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.

THE EROSION OF SLAVERY

Africa, like Europe, is a continent which has exported millions of colonists, who through their labours and initiative created the ‘New World’ of North and South America, with all that implies for the shape of the modern world. The African emigrants, almost without exception, were taken from Africa by force, and colonized America and the Caribbean as slave labourers. Thus, whilst helping to create the New World by their labour, the historical legacy of African immigration to the American hemisphere has left deep and bitter social, economic and political problems which are still far from solution. The period 1790– 1870 represents a great watershed in this historical movement of world significance. It is not, perhaps, a theme of Africa's domestic history, but none the less one which, through its effects on the relationships of ‘white’ and ‘black’ races and their attitudes to one another, has constantly had the effect of directly influencing the development of African, as well as European and American history.

The essential feature of the period under review is that it witnessed a revolutionary transformation in the legal and civil status of Africans and people of African descent living overseas. In 1770, although there were significant groups of free ‘people of colour’ in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Britain, they were small in number, and emancipated by individual acts, as part of no movement hostile to slavery as such. In general in 1770 white people felt it to be acceptable and normal that the status of black men outside Africa should be that of slavery.

Strictly speaking, the only European colony on the Western side of Africa before the end of the eighteenth century was Portuguese Angola. Elsewhere Europeans who settled to trade paid rent for their settlements to African rulers. Sovereignty was not surrendered. African rulers followed the precedent set in 1482, when the Portuguese were grudgingly permitted to build a fort at Elmina in return for a regularly paid rent. There were a few exceptions to this rule, but normally European traders were only allowed to settle in West Africa if they made regular payments in return. There was no transfer of sovereignty in these settlements.

All along the coast African rulers and European traders were united by the reciprocal obligations of ‘landlord’ and ‘stranger’. The land-lords protected their strangers and undertook to provide them with trade. Hence, in the period of the slave trade, Europeans did not appear in West Africa north of the equator as invaders or masters, but as equal trading partners.

Whatever misery they brought to those they purchased and shipped across the Atlantic, European slave traders were welcomed by their African customers. They offered, in return for slaves, a wide range of manufactured goods otherwise unobtainable in West Africa. Both trading partners, African and European, received the commodity they wanted, and made the best bargain they could. Yet, though individual Africans might often outwit their European customers, the overall economic advantage lay with the Europeans. In return for slaves, wealth-creating human machinery, they gave expendable consumer goods, turned out in growing volume by the expanding economy of industrializing Europe.

THE AFRICAN PEOPLES OF SOUTH AFRICA, c. 1800

By the mid-eighteenth century the greater part of South Africa had been settled by Bantu-speaking peoples through a prolonged process which may have begun as early as the third century AD. The Bantu replaced or absorbed earlier populations of San hunters and gatherers, and in some areas Khoi pastoralists also, though some survived in rugged or poorly watered country, or in dependence on Bantu groups. From these peoples the South African Bantu speakers had acquired a number of distinctive click consonants and incorporated them in their languages.

Bantu settlement was densest in the south-east, along the eastern coastal corridor between the Drakensberg mountains and the sea where the relatively high rainfall and fertile soils provided the most congenial conditions for human settlement. By 1800 the Bantu had reached the Great Fish river and had begun to spread into the lands to the south-west, between the Fish and Sunday rivers, named Zuurveld by the Cape Dutch settlers.

On the high veld, west of the Drakensberg and east of the Kalahari, the Bantu occupied much of the area of the modern Transvaal, Botswana, Orange Free State and the less mountainous parts of Lesotho, but had not in general advanced as far south as the Orange river.

Two main linguistic and cultural groups had differentiated themselves among the South African Bantu. The Nguni-speaking peoples lived along the eastern coastal belt between the Drakensberg and the sea, while the Sotho- and Tswana-speaking peoples occupied the interior plateau. West of the Kalahari, the Ambo and Herero in South-West Africa (Namibia) belonged to a third linguistic grouping.

The third chapter of this volume has already shown how little connection there was between the brilliant medieval civilization of the East African coast and most of the vast interior which lay behind it. The Waqwaq of the tenth-century Arabic geographer al-Mas'ūdl might be the Makua of northern Mozambique. The Matamandalin of the Kilwa Chronicle might be the Matambwe of southern Tanzania. The sixteenth-century Portuguese identified by name three small ethnic groups living in the immediate hinterland of Malindi and Mombasa. There is one late medieval reference to people from the interior arriving at Mombasa carrying ivory tusks and skins on their heads. But there is no record of any penetration of the interior by Arabs or Swahili before the eighteenth century, and the only notable overland journey carried out by a Portuguese to the north of the Zambezi was that of Gaspar Bocarro from Tete to Kilwa in 1616. No significant collection of imported objects has yet been found at any interior site north of the Zambezi dating to the period before 1600.

The reasons for this strange disjunction between coast and interior are certainly in large measure geographical. Behind the narrow coastal plain, the land rises towards the great central plateau, in shelf after shelf of dry thorn scrub, hard to inhabit and difficult to cross. Much of the plateau stands at approximately 1,200 metres above sea level, and its eastern rim rises in places much higher. The Iringa highlands, the Ngulu mountains, the Usambara and Pare hills all rise above a height of 1,800 metres.

The nineteenth-century history of the portion of Africa bordered by the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Indian Ocean, the Juba River, and approximately the 35th degree west and the 5th degree north is a story of the transformation of a conglomeration of tribes, principalities and kingdoms, some loosely connected with the Ethiopian state of those days, others independent, into a united Ethiopia and a series of European colonies along the coasts. Though the final stages of this process took place in the last quarter of the century, the forces which caused it appeared much earlier. The peoples of the area, who had not been part of any major international developments after the interests of the Portuguese and the Ottoman Turks had clashed there in the sixteenth century, were faced, within the span of a generation or two, with a completely new political and economic environment, caused by the rise of Muhammad ‘Alī's Egypt and the reawakening of European interest in the area. After two centuries of relative isolation and stagnation, the pace of events began to quicken; new challenges brought new responses, and a period of important developments was inaugurated.

ETHNIC, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL DIVISIONS,o c. 1800

As far back as recorded history goes, the two main elements of the region's population were the peoples speaking Cushitic and Semitic languages. By the beginning of the nineteenth century large migrations and a continuous process of assimilation had created a very complex picture with a number of Cushitic tribes or population groups surrounding as well as interspersed among more or less semitized Cushites in the northern and central highlands.

The history of Central Africa between AD 1000 and 1600 can be broadly divided into three parts on the basis of the historical evidence so far available. In the south-east the territory of Zambia is primarily known in this period through archaeological research. The main theme is the transition from Early Iron Age cultures to Later Iron Age cultures. This transition concerned the spread of more advanced technologies, the evolution of new pottery styles, and the exchange of rare commodities over increasingly long distances. The second region, in the savannas of south-western Zaïre and Angola, saw the emergence in the late medieval period of several important political leaders. Their exploits have been recorded in oral evidence which can be supplemented, in the sixteenth century, by the writings of early European visitors to the region. Finally, the third and largest part of Central Africa covers the equatorial forest and the woodland margin to the north of it. Here historical evidence is extremely sparse, and historical speculation depends largely on ethnographic and linguistic data. The results are so far unsatisfactory, but further work should gradually enable us to understand the two main themes of the history of the north. One is the interaction between forest cultures and savanna cultures both north and south of the equator. The other is the changing relationships between gathering and farming peoples within the forest.

The history of West Africa in the nineteenth century is chequered with jihads – Islamic holy wars. While differing in place, timing and execution, all show religious and political similarities, and all brought about important changes in the societies in which they occurred. It is the purpose of this chapter to describe these jihads. But first it is necessary to describe the situation in the Islamic world at large at this time. For the West African jihads, while in some respects local movements, were, in other respects, associated with events and movements taking place across that wider world.

THE ISLAMIC WORLD IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES

Islam is a religion and a way of life. It was also once a great world power. From the seventh century ad, Muslims embarked on a course of imperial expansion which extended over Persia, much of the Byzantine empire, reached eastward to the river Indus and westward into North Africa and southern Spain. Thus secured, Islam remained, throughout the Middle Ages, powerful and self-sufficient. It is true that by the end of the fifteenth century, the Muslims had lost Spain to the Reconquista. But they contained the main assault of Christendom – the Crusades – with ease and, confident within the circle of their vast territorial dominion, they were well content with the majesty of their intellectual and spiritual achievements. By the sixteenth century Islamic dynasties were ruling much of India, while in the west the Ottoman Turks were masters not only of the Middle East and North Africa, but also part of the Balkans.

There is obviously no scheme of periodization which is valid for Africa as a whole, and the opening and closing dates of this volume are not intended to be more than notional. In terms of political history, they fit best with events in North and West Africa, where the period opens with the great conquests of the Almoravids to the north and south of the western Sahara, and where it closes with the Moroccan conquest of the Niger bend, which destroyed the political unity of the western Sudan established during more than three centuries of strong rule by successive dynasties of Mali and Songhay. It is significant that these were the first and the last occasions on which conquering armies crossed the desert, and, taken together, they demarcate the high period of trans-Saharan communications, when the comings and goings of pious Muslims were reinforced by the golden trade of the Sudan, which fertilized the economic revival of all the Mediterranean lands. At its height, the Almoravid empire stretched from the Senegal to Saragossa, while that of the Almohads, which succeeded it, was narrower only in its lack of direct control over the desert routes. The golden trade, however, continued to flourish and to bind the two shores of the Mediterranean into a single network, which survived through medieval times. The Hafsid successors of the Almohads in Tunisia were trading, by the fifteenth century, as far afield as Norway in one direction and Bornu in the other.

The second half of the ninth century seems to have been a period of revival for the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. The damage done to its economic life by the rapid expansion of Islamic power in the Near and the Middle East had not destroyed Aksum altogether. It had only weakened it. Unable to maintain its usually strong frontier garrisons, Aksum had lost extensive territories on the Red Sea coast as well as along the Beja borderlands in the north. Furthermore, the areas which had long been conquered and incorporated into the empire beyond the Tekeze river in the west – notably the Walqayt and probably also the ancient Samanoi – had apparently broken off and regained their independence. These calamities had befallen the Christian empire of Aksum in rather rapid succession, following upon the rise of Islam and the eventual control of the Red Sea trade by Muslim powers and merchants. All this seems to have brought about a certain degree of political disintegration and a decisive weakening of the central institutions of the state for a period of over two centuries. But when, in the last quarter of the ninth century, we begin to have a few literary and traditional references to the Ethiopian region, it becomes very clear that the Christian state had definitely survived all these vicissitudes in the highland areas of southern Eritrea, Tigre, Lasta and Angot. These areas form the high ridge which separates the basins of the numerous rivers flowing in the direction of the Nile and the Red Sea, and as such they constitute a compact geographical unit.

MALAGASY SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STRUCTURE

In 1790 the Malagasy people were divided into a large number of ethnic groups, and a still larger number of political units. But despite local variations there was a striking degree of uniformity in language and customs.

There were large gaps in the pattern of settlement. Ethnic groups were separated by immense empty areas of bush or forest. Hunting, fishing and gathering provided secondary resources. Agriculture depended in large measure on slash and burn techniques with the cultivation of millet, taro, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, various beans, cassava, and mountain rice. Rice fields, constructed out of swamps or along water courses, were cultivated by means of the hoe and by trampling cattle; they provided rice in a number of areas. Zebu cattle were both work animals and visible capital, sacrificed only in religious ceremonies.

The Malagasy house was rectangular, with a steeply pitched roof, aligned along a north-south axis with a door to the west. The framework was of wood, the walls, according to area, made either of the leaf stalks of ravenala or of palm fronds, or of clay earth, the roof of leaves or thatch. Dress consisted of a loincloth and toga (Jamba) for the men, a sheath dress for the women. Cotton and silk were woven; while on the eastern coast sheath dresses were made from interlaced reed mats. In general furniture consisted of plaited mats. Containers were of vegetable origin (gourds, bamboo, wood) or of earthenware. Each family was self-sufficient in food; for heavy work, such as embankments and house-building, they were assisted by relatives.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the northern belt of West Africa may be viewed as a period of transition between the collapse of Songhay, the last of the great western Sudanic empires, and the rise of the revivalist militant Islamic movements which shaped the western Sudan in the nineteenth century, prior to the colonial occupation.

The period under survey opened with the Moroccan conquest of Timbuktu, and relations between Morocco and the Sudan remained a principal theme throughout. The history of the middle Niger valley evolved around the unsuccessful attempt of the arma, heirs to the Moroccan conquerors, to build an effective government in place of the political structure of the Sudanic empires. All the great empires in the Sudan achieved political supremacy through military conquest, and each had its own ethnic group - Soninke, Malinke or Songhay - as its nucleus. In these cases, however, conquest and domination were mitigated by social and cultural values common to all peoples of the western Sudan. People moved quite freely across ethnic boundaries to be integrated into parallel strata of society. The pashalik of Timbuktu, on the other hand, was based on an unmitigated conquest by an alien group, imbued with a sense of superiority of the white over the black. In the Sudanic empires there was much in common between the local forms of socio-political organization and the administration of the central government. There was also a continuity from one empire to its successor. There was little in common between the organization of the military ruling caste of the arma and that of the conquered population, and there was little continuity from the former imperial structures.

Historians of North-East Africa have been largely concerned with developments in the kingdom of Ethiopia and, to a lesser degree, with the principalities of the coast. These communities were literate, had recorded their history and were occasionally visited by foreigners. The Galla peoples on the other hand, illiterate until modern times and considered hostile to foreign visitors, have been relatively neglected, but the story of their great migrations, the evolution of their society and culture, the growth of their political power and their transformation into the predominant element in the Horn of Africa is in reality the principal theme throughout this period. Even contemporaries in Ethiopia failed to recognize for a time the significance of the Galla invasion, for they remained largely preoccupied with internal rivalries and with the threat still posed to the Christian kingdom in the second half of the sixteenth century by the Muslim elements of the coast.

THE MUSLIM THREAT AND THE GALLA EXPANSION

Imām Ahmad Gragn, who had conquered Ethiopia at the head of the armies of Adal and dominated the country for more than a decade, was killed in 1543 at the battle of Woina-Dega. Galawdewos, who had succeeded his father Lebna-Dengel in 1540 as king of kings of Ethiopia, quickly reconquered the northern and central plateaux, but it took him several years to overcome the resistance of the rulers of Damot and the Muslim sultanates of the south. By the beginning of the 1550s, Ethiopia was once again united within its old borders. Nevertheless, Galawdewos realized that most of the factors which had contributed to the collapse of the kingdom in the days of his father were still in existence.