Expanding Trade Routes

Sources

Early Trade Routes. By the year 500, the kingdom of Ghana relied on trading iron and gold to buy salt mined in the Sahara Desert and merchandise from north of the desert. Camel caravans traveled the trade routes with their cargo. The nomadic Berbers of North Africa called the part of the continent south of the Sahara Bilad al-Sudan (Land of the Black Peoples), and the entire region of West Africa became known as the Sudan. One of the earliest trade routes followed by the northern traders linked the salt mines of Taghaza (an oasis in the Sahara), to Walata on the southern edge of the Sahara, and to other points in West Africa, including the important trading center of Djenné and the goldfields further south. During the latter part of the ninth century a route developed further west, linking the Moroccan cities of Tangier, Fez, and Sijilmasa to the West African market towns of Audaghost and Walata. From those towns, merchants could take other routes along the Senegal and Niger Rivers to reach other parts of the region. The Arab writer al-Hussan recorded in 950 that in Fezzan, a region of southwestern Libya, gold was exchanged for copper, which was traded for more gold further south. Writing a century later, al-Bakri told of a caravan from Morocco carrying more than two thousand brass rods to be traded south of the Sahara. Other items traded across the desert included horses, textiles, glass beads, ivory, and kola nuts.

A TRANSPORTATION ENTERPRISE

During the thirteenth century, the five Maqqari brothers developed a successful business in communication and transportation along a trans-Saharan trade route. The brothers from Tlemcen (in northwest Algeria, near the Moroccan border) created ways to ease the strenuous, dangerous journey across the Sahara Desert from Sijilmasa in southeast Morocco through the oasis of Taghaza to the West African market town of Walata on the southern edge of the desert. The Maqqari brothers dug and maintained wells along the route and also provided caravan guides. Two brothers stayed in Tlemcen and received goods from European traders. Another brother lived in Sijilmasa, where he gathered information about markets and prices in North Africa and the Sudan. With this information, he could maximize profits by shipping particular goods when they were most in demand. The other two brothers lived in Walata, where they distributed merchandise from the north to the local traders and sent local goods by caravan to their brothers in the north. Their enterprise apparently found favor with Mali officials, who encouraged the brothers to trade throughout the country.

Source: J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, eds., The History of West Africa, second edition, 2 volumes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, 1987), I: 143.

Trade Routes by 1500. In the eastern part of West Africa, by the year 900, the Kanuri people around Lake Chad in the kingdom of Kanem-Bornu had set up trade routes that circled north to Tripoli and east to Cairo and Mecca and back to Lake Chad. After 1000, merchants traded from Timbuktu north to Tunis and the Mediterranean Sea. From Timbuktu, trade spread all across the Sahel and savanna regions south of the Sahara and along the major rivers, the Senegal, Niger, and Benue. These river routes made it fairly easy to get merchandise to Djenné and Gao. By around 1300, the forest areas along the Gulf of

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Guinea coast in West Africa were connected with the major trading centers. The cities of Ile-Ife and Benin in present-day Nigeria were thriving trading centers in the 1300s and 1400s. Ile-Ife traded ivory, gold, pepper, kola nuts, and slaves north to other Niger River communities and further along the trans-Saharan routes. Some of the caravans on the trade routes were quite large. Visiting West Africa in the mid fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta wrote of seeing Egyptian-made cloth in Walata as proof that trade existed between West Africa and Egypt. He also heard that a huge caravan of more than twelve thousand camels passed near Tadmekka in the Sahel every year.

Control of Trade Routes. After 500, the West African kingdom that controlled the trade routes held the power in the region. In the ninth century, the ancient kingdom of Ghana controlled a region of goldfields called the Wangara, between the upper Niger and Senegal Rivers. From the Wangara, vast quantities of gold were traded north across the Sahara Desert in return primarily for salt and cloth from North Africa. Ancient Ghana went into decline following conquest of its capital city by Muslim Almoravids from North Africa in 1076. By the mid thirteenth century the great Empire of Mali had arisen to control the gold trade and trade routes. The shift in power from Ghana to Mali created a southward shift in trade from the Sahel toward the savanna, and Timbuktu replaced Walata as the main end point for desert caravans. By the mid fifteenth century, Mali had been absorbed by the even larger and more powerful Songhai Empire, which asserted its control over the trade routes. By this time the primary source of West African gold was farther south than Wangara, in the Akan forest in present-day Ghana, with Djenné as the starting point of the southward routes to this region.

Slave Labor. By the sixteenth century, slavery had been a fact of life in West Africa for thousands of years. Often slaves were captives taken during wars or other people from outside the tribe. Frequently, they rose in rank, became administrators, and sometimes gained their freedom. In certain situations merchants used slaves instead of pack animals. In the sixteenth century Leo Africanus wrote that when merchants from Wangara traveled to Bornu with gold, the roads were too rough for camels so their loads were transported by slaves, who were usually made to walk ten to twelve miles a day. Leo saw two such caravans in one day. The slaves carried not only merchandise but also food for their masters and the soldiers who guarded them. Salt bars were carried on camelback across the Sahara to towns in the Sahel and then transported further south by Muslim traders called Wangara after the goldfields. Their merchandise was sometimes carried by donkeys or bullocks, but they also used slave porters, who carried wares on their heads often as far as the Akan gold mines. In Yoruba, where the environment was not conducive to raising small draft animals, trade activities depended on footpaths and human caravans.

Changes in Transportation Needs. Losing control of the trans-Saharan trade routes contributed to the fall of the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai Empires. The end of Songhai domination was foreshadowed in 1544, when Sultan Muhammad al-Mahdi of Morocco demanded that Songhai ruler Askia Ishaq I hand over the gold mines. Ishaq refused, and the Songhai army successfully repelled a Moroccan invasion. Trans-Saharan trade continued profitably for the Songhai until Moroccan troops conquered their empire in 1591. This disruption of trans-Saharan trade routes, coupled with development of successful trade between Europeans and West Africans along the southern Gulf of Guinea coast, changed transportation patterns in the region. As trade to North Africa became much less profitable, the cities that had grown up along the trans-Saharan trade route were eventually abandoned.

Sources

Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, 3 volumes, translated by John Pory, edited by Robert Brown (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896).

J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, eds., The History of West Africa, second edition, 2 volumes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, 1987).

Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds.,Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999).

Brian Catchpole, A History of West Africa in Maps and Diagrams (London: Collins Educational, 1983).

Pekka Masonen, “Trans-Saharan Trade and the West African Discovery of the Mediterranean,” in Ethnic Encounter and Culture Change: Papers for the Third Nordic Conference on Middle Eastern Studies, edited by M’hammed Sabour and Knut S. Vikor (Bergen: Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 1997), pp. 116-142.

Mary Penick Motley, Africa, Its Empires, Nations, and People (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969).