THE PROCESS OF CONSOLIDATION

The primary problem of the central Sudan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that of consolidation, of state and of society. The main stages of penetration and expansion occurred in earlier centuries: the arrival of outstanding individuals or groups; the more general encroachment of nomads upon settled realms; the transmission of Islam across the Sahara and its planting in the Sudan; the extension of a corresponding framework of trade; the crucial exodus of the court of the Saifawa from Kanem to Bornu towards the end of the fourteenth century. The same patterns may, indeed, be traced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Wadai, with the coming of 'Abd al-Karīm in the early seventeenth century, there is an unusually late instance of the héros civilisateur theme. Nomad incursions continued, and, as records become fuller in later years, it is possible to analyse the contribution, probably overrated, of such people to state formation; and also, perhaps, by analogy to suggest the process which may have taken place in earlier times. The expansion of Islam was also repeated again and again, on the smaller stages of outlying states, such as Mandara, Bagirmi and Wadai. Even the exodus to Bornu was a continuing affair, often closely associated with nomad groups.

The persistence of these patterns of mobility is one major qualification to be attached to the fundamental theme of consolidation. Another arises from the fact that the same event may be seen either as illustrative of mobility, even of the dissolution of society, or of consolidation, depending upon one's point of view.

OTTOMAN EGYPT

Egypt, although geographically situated in Africa, was at the beginning of the sixteenth century essentially a part of the Near East by virtue of its recent history, its culture and its closest political connections. One of the earliest of Muslim conquests, Egypt had grown in importance as a centre of Islam when, in the thirteenth century, its rulers halted the Mongol advance which had overwhelmed the eastern Islamic territories and extinguished the caliphate in Baghdad. The same episode had confirmed the links between Egypt and Syria, and the Mamluk sultans succeeded the Ayyubids and the Fatimid caliphs as the rulers of an empire situated at the crossroads of western Asia and northern Africa. With the Maghrib, the upper valley of the Nile, and the trans Saharan Sudan, there were trading connections, while Muslims came from these regions to study at the university mosque al-Azhar or to travel as pilgrims to the holy cities of the Hejaz. But the political bond between Egypt and the adjacent parts of North Africa, which had briefly existed under the Fatimids, was never renewed, while not until the nineteenth century did a ruler of Egypt effectively govern the Nile beyond Aswan. The Ottoman conquest, which ended the Mamluk sultanate, and converted Egypt into an outlying province of an empire with its centre at Istanbul, continued the historic detachment of the country from Africa and its association with the Islamic Near East.

The Guinea coast at the start of the seventeenth century was less developed than the western Sudanic hinterland, which had larger territorial states and more differentiated societies and whose peoples displayed a greater capacity to organize production and to defend or expand their spheres of socio-political control. But also on the coast one is dealing with a historical situation which has as its antecedents millennia of slow population growth, enhancement of technology, and spread of specialization. An outstanding consequence of cumulative growth and development was the emergence of distinctive cultures over relatively large zones. Moving from west to east one could distinguish four areas: upper Guinea, with a dominating Mande presence; the Gold Coast, where the Akan were prominent; Yoruba/Aja territory; and eastern Nigeria, comprising mainly the Ibo and Ibibio. Social differentiation and the emergence of state powers were of major significance in all of these areas, and the internal contradictions were invariably affected in some degree by the presence of Europeans.

YORUBA, AJA, BINI

The culture zone which had the deepest roots by 1600 embraced all the Yoruba and included the Bini and the Aja. The family was the most important unit in daily life, and the specific patterns of family organization throughout the region had much in common. The Yoruba word ebi is equivalent to ‘family’ among most of the groups involved – from the Aja to the Itsekiri. Understandably, the ebi family principles were extended to the political superstructure. The leading states of this ‘Ebi Commonwealth’ (as it has been called) were Oyo, Benin and Dahomey.

FOR very different reasons the two kings who lived at the beginning of the period to which this part of the History is devoted have received more attention in modern times than any of their predecessors or successors on the Egyptian throne: Akhenaten, on account of his religious and artistic innovations, and Tutankhamun, on account of the chance survival of his tomb at Thebes with its fabulous contents untouched since antiquity until its discovery in 1922. Neither of them was accepted as having been a legitimate ruler worthy of inclusion in the king-lists of the Nineteenth Dynasty kings Sethos I and Ramesses II, as recorded in their temples at Abydos. While they and their successors until the end of the Twenty-first Dynasty occupied the throne of Egypt, important events were happening in Western Asia, the course of which is traced in this volume. The long Kassite rule in Babylonia came to an end and the rivalry between Assyria and Babylonia began. The Hittite empire reached its peak, declined and fell, as did the Elamite kingdom in Persia. The Phrygians appeared on the scene for the first time. Along the Mediterranean shores, in Phoenicia and in Ugarit new forms of writing were developed. Palestine emerged from its long period of anonymity with the rise of the Hebrew kingdom culminating in the reign of Solomon.

European sea voyages to Africa and America in the fifteenth century laid the basis for an extensive operation linking up the three continents. From an African viewpoint, there were three sets of relationships which can be isolated for analysis. First, there were direct ties between Africa and Europe; secondly, there was an African presence created in the Americas; and thirdly, there was a tri-continental interaction which was more than just the sum of the other two. This interaction involved commerce, the establishment of settler colonies and the creation of new social relations – amounting to a different international political economy, with its centre in western Europe and with its dynamics supplied by capitalist accumulative tendencies.

EUROPE'S IMAGE OF AFRICA

Portuguese navigational achievements intensified contacts between Europe and the western Sudan – contacts which had until then stretched tenuously across the Mediterranean and the Sahara, and which had been mediated by the Muslims of North Africa. Farther along the western coast and in southern Africa, Europeans made completely new acquaintances. The people of the Kongo kingdom, the Khoisan (Hottentots) and the mwene mutapa's kingdom were all featuring in European literature in the sixteenth century. When the Portuguese sailed up the East African coast, they met not only new African faces, but also their familiar antagonists, the Muslims. Catholic Europe had entertained the hope that the political power of a Christian ‘Prester John’ somewhere in Africa or Asia might be drawn into the balance against the Muslim world; but this was never to be, although relations were established with the Christian state of Ethiopia, signifying the renewal of cultural links which had been severely attenuated since the rise of Islam.

Variety of experience is perhaps the most striking feature of the history of eastern Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along the coast this vast region stretches southwards from Mogadishu to the mouth of the Zambezi river. Inland it extends from the southern Ethiopian escarpment and the southern Sudan down along the western edge of the great lakes region, across the corridor between Lakes Tanganyika and Malawi, and then follows the Luangwa river until its confluence with the Zambezi. In the northern interior – including most of modern Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi – both Nilotic-speaking and Bantu-speaking peoples were still isolated from the coast, still able to resolve their problems without having to confront the economic and allied challenges that would emanate from the coast in the nineteenth century. In the central interior – encompassing most of the Tanzanian mainland – it is possible to see a gradual transition by the end of the eighteenth century from the northern pattern of historical development to that of the southern interior – comprising what is today southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique, Malawi, and the eastern-most region of Zambia – where the main challenge to the Bantu-speaking peoples was the growth and impact of international trade. On the coast, the various Swahili-speaking communities were already concerned to preserve what they could of their ancient political and economic independence from two successive sets of overlords, the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs. Yet throughout these two centuries it is also possible to discern common processes at work in these four regions of eastern Africa.

Two great divides have marked the last seven millennia in Africa: the transition to food production and the modern revolution in the means of communication. The impact of these innovations was by no means felt simultaneously throughout the continent. A few people living in the most inhospitable areas have yet to participate in the first, but the vast majority of Africans were already pastoralists or agriculturalists long before the end of the first millennium AD. The impact of the second, nineteenth-century revolution was more immediate, though certain aspects of communications were already being influenced by much earlier developments. In successive millennia, trade-links within Africa had been profoundly affected by the Phoenician, Arab and Portuguese explorations of, respectively, the North African, Indian Ocean and Atlantic coasts of Africa. North of the equatorial forests, the camel and the horse had increased man's mobility, and Islam had brought literacy to a restricted few. But until the transformation which began, not with colonial rule, but with the steamers, railways, telegraph, vernacular bibles and newspapers of the nineteenth century, communications throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa had remained largely dependent on oral messages and human porterage. Until the nineteenth century, the pace of change was not dependent on an alien technology. The main lines of communication lay not with the outside world, but within the continent itself.

Compared with these watersheds, the year 1600 marked no noticeable break in continuity; yet in some important respects the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Africa do constitute a period of transition, distinct from both the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.