bornu, lying around Lake Chad, were able to expand their political dominance deep into Fezzan, occupying the principal oases until the sixteenth century [66]. With the increased volume of trans-Saharan trade in the Islamic period, new cultural influences began to spread in Western Africa. The most important of these was a new religion, Islam, which was adopted in the states belonging to the sphere of the caravan trade by the end of the eleventh century. The conversion was mainly peaceful, and it had been preceded by a long period of coexistence in the trade route terminals [67]. Motives for the conversion were certainly many: we should not underestimate the charm of novelty and human curiosity, nor the various advantages a new religion can offer to an individual convert, such as healing and social prestige. In Western Africa, Muslims are still visibly distinguished from other people by their dressing and eating habits, and they do not hesitate to perform their religious rituals in public space [68]. To West African traders, Islam provided uniform standards and measures [69]. To the rulers, the conversion offered several political advantages. First, they became, at least in theory but often in reality too, equals to North African rulers, which made the maintenance of diplomatic relations easier. Yet the conversion did not include any recognition of the political supremacy of North African rulers [70]. Secondly, Islam provided them with an effective means to increase their personal power. Literacy facilitated the government of large empires, and Islam could be used as a unifying cult within the multiethnic and multireligious states, as Christianity was in the later Roman Empire — there was not always a big difference between the omnipotent God and the emperor [71]. Yet Islam remained for a
long time as a cult of the courts and commercial centres:
Mali, Songhay and Bornu were no Muslim states, although
medieval Arabic sources depict them as such. Actually,
the West African rulers were not very anxious to spread
the new religion among their subjects, since it could
have endangered their own position [72]. Contrariwise, the West African rulers
had to play all the time a double role: in relation to
Arab traders and rulers they acted as pious Muslims, but
in relation to their own subjects they carefully
fulfilled their duties as divine kings. In this way,
Islam caused internal tension in West African societies
which occasionally broke out in civil war, if the ruler
could not maintain the balance between the Muslim and
traditionalist cliques [73]. However, the adoption of Islam had not
only political consequences; it also integrated Western
Africa more closely into Islamic civilization, and gave
West Africans, for the first time in their history, a
concrete reason to cross the Sahara. The Discovery: Arrival of the West Africans in the Mediterranean There is no evidence that West Africans had crossed the Sahara during classical Antiquity. Some individual adventurers may have done so, but their experiences remain unknown to us. Black people were not, of course, unfamiliar in the ancient Mediterranean. There were many black warriors, freemen and slaves in Egyptian, Carthaginian and Roman societies, but they were mostly Nubians or the autochthonous black inhabitants of the northern Sahara who later merged with the imported black slave population [74]. It was not until the beginning of the regular trans-Saharan trade in the Islamic period that the first West Africans began to arrive in the Mediterranean. The vast majority of them were slaves [75]. There are no records concerning the volume of trans-Saharan slave trade, but it is estimated that during the thousand years which followed its beginning in the eighth century AD, about 9.3 million black slaves were imported to the north, including those who died during the painful crossing of the desert. In fact, the total quantity of the trans-Saharan slave trade was equal to that of the Atlantic trade, though its annual volume was much lower [76]. However, no great black communities were born in Northern Africa, comparable to the Atlantic slave societies. There were several reasons for this. First, slaves were mainly used in Northern Africa for domestic tasks, contrary to the plantations in the New World, and therefore no massive concentrations of black population could develop. Secondly, the vast majority of the slaves were women whose fertility was low, whereas male slaves were mostly eunuchs or soldiers whose ability to father children was limited. The mortality of slaves had to be replaced by importing new ones, and thus the overall amount of black slaves who were actually present in Northern Africa remained small. Thirdly, the offspring of black concubines by their Arab masters were free and they merged gradually in the local North African society: the Alawid sultan Mulay Ismail (1672–1727) of Morocco, for instance, was the son of a black concubine. And finally, manumission of slaves as an act of piety, or after a certain term of service, was quite common in the Islamic world [77]. Although most of the freed slaves remained in Northern Africa, some of them chose to return to their original homeland [78]. The voluntary traffic of West Africans to the Mediterranean began with the adoption of the Muslim faith. Pilgrimage to Mecca is one the five pillars of Islam, and in principle an obligation for all Muslims. The first West African Muslims had visited Mecca in the early twelfth century, probably soon after their conversion. These pilgrims were mainly notables and rulers who had the economic means to perform the long journey [79]. Especially the rulers of Mali became famous of their sumptuous pilgrimages, the first of which is said to have taken place in the 1260s [80]. The most famous was the magnificent pilgrimage of Mansa Musa in 1324, whose visit was remembered in Cairo for centuries afterwards [81]. It was certainly witnessed by some Italian merchants too, for Cairo was the centre of the Mediterranean spice trade; at least the name Melli appeared in European maps already in 1339 [82]. Another equally impressive event was the pilgrimage of Askia Muhammad of Songhay in 1496–98 [83]. Pilgrimage by common people became more general from the fourteenth century onwards: a caravan of 5,000 West African pilgrims is reported to have arrived in Cairo in 743/1343. The most popular route from Western Africa to Mecca passed through Walata and the oases of Tuat, Ghadames and Augila. Another important route crossed the central Sahara, through Agadez and Murzuk. The third route led through Hausaland and Darfur to the Nile, but it came into use only much later. Having reached Cairo, the West Africans joined in the official pilgrimage caravan organized by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and later by the Ottoman governors [84]. The royal pilgrimages had also an important role in maintaining diplomatic relations with North African rulers. Yet official state visits were performed much earlier. Already in the first half of the twelfth century, the Muslim ruler of a West African state called Diafunu visited Marrakesh where he met the Almoravid amir [85]. Even before this visit, the Rustamid imam of Tahert had sent in the early ninth century a delegation with precious gifts to the court of the ‘King of Blacks’, referring most likely to the ruler of Gao [86]. In the fourteenth century, delegations were exchanged frequently between the West and North African capitals. The rulers of Mali, for example, sent embassies to congratulate the victorious Marinid sultan Abu ’l-Hasan of Morocco for his conquests of Tlemcen in 1337 and Constantine in 1349 [87]. In 1577, the ruler of Bornu sent an embassy to Istanbul to seek military assistance from the Ottoman Empire [88]. These delegations prove that rulers of the largest West African states were closely observing the political situation in Northern Africa. Diplomatic relations were also maintained by correspondence. Unfortunately, no letters have survived, and there are a few references to their contents in the medieval Arabic sources [89]. Presumably the correspondence dealt largely with affairs related to the trans-Saharan trade: in the early thirteenth century, the governor of Sijilmasa, for example, wrote to the ruler of Ghana, complaining about the maltreatment of certain Arab traders [90]. By these direct contacts to the north, West Africans learnt to know both their own continent and the outside world. Already before the adoption of Islam, those West Africans, rulers and brokers, who were dealing closely with the caravan trade certainly had some idea of the Mediterranean, which was based on the information they obtained from the visiting Arab merchants. Afterwards, this knowledge was improved by the information the West African pilgrims provided of those areas they had passed through on their long voyage to Hijaz. Moreover, in Mecca, the pilgrims were able to hear news concerning even more distant areas, as believers arrived there from every part of the Muslim world. Their mutual communication was possible, as they all shared the same language, Arabic. According to Umar Al-Naqar: [91] «The traditional means of transport, before the age of air travel, necessitating occasional halts along routes which lay across North Africa and Egypt or along the stretch of the Sudan belt to the Nile, gave the [West African] traveller ample time for observation of the lives of different countries and people. This no doubt added to his store of general knowledge and broadened his outlook. Encouraged by the religious merits of visiting places outside the Hijaz, such as Jerusalem, some ordinary West Africans finding themselves abroad travelled further afield in the Muslim world to places like Constantinople and Baghdad.» Al-Naqar’s view applies above all to the situation in the nineteenth century—when Africans knew nothing of the wider world and very little of their own—and it is strongly supported by the data available in the contemporary European sources: the explorers frequently met West Africans who could boast of having visited not only the holy cities of Islam but also Fez, Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul. Some of them had visited the Middle East several times, or alternatively stayed there for years [92]. Heinrich Barth, for example, met in Kano in 1851 ‘a native of Negroland’ who had spent twenty years in Istanbul and spoke modern Greek fluently [93]. Yet as early as the late sixteenth century, a Portuguese navigator reported that he had met in Senegambia many blacks who were capable of speaking French; some of them had even visited France [94]. However, not every West African traveller was a pilgrim or headed for the north: the local traders were regularly operating in a wide area reaching from Senegal to Darfur in the east [95]. Considering the infrequence and irregularity of the caravans—the mere crossing of the Sahara took at least sixty days and it could be done in certain seasons only—news concerning the wider world reached West African interior surprisingly fast [96]. When Mungo Park arrived in Segu in July 1796, being the first European visitor in this city, he was told about the naval battles between the French and the British in the Mediterranean which were fought a year earlier [97]. When Hugh Clapperton visited Sokoto in 1824, he was surprised by Muhammad Bello, ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate, who asked him detailed questions concerning the British policy in India and the religious situation in Europe, though some of his inquiries in the latter subject were rather dated [98]. In December 1871, Gustav Nachtigal heard in Kukawa, the capital of Bornu, rumours concerning the Franco-Prussian war [99]. Although these reports were often rather perfunctory, as Nachtigal complained, they indicate that some nineteenth-century West Africans understood perfectly well that there is a wider world outside their own and they were interested in knowing about it. There is much less data available concerning the flow of information from the Mediterranean into Western Africa in earlier times, apart from the Marinid campaigns, but it is reasonable to assume that the situation was quite similar to the nineteenth century; at least we know that already in the twelfth century, some Muslims from Ghana went to Spain [100]. Thus it is not entirely unrealistic to speculate that news concerning the remarkable events in the medieval Mediterranean, such as the battle of Hattin in 1187, the death of King Louis IX in Tunisia in 1270, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, or the conquest of Granada in 1492, were received in the capitals of Ghana, Mali and Songhai almost immediately. Besides personal experiences of the pilgrims and rumours told by the Arab merchants, the third source of information concerning the wider world was books. Alongside Islam, some West African Muslims became literate in Arabic, which gave them access to the entire Arabic scientific literature, including the geographical works. This point is significant, as geography was far more advanced in the medieval Islamic world than in contemporary Europe. A reason for this was that the Arabs had close commercial contacts not only with sub-Saharan Africa, but also with India, China, Russia and Central Europe [101]: the twelfth-century Arab geographers knew even some Finnish toponyms [102]. Books became an important item of merchandise in the trans-Saharan trade, although it is very difficult to know which titles the West African readers obtained [103]. However, we may expect with good cause that many of the books which were popular amongst the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century North African scholars, such as the works of al-Masudi, al-Bakri, and Ibn Khaldun, were probably familiar to their West African counterparts too [104]. Eventually West Africans began to study in the famous Islamic universities of Northern Africa. Already in the twelfth century there were in Ghana ‘scholars, lawyers, and Koran readers [who] have become pre-eminent in these fields’; some of them were probably educated in Morocco [105]. In the following century, a hostel (madrasa) for West African students and pilgrims was opened in Cairo, and it was maintained by the rulers of Bornu [106]. The first West African Islamic university, called Sankore, was established in Timbuktu by Mansa Musa in the 1330s. The building was designed by Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, an Andalusian architect whom Mansa Musa had invited to his empire with other Muslim scholars [107]. It is claimed that the Sankore library would have contained all the important works of Arabic literature, until the library was burnt in the nineteenth century [108]. Summarizing all the various aspects of the commercial, intellectual and physical contacts with Northern Africa through the trans-Saharan trade and pilgrimage, we may conclude that West Africans certainly knew more than something about the Mediterranean and perhaps a little about Europe too, before the beginning of the Portuguese discoveries in 1415—some individuals may even have possessed quite a detailed picture of their contemporary world. Yet this knowledge was restricted to a narrow group only, consisting mostly of rulers, scholars, noblemen, and wealthy merchants, who all had a practical need for accurate information of the wider world and means to achieve it; to most West Africans, living outside the sphere of the caravan trade, the Mediterranean was certainly as fantastic place as the sub-Saharan Africa was to most Europeans up to the nineteenth century [109]. It is curious that Mansa Musa, for example, whose deeds are so well documented in the Arabic sources is remembered in the local oral tradition mainly as a great magician who brought powerful fetishes from Mecca [110]. On the other hand, the
question of the West African discovery of the
Mediterranean is somewhat academic: whatever the West
Africans knew about the wider world, this knowledge did
not encourage them to start exploring it themselves.
Nevertheless, speculating on this question helps us to
break the persistent image of sub-Saharan Africa as a
‘Dark Continent’, living in constant stagnation
and being forgotten before the coming of the Europeans.
Africa was part of the global system of economics and
knowledge long before Livingstone and Stanley;
yet it was not until the age of European exploration that
the encounter of Africans with the wider world turned
definitely to a collision. [2] Hearts of darkness. The European exploration of Africa, London 1992, ix; italics added. [3] S. Olu Agbi, Japanese relations with Africa 1868–1978, Ibadan 1992, 1. [4] For more on this subject, see for instance Ivan van Sertima, They came before Columbus: the African presence in Ancient America, New York 1977. [5] Also, it would be useful to ask how well
the nineteenth-century Europeans knew their own continent.
If explorers met East Africans who had no idea whether
the Lualaba is connected to the Zaire or the Nile, there
were similarly many Englishmen and Frenchmen who hardly
had any idea concerning the course of the Danube, or
Scandinavian geography. On the other hand, we should
remember that very few people, whether in Africa or in
Europe, had any need for accurate geographical
information about distant areas they had no reason to
visit themselves and with which they had otherwise no
contacts. [6] On the other hand, the stormy waters of Atlantic did prevent direct maritime contacts between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean for a long time, until the Portuguese developed the caravel in the fifteenth century. Although the fantastic voyage of Hanno to the Bight of Biafra is still firmly established in modern African historiography, there is no indisputable proof of any Carthaginian sailings beyond the southern Morocco or circumnavigation of the African continent during Antiquity. See Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners. Seafarers and sea fighters of the Mediterranean in ancient times, 2nd edition, Princeton 1991, 116–23; P.E.H. Hair, ‘The Periplus of Hanno in the history and historiography of Black Africa’, History in Africa, xiv, 1987, 43–66; cf. Werner Huß, ‘Die Antike Mittelmeerwelt und Innerafrika bis zum Ende der Herrschaft der Karthager und der Ptolemaier’, in H. Duchhardt, J.A. Schlumberger & P. Segl (eds.), Afrika. Entdeckung und Erforschung eines Kontinents, Köln 1989, 3–5. [7] Merrick Posnansky, ‘Aspects of early West African trade’, World Archaeology, v, 1973, 149–50. [8] Histories, 4.183. [9] See E.F. Gautier, ‘Anciennes voies
du commerce trans-Saharien’, in Hyllningsskrift
tillägnad Sven Hedin på hans 70-årsdag den 19 Febr.
1935, Stockholm 1935: Geografiska Annaler, XVII, 550–62. [10] Raymond Mauny, ‘Une route préhistorique à travers le Sahara occidental’, Bulletin de l'I.F.A.N., ix, 1947, 341–57. [11] See for instance Huß, ‘Die Antike Mittelmeerwelt’, 6–7. [12] See John Swanson, ‘The myth of trans-Saharan trade during the Roman era’, International Journal of African Historical studies, viii, 1975, 582–600; Mark Milburn, ‘On Libyan and Saharan chariots and "Garamantes"’, The Maghreb Review, iv, 1979, 451–8; and Timothy F. Garrard, ‘Myth and metrology: the early trans-Saharan gold trade’, Journal of African History, xxiii, 1982, 443–61. [13] Johannes Nicolaisen, Ecology and culture of the pastoral Tuareg with particular reference to the Tuareg of Ahaggar and Ayr, Copenhagen 1963: Nationalmuseets skrifter, etnografisk række, IX, 320. [14] Gabriel Camps, ‘Le cheval et le
char dans la préhistoire Nord-Africaine et Saharienne’,
in G. Camps & M. Gast (eds.), Les chars préhistoriques
du Sahara. Archéologie et techniques d'attelage. Actes
du colloque de Sénanque 21–22 mars 1981, Aix-en-Provençe
1982, 9–22. [15] A.R. Willcox, The Rock Art of Africa, Beckenham 1984, 38–40; for an explanation for the lack of archaeological evidence, see Robin Law, ‘The Garamantes and trans-Saharan enterprise in classical times’, Journal of African History, viii, 1967, 197–8. [16] There is, for example, a claim in the Greek sources, according to which a Carthaginian called Mago would have crossed the desert three times (see Huß, ‘Die Antike Mittelmeerwelt’, 7)! [17] Histories, 2.32. [18] Law, ‘The Garamantes’, 184–6; Huß, ‘Die Antike Mittelmeerwelt’, 7. [19] Jehan Desanges, ‘Rom und das Innere Afrikas’, in H. Duchhardt, J.A. Schlumberger & P. Segl (eds.), Afrika. Entdeckung und Erforschung eines Kontinents, Köln 1989, 36–7. [20] Michael Brett & Elizabeth Fentress, The
Berbers, Oxford 1996, 208. Tin Hinan (‘She of
tents’) is the alleged ancestress of the central
Saharan Tuaregs. [21] P. Salama, ‘The Sahara in classical Antiquity’, in UNESCO General History of Africa, II, London 1981, 526; Desanges, ‘Rom und das Innere Afrikas’, 35. [22] Susan Keech McIntosh, ‘Conclusion’, in S.K. McIntosh (ed.), Excavations at Jenné-Jeno, Hambarketolo, and Kaniana (Inland Niger Delta, Mali), the 1981 season, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1995: University of California publications in anthropology, XX, 390. [23] See Vallées du Niger, Paris 1993,
546, figure 81. [24] See Posnansky, ‘Aspects’, 156. Yet there is an historiographical myth, according to which some Norman traders from Dieppe and Rouen sailed to the Guinea coast already in 1364 (Th. Monod, ‘Un vieux problème: les navigations dieppoises sur la côte occidentale d'Afrique au XIVe siècle’. Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N., xxv, 1963, sér. B, 427–34). [25] James L.A. Webb Jr., Desert Frontier. Ecological and economic change along the western Sahel, 1600–1850, Madison 1995, 13–14; Erkki Virtanen, ‘Nomadism and desertification’, Suomen Antropologi, vii, 1982, 182–3. [26] Jean Devisse, ‘Trade and trade routes in West Africa’, in UNESCO General History of Africa, III, London 1988, 371; McIntosh, ‘Conclusion’, 391. [27] Juliet Clutton-Brock, ‘The spread
of domestic animals in Africa’, in T. Shaw et al.
(eds.), The Archaeology of Africa. Food, metals and
towns, London 1993, 65–6; Brent D. Shaw, ‘The
camel in Roman North Africa and the Sahara: history,
biology, and human economy’, Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N.,
xxxxi, 1979, sér. B, 663–721. [28] Devisse, ‘Trade and trade routes’, 369–71. [29] Desanges, ‘Rom und das Innere Afrikas’, 35–6; James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, Princeton 1992, 82–3 and 132. [30] Swanson, ‘The myth of trans-Saharan trade’, 593–8; Desanges, ‘Rom und das Innere Afrikas’, 49. [31] Devisse, ‘Trade and trade routes’, 381; Timothy Insoll, ‘A cache of hippopotamus ivory at Gao, Mali; and a hypothesis of its use’, Antiquity, lxix, 1995, 331; McIntosh, ‘Conclusion’, 390. [32] In 1912 Maurice Delafosse, for instance, introduced a widely adopted hypothesis, according to which the founders of ancient Ghana were Jews who had escaped Roman revenge from Cyrenaica after their unsuccessful revolt in AD 117 (see Haut-Sénégal-Niger, Paris 1912, II, 22–5). [33] See R.J. & S.K. McIntosh, ‘From
siècles obscurs to revolutionary centuries on the middle
Niger’, World Archaeology, xx, 1988, 141–65. [34] Devisse, ‘Trade and trade routes’, 376–7; P. Allsworth-Jones, ‘Imported or indigenous: a recurring debate in West Africa’s prehistory’, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, xiii, 1994, 30; R.J. & S.K. McIntosh, ‘Prospection archéologique aux alentours de Dia, Mali 1986–87’, Nyame Akuma, no. 29, 1987, 42–5; Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, ‘Herders, traders and clerics: the impact of trade, religion and warfare on the evolution of the Moorish society’, in J.G. Galaty & P. Bonte (eds.), Herders, Warriors and Traders. Pastoralism in Africa, Boulder 1991, 202. [35] Pekka Masonen, ‘Saharan karavaanikauppa: myytit ja historiallinen ilmiö’, Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, xcii, 1994, 120–3; Devisse, ‘Trade and trade routes’, 379–83; Andrew S. Ehrencreutz, ‘Studies in the monetary history of the Near East in the Middle Ages II: the standard of fineness of western and eastern dinars before the Crusades’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vi, 1963, 251. [36] Tadeusz Lewicki, ‘The role of the Sahara and Saharians in relationships between north and south’, in UNESCO General History of Africa, III, London 1988, 289 and 307. [37] The names Ghana and Gao (‘Kawkaw’)
are mentioned in the Arabic sources for the first time in
the mid-ninth century by al-Khuwarizmi. Yet both states
certainly existed long before this date; customarily the
formation of ancient Ghana is dated to the fourth century
ad. For al-Khuwarizmi, see J.F.P. Hopkins & N.
Levtzion, Corpus of early Arabic sources for West
African history, Cambridge 1981, 3–10. [38] S.K. & R.J. McIntosh, ‘Cities without citadels: understanding urban origins along the middle Niger’, in T. Shaw et al. (eds.), The Archaeology of Africa. Food, metals and towns, London 1993, 633. [39] E. Ann McDougall, ‘The view from Awdaghust: war, trade and social change in the southwestern Sahara, from the eight to the fifteenth century’, Journal of African History, xxvi, 1985, 12; B. Marie Perinbam, ‘Trade and society in the Western Sahara and the Western Sudan: an overview’, Bulletin de l’I.F.A.N., xxiv, 1972, sér. B, 783. [40] Ould Cheikh, ‘Herders, traders and clerics’, 202. [41] Jean Devisse, ‘La question d’Audagust’, in D. Robert, S. Robert & J. Devisse (eds.), Tegdaoust I. Recherches sur Aoudgahost, Paris 1970, 113–14; Ralph A. Austen, ‘Marginalization, stagnation and growth: the trans-Saharan caravan trade in the era of European expansion, 1500–1900’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires. Long-distance trade in the early modern world, 1350–1750, Cambridge 1990, 314. [42] Devisse, ‘Trade and trade routes’, 388–9; Austen, ‘Marginalization’, table 10.3. [43] Devisse, ‘La question d’Audagust’, 142–6. [44] Ronald Messier, ‘The Almoravids.
West African gold and the gold currency of the
Mediterranean basin’, Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient, xvii, 1974, 39. [45] Nehemia Levtzion, ‘cAbd Allah b. Yasin and the Almoravids’, in J.R. Willis (ed.), Studies in West African Islamic History, I, London 1979, 91–9. [46] Messier, ‘The Almoravids’, 32–3. [47] Reasons for the decline of trans-Saharan trade during the late twelfth century were probably both the political turbulence in the western Sahel, caused by the decline of Ghana, and the fact that the Almohads, who superseded the Almoravids in Morocco and Andalusia, could not expand their rule in the western Sahara. The last supporters of the Almoravids were still fighting against the Almohads in southern Morocco in early thirteenth century. [48] See Urs Bitterli, Cultures in
Conflict. Encounter between European and non-European
cultures, 1492–1800, Stanford 1989, 140–2. [49] B. Marie Perinbam, ‘Soninke-Ibadiyya interactions in the Western Sudan c. ninth to c. eleventh century’, The Maghreb Review, xiv, 1989, 73–4; see al-Bakri and al-Muhallabi, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 79 and 174. Yet it is well possible that the early Arabic writers, when describing the separate identities of the two settlements in the Sahelian cities, are consciously contrasting the difference between the ‘white’ merchants and the black natives, to a degree which never existed in geographical reality (Timothy Insoll, ‘The external creation of the Western Sahel’s past: the use and abuse of Arabic sources’, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, xiii, 1994, 42). [50] Lars Sundström, The Trade of Guinea, Lund 1965: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, XXIV, 14 and 58–9; see al-Bakri, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 83. [51] Stephen Baier, An economic history of
Central Niger, Oxford 1980, 58–9 and 67;
Perinbam, ‘Trade and society’, 787. [52] According to al-Bakri, writing in the late eleventh-century, there was hardly anyone in Awdaghust ‘who does not complain of one or the other [disease]’ (Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 68). [53] Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Merchants vs. scholars and clerics in West Africa: differential and complementary roles’, in N. Levztion & H.J. Fisher (eds.), Rural and Urban Islam in Africa, Boulder 1987, 21–37. [54] See al-Bakri, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 80. [55] There was, of course, great variation in the degree of accommodation between the Arabs and Europeans in different areas and times. Also, one reason for accommodation in both cases was certainly the wish to win the sympathies of the local people for the religion of the traders. However, the essential difference between the Arabs and Europeans was perhaps that the Quranic law requires commercial exchange to be just and peaceful, and this principle concerns also the trade with non-Muslims, whereas Europeans’ attitudes were based more on the actual balance of power. See A. Udovitch, ‘Islamic law and the social context of exchange in the medieval Middle East’, History and Anthropology, i, 1985, 445–65. [56] Ward Barrett, ‘World bullion flows, 1450—1800’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires. Long-distance trade in the early modern world, 1350–1750, Cambridge 1990, 224 and 247. [57] See Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, in Hopkins
& Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 132. [58] E. Ann McDougall, ‘Salts of the western Sahara: myths, mysteries, and historical significance’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, xxiii, 1990, 233–7; Sundström, ‘The Trade of Guinea’, 122–6. [59] Perinbam, ‘Trade and society’, 780–2. [60] This fact is well illustrated in discussion between the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur (1578–1603) and his counsellors who opposed the sultan’s intention to attack Timbuktu, emphasizing that none of his predecessors had ever dared to undertake such a venture. Yet Ahmad al-Mansur pointed out that, unlike his predecessors, he possessed cannons and muskets which would crush the Songhay cavalry (see Mohammed Esseghir ben Elhadj ben Abdallah Eloufrani, Nozhat-Elhâdi. Histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc (1511–1670), traduction française par O. Houdas, Paris 1889, 160). [61] See R.A. Kea, ‘Firearms and warfare on the Gold and Slave Coasts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries’, Journal of African History, xii, 1971, 185–213; and Humphrey J. Fisher & Virginia Rowland, ‘Firearms in the Central Sudan’, ibid., xii, 1971, 215–39; also Geoffrey Parker, ‘Europe and the wider world, 1500–1700: the military balance’, in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, Cambridge 1991, 161–95. [62] According to Heinrich Barth, who travelled widely in Central Africa in 1850–54, both the rulers of Bornu and Bagirmi could muster an army of 13,000 men (Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa..., London 1965: Centenary edition, II, 560 and 638–40). [63] See Lansiné Kaba, ‘Archers,
musketeers, and mosquitos: the Moroccan invasion of the
Sudan and the Songhay resistance (1591–1612)’, Journal
of African History, xxii, 1981, 457–75. [64] The annual horse mortality of the French colonial cavalry during their conquest of the Niger valley in the 1880s was almost ninety percent. This high mortality was caused mainly by the unhealthy environment; only few horses died in actual combats (Webb, ‘Desert Frontier’, 74). [65] See Abderrahman es-Sa’di, Tarikh es-Soudan, traduit de l’arabe par O. Houdas, Paris 1900, 163–4; Kaba, ‘Archers’, 458, n.4. [66] Austen, ‘Marginalization’, 347; Perinbam, ‘Trade and society’, 783. [67] The impulse for the conversion in the western Sahel is customarily attributed to the Almoravids who are said to have conquered Ghana in 469/1076, forcing its inhabitants to embrace Islam. Yet the Almoravid conquest of Ghana is one of the many myths which still haunt African historiography: we know nothing about the Almoravid activities in the western Sahel after 448/1056–7 and very little of the actual conversion. The available Arabic sources tell us only that Islam was adopted in Ghana, as well as other parts at the Niger bend area, at the time of the Almoravids; in Senegambia it was adopted already before the Almoravids. See Pekka Masonen & Humphrey J. Fisher, ‘Not quite Venus from the waves: the Almoravid conquest of Ghana in the modern historiography of Western Africa’, History in Africa, xxiii, 1996; also Dierk Lange, ‘The Almoravids and the Islamization of the great states of West Africa’, in Itinéraires d'orient hommages à Claude Cahen, Bures-sur-Yvette 1994: Res Orientales, VI, 65–76. [68] See Humphrey J. Fisher, ‘The Juggernaut’s apologia: conversion to Islam in black Africa’, Africa. Journal of the International African Institute, lv, 1985, 151–73. [69] Daniel F. McCall, ‘Islamization of
the Western and Central Sudan in the eleventh century’,
Boston University Papers on Africa, v, 1971, 17;
Perinbam, ‘Trade and society’, 788–9. [70] Robert Smith, ‘Peace and palaver: international relations in precolonial West Africa’, Journal of African History, xiv, 1973, 612–14; see al-cUmari’s description concerning the meeting of Mansa Musa of Mali and sultan al-Nasir of Egypt in 1324, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 269–70. [71] J-L. Triaud, Islam et sociétés soudanaises au moyen-âge, Ouagadougou 1973, 106 and 159; Lansiné Kaba, ‘Power, prosperity and social inequality in Songhay (1461–1591)’, in Earl Scott (ed.), Life before the drought, Boston 1984, 32–3. [72] Nor were they anxious to convert their neighbouring peoples to Islam; it would have made the obtaining of slaves more difficult, since Muslims might not be enslaved—at least in principle (Kaba, ‘Power’, 33). [73] John D. Fage, ‘Some thoughts on
state-formation in the Western Sudan before the
seventeenth century’, Boston University Papers in
African History, i, 1964, 27–34; Biodun
Adediran, ‘Islam and state-formation in West Africa:
the experience of Mali c. 1200–1450’, Islamic
Culture, lviii, 1984, 63–73. [74] Jehan Desanges, ‘The proto-Berbers’, in UNESCO General History of Africa, II, London 1981, 427–8. According to al-Bakri, the city of Sijilmasa in southern Morocco, which soon became an important centre of the caravan trade, was founded and ruled in 140/757–8 by a black called cIsa b. Mazid (Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 65). Nothing is known of his ethnicity; he probably belonged to the indigenous North African black population. [75] Another important source for black slaves was Nubia whose Christian rulers had to provide annually 360 slaves for the Muslim governors of Egypt (S. Jacobielski, ‘Christian Nubia at the height of its civilization’, in UNESCO General History of Africa, III, London 1988, 194–5). The black troops in Tariq b. Ziyad’s army which invaded Spain 711 were thus more likely Nubians than West Africans (see Ishaq b. al-Husayn, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 39). [76] K.P. Moseley, ‘Caravel and caravan. West Africa and the world-economies, ca. 900–1900 AD’, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations, xv, 1992, 534. [77] J.O. Hunwick, ‘Black slaves in the Mediterranean world: introduction to a neglected aspect of the African diaspora’, in Elizabeth Savage (ed.), The Human Commodity. Perspectives on the trans-Saharan slave trade, London 1992, 5–38. [78] Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara and Sudan,
translated from the original German with new introduction
and notes by A.G.B. Fisher & H.J. Fisher, London 1971–87,
II, 178. [79] al-Zuhri, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 98; cUmar Al-Naqar, The pilgrimage tradition in West Africa, Khartoum 1972, 27 and 92–3. [80] Ibn Khaldun, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 333. [81] al-Maqrizi, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 351. [82] See the portolan map of Angelino Dulcert, in Youssouf Kamal, Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Aegyptii, IV:2, Cairo 1937, 1222–3. [83] es-Sa’di, ‘Tarikh es-Soudan’, 119–21. [84] Al-Naqar, ‘The pilgrimage tradition’, 92–113. [85] Yaqut, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 170. This Almoravid amir was most likely Ali b. Yusuf (1106–42), or his successor Tashfin (1142–46). [86] Ibn al-Saghir, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 24; Insoll, ‘A cache of hippopotamus ivory’, 334. [87] Ibn Khaldun, in Hopkins & Levtzion,
‘Corpus’, 335 and 340–1. [88] Smith, ‘Peace and palaver’, 613. [89] See for example Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 146 and 247. [90] al-Maqqari, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 372. [91] ‘The pilgrimage tradition’,
124. [92] See for example Barth, ‘Travels and discoveries’, II, 35–42; Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 23 and 24, London 1826: reprinted 1985, II, 231; L. Binger, Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée par le pays de Kong et le Mossi, Paris 1892, I, 53, II, 86. [93] ‘Travels and Discoveries’, I, 530. [94] William Cohen, The French encounter with Africans. White response to blacks, 1530–1880, Bloomington 1980, 5. Some West Africans had visited Portugal already in the mid-fifteenth century. [95] ‘Travels and discoveries’, I, 510–11; see also Nachtigal, ‘Sahara and Sudan’, II, 174; Denham, Clapperton & Oudney, ‘Narrative’, II, 251. [96] Letters from Europe reached, for
example, Barth in Kano in ten months (‘Travels and
discoveries’, I, 540). In general, the delivery of
mail and supplies to European travellers through trans-Saharan
caravans was reliable: Clapperton, who visited Kano in
1824, could enjoy there English newspapers and three
bottles of port wine which were sent to him by Denham
who, for his part, had received them from Tripoli (Denham,
Clapperton & Oudney, ‘Narrative’, II, 245). [97] ‘An abstract of Mr. Park’s account of his travels and discoveries, abridged from his own minutes by Bryan Edwards, Esq. 1798’, Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, London 1810: reprinted 1967, I, 381. [98] Denham, Clapperton & Oudney, ‘Narrative’, II, 295 and 314. [99] ‘Sahara and Sudan’, III, 30. [100] al-Zuhri, in Hopkins & Levtzion,
‘Corpus’, 98. [101] D.M. Dunlop, Arab civilization to A.D. 1500, London & Beirut 1971, 150–71. Another equally important reason was the pilgrimage tradition, for pilgrims needed detailed and reliable itineraries in order to reach Mecca. Also, the Arabs had preserved the ancient Greek geographical knowledge which was lost in Western Europe. [102] Oiva Tallgren, ‘Suomi ja Idrisin maantiede v:lta 1154’, Valvoja-Aika, 2, 1930, 63–72. [103] See Jean-Léon L’Africain [Leo Africanus], Description de l'Afrique, nouvelle édition traduite de l'italien par A. Épaulard, Paris 1956, II, 468–9. [104] There are, for example, some references to al-Hulal al-mawshiyya, an anonymous history of Morocco written in Granada in 1381, in Tarikh al-Sudan, written in Timbuktu in c. 1652–55 by a local scholar, cAbd al-Rahman al-Sacdi (see es-Sa’di, ‘Tarikh es-Soudan’, 42–4). Muhammad Bello, for his part, was well acquainted in the history of Islamic Spain, which suggests that he had read some Arabic books on this subject (see Denham, Clapperton & Oudney, ‘Narrative’, II, 331). [105] al-Zuhri, in Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 98; see also al-Sharishi, in ibid., 153. [106] al-Maqrizi, Hopkins & Levtzion, ‘Corpus’, 353. [107] Sékéné Mody Cissoko, ‘L'Université
de Tombouctou au XVIè siècle’, Afrika Zamani,
no. 2, 1974, 105–37. On the life of al-Sahili, see J.O.
Hunwick, ‘An Andalusian in Mali. A contribution to
the biography of Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, c. 1290–1346’,
Paideuma, xxxvi, 1990, 59–66. [109] Norman R. Bennett, Africa and Europe. From Roman times to national independence, 2nd edition, New York 1984, 23. [110] J. Spencer Trimingham, A history of
Islam in West Africa, London 1962, 3. |
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