REGIONAL DIVISIONS

The history of Central Africa in the nineteenth century covers two broad geographical zones. The equatorial zone comprises Africa's largest surviving area of tropical rain forest, together with the adjacent woodland on the fringe of the central Sudan. The savanna zone, in the south, stretches from the Atlantic in the west to the middle Zambezi in the east, and is mainly light woodland, rather than true savanna grassland. The whole region was, and is, one of the most sparsely populated of the habitable areas of Africa, currently averaging about six people to the square kilometre, or about one sixth of the density found in the wooded areas of West Africa. Central Africa has no great concentrations of rural population, such as are found in the Niger delta to the west, or in the interlacustrine highlands to the east, and the only urban growth has been in recent commercial, administrative and mining centres such as Duala, Bangui, Kinshasa, Luanda and Ndola.

Late in the nineteenth century Central Africa was divided into four political zones which are reflected in the subsequent history of the area. The central and north-eastern zone consists of the republic of Zaïre, an area of about 1 million square miles and twenty million people, who were ruled during the first half of the twentieth century by Belgium. The south-west consists of Portuguese-speaking Angola, an area of half a million square miles and five million people. In the quarters adjacent to these two huge territories there developed the spheres of British influence in the south-east, and of French influence in the north-west.

EGYPT, NUBIA AND THE EASTERN DESERTS

Among works of reference, an indispensable instrument for all aspects of Islam and the Arabic world remains the five-volume The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st edn (1913-38). The standard introduction and bibliography is Cahen, Jean Sauvaget's introduction to the history of the Muslim East (1965), which gives a systematic regional and thematic arrangement of the available source material. For continuous acquaintance with the periodical literature, the student should follow either Pearson, Index Islamicus (1958, and supplements 1962, 1967, 1972), or Abstracta lslamica, a supplement to the Revue des Etudes Islamiqms (since 1927), which contains short evaluations and registers work done in Arabic.

Unlike other parts of the Arab world (or for that matter of the Middle East and of the rest of Africa), Egypt is in the privileged position of possessing a quantity of primary archival material for its history before the fifteenth century. For the period before the tenth and eleventh centuries there are a number of papyri dealing with administrative, juristic and even private matters. The richest collection is that of the Egyptian Library, cf. Grohmann (1934-62 and 1954). A limited quantity of other primary material (deeds, state correspondence, decrees etc.) is preserved from the Fatimid period, e.g. the letters of the caliph al- Mustansir, ed. Magid (1954), and the Fatimid Decrees in Stern (1964). The Ayyubid and Mamluk epochs seem to be rich in this material, but so far only some parts have been made accessible or catalogued; useful introductions to these materials are Atiya (1955), for Ayyubid official documents, and Ernst (i960), for those of the Mamluk sultans.

POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS BEFORE 1830

It is customary to link together the different states of north-west Africa, the Maghrib. But they were, in fact, very varied. They differed from each other and they did not constitute any form of political unity. Turkish suzerainty existed over Algiers and Tunis, but not over Morocco.

This suzerainty was, as it has often been described, largely fictive and mainly ceremonial, but it did have some real meaning. It was in Istanbul, in Smyrna and in Anatolia that the governments of Algiers and Tunis recruited their garrison troops (the ojaq). When the Porte was in peril in some way (as in 1795 against Tripoli, in 1810 against Crete, and most notably at the time of the Greek war of independence), then it received assistance from its vassals. Morocco, which was fully independent, was a country where political unrest and agitation were frequent. The sovereign was a hereditary monarch, but he had to be proclaimed sovereign by the different tribal and military units which covered most of the territory, as well as by the principal town organizations. In a sense therefore it could be said that the Moroccan monarchy was also elective. There had been many succession struggles; regional and local preoccupations could express themselves through the issue of a sovereign's proclamation; at times, revolt can almost be described as endemic, particularly during the rule of Mulay Sulayman (1792–1822). In the regency of Algiers the dey was chosen by the Turkish garrison.

EGYPT AND THE NILE VALLEY IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, the political condition of Egypt and the Nilotic Sudan was not far removed from anarchy. Egypt was still, as it had been since 1517, a province of the Ottoman Empire, but it was no longer under the effective control of the sultan. Since the early seventeenth century, the power of the Ottoman viceroy had been eroded until he was no more than a figurehead. The country was dominated by a military elite composed of the officers of the Ottoman garrison-corps (especially the Janissaries) and a group of grandees, the beys, most of whom were members of Mamluk households, and were of Circassian, Bosniak or other alien origin. The whole political structure was deeply riven by faction. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a group known as the Qāzdughliyya, after the Mamluk household which formed its nucleus, had triumphed over their rivals, only to split up into competing personal factions. Between 1760 and 1772, the most capable and ruthless of the Qāzdughlī leaders, Bulut Kapan ‘Alī Bey (often called al-Kabīr, ‘the Great’), established a kind of dictatorship. After he had been overthrown, and eventually killed (in 1773), the primacy in Egypt passed to his own former mamlūk, Muhammad Bey Abu’l-Dhahab, whose death in 1775 was followed by a revival of faction-fighting. After many vicissitudes, including an Ottoman expedition in 1786–7 intended to restore the sultan's control over Egypt, brāhīm Bey and the ultimate victors in this contest were two men, I Murād Bey, who established a somewhat uneasy duumvirate.

This volume is concerned with a period of African history which has traditionally been defined by events emanating from Europe. The year 1790 roughly marks the beginnings of the effective impact of the British anti-slavery movement on West Africa, where the freed slave colony of Sierra Leone was already struggling to establish itself. Protestant missionary enterprise in West and South Africa had begun. In 1795 the British first occupied the Cape of Good Hope, while three years later Napoleon's occupation of Egypt launched the movement of ‘modernization’ in North Africa. In succeeding decades the impact of European traders, missionaries and consuls increasingly began to affect the internal social, political and economic balances within African societies. The choice of 1870 as the terminal date for this volume is obviously dictated by the beginnings of the European scramble for African territory which will be a major theme of volume 6. The period can thus be considered as one dominated by the theme of Africa's growing contact with Europe, as a time of slow penetration and preparation by Europeans for the coming of partition and colonial rule.

Such a perspective, however, offers a somewhat irrelevant pattern for the history of the continent as a whole. Though Bantu in South Africa, or Arabs in Algeria, felt the direct impact of European settler colonization, elsewhere in the continent the vast mass of Africans rarely saw a European, and Europe influenced their lives only indirectly or at second-hand, except for those who lived in coastal areas where there was a direct European presence.

THE EUROPEAN PRESENCE IN AFRICA

The history of every continent is the product of a complex amalgam of forces, some of internal, others of external origin. In Africa, where the technique of literacy was introduced to most indigenous communities only in comparatively recent times, the exploits of outsiders are far more richly documented than those of local people. Thus there exists a bias tending to overstress the importance of external influences inherent in most of the written material available to the student of the African past, a bias that needs constantly to be corrected by an imaginative awareness of the achievements of African societies in developing their own varied and elaborate cultures. Obviously modern Africa has been profoundly affected by the techniques, the institutions and the ideas introduced by men and women of European origin; but in historical terms the impact of Europe must be regarded as a relatively recent development, to be measured in most parts of the continent in terms not of centuries, but merely of decades. When this comparatively brief involvement with Europe is set against the long span of intercourse with Asia, it becomes clear that Africa, at least until the end of the eighteenth century, was far more deeply affected by the greater of her two continental neighbours.

For it was from Asia that there had come, probably as early as the sixth millennium BC, the revolutionary techniques of cereal cultivation and of pastoralism. Later innovations of Asian origin, each capable of exercising a profound influence on the lives of those who adopted them, included the craft of iron-working, the camel, the banana, the largest of the yams and a variety of other food-crops.

WHITE EXPANSION AND THE BRITISH OCCUPATIONS

When the British took possession of the Cape in 1795 they inherited from the Dutch East India Company a situation which already exhibited many of the most significant features which were to characterize the history of South Africa until well into the nineteenth century. Outside the wheat and wine-growing areas of the Cape, the settlers had developed a system of stock ranching, requiring the exploitation by individual white farming families of large farms worked with the assistance of non-European labour. This resulted in a continuous territorial expansion of the white settlement, which by 1795 had already resulted in the extension of the original tiny settlement around Cape Town to the Fish river, the Sneeuwbergen and the Khamies Bergen. This vast expansion, by scattering the white population so thinly that the growth of urban areas was severely restricted, inhibited the development of alternative economic opportunities for whites and encouraged further expansion.

At first there was little resistance from San and Khoi, but white expansion at length resulted in a situation of endemic frontier conflict. In the north-eastern districts of Tarka, Sneeuwberg and Agter Bruintjies Hoogte, the San hunters mounted a ferocious resistance against further encroachment on their hunting grounds. In the Zuur-veld, where white and African farmers were settled alongside each other, two frontier wars had left the issues between them unresolved.

European relationships with West Africa in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century were to a large extent dominated by the European effort to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade and to replace it by trade in the agricultural produce of West Africa. This led in part to the foundation of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the strengthening of British and French trading depots in other parts of the coast, a new European curiosity about the interior of Africa, and a renewed interest in effecting social and cultural change in Africa through Christian missions. This range of activities became an integrated programme of the abolitionists – stopping the slave trade, maintaining an anti-slavery naval squadron to enforce the prohibition, expanding ‘legitimate trade’, supporting missionary activities and exploration of the interior. These activities encouraged the involvement of Europeans in Africa, and several European and American nations came to participate in them to a greater or lesser extent. Abolition of the slave trade became the most common ideology to justify to the European public the expense and the fact of this involvement. This ideology was particularly strong in Britain, and from Britain it affected other countries. For example, owing to the tradition of Anglo-French rivalry in West Africa, the British example ensured the wholesale adoption of the abolitionist programme in France. Consequently, in the written European sources on Africa in this period, whether from missionaries, explorers, ‘legitimate’ traders, naval officers or government officials, the theme of abolition looms large, often disproportionately large, and the period 1807 to about 1870 in West African history has often been called the anti-slave trade or abolitionist era.

The eastern coast of Africa looks out over the Indian Ocean, which, though vast, is comparatively easily navigated. Consequently there has been much contact over the past two thousand years among the peoples who inhabit its shores. This, coupled with similar climatic and ecological conditions in most of the surrounding coastal lands, has resulted in a considerable degree of cultural homogeneity, particularly marked in the western part of the ocean. Communication between the African coast and the interior was, on the other hand, difficult.

Voyages in this part of the Indian Ocean would have been facilitated by the pattern of the monsoon regime, the winds blowing from a north-easterly direction towards East Africa for half the year, and from the south-west for the other half. This renders voyages by sailing ship from the Persian Gulf and north-western India particularly easy; those from Aden and the Yemen are rather more difficult. To the south, the South Equatorial Current facilitates voyages from the Far East to Africa, and the return is assisted by the monsoonal drift setting to the east between that current and India, together with predominantly westerly winds in this region.

The main motive for voyages to East Africa was trade, but the pressure of population in the arid lands bordering the northern margin of the Indian Ocean provided a stimulus to migration. In the traditions of the coast, religious persecution figures as the reason for migrants leaving their homelands in the Persian Gulf, but it is probable that the attractions of well-watered lands, coupled with the prospect of wealth and a comfortable life in an agreeable environment, played at least as great a part.

Southern Africa can be divided into two ecological regions with sharply contrasting historical evolutions. The huge western zone consisting of South-West Africa, Botswana and the western Cape remained until 1600 a predominantly non-agricultural area. The peoples who occupied sparsely the vast expanses of acacia scrubland at the centre of the Kalahari were necessarily hunter-gatherers. At its fringes, however, pastoralism was possible, and in the far north, the pastoralists had become iron-using and Bantu-speaking by the end of the period. It seems likely that Iron Age pastoralists such as the Herero had spread in a westerly direction towards the plateau of southern Angola. Elsewhere pastoralists remained Late Stone Age peoples, who were very different in language, culture and appearance from their Bantu-speaking neighbours. They lived in association with closely related hunter-gatherers, and their contacts ranged from open conflict over waterholes, grazing lands and game, to various forms of clientship and trade.

The eastern half of southern Africa, comprising Rhodesia, southern Mozambique and eastern South Africa, has a rather more complex history than the south-west. With richer soils and vegetation, heavier rainfall and more abundant mineral resources, it has been able to support a far larger population. In modern times, this population has been classified into two broad cultures. In the north-east, between the Zambezi and Limpopo, are the Shona. In the south-east, south of the Limpopo, are the South-Eastern Bantu, comprising the Sotho-Tswana of the plateau, the Nguni of the coastlands, and the Tonga-Tsonga of southern Mozambique.

MUSLIM SETTLEMENTS ON THE COAST

Until the end of the eighteenth century the inhabitants of the islands and ports of East Africa had very little to do with those of the interior. The East African coastal belt belonged to the rest of the continent only in a geographical sense. Events at the coast passed almost unnoticed in the interior, while people living along the coast were rarely touched by what happened up country. The East African littoral was more a part of the Indian Ocean world than of the African continent. From the second century at least, Arabs from the south of Arabia and the Persian Gulf had been trading to East Africa, following the monsoon winds. They transacted their business in the ports and went back with the trade winds to India or beyond. During Muslim times, some of these Arabs and Persians, especially the Shirazi, began to build fortified urban settlements on the coast and the offshore islands. The earliest of these known so far was at Manda in the Lamu archipelago, and dates to the ninth century. Zanzibar and Pemba were probably occupied soon after this. The Islamic settlements at Mafia and Kilwa were built mainly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a score of other stone-built towns were added during the next two hundred years. Thus by the fifteenth century a considerable population of immigrants had settled in the islands and ports of East Africa.

PROLEGOMENA AND ORIENTATIONS

The sources available for the history of Guinea before the seventeenth century are not good. The Arabic writers whose works enable historians with some confidence to reconstruct the main political outlines of the West African Sudan from about the eleventh century onwards, and even to gain some insight into aspects of its economic and social history, were in general uninformed about developments further south. Literacy in Arabic did spread to some of the peoples of Guinea, but it did not do so significantly before about the seventeenth century, and there are few if any surviving documents of historical value whose origins relate to earlier than the eighteenth century. With the advent of European traders to the Guinea coasts in the fifteenth century, a considerable corpus of documentation in European languages did begin to build up. But centuries were to pass before Europeans began to penetrate significantly into the interior. Their direct knowledge, and that of the Africans who acquired literary skills from them, was therefore confined to the coastlands. Even here there must have been much which escaped their notice, and even more that was at best imperfectly understood, while what they had to say about what was going on further than a few miles from the coast was essentially hearsay.

Some of the historical traditions maintained orally by the peoples of Guinea themselves certainly relate to times before 1600. In lower Guinea, for example, there are some traditions, such as those of the Yoruba, the Edo of Benin, and the Akan, which have something to say about events which may have occurred as far back as the thirteenth century – in extreme cases, perhaps even to as far as about the eleventh century.

THE FATIMIDS

The Fatimid conquest of Egypt in AD 969 was accomplished without much difficulty, as the country had for some time already been in internal chaos and had suffered heavily from famines. The skilful political and religious propaganda of the Fatimids also prepared the ground for a ready acceptance of the new dynasty by the population. When the Fatimid general Jawhar (a former slave of Dalmatian origin), after overwhelming the last feeble resistance of the Ikhshidid army, entered al-Fustāt on 1 July 969 and formally proclaimed the new regime by introducing the khutba (Friday sermon) in the name of his master, the caliph al-Mu'izz (952–75), the event had a more profound significance and more far-reaching consequences than a simple change of dynasty so common in the annals of the Islamic world. The coming of the Fatimids marked a new epoch in the history of Egypt which, for the first time since the Ptolemies, became not only the seat of a completely sovereign dynasty, but also the centre of an empire that survived its original founders and lasted for more than five centuries.

The imperial idea was, indeed, inherent in the Ismā'ili ideology, of which the Fatimids were the most prominent champions, and only they, among all the Ismā'ili Shi'a branches, came within reach of attaining the ecumenical goal of the doctrine. They considered their North African period merely a preparatory stage, and the conquest of Egypt only one of the stepping-stones, on the road to the creation of the universal Ismā'ili empire, ruled by the Prophet's descendants in accordance with the esoteric doctrine of the Ismā'iliya.

ALMORAVIDS AND ALMOHADS TO c. 1250

During the second half of the eleventh century the Almoravids, who had emerged from the south-western Sahara, extended their conquests from Ghana in the south, and over the Maghrib to Spain in the north. Morocco, which had previously been divided among rival dynasties, was united and began to assume its own political identity. Muslim Spain, which had previously attempted to exert political influence over Morocco, now came under the rule of a Berber dynasty. It was under this union that the Muslim civilization of Spain made its greatest impact on Morocco. The western Sudan, which had previously been connected with the Maghrib by enterprising traders only, became more closely attached to the Maghrib, and not only for the relatively short period of the Almoravid occupation. Greater intensity of Islamic activity south of the Sahara and the ever-increasing trade fostered relations between the Maghrib and the western Sudan. A good illustration of the greater integration of the Muslim Occident, from the Sudan to Spain, is the group of Muslim royal tombstones dated between 1100 and 1110, which in all probability had been sculptured and inscribed in Spain, and then carried across the Sahara to be erected on the graves of two kings and a queen of Gao, who were recent converts to Islam.

About 1055, after they had forced the Sanhaja of the southern Sahara into the Almoravid movement, the spiritual leader 'Abdullāh b. Yāsin and the military commander Yahyā b. 'Umar led these nomads northwards to conquer Sijilmasa from the Maghrawa dynasty of the Zanata (for the earlier history of the Almoravids, see Volume 2).

A principal underlying theme for the central Sahara and Sudan in this chapter, in the period roughly from AD 1050 to 1600, is supplied by the basic pattern of penetration. New people, new ideas, new goods were crossing, or sometimes emerging from, the Sahara, and becoming established in the Sudan. There was considerable mobility, too, within the central Sudan itself, most dramatically illustrated by the exodus of the court of Kanem into Bornu about 1400. In the corresponding chapter in the next volume, concerned with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is more the tendency towards consolidation of states and societies which runs through the whole story.

The countries of the Sudan were by no means inactive partners in the trans-Saharan relationship. Sudanese gold was of critical importance for the Mediterranean economy; Sudanese slaves coloured the societies into which they were received. Even Islam, that most outstanding of all the gifts of the outside world to the Sudan in this early period, was influenced in its North African base by the beliefs and observances which these same slaves brought with them. Nevertheless, what was received in the Sudan countries had, on balance, a more profound historical influence than what was exported thence. Just what form this influence took in the Sudan depended upon the strengths and weaknesses, the needs and ambitions and preferences, of the receiving societies. And it is by rivetting our attention upon the local contribution that the new school of the historiography of black Africa has performed its most signal service.