The Economic Context for State Building

Sources

Organized Societies. During the first twelve hundred years of the Common Era, there appeared a procession of large, indigenously organized societies in the western, central, and eastern sections of West Africa, generally in the vicinity of the Senegal and Niger River basins or the region around Lake Chad. These societies included ancient Ghana, the Susu, Gao, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, the Takrur, the Do or Dodugu, the Hausa, Kiri, the Mossi, and the Dagomba.

The Impetus for Empires. Though the rise and fall of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, the Hausa city-states, and the rest of the West African rulerships are frequently attributed to the trans-Saharan trade and the expansion of Islam, these factors alone do not explain the history of the region. It is true that trans-Saharan trade was of crucial importance in the origins and growth of those states, particularly regarding the regular acquisition and accumulation of wealth by the commercial and ruling elites, and the spread of Islam had both external and internal influences on Sudanic history. In fact, the caravan trade and Islam were no more significant than at least five other crucial factors: the regular production of food surpluses and an associated population growth, the kafu basic political unit in the West African savanna, widespread knowledge of iron metallurgy, the economics of military innovations, and the singular significance of gold.

Food Production and Climate. With their annual wet and dry seasons, the savanna and Sahel of West Africa are subject to two extremes in weather: heavy equatorial rains causing the flooding of river valleys and dry Harmattan dust storms. The southern savanna area closest to the forest gets 1,500 to 2,000 millimeters of rainfall a year for more than six months, along with high temperatures. The central savanna and the northern savanna or steppe known as the Sahel, particularly the river valleys, were one of the three primary centers in Africa for the early evolution and development of food production. From their brown, sandy, structured soils called duricrusts, with strong concentrations of iron oxide and alumina mineral content, came the sorghum, millet, and rice that were staples of the West African diet.

Food Production and Migration. During the first millennium before the Common Era, many clusters of peoples gravitated toward these fertile areas, resulting in concentrations of settlements and cultivation in several defensible locations. As their populations expanded, they reached the point of requiring adjustments to residential organization. One such large migrating population was the Soninke, a Mande-speaking people, who moved from their original desert/Sahel habitat called Wagadu, situated in an area of unstable climate and geography. According to oral traditions, Wagadu had a seven-year drought just before the beginning of the Common Era. Ostensibly because of that extended dry period, the Soninke migrated in stages over a large part of the Western Sudan, from the Gambia east through Songhai territory. A large group of them settled within the central-northern savanna belt and established the ancient state of Aoukar, later called Ghana. This kind of migration occurred in many other parts of West Africa. In areas where the soils supported successful agriculture, reliable food surpluses produced concentrated populations, which created highly evolved societies, such as Ghana and the other large Sudanic states.

Kafu Organization. Among Maude speakers, the basic state in the Western Sudan started with a clan or kinship lineage who acknowledged a common founding ancestor and inhabited an identifiable territory, with boundaries that were sometimes overt (such as sections of rivers or clusters of trees) but in other cases amorphous. As chief or clan head (dugutigi), the group might select either a patriarch who was recognized as a direct descendant of the first clan settler or a person who had demonstrated skills and clan integrity. They also elected a council of elder-advisers. The chief’s functions included the distribution of group wealth and land usage and the adjudication of disputes. As the embodiment of the spiritual identity of his clan, the chief or clan head was not allowed discretionary power within this traditional arrangement; instead he was guided and circumscribed by lineage custom and accepted clan values. An extra-clan rulership was a collection of several clans or lineage groups under a dominant clan and chief that had grown wealthy or large enough to impose an artificial order on the larger collective, either by a well-equipped military or by secret societies within the dominant clan group. The chief of this collected group of clans, thefama orfarin, was the master protector of the land and the political authority over the collective body. The combined body of clans, lineages, villages, and/or microstates was called the kafu. The name of the chief’s home village generally became the name of the kafu.

Bases for State Building. John Iliffe has called the kafu “the enduring political community of the savanna, the building-block with which larger … polities were constructed.” The clan and the kafu represented the essential localism of West African state-building processes. Empire builders who overextended their reach could easily lose their authority by moving too far from their power base in the kafu. Instead of being destroyed, however, the West African empire was most frequently reduced back to its root kafu, as was the case with Ghana, Mali, Songhai, the Susu, and most other states that achieved a zenith and then declined. The majority of the general histories of these rulerships have reported their abrupt devastation and end because of a single violent clash, but, in fact, the societies continued unabated, although much reduced.

Iron. Mande-speaking cultivators—including the Soninke, Wangara, Wakore, Sarakolle, Susu, Malinke, and Dyula—generally used iron tools and iron weapons. According to evidence found in excavations at Djenné-Jeno in the Niger bend area, they had been doing so since at least the third century B.C.E. At least thirteen iron-smelting furnaces dating from the fifth to the third centuries B.C.E., have been found in Taruga and the Baruchi Plateau of contemporary Nigeria. Taruga was part of the Nok-culture sites, which include examples of the oldest African sculptures of the human form. Additional evidence, dating from the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C.E., has been found at Nsukka in southern Nigeria, as well as in Cameroon, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo. Iron hoes, axes, digging sticks, knives, and other implements helped these areas in the production of the food surpluses necessary for a sustained population increase, contributing to the spread of Maude speakers throughout the savanna and eventually into the forest areas of West Africa.

Metallurgists. Ironworkers—smiths and smelters, in particular—were an indispensable part of every centralized state. Ironworkers produced objects that had symbolic and practical values in the traditional societies of the Sudan-Sahel, including bridewealth, essential farming tools, and technologically advanced weapons of war. They had both economic and spiritual power within West African societies, and at times, political power. Among Maude speakers, the blacksmith was a mythical hero who “descended from the sky and brought fertilizing water to a parched land.” Traditionally, blacksmiths and smelters were typically seen as the bringers of life and civilization through the forging stone (mother stone) and the anvil. Iron brought life-affirming agricultural tools and weapons of defense, but at the same time it was seen as a threat to those who did not embrace it and wanted to get rid of it. In general, ironworkers were highly respected, sometimes feared, craftsmen within their communities, but Muslim

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populations increasingly disparaged them, believing that they clung to traditional magic and superstition. In traditional societies ironworkers stimulated an increase in social differentiation and stratification because of the increasing specialization of skilled labor their work required.

Metallurgy and State Building. Some scholars, such as R. Haaland and Augustin F. C. Holl, believe that the “intensification of iron production is directly associated with the rise of Ghana (and the other successive rulerships) as a centralized state” and that the central authority had either to control the process and volume of iron production in its immediate region or to control access to that process, if it intended to maintain its superiority in that region and continue to expand its boundaries. A persistent tension existed because clan chief’s and rulers were both in competition and in alliance with iron craftsmen. Ironworkers were not only necessarily a pre-existing part of the population base from which a rulership was expanding, but they might be a crucial part of a population the rulership was trying to capture and as such had to be absorbed into whatever kafu had growth ambitions. Like the fama, or ruler, metallurgists were believed to have great spiritual and magical power within the clans. Through the investiture process, the fama was transmuted to semi-divine status with all of its attendant ceremony and trappings. Iron smelters and smiths transmuted “ordinary” sand and rock into precious metal in the shapes of farming tools, weapons, body decorations, trade goods, and other implements.

Metallurgy and Migration. The Mema region, situated on a large floodplain approximately one hundred kilometers northwest of the Niger Delta, was the central area for iron production in Ghana and, later, Mali. Excavations there from the 1950s through the 1990s have uncovered evidence of periods of increased intensity and concentration of ironworking for weapons, tools, and jewelry from 342 to 970, from 1025 to 1225, and from 1310 to 1550. More than one hundred mines and ironworking sites were found, including ninety-four village mounds and fifteen smelting/slag areas. Evidence at Mema also shows a sharp decrease in the number of settlements in the region during the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, as the trade routes and military expansion shifted northeastward within the Empire of Mali. As the population thinned, the Mema area still produced significant iron implements, but at a much reduced level.

Bonds between Metallurgists and Rulers. The rulers of Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and the other Sudanic states regularly attempted to bond the two realms of traditional spiritual power by claiming expertise as ironsmiths and smelters and simultaneously asserting the divine right to rule, as did the thirteenth-century Susu ruler Sumanguru. In war, he was reputed to be invulnerable to iron because he was a divine master of that metal. To cement the loyalty of ironworkers, rulers frequently married daughters of smiths or smelters, ignoring the ironworker clans’ restrictions of endogamy (marriage within one’s own clan or group). Others—like Sumanguru’s vanquisher, Sundiata—who were not ironworkers, publicly allied themselves with smiths and smelters to maintain their loyalty. According to the oral Epic of Sundiata, the young Sundiata took refuge in Mema, a significant ironworking area, where he had become a favorite of the fama. When he returned to Kiri (Mande) to establish the Keita dynasty and the beginnings of the Mali Empire, he was at the head of a Mema iron-equipped army, which then defeated one of the best militaries in the region at that time: Sumanguru’s Susu army of excellently equipped soldiers, including many with chain-mail armor.

Ironworker Advisers. Sundiata had learned how to pay homage and give respect to the ironworker clans, keeping ironworker elders among his closest advisers. Such elders essentially controlled the production of iron tools and weapons in the region, and thus they could significantly influence the success of food production and the outcome of battles. Staying on good terms with ironworker elders was thus good policy, lest the elders curse the state administration by refusing to serve that rulership. In recounting the final battles of Sundiata and Sumanguru, The Epic of Sundiata comments on the fields of iron-smelting furnaces at the gathering places of opposing forces.

Metallurgy and War. Access to large quantities of quality ironwork was critical to the success of West African states and empires. The greater the state expansion, the more manpower and weaponry were needed to maintain, defend, and continue the spread of state influence. In the Western Sudan, hunter and secret-society protective clans often provided the military forces with chief’s and fama needed to defend their territory and sometimes to establish a sphere of influence over other villages and clans. When called on for work as mobile warriors, these groups used tactics and strategies borne of their forest and tracking experience. Before the eighth century they generally used iron-tipped weapons such as spears, arrows, and knives, which gave them a distinct advantage over those who did not have access to iron armaments. The advantage also went to the side that either had ironworker clans associated with it or had immediate access to such clans—as well as to the side that brought the greatest number of combatants to a show of force. Since a throwing spear or arrow, for example, was used only once, it took sustained effort to produce weapons in the great numbers required for a war. A regular part of military campaigns was seizing control of the opposition’s ironworks or scuttling them by chasing away ironworkers and destroying their furnaces, forges, stones, and living quarters. Before the ninth century, most large armies in the Sudanic area, including that of Ghana, were essentially infantry and archers who engaged in close combat with weapons such as stabbing spears, axes, clubs, and

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hammers. Overwhelming numbers and superior tactics usually carried the day, sometimes along with psychological duplicity or trickery.

Cavalry. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the horse was introduced to Sudanic warfare, and rulerships that supplemented their infantry and archers with well-trained cavalry earned the advantage in combat. Ghana added cavalry to its military but was never able to use it to full advantage. It overextended itself by having to station garrisons of soldiers in trading cities to protect routes, merchants, and merchandise, while also having to fight incessant little wars and a few major wars against the Almoravids. As documented in accounts of the Battle of Kirina (1235), by the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, the Susu and early Mali had chain-mail armor for chest protection, iron helmets for head protection, established societies of cavalry hórsemen wearing clan emblems, and slave infantrymen in substantial numbers. By the fourteenth century, the Songhai had added a large river navy to their military forces, while maintaining the traditional aspects of the Sudanic fighting army. Mali at its peak and Songhai had permanent standing armies, which practiced and drilled and stood ready to defend or attack quickly. The last metallic innovation, which neither Mali nor Songhai accepted, was the gun. It was the weapon that gave the invading Moroccans their victory in 1590-1591. In all other cases in the Western Sudan, the states with the best ironworks generally triumphed. Ultimately, all this military activity had a tremendous impact on the well-being, quality of life, and business stability of the merchant class. Continued warfare was usually bad for business, although all sides in a dispute usually allowed traders to move freely, even through ferocious fighting.

Metallurgical Property Rights. Ironworking and other skilled crafts were nearly always regarded as the property of a particular lineage or clan. In Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and most of the other states, ironworkers belonged to hereditary occupational castes that observed relatively strict rules of endogamy. They were widely recognized as separate and distinct “mystery” groups within Sudanic societies, and they most frequently lived in their own villages some distance from the main body of settlement, in special, restricted quarters within a particular settlement. Mastering smelting and smithing required years of apprenticeship, and because they were full-time professions in larger societies—such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai—they took significant numbers of men away from farming, leaving much more of the agricultural work to be done by women, children, and war-captive slaves. Smelting and smithing were primarily dry-season work, as was most savanna-Sahelian agriculture. Men were the smelters and smiths while women and children helped by providing them with food and drink, mining for ore, gathering wood to make charcoal for the smelting process, and locating clay for the furnaces or tuyeres (pipes through which blasts of air were delivered to forges or furnaces). Ironworkers were generally paid extremely well. Payment was most frequently in food, livestock (including horses), metal coins, cowrie shells, gold pieces, and/or iron bars. Given their prestige in their communities, it was not unusual for enterprising ironworkers to achieve political authority over clans and villages, become involved in extensive trade networks, or enter into relatively large-scale slave holdings. The importance of the ironworkers to West African societies, large and small, cannot be overestimated.

Metallurgical Production. For everyday military, ceremonial, ritual, and traditional use, ironworkers made knives, machetes, sickles, digging sticks, walking canes, nails, hoes, axes, chain mail, arrow and spear tips, swords, daggers, lances, finger guards for bowmen, bits, stirrups, spurs, saddle parts, harpoons, fishhooks, picks, pokers, hammers, adzes, chisels, tongs, woodcarving tools, portions of boats and war canoes, leatherworking tools, needles for weaving, pottery tools, neck and leg chains for slaves, bracelets, anklets, necklaces, hairpins, rings, earrings, gongs, bells, noisemakers, thumb pianos, cymbals, flutes, royal staffs, ceremonial hammers, anvils, double gongs, crowns, metal for clothing and embroidery, circumcision knives, and many other objects.

Iron Smelting and Forging. The iron-smelting process included prospecting for ore, mining it, transporting it or arranging for it to be transported, preparing the sand or rock ore, acquiring and transporting wood charcoal and the proper clays for construction or repair of the tuyeres and furnaces, making and maintaining the pot or bag bellows and the foundry roofs and shelters, loading and lighting the furnace, operating the bellows, overseeing all elements of the smelt, and, finally, extracting the iron bloom (a malleable lump of metal) for the blacksmith to form into usable tools and weapons, usually heavy implements such as axes and hoes. For objects such as lighter tools, knives, and jewelry, the smelter broke the iron bloom, reworked and purified it, and put it into preforms. Rituals, prayers, and sometimes songs and dances were also part of the process. In addition to forging, the smith also had to acquire and prepare charcoal, get and transport a large stone anvil, produce a smith’s stone and tools, construct a crucible furnace to rework the bloom, and select clays and use them to construct his bellows, tuyeres, and shelter.

Gold. Throughout its millennium of existence, the trans-Saharan caravan trade remained a dangerous undertaking. Besides natural perils such as violent dust storms, venomous snakes and scorpions, disappearing trail signs, poisoned waterholes, dromedary incapacity, human illnesses, “heat insanity,” and deaths of indispensable guides, various bandits and disgruntled caravan workers were threats to travelers’ lives and livelihoods. A one-way northsouth trip generally took a minimum of two months and could take up to six months. Caravan travel required planning, organization, financial backing, strategic provisioning, and faith in an established network. Because the risks were so great, a caravan journey was not undertaken without the expectation of substantial profit. Though caravan merchants traded for leather goods, harem slaves, cloth, iron bars, and southern foodstuffs, including the kola nut, the only item whose value made their dangerous journey worthwhile was gold. The desire for direct access to West African gold, or at least control of access to the forest-dwelling producers of gold, was one of the principal stimuli for outside intervention in West Africa. As early as the late eighth century, Arab writings and European maps called ancient Ghana “land of gold,” and finding ways to acquire it became a major compulsion for outside forays into the region, whether hostile or hospitable. Ivan Hrbek has reported that “the control of the western gold route, not the colonization of the whole Maghrib, was the primary aim of the North African policy of the Fatimids,” the first Arab dynasty to establish the political unity of all North Africa.

The Gold Standard. For most of the period 500-1590 West Africans seem to have been less interested in gold than in copper, which they more frequently sought after for rituals and adornment, but outside the region, in North Africa, gold had been viewed as a commodity of prestige and significant worth and had been a recognized standard of international trade since at least 1800 B.C.E. Egypt, the world’s first major source of gold, was probably responsible for providing the Romans and Assyrians with their initial supplies of the malleable, noncorrosive, shiny metal. By the time of the Phoenician voyages along the West African coast in approximately 1200 B.C.E. the existence of its gold had become known worldwide and begun to attract the earliest of many generations of Arab empire builders, European explorers, and various other conquerors. Although by the seventh century C.E. gold had been discovered in ancient Gaul (France) and a few places in central Europe, Europe never became a consistent and reliable source of gold. Raymond Mauny has estimated that West Africa was one of the main sources of European gold throughout the medieval period up to the discovery of the Americas. In fact, finding and acquiring gold was one of the prime motivations for the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French voyages of exploration that began in the fifteenth century. Nehemia Levtzion adds that during the Middle Ages “two thirds of the world’s production of gold came from the Sudan to replenish the raw material needed for the European mints.”

Securing and Controlling Gold Sources. Starting in the eighth century C.E. and continuing through the seventeenth, a succession of Muslim Arabic and Berber clans and kinship associations—including the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Aghlabids, the Umayyads, the Almoravids (Murabitun), and the Almohads—competed with each other in attempts to impose religious, political, and economic unification on all North Africa, Spain, and other parts of southern Europe, or on significant portions of the region. Each of these groups made strong efforts to consolidate clan-based dynasties and Muslim empires, using increasing degrees of Islamic fundamentalism as the publicly announced reasons for their expansion and absorption of people and territory. The recorded histories of these groups focus on their religious motives and say little about the role of gold as an inducement for their conquests. The trans-Saharan caravan trade is a central subject in the great majority of these histories, but they usually explain attempts to control West African trading cities such as Audaghost, Djenné, and Gao as exerting “a more correct” Muslim presence. Yet, Muslim “religious war” in West Africa clearly benefited the invaders financially. For example, the Almoravids’ invasions of the Sudan decimated the Ghanaian trading city of Audaghost in 1054, destroying its ability to control the gold trade with North Africa. The kafu of Takrur, to the west of Ghana, greatly benefited by the absence of Audaghost. Throughout the eleventh century the rulership of Takrur was both a valued ally of the Almoravids and a competitor of Ghana in the gold trade. For the short term, eliminating the competition increased the regularity and volume of gold exports for the Almoravids. However, the gold regions of Ghana remained beyond their control, so in 1076 they destroyed Kumbi Saleh, the capital city of Ghana. Again, their chief aim was consolidation of direct access to and control of the gold-producing regions of ancient Ghana.

The Demand for Gold. The importance of West African gold should not be underestimated. Because of continued competition among dynasties, to remain in power for any length of time an Arab ruler had to maintain expensive land and sometimes naval forces. Their traditional sources of gold imports—initially Asia and Egypt—could not provide enough of the metal at the levels needed to pay these troops. Once the existence of gold in Ghana and a competing kafu, Takrur, became known to the Arabs, they began to see that region as the best source for the large quantities of gold they needed. By the eighth and ninth centuries, gold from the Sudanic areas became readily available through an expanded caravan trade. The primary source of the financing for the various Arab armies became Sudanic gold, which was used for minting high-grade imperial coins. The foundation of the banking system that sponsored and underwrote the trans-Saharan caravan trade became Sudanic gold, as did the basis of the entire monetary system of the Arab African world.

Gold Purification and Minting. In the Muslim world, as in the Roman traditions that the Muslims in small part

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imitated, the minting of coins was a symbol of regal authority and a consistent demonstration of ruling-class monopoly. For Muslim leaders, gold coinage became a sign of one’s prestige within the expanded Muslim community, so individual rulers regularly and fervently competed with each other over acquiring unobstructed access to gold supplies for their mints, the purer the gold the better. By the mid tenth century, the Fatimids had started a boom in gold-coin minting and made West African gold famous. It was regarded as the highest grade of gold because it could normally go straight to coinage without “purification”— smelting to remove impurities and naturally occurring alloys. Sudanic gold was easy to smelt and mold into various shapes and was relatively rare. It came in specks, dust, nuggets, and lumped ore from alluvial goldfields in the Senegal, Niger, Volta, Casamance, and Faleme Rivers, and the forest areas fed by Lake Chad. It also came from laborintensive seasonal shaft mining in the Sudanic region. Archaeological data reveals that there were thousands of gold-working shafts in the Sudanic region from the tenth century through the seventeenth. In order to regularize the importing of this gold, the Fatimids made the Sijilmasa-Ghana route the main avenue for the gold trade for at least two centuries, from the eighth through the tenth. This route included Audaghost, part of the Ghanaian Empire, as the primary intermediate stop because of its access to water and fresh supplies.

Gold Coins. The Fatimids worked this route with the intention of building a gold reserve in their treasury and acquiring the amounts of gold they needed to mint and distribute reliable gold coinage that would earn them international credibility. From Sijilmasa in southeastern Morocco, gold went to the Fez, Tangier, Spanish Cordoba, Sicily, Italy, Portugal, Sardinia, and Corsica. From the tenth century onward, various other Arab rulerships also used West African gold for minting coinage. Thus, the intensity of the trans-Saharan caravan trade was most often determined by the gold requirements of the gold-minting dynasties in North Africa, Spain, and Egypt, including not only the Fatimids but also the Aghlabid governors of Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and Sicily in the ninth century; the Umayyads of Spain in the tenth; the Zirids of Tunisia, eastern Algeria, and Granada in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and the Almoravids and Almohads of North Africa and Spain in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.

Gold Transactions with the Arab World. According to archaeological evidence, written transaction records, and historical estimates, in 904-905 approximately 100,000 gold dinars were minted from an estimated 400 kilograms of gold in Egypt. In 1009-1010, 40,000 gold dinars were struck in Umayyad Spain, using approximately 160 kilograms of gold. J. Devisse has estimated that more than 250,000 ounces were exported to Arab North Africa and Egypt in 1400, 500,000 ounces in the fifteenth century, and 850,000 in the sixteenth. Gold exports to these Muslim regions declined to 500,000 ounces in the eighteenth century and 400,000 in the nineteenth, as coastal trade with Europeans siphoned off more and more West African products. Mauny has estimated that, during the 500-1590 period, the annual gold production and export from Ghana, Mali, and Songhai was 4 metric tons from the Bure fields, 500 kilograms from the Galam fields, 200 kilograms from the Poura-Lobi fields, 4 metric tons from the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast, and 300 kilograms from Kpelle-Sierra Leone. Other historians have disputed some or all of those estimates. For example, J. B. Kiethega says Poura-Lobi, in present-day Burkina Faso, never exceeded an average production and distribution of 50 kilograms per year between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Gold for Europe. Arabic states required 2 to 3 tons of West African gold annually from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. Approximately forty camels could carry this amount comfortably, but most trans-Saharan caravans were much larger than forty camels, and there were usually at least ten to fifteen caravans a year from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. Clearly, then, more gold than what was required by Arab Africa was being transported, most likely to be sent into various parts of Europe via international trade. Once Europeans developed the ships and navigational technology to open up maritime trade with West Africa, they no longer needed North African middlemen. According to Portuguese records, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that European country acquired approximately 42,185 kilograms of gold from Maude traders along the coast of West Africa. By this sea route, more than 550,000 ounces of gold had been exported to all of Europe by 1600, and 1,500,000 ounces had been sent to that continent by 1700.

Domestic Gold. Both iron and gold were strategically necessary in the state-building processes of the Western Sudan. As the kafu in Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and the other states got larger through increased access to iron and gold products, these rulerships needed still more gold and iron to sustain themselves. The greater the expansion, the greater the need for iron and gold. The Western Sudanic states did not mint gold coins, and they based their monetary systems on cowrie shells, cattle, and copper products, not on gold. Yet, they did use gold to pay for imported horses, chain-mail armor, exotic swords, and other armaments. Maintaining large armies, even nonstanding armies as in ancient Ghana, was expensive. States needed to station garrisons in provinces to collect taxes and tribute, as well as to provide protection for traders and the trade routes. Gold and eventually slaves became the accepted currency to pay for these services. Additionally, the Sudanic states established “spheres of influence” over the gold-producing areas; they did not have direct control of them. The Sudanic states were middlemen in the gold trade, further distancing the North African dynasties from direct access to the gold they continually sought.

Sources

Philip de Barros, “Iron Metallurgy: Sociocultural Context,” in Ancient African Metallurgy: The Sociocultural Context, by Michael S. Bisson, S. Terry Childs, de Barros, and Augustin F. C. Holl, edited by Joseph O. Vogel (Walnut Creek, Cal.: AltaMira Press, 2000), pp. 147-198

F. De Medeiros, “The Peoples of the Sudan: Population Movements,” in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, edited by M. El Fasi and I. Hrbek, volume 3 of General History of Africa (London: Heine-

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mann / Berkeley: University of California Press / Paris: UNESCO, 1988), pp. 119-139.

J. Devisse, “Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa,” in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, edited by M. El Fasi and I. Hrbek, volume 3 of General History of Africa (London: Heinemann / Berkeley: University of California Press / Paris: UNESCO, 1988), pp. 367-435.

R. Haaland, “Man’s Role in the Changing Habitat of Mema During the Old Kingdom of Ghana,” Norwegian Archaeological Review, 13 (1980): 31-46.

Augustin F. C. Holl, “Metals and Precolonial African Society,” in Ancient African Metallurgy: The Sociocultural Context, pp. 1-82.

John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973).

Raymond Mauny, Tableau géographique de l’Quest africain au Moyen Age, d’après les sources écrites, la tradition et I’archéologie (Dakar: IFAN, 1961).