THE REST OF THE STORY ABOUT AFRICA
The story of Africa is marked by the rise of complex societies (chiefdoms and states), migrations, agriculture and pastoralism, and particularly diversity. The introduction of iron transformed the continent because it opened up potentials for agriculture. This led to expansion of populations accompanied by migration. Complexity followed as populations grew. Trade became central on the eastern coast of Africa with links to the east as far away as China. Trade as well was important within the world of Benin and Ghana in the west.
Clearly long distance trade was as important as the introduction of iron to African kingdoms. The establishment of trade routes, both inland and along the coast, offered political opportunities for enterprising individuals. Controlling markets meant control over resources and people who utilized them. Larger states developed around market centers, notably the kingdoms of the western Sudan (Ghana, Ife, Benin, Mali and Songhai) that exploited the wealth of the trans-Saharan trade and the kingdoms of south central Africa (Great Zimbabwe) and those along the eastern African coast (Kilwa, Malindi, Mombassa, Bunyoro, and Buganda) that controlled trade within the Indian Ocean region.
While agriculture using plow agriculture transformed lifeways in Africa just as it did in Europea, other lifeways were equally important as contrasts. Pastoralists were successful in the central part of Africa in the great savannas. Hunters and Gatherers continued to be successful in restricted areas such as in the Kalahari where life changed little over the last 10,000 years in the rain forests of central Africa. The story of the prehistory of Africa is one marked by contrasts and diversity as people adapted to different geographical regions.
The oral traditions of African kingdoms usually start with a male founder who persuaded or forced people to accept his rule. There are many such legends where the founder-king was a blacksmith signaling the importance of iron in African kingdom evolution. The presence of supernatural sanctions behind the power is noteworthy as well.
Largely African societies were held together through the performance of social control relating to supernatural forces that guided custom. The spirit world can easily be seen in masks and dress used by African societies. The presence of secret societies reinforced the guiding forces. A third power that African societies employed to hold societal structure together was a strong power of dead ancestors. Familial relationships of clan networks were extended to the dead. A more example of this can be seen in the ancestor worship of the people living in Madagascar.
Kush (also Cush), with its Egyptian-like civilization on the Nile, and the flourishing, irrigation-based culture of Meroe (or Saba, modern north Yemen) together contributed in about the 2500 B.C. to the rise of the kingdom of Kush. This kingdom was located in the highlands above the Red Sea in and around what is now northern Ethiopia. The center of this kingdom was the city of Kerma. About 1500 B.C., the Egyptians advanced up the Nile and conquered Kush. Kerma was then abandoned. Egyptians ruled the region for several centuries before the region became an independent kingdom once again. By this time, the culture had become highly "egyptianized" as a result of acculturation.
The next phase of history in the area relates to a dramatic rise and expansion. It is at this time that the center of influence in the region shifted to a city known as Meroe and a kingdom known as Aksum. The Kingdom of Aksum eventually conquered a weakened Egypt and for 70 years ruled the entire Nile region. Aksum later become involved in trading with Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Local farmers grew spices and arabic gum, which Aksum exchanged--together with tortoise shell collected along the Red Sea and ivory and gold--for Egyptian cloth, linen, articles of flint, glass, brass, sheets of soft copper, iron ingots, wine, olive oil, and gold and silver.
The army of Aksum made its force felt along and across the Red Sea and beyond the Nile. In the centuries following, Aksum conquered places such as Yemen. The kings of Aksum progressively conquered an empire in southwestern Arabia. Following A.D. 350, Aksum's famed king Ezana unified his African holdings and converted himself and his kingdom to Christianity. Fortunes turned in the seventh century A.D. when a great sweep of Islam conversion reached the region. Gradually, power shifted away from Aksum. The Aksum kings moved inland and southward and formed the Kingdom of Ethiopia.
To the south a profitable commerce had begun to develop between the peoples of the coastal towns and seafaring merchants from Arabia, Persia, and other Asian centers. Some of the visitors, especially the Arabs, settled and intermarried with indigenous residents. Their descendants formed the nuclei for a series of impressive east African city-states that flourished until the arrival of the more powerful Portuguese in the 16th century. The eastern coast of Africa was to flourish as trade up and down the coast eventually linked Africa to Asia.
During the centuries of the ascent of Aksum and the city-states along the east coast, the pattern of life of innumerable interior Africans began to alter drastically. Agriculturists, endowed with new crops and new tools (importantly the iron plow) and weapons of iron, began to effect a major change in the preexisting arrangements of African life across a great belt of Africa from Nigeria in the west to Kenya in the east. The change included or was generated by a population explosion. This in turn propelled at least one set of agriculturists from their original base in eastern Nigeria southeastward toward the border of Zaire and Zambia; this group then traveled westward, southward, and northeastward until it met a southern- and western-moving flank of peoples involved in pastoral pursuits. The descendants of the first group now inhabit nearly all of Africa south of central Kenya, southern Uganda, northern Zaire, and southern Nigeria. The second, linguistically less numerous and markedly different from the first in the features of its members, includes the cattle herders of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and northern Nigeria. Yet both migrated (and were migrating until the colonial incursions in the early 1800s) in large numbers, and both may well have owed their newfound mobility to the adaptation of new crops and new techniques from Asia.
Whatever the impetus, a demographic and political revolution resulted from the dramatic movement of agriculturists and pastoralists from opposite directions and their final clash in the interior, possibly as late as the 8th century.
For West Africa, the pattern seems strikingly different, at least insofar as it emerges from the Arabic writings of early travelers and geographers. These writings, which date back to the eighth century, contain much information about the powerful empires and other significant states that succeeded one another in western Africa. The main theme of early West African history was the rise and fall of imperial fortunes along the great rivers that thread through the sub-Saharan dry zones--rather than in the crowded pre-urban environment of Nigeria's forests. From the earliest years small, tightly knit, and fiercely autonomous states existed side by side, were created and destroyed, and fought to avoid being swallowed up by the major empires that sprang periodically from the ambitions, economic circumstances, or martial abilities of a particular emerging state. Although some peoples of eastern and southern Africa lived, and still live, without chiefs or other hierarchically arranged organizations, West Africans experienced the government of single chiefs (sometimes men accorded divine rights and powers), the government of chiefs and their councils, and--rarely--the government of councils of equals.
Alluvial gold was the first of the important raw materials that the states monopolized in order to supply the markets of northern Africa and southern Europe; a second was salt mined near oases in the southern Sahara. Slaves captured in raids and war grew in importance as a commodity after about the tenth century. Kola nuts and other agricultural products were also important, as were the dyestuffs of northern Nigeria. All these goods were highly prized in and around the Mediterranean basin, and West Africans traveled across the vast desert in mighty caravans to the markets of Fez and Marrakesh in Morocco, Tunis in Tunisia, Tripoli in Libya, and Cairo in Egypt. In exchange the traders of the north brought cloth, horses, glass and metal ware, swords and armor, and--in time--muskets and other equipment of early modern warfare. The caravans from the north also brought Islam and its scriptures and written language.
Ghana was the earliest of the great empires. In the markets of its capital in the southeastern corner of what is now Mauritania, not far from the Senegal River, local entrepreneurs bartered the gold, ivory, and slaves of black Africa for the salt of the Sahara and for the horses, cloth, swords, and books of North Africa and Europe. Salt was worth its weight in gold. The empire of Ghana then controlled the major sources of Africa's alluvial gold. Early writers in Arabic called the king of Ghana the richest person in the world because of his gold.
Ghana reached its imperial zenith A.D. 1000. At this time the Kingdom of Yoruba rises in power. In 990 its cavalry regiment conquered the state of Sanhaja, now part of Morocco. It governed peoples living as far south and east as the middle reaches of the Senegal River and the great bend of the Niger River. Ghana was ruled by a series of powerful monarch. The king administered a far-flung empire with the assistance of viceroys and counselors with oracular power. In addition to the major export of gold, which was taxed, the Ghanaians also traded honey, kola nuts, dried fruit, and cowrie shells within the empire.
Ghana was conquered from the south by Islamic fundamentalists in the middle of the eleventh century. The Almoravids swept out of what is now Senegal and across Ghana, into Morocco, and eventually subdued all of southern Spain. Ghana, reduced in size, continued to function, but its major trading ties had been sundered and by the thirteenth century it was no longer a significant power.
Ghana's fall may have contributed to the development, from a series of smaller states in the old Ghana, of the nucleus of what became the empire of Mali. Mali, with its center in the comparatively fertile plateau region between the upper reaches of the Senegal and Niger rivers, replaced Ghana as the most important kingdom of the western Sudan. Mali grew from a minor state into Ghana's successor in the early thirteenth century, after its leader transformed it from an age-group or clan organization into the nucleus of a powerful army and began to expand its borders. This army conquered the upper Niger River region and attacked the capital of diminished Ghana. Later, a new state the economic center of trade across the Sahara established as the Kingdoms of Benin and Mali. These kingdoms controlled the gold trade and also monopolized imports of salt. They developed parallel to each other and vied for control of the region at various times.
By the middle of the thirteenth century the kings, or mansas, of Mali reigned supreme from the upper Senegal River to the great bend of the Niger River, 800 km (500 mi) to the east, and from the Sahara in the north to the upper Volta rivers in the south. Mali was ruled by generals, many of whom were Muslims, and several of whom as early as 1300 were making pilgrimages all the way to Mecca. The most famous of these pilgrims was Mansa Musa, who ruled from 1312 to 1337. In about 1324 he went to Cairo with 500 slaves, each carrying a six pound staff of gold. His following caravan consisted of 100 camels, each individually laden with 300 pounds of gold. In Cairo, Musa's wealth, piety, generosity, and fine clothes all made a favorable impression--so much so that until about 1750 the great blank spaces of inner Africa were inscribed by mapmakers only with Rex Melli or Musa Mali.
The rulers of Mali, a mercantile state much more sophisticated than Ghana, held splendid court, but they maintained traditional rituals and observed the integrity of local chiefs. They set the governmental tone for succeeding empires and for the smaller states that somehow managed to maintain their autonomy within or on the borders of the larger entities.
In northern Nigeria several city-states existed between Mali and its successor Songhai to the west and Kanem-Bornu, the growing empire to the east. Bornu dominated the Lake Chad region from around A.D. 1500 until the onset of colonialism. Songhai succeeded Mali as the major empire of the sub-Saharan region. Its capital, Gao, was on the Niger River far to the east of Mali and on the frontier of the very different forest zone to the south. After the reign of its king, Sonni Ali, in the mid-fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Songhai dominated the semidesert regions once ruled by Ghana, Benin and Mali.
Yoruba Kingdom Learning Module
In southern Africa, the center of Zimbabwe emerged as an important religious and trading center that flourished between 950 and 1450. Its elaborate stone-built ruins extend over an area of about 60 acres. The Zimbabwe Ruins, located 27 km (17 mi) southeast of Fort Victoria in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), constitute the most impressive Iron Age site in southern Africa. Unlike the heavy urbanization found in West Africa, high population density was absent in southern Africa. The difference in the two regions relates to the nature of soils. Intensive cultivation was possible in West Africa but not in Southern Africa where soils simply could not support intensification. This meant that larger communities needed to be moved periodically in Southern Africa as soil nutrition declined.
The earliest site of occupation, possibly as early as A.D. 300, lies on a low, boulder-covered hill called the Acropolis. The western enclosure of the Acropolis has yielded traces of five occupation periods. The earliest, of simple Iron Age farmers, flourished in the 4th century AD. Karanga peoples settled on the Acropolis about 950, building the first stone-walled enclosures there about 50 years later, as they began to expand their trading activities.
By about 1200, Zimbabwe was occupied by prominent Karanga chiefs, who erected in the valley below the Acropolis the immense elliptical structure known as the Great Enclosure. The great freestanding outer wall of granite blocks, more than 244 m (800 ft) long and up to 9.8 m (32 ft) high, enclosed large huts, compounds, and a mysterious conical tower. Zimbabwe's rulers bartered copper and gold from mines under their control with traders from the east African coast. Fine metal ornaments of African manufacture as well as imported glass beads and Chinese porcelain litter the deposits of the site.
People no longer lived at Zimbabwe after the middle of the fifteenth century probably because soil fertility declined and erosion from over intensive cultivation set in. There is evidence that the site continued to be an important religious shrine for some time after that however.
Cattle based societies surround the Great Zimbabwe center. The real wealth of those who ruled the grassland plateau country around Zimbabwe lay in cattle. Cattle were a political as well as economic asset; those who had power distributed cattle to their dependents. They were in effect Big Men who redistributed wealth. Cattle-raising societies tend to be relatively unstable since hers can easily be rustled away by rivals. It was due to this fact that power bases shifted on a more or less regular basis in these societies.
Slideshow and Learning Module on Great Zimbabwe
Two kingdoms, Nyoro and Nkore, in the region of what is now Uganda rose in East Africa. The kings and ruling families formed a hereditary elite, marrying only among themselves in these kingdoms. They maintained a strict social distance from their subordinants. Social status was clearly marked and daily activity reinforced differences.
Bantu speaking people settled along the Indian Ocean and took advantage of opportunities for overseas trade with traders from Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The trading towns that developed there reflect Arab contact and included Arab enclaves. About 40 city-states grew up along the East African coast, including Malindi, Mombasa, Kilwa, and Zanzibar. There wealth came from trade - exports in ivory, which was in great demand in India and China, and gold formed the primary trade items.
By A.D. 1500, much of Africa was under the control of centralized, royal governments. Still, large numbers of people continued to live in simpler tribal societies. The kingdoms of Africa seem to have several common features: (1) checks on royal power and (2) restrictions on the accumulation of individual wealth. Each kingdom developed in an unique way with its own political and economic organization just as each had its own individual artistic tradition that we recognize archaeologically.
By Richard Effland, MCC