Appearance
7.8 — The Empires of Africa
In 1324 the ruler of Mali travelled to Mecca on pilgrimage. Mansa Musa's caravan is described in Arabic sources as including thousands of people, hundreds of camels each carrying gold, and five hundred attendants each bearing a gold staff.
He spent and gave away so much gold in Cairo that he depressed its price there for years. Egyptian chroniclers writing a decade later still noted the effect on the dinar.
Fourteen years later, a Spanish mapmaker drew Mansa Musa on the Catalan Atlas, seated on a throne holding a gold nugget, with a caption explaining that he was the richest and most noble king in that land because of the gold found in his country. European cartography knew who he was.
This chapter covers the African states that most world histories skip, and it starts by saying why they get skipped.
Why this is not in the standard story
Three reasons, and none of them is that there was nothing to write about.
Written sources are in Arabic and in African languages — Arabic chronicles, the Timbuktu manuscript collections, Ge'ez texts from Ethiopia, Swahili chronicles — and European historiography was built on Greek and Latin.
Building materials were often not stone. Much West African urban architecture was in mud brick, which requires continuous maintenance and does not leave ruins that look impressive to a European eye. Absence of stone ruins was read as absence of civilisation, which is a straightforward category error.
And nineteenth-century colonial ideology required Africa to have no history, because a continent with a history is a continent with a claim. Hegel wrote that Africa was no historical part of the world. This was not an innocent mistake and its effects on curricula persist.
The West African empires
The geography is the starting point. The Sahara is a barrier that can be crossed by camel, and the Sahel — the grassland belt along its southern edge — is where the crossing arrives. North of the desert there was salt and a demand for gold. South of it there was gold and a demand for salt.
Salt is not a luxury in a hot climate. People lose it in sweat and must replace it, and inland West Africa had almost none. It was mined in slabs at Taghaza in the middle of the desert and carried south, and at times it traded weight for weight against gold.
The camel made the trade possible — introduced to the Sahara in the early centuries CE, able to carry around 200 kilograms and go days without water (Chapter 3.8).
Ghana — not the modern country, which took the name in 1957, but an empire in what is now Mali and Mauritania — flourished from roughly the eighth to the eleventh century, taxing the gold and salt passing through. The Arab geographer al-Bakri described its court in the eleventh century from travellers' reports: the king holding audience with gold-adorned attendants and horses in gold cloth, a separate quarter for Muslim merchants with a dozen mosques, and an administration with interpreters and a treasury.
Mali rose in the thirteenth century under Sundiata Keita, whose story is preserved in a griot oral epic that is one of the great works of African literature. It controlled the gold fields of Bambuk and Bure and the trade routes north.
Mansa Musa, ruling around 1312–1337, is estimated by some modern reckonings as among the wealthiest individuals who ever lived — a figure that should be treated as a headline rather than a calculation, since comparing medieval and modern wealth is not straightforward. What is documented is the pilgrimage, its effect on the Cairo gold market, and what he did on returning: he brought back scholars and architects, and funded mosques and libraries at Timbuktu and Gao.
Songhai succeeded Mali in the fifteenth century, under Sunni Ali and then Askia Muhammad, and was the largest of the three, running an administration with provincial governors, a professional army and a fleet on the Niger.
Timbuktu deserves its reputation. The Sankore mosque and its associated scholarly community made it a centre of Islamic learning, with a book trade that contemporaries described as the most profitable business in the city. Ahmad Baba, a scholar of the sixteenth century, wrote dozens of works and complained when a Moroccan invasion carried off his library of 1,600 volumes that it was the smallest of his family's collections.
And the manuscripts survive. Hundreds of thousands of documents in Arabic and in African languages written in Arabic script — on astronomy, medicine, law, mathematics, history, poetry and commercial contracts — are held in family and institutional collections in Timbuktu and across the region. When jihadist groups occupied northern Mali in 2012, librarians and families smuggled a large part of the collection out of the city in boxes and rice sacks, and most of it was saved.
Songhai fell in 1591 to a Moroccan expedition that crossed the Sahara with firearms against an army that had almost none. The technology gap was decisive and it was recent — a demonstration of Chapter 8.3's argument.
And the trade routes died afterwards for a different reason: European ships on the Atlantic coast (Chapter 8.4) meant West African gold could be bought at the shore rather than carried across a desert. The Sahara trade collapsed and the great inland cities declined, which is the same mechanism that killed the Silk Roads.
Ethiopia
A Christian kingdom in the Ethiopian highlands with a continuous history from antiquity to 1974.
Aksum, from the first century CE, was a major trading power on the Red Sea, minting its own coinage in gold, silver and bronze — one of very few states outside Rome, Persia and India to do so. It converted to Christianity in the fourth century, making it one of the earliest Christian states anywhere.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church retained its own liturgical language, Ge'ez, its own canon of scripture including books not in other canons, and practices including a Saturday sabbath and dietary rules that reflect a very early and independent development.
The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are carved downward out of solid rock like the Kailasa temple at Ellora (Chapter 6.7) — eleven churches, connected by tunnels and trenches, cut rather than built.
The Solomonic dynasty claimed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, a claim set out in the Kebra Nagast, and the tradition that the Ark of the Covenant is held at Aksum is maintained by the church.
And Ethiopia was never colonised, apart from the Italian occupation of 1936–41. It defeated an Italian invasion at Adwa in 1896 — the most complete defeat of a European army by an African one in the colonial period, and a fact that made Ethiopia a symbol across Africa and the African diaspora for the following century.
The Swahili coast
A chain of city-states down the East African coast — Mogadishu, Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Kilwa, Sofala — trading across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon (Chapter 2.5).
Exports: gold from the interior, ivory, timber, and enslaved people. Imports: Indian cloth, Chinese porcelain, Persian ceramics.
The Swahili language is Bantu in structure with substantial Arabic vocabulary, and the culture is the product of that trade — African, Islamic and Indian Ocean at once. Kilwa's ruins include a large stone palace complex, Husuni Kubwa, and Ibn Battuta visited in 1331 and called Kilwa one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world.
Chinese fleets under Zheng He reached this coast in the 1410s and 1420s (Chapter 5.7), and a giraffe sent from Malindi to the Ming court caused a considerable stir.
The Portuguese destroyed the system. Vasco da Gama and his successors bombarded and sacked the Swahili ports from 1500, imposed passes and tolls, and diverted the trade — the same method they used in India, and Chapter 8.4 covers it.
Great Zimbabwe
A stone-built city in the interior of southern Africa, occupied from around the eleventh to the fifteenth century, with a population possibly around 10,000 to 18,000 at its height.
Its wealth came from cattle and from gold, traded to the Swahili coast — Chinese and Persian ceramics and Arab coins have been excavated there.
And its archaeology is a case study in politics. Colonial-era authorities in Rhodesia insisted the site had been built by Phoenicians, Arabs or a lost white civilisation, because a sophisticated African-built city was inconvenient. Archaeologists who reported the obvious — that it was built by the ancestors of the local Shona people — were pressured, and in the 1970s the government of Rhodesia censored the archaeological record and required guidebooks to present the foreign-origin theory. The evidence was never in doubt.
Benin, and the bronzes
The Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria, from around the thirteenth century, had a walled capital whose earthworks were among the largest such structures anywhere.
Its metalwork is the point. The Benin bronzes — actually mostly brass — are plaques and heads cast by the lost-wax method (Chapter 6.7) at a technical level that astonished Europeans who saw them, and their naturalism and casting quality bear comparison with anything produced in Renaissance Europe.
In 1897 a British punitive expedition sacked Benin City, burned it, exiled the ruler and removed several thousand objects, which were sold to cover the cost of the expedition and are now in museums across Europe and North America. The restitution of the Benin bronzes is one of the most active museum controversies of the present decade, and several institutions have begun returning them.
What Africa's history actually shows
Three corrections.
These were states with taxation, standing armies, administration, literacy, long-distance trade and monumental construction. They were not tribes and they were not isolated. Mali's ruler was on a European map. Kilwa traded Chinese porcelain. Ethiopia was a Christian monarchy older than most European ones.
Africa's technological position was mixed rather than uniformly behind. African iron working is very old and in some regions independent. What Africa largely lacked was the plough — because the tsetse fly made draught animals impossible across much of the continent (Chapter 3.8), and hoe agriculture cannot generate the same surplus per worker. Combine that with poor soils, low population density, few navigable rivers into the interior and the disease environment, and the constraints are geographical rather than about people. Chapter 4.5's argument applies here in a different form.
And slavery within Africa existed before the Atlantic trade and was transformed by it. Domestic and trans-Saharan slavery were long established; the Atlantic trade added demand on a scale that reorganised West African politics around supplying it (Chapter 8.6). Both statements are true and neither excuses the other, and Chapter 8.6 works through the accounting.
Where this shows up in your life
Ghana, Mali, Zimbabwe and Benin all took their modern names from these states, deliberately, at independence — a claim to a history that colonial rule had denied.
The gold that circulated in medieval European coinage was substantially West African, arriving through the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Europe's monetary system ran partly on Malian gold.
And the museum question is live. Objects in the British Museum, the Quai Branly, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and dozens of others were taken in punitive expeditions and colonial seizures. Chapter 11.1 covers the Scramble for Africa that produced most of them.
What the next page covers
At the other end of Eurasia, in the same centuries, China invented printing, paper money, gunpowder and the compass; Japan developed a political system with an emperor who did not rule and a military government that did; and Korea invented an alphabet so well designed that linguists still hold it up as a model. Chapter 7.9 covers China, Japan and Korea in the medieval centuries, and it ends with the decision that Chapter 5.7 flagged: the Ming court cancelling its ocean voyages, sixty years before Columbus sailed.