Studies of trans-Saharan trade from the development of the Iron Age in Western Africa to the end of the 1700s focus on the connectivity between northern Africa and the West African Sahelian societies of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay; the role of Islam as a unifying factor among African peoples north and south; and the discrete nature of the products traded, of which gold, slaves, and salt were the most notable.
The long run of relations between the peoples of the Sahara and those of the adjoining Sahel are characterized by periods of cooperation alternating with competition. In the background to human affairs lies the enlarging nature of the desert and the recoiling nature of the savanna and Sahel environments, beginning at the end of the post-Pleistocene pluvial, now dated generally at 3000bce. Where sedentary black people had previously inhabited north to about 20 degrees latitude, Berber-speaking nomads progressively enlarged their domain at the expense of sedentary environments as desert life pushed south in a general desiccation of Africa between 15 and 25 degrees latitude. These
Trans-Saharan trade, ninth-nineteenth centuries.
Environmental changes played in favor of the nomads, the enlargement of whose realms were further facilitated by the introduction of the camel, first to North Africa and then the entire Sahara, during late Roman times. Trade between the two broadly distinct African regions and peoples of North and West Africa, is thus set against a general framework of environmental change and more local social relations between adjoining peoples, nomad and sedentary Africans, at the moving southern margins of the desert.
Before Islam, trade between tropical Africa and North Africa across the Sahara was effectively nonexistent. The largely unknown history of relations between black sedentary folk of the Sahel and Berber-speaking nomads of the Sahara was interrupted by the emergence of Islam, which penetrated partially and differentially throughout the Sahara and the Sahelian fringe of tropical Africa during an initial period of Islamization, which can be dated from the 660s to the emergence of the Almoravid Islamic movement in the 1030s. With the eruption of the Almoravid movement among the Sanhaja people of the southwestern Sahara, Islam became more codified and widespread among Saharan peoples. Islam is significant because it unified geographically and socially disparate peoples and unification furthered trade.
In the east, the route through Zawila became the primary conduit by which black African slaves were traded north, especially with Ifriqiya (Tunisia) and the eastern Islamic lands, for horses south. So it was that in the Chad Basin, Kanem arose as a slave-raiding state connected to North Africa and today’s Middle East through Zawila and Tripoli. As first noted in the writings of Herodotus, the Libyan (Berber) peoples of the northern fringe of the Sahel raided for slaves among their neighbors still farther south, a practice that continued until the early 1900s.
In the west, the interest was on gold. In the earliest Islamic empire, the Umayyad, considerable progress was made tying the newly conquered Maghrib to Sudanic peoples trading in gold. Ghana, first identified in the Arabic sources in the 830s by al-Fazari and al-Khwarizmi, was the likely destination, although nothing is sure about places in western Africa at this early date. The last in ‘Uqba’s line, great-grandson ‘Abd al-Rahman, final Umayyad (and first Abbasid) governor of the Maghrib (747-754), ordered wells dug along trade routes running south from Morocco to the Sudan. The last of these was about 16 days’ south from the Draa River Valley.
The earliest routes across the Sahara from Morocco crossed territory, largely in Mauritania, covered by light grasses in which water was relatively plentiful. This route allowed connections between the Maghrib and the Senegal River to flourish, and may well have led to the conversion of the people north of the Senegal River and the intervening Sanhaja nomads of the western Sahara to Islam early on, before significant cross-desert relations began with Ghana. The end of this route landed caravaniers in Tarkrur, in the Senegal River lowlands. What was traded here is unknown, but the sedentary people of Takrur became the core of the modern Tukolor, as they have become known. The Takarir (people of Takrur) were Islamized as early as, or earlier than, the nomads to the north of them; they strengthened Islam outward from their far western homeland to other peoples north and east of them, and formed the core for the construction of modern Senegalese identity.
Equally early was a route from Ghana leading east to Gao and then northeast through the Air and Tibesti highlands of Niger and Libya to the Egyptian oases of Kharga and Dakhla. Described in early Arabic sources, this route was then prohibited by Ahmad ibn Tulun, the Abbasid ruler of Egypt between 868 and 884, perhaps because of its environmental hazards or because of raiders plundering camel loads of goods. It was, in any case, to Sijil-masa’s benefit that the Ghana-Egypt route dried up.
The main trade route connecting Sijilmasa and Ghana ran due south from Morocco, from the Draa Valley to Awdaghust and then onward to Ghana. The route, more dangerous than the Mauritanian, was shorter: Ghana lay some 50-60 stages, or daily marches and stops, from Sijilmasa and some 10-15 stages south of Awdaghust. Eight stages passed through land without water. Caravans organized like fleets in the desert, composed of hundreds of camels bearing trade goods in both directions, are described in the medieval literature. These were sent out by Sijilmasa merchants on schedules with, as the tenth century writer Ibn Hawqal informs us, letters of credit of very high value. In 951, Ibn Hawqal estimated the revenue of the independent emir of Sijilmasa at approximately 400,000 dinars, half the annual income of the Maghrib. Undoubtedly, most of this value was in gold.
The King of Ghana extracted levies on salt and other goods coming in and going out of Ghana; he may have held the trade in gold nuggets (as opposed to gold dust) as a monopoly. Ghana, presumably at the site known as Kumbi Saleh in southeastern Mauritania (excavated by Mauny and others in 1949-1951 and 1970) was a break-in-bulk point in the trade in gold. Gold dust and gold nuggets, culled from placer deposits in the streams of the Guinea Highlands and particularly along the Bambouk gold fields in the upper Senegal River watershed, were brought to Ghana by black African traders, ancestors of the Juula (Dyula) merchant class, and traded in the Sahelian capital for salt, copperware, cloth, and spices brought south along the trade route. Slaves, ivory, cowrie shells (used as currency in the Sudan) and ambergis accompanied the movement of gold north, but in contrast with Kanem, far to the east, the trade in slaves out of Ghana appears to have been distinctly secondary to gold. However, al-Idrisi, writing nearly a century after al-Bakri, notes that Ghana (and Takrur and Silla, a city in the Senegalese lowlands converted to Islam by Takrur) raided people living in stateless societies to the south and sold them to Maghribi traders. Likewise, gold, some 18 days’ distant, was from lands probably not directly controlled by Ghana, although clearly within its sphere of influence.
Salt—not gold—may lie at the urban genesis of Ghana some centuries before Ghana’s connections with northern Africa over gold. Rock salt, absent throughout the Sahel and West Africa generally, is prevalent at a number of sites in the south central Sahara. The most prominent of these was Teghaza, in the center of the desert, toward which a caravan route was directed to pass and from which Maghribi traders carried slabs of salt south to Ghana.
By the thirteenth century, Ghana had passed into oblivion and the focus of trans-Saharan trade pushed east to Malinke-speaking chiefdoms incorporated into the Mali empire. By the early 1200s, the Soso, earlier a tributary people of the Soninke, ruled Ghana; they were defeated by a Malinke warrior destined for greatness, Sundiata Keita. One hundred fifty years after the emergence of the Almoravids, ancient Mali emerged as a second great empire of the western Sudan. New sources of gold in the Bure region in the upper Niger had opened up, favoring Mali’s location in that area; the merger of its two parent chiefdoms,
Do (Daw) and Malal, may have yielded overwhelming strength.
Songhay was the last of the great empires of the western Sudan. In the late 1300s, Mali had been invaded by Tuareg raiders; the former allies of Mali sacked and held Timbuktu for a generation. As in the past, the nomads attacked along the edges of empire in a time of weakness but did not penetrate beyond the fringe of the desert. In this human ecotone arose Sunni ‘Ali, who, with the help of Niger fishermen, chased out the Tuareg and established a new polity along the Niger Bend. His successor, Askiya Muhammad (r. 1493-1528), established Songhay power from the borders of modern Nigeria in the east to Senegal in the west. Songhay power, greatest in the 1500s, was eventually eclipsed by forces new and different to the dynamics of a realm of society and trade that had endured for 1000 years. In 1591, Timbuktu was invaded by Moroccans themselves, intruders from the Maghrib, who attempted to conquer the trans-Saharan trade for themselves in an attempt that petered out over 30 years of fragile control over Timbuktu. Timbuktu, however, came to radiate cultural strength as a city where Muslims—both Berber and Sudani—lived and worked together. By this time Europeans, previously entirely unknown in the western African scheme of things, had established footholds along the West African coast.
James a. Miller
See also: Sahara: Salt: Production, Trade; Sijilmasa, Zawila, Trans-Saharan Trade; Tuareg: Traders, Raiders, and the Empires of Mali and Songhay; Tuareg: Takedda and Trans-Saharan Trade.
Further Reading
Brett, Michael. “Islam and Trade in the Bilad al-Sudan, Tenth-Eleventh Century A. D.” Journal of African History, no. 24 (1983): 431-440.
Garrard, Timothy. “Myth and Metrology: The Early TransSaharan Gold Trade.” Journal of African History, no. 23 (1982): 443-461.
Levtzion, Nehemia. “The Sahara and the Sudan from the Arab Conquest of the Maghrib to the Rise of the Almoravids.” In The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2, edited by J. D. Fage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Levtzion, Nehimia, and J. F. Hopkins (eds.). Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Saifawa Dynasty: See Borno (Bornu), Sultanate of: Saifawa Dynasty: Horses, Slaves, and Warfare.
World History
