Africans’ preference for hoe cultivation over plow agriculture, and for bloomery furnaces over blast furnaces, despite knowledge of both technologies, puzzled early European observers, many of whom nevertheless acknowledged the productivity of these systems.

This perspective was not shared by colonial agronomists and metallurgists, who regarded African techniques as outdated and inefficient. Yet their determined efforts to introduce plow agriculture and blast-furnace technology failed to demonstrate the superiority of these presumably more advanced methods.

Even when African technologies proved reliably competitive under colonial contexts, assumptions about their inefficiency persisted in both scholarly and popular literature, where modern technological disparities were projected into the past.

Such facile assumptions have generated numerous misconceptions about the relationship between technology and broader social processes in pre-colonial African societies, which are often contradicted by the historical evidence.

This article adopts a comparative approach to African agriculture and ironworking, explaining the efficiency of pre-colonial technologies through the failures of colonial plow-farming and blast-furnace projects.

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PATREON

Jack Goody and the origins of popular misconceptions on African technologies.

The comparative history of technology in Africa and the rest of the Old World is a subject so vast that in dealing with it one would be expected to hesitate to commit oneself to statements of general application lest particular instances be found to controvert them.

Yet this caution has not always characterized comparative sociology. Few scholars have been more influential in shaping general assessments of pre-colonial African economic and political history than the celebrated anthropologist Jack Goody.

In his book “Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa” (1971), Goody articulated a number of arguments about African history that have since been popularised by more influential writers like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in ‘Why Nations Fail’ (2012) and Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ (1997).1

Goody argues that the plow increases productivity by expanding the size of land under cultivation, and observes that it did not spread south of the Sahara except in Ethiopia. He claims that this created a technological gap in productivity between African agriculture based on the hoe with “scarce” iron, and an “advanced” agriculture in Eurasia based upon the plow.

He argues that this gap resulted in different patterns of landholding, social organization, and specialization in feudal Eurasia (and Ethiopia) than those found in Africa. He further claims that iron smelting diffused into Africa from the Mediterranean but wasn’t advanced because African blacksmiths couldn't manufacture firearms, thus enabling the Portuguese in the 15th century to dominate them in battle.2

Goody’s arguments were a product of their time, when limited empirical information about African agriculture, metallurgy, and military history made such sweeping generalizations more plausible than today. Nevertheless, these claims have proven remarkably durable among some social sciences.

In particular, his limited engagement with African land-holding systems outside Ethiopia and his claims about the relationship between “feudalism” and slavery, and the transformative effects of the plow, were uncritically reproduced by Acemoglu and Robinson.

[see my essay on Acemoglu in Kongo ]

Archaeological evidence for the independent origin of African metallurgy has been known since the 1970s. More recent research has since discovered older iron-age sites in Cameroon and Central Africa dating to the late 3rd millennium BC, which significantly predate their presumed points of diffusion in North Africa, and are indeed some of the oldest confirmed dates for iron metallurgy anywhere in the world.

Natural draft furnaces in the Seno plain below Segue, Burkina Faso, 1957, Quai Branly. Earthen smelting furnaces in Ouahigouya, near the capital of Yatenga kingdom, Burkina Faso, 1911, Quai Branly.

Iron smelting at Oumalokho near the border of Mali and Côte d’Ivoire, illustration by Louis Binger, ca. 1892.

The Plow vs the Hoe in pre-colonial African agriculture.

Historians who support Goody’s claims about the low productivity of African agriculture and metallurgy, but are critical of his “technological determinism,” therefore preface their arguments by acknowledging African expertise in ironworking.

Austen and Headrick (1983), for example, note that the development of agriculture and ironworking was an autonomous and revolutionary process. And that African furnaces, which produced high-carbon blooms, attained “a level of sophistication which rivaled contemporary European and Middle Eastern metallurgy in at least its smelting processes.” They suggest, however, that locally produced iron eventually became less competitive than European imports derived from blast furnaces, which were capable of producing iron in far greater quantities.3

They also argue that the reluctance of African cultivators to take up plowing is largely explained by ecological reasons, most notably, the nature of the soils and the costs of integrating horses and cattle into farming. And that there was little incentive to adopt new technologies to increase agricultural productivity (in the form of yields per unit of land), since productivity per unit of relatively scarce labor could be maximized by extensive methods of long fallow cultivation using hoes.4

Historians who are against using the hoe as a proxy measure for agricultural productivity, such as Anthony Hopkins, argue that the plow wouldn’t have produced significant increases in agricultural yields.

Others, such as John Thornton, take this argument further, pointing to the abundance of historical accounts describing the high productivity of pre-colonial African agriculture, metallurgy and cloth making, despite the relatively “simple” technologies that were employed.

In his magnum opus ‘An Economic History of West Africa’, (1973), Hopkins argued that the plough cannot be used to determine the degree of progressiveness of African agriculture, and that its greater cost did not justify its meager improvement in yields, which in some cases were even lower than from hoe farming.

His observations on the limitations of the plow in West African agriculture deserve to be quoted in full5

“Historians and economists are inclined to rank agricultural systems in linear progression from ‘backward’ to ‘advanced’. However, the idea of an agricultural league table can be very misleading. Different systems of cultivation, including those commonly regarded as advanced, co-existed in pre-colonial West Africa, as they did in pre-industrial Europe.

None was anachronistic, for each was subtly adapted to particular circumstances. Furthermore, to equate permanent agriculture with market activity, and shifting cultivation with subsistence farming, is tempting, but mistaken. The methods varied, but the economic goals of both systems were often the same.

To cite the plough as an example of the technological disparity between Europe and Africa is to draw attention to an important, if undisputed, fact. To imply that the presence of the plough would have transformed the development potential of West Africa is to advance a very different case, and one that is open to question.

It is suggested here that the plough was not used in West Africa because it was unsuitable, or too costly, or both. The plough is of greatest use in areas where soils are heavy and land cannot be cleared by fire. These conditions are more typical of Europe than of Africa. Moreover, draught animals are needed to work a plough effectively. Draught animals could not survive in the forest, where, in any case, the plough was ill-suited to the dominant pattern of irregular, tree-studded plots. Ploughing in the savanna could easily lead to soil erosion, as experiments undertaken in French West Africa during the 1920s amply demonstrated.

All the same, the plough could have been used in some parts of West Africa, where the soils were not likely to erode easily, where draught animals were available and where cereal cultivation favoured the creation of a field-type landscape. The plough was not adopted in these areas because its greater cost did not guarantee a more than proportionate increase in returns. The plough can prepare more land in a shorter time than can manual labour, but this achievement often involves a fall in output per man hour, and, in some cases, in output per acre as well.

Farmers’ incomes need to rise some way above the level needed for subsistence before they can afford to adopt new techniques, such as the plough. Even so, a more advanced technology will be used only if it is more profitable than existing methods of production, or if it is essential to ensure survival. Neither of these conditions appears to have applied to pre-colonial West Africa, which, like India, developed a relatively simple technology, but one that was well suited to its requirements.

If ploughs had been available in West Africa in the pre-colonial era, they would have been treated as conversation pieces rather than as agricultural implements. Indeed, that is just what many of them became during the colonial era, when officials tried to convert Africans to the use of technically superior, but economically unrewarding, farm implements.

It is as well to remember that virtually the whole of the massive expansion of domestic foodstuffs and export crops which occurred during the twentieth century was produced with the aid of traditional tools.

To suppose that the failure to adopt a more complex agricultural technology was a cause of underdevelopment in Africa is to put plough before ox, and invention before need.”

Agricultural Terraces in the Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Shutterstock image.

Terraces of Inyanga, Zimbabwe. Images by Plan Shenjere-Nyabezi

While Hopkins suggests it was the productivity of labour rather than land in Africa that was low compared to colonial America. Thornton argues that the productivity of both Land and Labour were relatively high, especially compared to Europe during the 17th century.

According to Thornton, while the absence of the plow is today held to be evidence of low agricultural productivity, the direct evidence from pre-19th century European descriptions of African agriculture does not describe a deficient level of productivity.

He cites a number of examples, including Giovanni Francesco da Roma (1645) in Kongo, Alvise da Mosto (1455) in Senegal, and Pieter de Marees (1668) on the Gold Coast, all of whom observed that fairly light work in farming produced high yields. At least one of the sources, the missionary Wilhelm Johann Muller, who visited the state of Fetu (Ghana) in 1668, mentions crop yields per seed of up to 1:100.6

He argues that modern agronomists are discontented with the performance of contemporary African agriculture because they judge it by the standards of the U.S. Great Plains in the 19th century, but that such observations cannot be extrapolated backwards to the 17th century, when visiting Europeans compared African production favorably with that of European farmers back home.

He notes that even in the 19th century, data collected by the agronomist E. R. Botelho from Caconda in Angola in 1887 revealed maize yields of upto 1,600 kg per ha from traditional hoe farming that were about half of those obtained in the US Great Plains, but relatively high when compared to Portuguese farmers.7

Thornton’s critics, most notably Austen and Hogendorn, argue that it was the productivity of labour (output per unit of labour), rather than the productivity of land (yield per hectare) or crop yield per unit of seed, that was in question.8

Thornton responded that his references also applied to labour productivity, since the sources he cites explicitly note the limited intensity of agricultural labour. Importantly, he points out that his critics don’t provide documentary evidence for African farmers’ low productivity before the 19th century.9

Supporters of Goody’s claims about the low productivity of African agriculture below the Sahara tend to identify Ethiopia as an exception to this general pattern, drawing on the work of specialists such as Donald Crummey and James McCann.10

However, neither of these scholars offers sufficient quantitative evidence to support such definitive claims.

McCann cites estimates of yield per unit of seed in the Ankober District of Ethiopia in 1880, provided by the physician Leopoldo Traversi, which ranged from 1:5 to 1:50.11 But these figures are no more impressive in quantitative terms, nor less impressionistic in their basis than those cited above in 17th-century Ghana.

Crummey's excellent overview of plow agriculture in 19th-century Ethiopia is equally less useful for comparative analysis, since the sources he provides from at least five different European visitors (mostly missionaries and soldiers) measure productivity in terms of yields per unit of seed, ranging from as low as 1:7 to as high as 1:400.

As Crummey explains: “Unfortunately, observers couched their reports of yields in terms of the amount of cereal produced in relation to that sown. As a result modern comparisons are rendered difficult. The sources give widely fluctuating figures, some hardly within the realm of sobriety.”12

The collection of pre-19th century documentary sources on Ethiopian agriculture by Richard Pankhurst reveals no significant differences in European perspectives of the productivity of local farmers from those provided by Thornton in West and Central Africa.

He cited Almeida (1624), who observes that the land produced two to three yields a year, even though “the effort the farmers put into cultivating is not great.” Similar observations were made by Alvares (1520-7), and other visitors, who “provide a chorus of praise for Ethiopian agriculture which continued throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”13

Pankhurst, however, notes that later European travellers, most notably James Bruce who visited the country in 1770, were less impressed with Ethiopian agricultural yields, citing estimates (presumably of yields per unit of seed) in the range of 1:9 and 1:20.

“By the end of our period agricultural progress in England and other parts of Western Europe had caused foreign visitors to take a less enthusiastic view of Ethiopian agriculture, which had failed to change with the times. [James] Bruce, who was himself a country squire, therefore paints a more critical picture of Ethiopian agriculture than any of his predecessors.

He suggests that Ethiopian crop yields were by now considerably inferior to those of Europe — indeed he contrasts them unfavourably even with those of Egypt, declaring that sometimes the Ethiopian farmer hardly reaped the seed he sowed. In Tigre, he states, it is a good harvest that produces nine after one, it scarcely ever is known to produce ten.’ He writes of an average harvest elsewhere of ‘twenty after one”

Any cross-country analysis of agricultural productivity is of course limited by multiple variables, including the differences in cultivated crops, their suitability to local soil and climate conditions, the potential alternatives for land and labor use, as well as the size, composition, and the changing needs of the population.

Yet despite these limitations, there’s little historical data to support the often repeated assertions that productivity from plow agriculture in Ethiopia (and arguably North Africa) was higher than that of hoe-based farming elsewhere on the continent before the 19th century, beyond the mere presence of the plow.

‘The Abyssinian Expedition: a native ploughing in the province of Tigre’. From “Illustrated London News”, 1868.

Oil painting depicting agricultural scenes in Ethiopia, early 20th century. British Museum

On the Failure of European plow agriculture in colonial Senegal.

A recent study by Rönnbäck and Theodoridis on productivity of European-owned plantations in early 19th-century Senegal suggests relatively low levels of agricultural yields and labour productivity compared to the American South.

However, this data is evidence for the failure of European agricultural experimentation in Senegal, rather than for low productivity of the latter, as the authors claim. As the authors acknowledge, the possibility that European settler farmers were unable to achieve high productivity may have been due to ignorance of local growing conditions and their refusal to learn from local farmers.14

The failure of European agricultural experimentation in Senegal is particularly relevant to questions concerning the efficiency of the plow in increasing productivity, since the advantages of plow cultivation were explicitly tested by French agronomists in late 19th-century colonial Senegal.

During this period, European demand for peanut oil skyrocketed for soap production and machine lubrication. French merchants heavily commercialized the crop in Senegal, but local farmers remained its chief suppliers.

French agronomists, who generally despised African agricultural methods, ran a series of experiments to prove the superiority of plows over hoes. However, their results were inconclusive, and the real-world applications instead confirmed the continued effectiveness of indigenous farming practices using traditional tools.

Experiments carried out from 1897-1899 by the agronomists Enfantin, Brennemann, and Perruchot, at the agricultural stations of Cayor, M’Bambey and Kaolack, using different sets of plows (American-made Oliver plow, French Fondeur, Algerian light-plow) that were compared with farms worked by local hoes, provided widely different results that “couldn’t irrefutably demonstrate that plow tilling can under all circumstances be a certain cause of increased peanut yields.”

Enfantin’s yields of 3,000-7,000 kgs per ha were dismissed as exceptional. Perruchot yields were much lower, at 2,100- 2,500 kg per ha on land prepared by plow vs 1,700-1866 kg per ha on land prepared by hoe. Brennemann yields were even lower at 1,300-2,020 kgs per ha on land prepared by plow versus 1,110-1,860 kg per ha on land prepared by hoe.

The researchers noted that these experiments did not specify the conditions under which these trials were carried out and the manner in which they were conducted. They note that Enfantin’s high yields could not be replicated, preferring Brennemann and Perruchot’s results instead. They recommended that any future improvements must take into account local soil conditions, which wouldn’t be suitable for deep plowing, which destroys the soil.15

M’Bambey experimental station. Senegal. ca. 1930-1939. Quai Branly.

Bambey peanut station. Animal traction. ca. 1958, Senegal ANOM.

Moreover, experiments in other parts of Africa suggest that yields could be twice as high using traditional hoe-farming than when plows were applied!.

Results obtained by agronomists working at the Belgian colonial stations at Congo da Lemba and Zambi in the Republic of Congo during the early 20th century indicate that production of peanuts was higher where the land was prepared by a hoe (Congo da Lemba station: 2,700 kg per hectare), than in land that was turned over with a plow (Zambi station: 1,400 kg per hectare).16

The experimenters note that this result tends to confirm the opinion expressed in the abovementioned studies in Senegal, which observed that:

‘We wanted to introduce the use of the plow to Senegal. The result did not meet expectations; the plowing being more perfect and deeper, the plants grew more vigorously, but fruit formation was lower and ripening occurred slowly and irregularly. It seems that for the terrain and climatic conditions of Senegal, entirely superficial work is preferable, unless a significant amount of manure can be applied.’17

Data from North African settler farms points to much lower yields than Senegal, although this is blamed on the different soil and climatic conditions.

An agricultural manual for European settler farmers in Algeria from 1891 noted that yields from peanuts in Algeria were less than half those obtained in Senegal: “The yield of one hectare is 600 to 700 kilos. It is important to point out that in Senegal this yield is twice as high, and this enormous difference can only be attributed to the lack of water in Algerian cultivation.”18

Ultimately, as noted earlier by Hopkins, it was the African farmer using his hoe, rather than the European settler with the plow, that supplied the bulk of the peanut exports during the colonial era.

Some colonial administrators likewise acknowledged that agricultural productivity in Senegal could not be assessed solely based on plow use, but rather had to be evaluated in terms of actual output.

In 1900, for example, Henri Courtet noted that it was the native Senegalese farmer who supplied 2/3rds of the estimated 180,918,728 francs worth of peanuts exported from 1888 to 1899. He explains that the local farmers knew how to space crops depending on soil fertility, to rotate the different crops, and to burn husks for fertilizer.

He cites the agronomist Brennemann, who observes that “As for the plow, it is highly probable that the native farmer will not use it. A plough does not work without oxen, and it has not been demonstrated that the surplus yield that would be obtained would cover the maintenance costs of the equipment and the oxen. A priori, in native cultivation, the improvement in yields is therefore not at all in the use of the plough, but rather in the choice of seeds, in their selection, and in their specialized adaptation to the cultivation of different soils.”19

More recent studies have shown that a combination of state intervention in farming practices, as well as the provision of improved seed varieties, ultimately explain Senegal’s “Green Revolution” during the first half of the 20th century, when the country became the world’s 2nd largest exporter of peanuts.20

While Goody (1971) continued to insist on the superiority of the plow and its hypothetical improvement of agricultural productivity in Africa long after its failure had been demonstrated in the colonial era21, his contemporaries such as the anthropologist Henri Raulin (1968) were highly critical of this technological determinism:

“Generally speaking, the Western expert, trained in European techniques, sees real and rapid progress only through the widespread adoption of agricultural machinery. However, in Africa, staple food crops (millet, sorghum, maize) and even cash crops (peanuts, cotton) have always been, and still are, grown without prior plowing, except for flooded rice paddies.”22

He observes that the plow still hadn’t been widely adopted in post-colonial Senegal, despite increased agricultural production, and lists several “resounding failures” of colonial-era “industrial farming experiments using mechanical means” such as the peanut experiment in Tanganyika by the Overseas Food Corporation, the Casamance experiment by the Compagnie Générale des Oléagineux Tropicales, and the Office du Niger experiment in Mali.

Importantly, he provides a useful comparison of African farmers in early 20th-century Senegal with their European peers in the Upper Giffre Valley of France during the 19th century, where the transition from extensive to intensive agriculture was achieved, ironically, by abandoning the plow for the hoe and spade.23

The repeated failure of the plow to compete with the hoe, even when used by European agronomists in colonial contexts, suggests that the development of agriculture in African history cannot be reduced to mere farm equipment.

Peanut cultivation at the M’Bambey experimental station. ca. 1930-1939. Senegal. Quai Branly.

Peanuts at the Station. Rufisque, Senegal. ca. 1906

Guns and Furnaces: Comparing African ironworking with Colonial Metallurgy

Regarding the skill of African ironworkers, Goody’s argument mostly rests on the observation that Africans did not manufacture firearms on the scale of their non-European peers, such as the Japanese and Indians, who were making matchlocks and cannons by the 16th to 17th centuries.

He suggests that this put them at a disadvantage against invading colonial armies both in the late 15th and late 19th centuries. Yet he qualifies this claim in his footnotes, pointing out the Africans could purchase firearms from Europeans, were skilled enough to repair guns and make gunpowder, and that Samori Ture’s blacksmiths managed to manufacture firearms in the late 19th century.24

Readers familiar with popular literature on Africa’s colonisation, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, will recognise some of the more familiar tropes and misconceptions on African military history. The most glaring of these is the conflation of the early colonial invasions of Africa from the 15th to 17th centuries with the actual scramble in the late 19th century.

In my critique of Diamond’s analysis of African history, I outlined the long history of Portuguese military campaigns against various African kingdoms, which were in many cases defeated by African armies, most notably at the battles of Mbanda Kasi (1622) and Kitombo (1670) against the armies of Kongo (Angola), and in 1644-8 against Queen Nzinga, which halted further expansion into the interior of Angola until the late 19th century.

Other battles, such as the battle of Maungwe (1684) against the Rozvi’s Changamire in present-day Zimbabwe, and the fall of Fort Jesus (1698) in Mombasa, Kenya, resulted in the complete loss of previously conquered territory (the kingdom of Mutapa and the East African coast).

Along the West African coast, the defeat of Portuguese invasions in 1446-7 and 1456 by the navies of African coastal polities armed with only poisoned arrows meant that the establishment of large colonial settlements was out of the question, and forced the Portuguese to resort to diplomacy. An Englishman who decided to test this détente in 1568 in Sierra Leone paid a steep price, losing many of his men to poisoned arrows.25

Evidently, whatever advantages Portuguese firearms had in these African battles were outweighed by the effectiveness of available weapons, whether arrows in Zimbabwe and Senegal, or imported firearms and local swords in Angola.

More importantly, the history of European colonialism in India suggests that indigenous manufacture of firearms could not, by itself, guarantee local autonomy.

Historians such as Kaushik Roy and Moumita Chowdhury argue that military organisation played a bigger role than military technology in explaining the success of the East India Company over Indian armies during the 18th century, even as the latter made improvements in gun technology, especially in the manufacture of artillery.26

It should be noted that the West African kingdoms of Benin (Nigeria)27 in the 16th century and Zinder (Niger) in the 19th century did manufacture artillery (ie; cannons, cannon balls, and gun carriages).28 However, the performance of these new technologies against rival African armies and invading colonial armies in the late 19th century was far from satisfactory, compared to pre-existing weapons.

Firearms from Benin City, ca. 16-19th century. Benin City National Museum, British Museum.

Returning to the example of pre-colonial Zimbabwe, the Portuguese myth of the invincibility of their firearms was destroyed at the pitched battle of Maungwe in 1684 by the Rozvi archers of Changamire. His subsequent attacks on the Portuguese settlements in 1693 and 1695 even netted some Portuguese captives, putting an end to Portuguese ambitions in the interior for nearly two centuries.29

It’s important to note that arrows were not the only weapon (nor even the primary weapon) used in pre-19th century African warfare. Other weapons were available, including lances, javelins, clubs, battle-axes, and swords; the last of which can be further subdivided into a whole range of slashing weapons, from broadswords to throwing knives to daggers, all of which were manufactured by African blacksmiths.30

Besides these were, of course, the guns purchased from the Europeans themselves, which became more decisive in battle from around the late 18th century onwards.

Weapons and knives of Central Africa (D.R.Congo), Jean Dybowski Collection. ca. 1893

Firearms used in Matebeleland (Zimbabwe), illustration from Frank W Sykes, 1897.

‘Increase of weapon lethality and dispersion over history.’ Graph by Trevor N. Dupuy (1979).31 Note that the theoretical killing capacity of firearms rises significantly during the 19th century.

Just like the plow, firearms didn’t confer significant advantages to African armies before the 19th century. And like the plow, the greater cost of manufacturing firearms locally (as opposed to simply purchasing them) couldn’t guarantee a more than proportional increase in their efficiency as missile weapons.

Robert Edgerton’s research on the Anglo-Asante wars traces the emergence of the technological gap between the Asante (in Ghana) and invading British armies to the mid-19th century, when the former’s flintlock guns proved less effective against the more modern rifles of the latter. But he stresses that this gap didn’t exist when the two armies first clashed in 1824, and was heightened by restrictions on Asante’s ability to buy modern rifles from the Dutch.32

Similar constraints forced Samory to manufacture his guns locally. An estimated 300-400 smiths made 200-300 rounds of ammunition a day and 12 rifles a week using local ores. One of Samori’s blacksmiths is known to have visited the French arsenal at St. Louis, Senegal, but nothing is mentioned about the introduction of more “advanced” methods of smelting like the blast furnace, which Goody thinks is necessary for the manufacture of firearms.33

It is important to note that as late as the 1970s, Mande blacksmiths in Mali continued to manufacture firearms (hunting rifles and pistols) entirely from scratch using relatively “simple” techniques, such as hammer forging and lost-wax casting. This lengthy process of local gun manufacture, which is thought to predate the 19th century, is described in this footnote.34

‘Plate 28. Gun made by Cekoro Traore, who specialized in their making and repairing, mostly for hunters, 1973’ Image and Caption by P. R. McNaughton

‘Plate 30. Detail of the gun depicted in III. 29. Note that the barrel is held in place inside the stock with wide hide straps’ Image and Caption by P. R. McNaughton

Traditional furnaces could still be found in rural Mali at the time, which would have resembled those found among the Fulbe of Futa Jallon (in Guinea) by the French officer Arsène Lambert in 1860, who, despite the typical prejudices of the time, praised these “miniature blast furnaces.” Incidentally, he also mentioned the high agricultural output of local farmers, despite the absence of the plow:

“It was also in this canton [of Kakriman] that I first saw the small clay factories used for smelting iron ore. They are veritable blast furnaces in miniature: chimney, drawpipe, crucible, pit for receiving the molten iron—nothing is missing. Alternating layers of coal and ore are piled up, as in our own, but neither quartz nor limestone is used to facilitate smelting, either because the Fulani are unaware of the melting properties of these materials, or because their rich ore does not require them.

They possess no other tilling tool than a small, rather convenient hoe and use no fertilizer other than the ashes of dried sod and stubble after the harvest, which they carefully burn before sowing. These primitive methods suffice for them, without crop rotation or fallow periods, to obtain abundant harvests from a soil that seems inexhaustible.”35

Iron ore smelting in Fouta-Djalon. — Drawing by Hadamard after M. Lambert

Blacksmith at work in Fouta-Djalon. — Drawing by Hadamard after M. Lambert

Furnaces in Mali: ‘Variations of dome-type smelting furnaces recorded by several authors’ Image and Caption by P. R. McNaughton

These repeated references to Africa’s “simple” technologies, which were surprisingly productive, whether in farming or in metallurgy, suggest that European explorers, like modern Western scholars, evaluated technological systems in terms of perceived complexity rather than actual efficiency.

It also explains why, when the Portuguese colonial government in Angola decided to construct a European-style foundry in Novas Oerias in 1765, complete with a blast furnace powered by water wheels and worked by European labourers, the project quickly became a “white elephant.” They ended up using the scheme as a way of concentrating skilled African blacksmiths and utilising their traditional technologies.36

View of the iron factory in Oerias, 1855

Interior of the machine room, hydraulic forge and storeroom. Image by Crislayne Alfagali

Iron smelting in Nova Oeiras, 1797. “A = The smelting furnace, to make iron bars, the ironstone is placed below the coal to be smelted. B = The furnace wall, built with pieces of tiles. C = The smoke that comes out from the holes in the wall. D = The clay pipe through which the bellows blow air. F = The bellows’ leather. G = Sticks with which they operate the bellows.” Image and captions by Crislayne Alfagali. Note the similarities with the above image of a blacksmith in Fouta-Djalon.

As Crislayne Alfagali’s excellent monograph on the Nova Oeiras factory explains, the actual iron production was undertaken at a separate (and segregated!) site next to the European-style foundry, where a “smaller factory was built for the Negroes to work in” according to a contemporary Portuguese report.

“The smaller factory was the only success of this grandiose undertaking, because the only successful iron smelting techniques —the Ambundu techniques— were employed here, a fact overlooked by the historiography that examined the “big factory” and its failures.

In the small foundry, furnaces dug in the earth, bellows covered with goat hair, and stones were the tools employed by the Ambundu blacksmiths and smelters, who exported approximately 60 tons of iron and steel from 1765 to 1800.”37

If the large quantities of (lesser quality) iron bars produced in European blast furnaces are what gave them the advantage over African smelters along the West African coast, as Austen and Headrick suggest, then the reverse happened in Angola, where Iron production by local blacksmiths at Nova Oeiras continued into the 19th century.

Ironically, it was these high-quality iron bars of African manufacture that were exported to the Portuguese Royal Treasury.

Like the French agriculturalists in colonial Senegal, the Portuguese metallurgists in colonial Angola discovered that their “complex” forms of technology couldn’t reliably compete with the “simple” technologies of African ironworking.

As for the colonial scramble during the late 19th century, It’s instructive that Ethiopia’s King Menelik II managed to defeat the invading colonial armies not by manufacturing firearms, but by accumulating massive stockpiles of modern rifles through skilful diplomacy.

By contrast, the Ethiopian emperor who famously manufactured firearms locally, i.e., Tewodros II, is also the only Ethiopian ruler of the 19th century to be defeated by a foreign power when the British sacked Magdala in 1868, ostensibly to free the European technicians whom Tewodros was using to make his firearms.

There’s substantial historical evidence that African envoys and travelers, who had been visiting Western Europe since the 1600s and were familiar with all the relevant innovations of European industry, immediately became aware of the technological gap once it became decisive during the 19th century.

They recognized the need to modernize their economies and military, either by employing European technicians or by attempting to implement these innovations independently. This process of technological transfer was ultimately cut short by the colonial invaders, whose attempts to impose new technologies also produced uneven results.

Replica of Emperor Tewodros’ cannon: “Sevastopol”. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Conclusion: the triumph of pre-colonial technologies

The above outline of Africa’s agricultural and metallurgical history demonstrates that mechanization cannot be used as a proxy for productivity.

The presence or absence of the plow, in particular, cannot in itself serve as a measure of Africa’s agricultural and labour productivity. Its limited adoption cannot be explained by the prevalence of “extractive institutions”, as Acemoglu and Robinson suggest, but is better understood in terms of its relative inefficiency in relation to cost and output.

The efficiency of the continent’s relatively “simple” technologies meant that local crafts industries remained fairly competitive, even during the colonial period, when “intermediate” technologies, such as plows and blast furnaces, proved to be poor substitutes.

While Africa’s traditional technologies were ultimately displaced by modern industrial technologies in local manufacturing, as occurred in the rest of the developing world, this later obsolescence should not be retroactively projected onto earlier historical periods

As Thornton explains, on the persistence of African hand looms:

“Historians of technology often admire early machines because they prefigure later ones, or because they represent the discovery of principles that will later be of great value. But this does not mean that an early version of a machine does a particularly good job.

Of course, with hindsight, it is easy to see that a decision to continue efficient hand production and eschew machines was mistaken, but that issue was scarcely clear to decision makers of the time.”38

Such anachronistic approaches tend to obscure the ingenuity and efficiency of historical technologies, and misguide contemporary efforts to address perceived technological gaps.

Like their colonial predecessors, modern “technological solutionists” who simply transplant technologies that have succeeded elsewhere while disregarding local conditions risk misdiagnosing economic challenges by putting the plow before the ox.

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OROMO LITERATURE AND WRITING SYSTEMS

Near the end of the classical period in the 4th century CE, the four major ancient African writing traditions of; Demotic (in Egypt), Meroitic (Sudan), Libyco-Berber (Maghreb), and Ge’ez (Ethiopia and Eritrea), were all being used to write the African languages for which they had originally been invented.

Yet by the 14th century, most of the continent had adopted the Arabic writing system and language, which was the lingua franca of the Islamic golden age.

From Morocco to Mozambique and from Senegal to Sudan, African scholars produced a vast corpus of Arabic manuscripts that today constitutes one of the most important sources for reconstructing the continent’s history.

However, the acquisition of literacy in classical Arabic (fusḥā), in which most of these manuscripts were composed, was confined to the professional ʿulamāʾ (scholars), whose knowledge and writings were only accessible and comprehensible among their own class.

While their writings circulated widely across networks of competing centres of learning, membership in this class, which was considered the sole custodian and interpreter of the Muslim intellectual tradition, depended on the literate command of Arabic.1

In this largely Arabic scribal world, only a handful of African written languages remained.

These included Coptic among the Christian minority of Egypt (which retained its traditional script alongside bilingual Arabic translations), Old Nubian, whose literary tradition disappeared with the collapse of the medieval Nubian kingdoms; and the more restricted graphic traditions of Tifinagh/Tifinaɣ and Nsibidi, which survived primarily in the form of brief inscriptions.

Although writing in Ge’ez continued to flourish in the Christian kingdom(s) of Ethiopia, the language itself had no living speakers since the fall of Aksum. It was reduced to a liturgical language just like Latin in medieval Europe. For many centuries, literature in the successor languages of Ge’ez, ie; Ahmaric and Tigrinya, remained marginal as the bulk of manuscripts were written almost exclusively in Ge’ez.2

Copy of a Psalter written in multiple scripts and languages, 12th-14th century, monastery of Saint Macarius, Wadi al-Natrun, Egypt.3 Beginning with Ethiopic/Ge’ez on the extreme left column, followed by Syriac, Coptic in the center, Arabic on the right, and ending with Armenian.

Arabic inscriptions (including one dated 1041 CE), and Tifinaɣ /Tifinagh inscriptions, side by side in the south-east Essouk cliffs, Mali.4

Quranic manuscript with glosses in Old Kanembu, ca. 1669 CE. Nigeria. ‘Imam Ibrahim Quran’ (manuscript 3ImI). Images by Dmitry Bondarev.5

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Initially, written texts in African languages across the Muslim societies of the continent were confined to the margins of the Arabic manuscripts written by African scholars, and in brief inscriptions that contained non-Arabic names, titles, and phrases.6

However, by the 16th/17th century, African scholars began producing written compositions exclusively in their languages.

Most of the earliest known ajami manuscripts from the post-medieval period have been uncovered over the last 30 years, in the city of Harar (Harari language), in the Sous valley of Morocco (Tashelhiyt-Berber), in West Africa (Fulfulde and Hausa), in Madagascar (Atemoro-Malagasy), and along the East African coast (Swahili).

For the Tashelhiyt-Berber language, the earliest ajami manuscript is the Lεqayd n ddin of Ibrahim Aẓnag (d. 1597), described as ‘the oldest known manuscript text in Berber.’7 For Harari, the oldest ajami manuscript is the Kitāb alfarāyiḍ of Abdarrahman al-Araši and Tayyib al-Wanagi, which is variously dated to between 1595 and 1669.8

Copy of the Kitāb al-farāʼiḍ, ca. 18th century, Harar. Ethiopia. Sherif Harar City Museum. Images from HMML Reading Room.

For Atemoro-Malagasy, the earliest securely dated ajami manuscripts are a collection of Sorabe manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, dated to 1590-1620, along with a local chronicle of the French invasion of Madagascar from 1659 to 1663. [See my essay on ‘The Sorabé script of Madagascar’ ]

Sorabe manuscript MP 23. Antemoro, Madagascar. 17th century, BNF, Paris.

For Fulfulde, evidence comes from the theologian Muhammad al-Wali (fl. 1688), whose al-Manhaj al-farid is an Arabic translation of a popular Fulfulde commentary on the Sughra of al-Sanusi.9 [see: ‘The philosophical theology of Muḥammad al-Wālī (fl. 1688)’]

For the Hausa language, there are references to ajami texts by the scholars, ɗan Masani (d. 1667) and Abdullahi Suka (fl. mid-17th century), who are thought to have composed the texts; Wakar Yakin Badar and Riwayar Annabi Musa. But the earliest extant manuscripts date to the late 18th/early 19th century.10

(left) Manuscript in the Zarma-Songhay language, written by Halim Marafa. (right) Hausa manuscript titled ‘Ajrumiya’. 18th-20th century. Institut de Recherches en Sciences Humaines, Niger.

For Swahili, the earliest known complete ajami manuscript is the Utendi wa Tambuka, dated 1728, but it represents a long-standing tradition, beginning with the “Siri al-asari” (The secret of the secrets) composed in 1663 by Mwana Mwarabu bint Shekhe.11 [See: ‘Poetry, Philosophy and History in Swahili literature’]

Copy of ‘Utendi wa Herekali’ by Muhamadi Kijuma. SOAS, London.

In Ethiopia, the earliest complete Amharic texts in the Ge’ez script also appear by the 17th century, mostly consisting of praise-poems and theological compositions that are based on an older literary tradition from the 14th/15th century. Significant writing in Amharic began in the 19th century, when it replaced Ge’ez as the main scribal language, including in theological writing.12

Amharic document MS MKL-008, ca. 1650-60, Läq̌ay Kidanä Mǝḥrät, Ethiopia. Image by M. Bulakh and D. Nosnitsin

Amharic manuscript on medicine with a list of diseases and treatments, 19th century, library of Ras Wassan Sagad of Shoa (r. 1808-1813), British Library.

These collections of Manuscripts written in African Languages challenge the persistent misconception that African languages were exclusively oral.

By the 19th century, Ajami written traditions had proliferated across the continent. Their expansion was closely associated with the broadening of the intellectual sphere beyond established scholarly elites, a process linked to the rise of political and religious movements that sought wider audiences, such as the Qadiriyya, Tijaniyya, and Sanussiyya brotherhoods.

At least 79 languages across the continent are known to have utilised the ajami script by the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Languages that use the Arabic and Ajami scripts. Map by Meikal Mumin

In 19th-century Hausaland, for example, scholars undertook extensive projects to translate existing Arabic works into Hausa and Fulfulde while also producing original compositions in those languages. Among the most notable of these authors was the Hausa scholar and ethnographer al-Hajj Umaru, whose writings provide a rare indigenous perspective on the society and culture of his time13

The bulk of these were written so that non-elite audiences could understand Islamic theological and legal concepts, but they also include ‘secular’ works on medicine, history, and genealogy.14

Fiqh manual in Fulfulde by Abd Allāh ibn Muḥammad. 18th-20th century. Mamma Haidara Library. Images from HMML Reading Room.

African languages, which were already used in administration, religion, commerce, and law, now developed a rich written tradition.

From early writings in the Afrikaans language (which was initially used by enslaved Muslims of South Africa before it was adopted by the Boers)15, to the Kabyle-Berber ajami manuscripts in Algeria16, and numerous societies in between, such as the Bamanakan, Mandinka, Yoruba, and Wolof.

Not coincidentally, several previously non-literate societies also invented their own writing systems during this period, which were exclusively used to transcribe their own languages.

The oldest of these are the Vai script of Liberia (ca. 1833) and Njoya’s script (ca. 1897) of the Bamum kingdom in Cameroon, which were followed by numerous scripts that appeared in the first half of the 20th century.17

Among these communities, language and script became closely intertwined as markers of cultural identity. Quite explicitly, the King of the Vai in Liberia recognised that his script “would soon raise his people” to the level of the literate Americo-Liberians and Mandinka scribes.

Chronicle of the Bamum kingdom, ca. 1900 CE, Archives du Palais des Rois Bamum, Fumban, Cameroon. EAP.

This dramatic expansion of African ‘vernacular’ literature continued into the colonial period, when many African languages were written in the Latin script, creating what the scholar Ali Mazrui describes as Africa’s ‘triple heritage’: the Indigenous, the Islamic, and the Western tradition.

The development of African vernacular literature, therefore, significantly predates the widespread adoption of Latin orthography, which represented the final stage of Africa’s literary efflorescence.

This dynamic history of writing in African languages is best illustrated by the emergence of Oromo literature in present-day Ethiopia during the 19th century.

Ethiopia has a long tradition of multiple writing traditions, which were, however, the exclusive domain of learned clerics associated with the Christian and Muslim courts of the dominant kingdoms.

The Oromo, who were ascendant during the 18th and early 19th centuries, soon adopted the Arabic, Ge’ez, and Latin scripts to compose some of the earliest works published in Africa by African authors.

The development of Oromo literature was, however, profoundly shaped by the changing political landscape of the region, particularly by the Oromo’s relationship with the reconstituted Christian kingdom of Ethiopia.

Between 1855 and 1974, the literary production of Oromo intellectuals evolved in response to these political tensions. As the Oromo language faced increasing marginalisation within state institutions, dissident scholars invented their own writing system, known as the Bakri-Sapalo script.

The complex history of Oromo literacy illustrates the significance of vernacular writing in African history as a powerful symbol of cultural identity.

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OROMO LITERATURE AND WRITING SYSTEMS

These resilient pack animals played a decisive role in revolutionizing trade and travel across the desert. Beyond their use as pack animals, camels also served as draught animals that powered a wide range of technologies, including water-wheels, irrigation systems, and oil mills.

The advent of camels in the Sahara marked a watershed in the demographic and political history of the desert.

What had once been perceived as a forbidding, empty expanse was gradually transformed into a habitable and more controllable environment capable of sustaining extensive networks of trade, communication, and human settlement.

The ‘camel revolution’ can be paralleled in its social and economic consequences with the introduction of motor vehicles during the first half of the 20th century, which similarly reshaped mobility and patterns of interaction across vast distances.

This article examines the history of the camel in Africa and explores its diverse uses among the nomadic and semi-nomadic societies of the continent.

Migration map of the historical camelid family and the current distribution of Dromedaries (red) and Bactrian camels (green).1

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The Dromedary in Africa: From the classical era to the late Roman period.

The interaction between Humans and Camels stretched back millennia before domestication.

Wild varieties of the Camel were present across northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula since the Paleolithic period. Camels appear in ancient rock art across the Near East, North Africa, and the Sahara during the prehistoric era, but these representations likely depicted wild species that were hunted.2

The domestication of dromedaries likely occurred in the late 2nd millennium BC.3 Depictions of saddled camels from various regions in Mesopotamia and Arabia dating to the early 1st millennium BC indicate that the single-humped dromedary camel (Camelus dromedarius) was domesticated shortly before this period. It was later introduced to Egypt by the mid-1st millennium BC during the Assyrian conquest.4

The earliest identified camel skeletal material in the Maghreb has been excavated from Carthage in Tunisia and is dated to the 5th to 3rd centuries BC. Camel remains have also been identified at the Garamantian capital of Jarma, Libya, in the 2nd century CE.5

The earliest renderings of camels in Egypt, and those found on Assyrian wall reliefs of military camps depicting their invasions of Egypt, do not distinguish between riding mounts and pack animals. By the 3rd century BC, under Ptolemaic rule, camels had come into general use for transport on the desert route between Coptos and the Red Sea that would remain in use during the Roman period.6

Terracotta figurine of a camel carrying transport amphorae. Roman, Egyptian. late 2nd–early 3rd century CE. Met Museum.

Painted vessel fragment depicting a woman atop a camel. Egyptian-Byzantine (Coptic) Period, 7th century A.D. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Romans encountered dromedaries in North Africa as early as 46 BC when Caesar defeated King Juba of Numidia and captured twenty-two camels as booty. Classical sources indicate that both Dromedary and Bactrian camels were used in civilian transport and later in military contexts, with distinctions between the camelus, which was a slow animal used for freight services, and the dromas, which was relatively fast.7

The use of Camels spread across much of the Roman world, not just in the semi-arid regions of the south and East, but also across Western Europe, where camel remains have been found in a variety of archaeological sites from the 3rd to 5th century.8

Distribution of finds of camel remains in Europe. Map by C. R. Green

In Roman Africa, sculptured scenes of agricultural life in the Tripolitanian hinterland that include depictions of Camels as plough animals point to the animals’ expanded use by the 3rd century CE. Short-distance routes between settlements previously dictated by horse and chariot could be extended into long-distance routes into the desert undertaken on camelback.9

A variety of autochthonous African groups within and along the frontier of Roman North Africa extensively bred camels, initially using them in trade and later for raids into the weakening empire. Key among these were the tribal confederations of the Numidians, the Austuriani, and the Garamantes.10

A text referring to the Austuriani raid of the city of Lepcis (Libya) in 364 indicates the latter’s inhabitants possessed a significant number of camels, with the Romans intending to requisition as many as 4,000 camels from the urbanites to defend the city.11

A camel from the ‘Mosaic of Silenus’ of Thysdrus. El Djem, Tunisia, 3rd c. CE, Wikimedia Commons

Henscir el-Ausaf, Tigi, Western Gefara: Ploughing Scene. ca. 3rd century CE.12

Farmer and Camel Plowing Field, Algeria, Africa, by Marshall M. Kirman, 1895.

According to the historian Richard W. Bulliet, during the late Roman period, the Camel and the mounted horseman largely replaced wheeled carriages across the Roman world, in both long-distance trade and warfare across much of North Africa, Western Asia, and Europe.13

Estimates on transport costs according to the Edict of the Maximum Diocletian (c. 301 CE) suggest that transport by Camels and donkeys was about 20% less expensive than overland transport by wheeled carts, although both means were more expensive than maritime transport. These estimates demonstrate the relative efficiency and low cost of pack animals over purchasing and maintaining wheeled carts.14

According to Stéphanie Guédon and Roger Bagnall, in the late Roman period, camel transport for long distances complemented preexisting forms of short-distance transport such as donkeys, horses, and wheeled carts on roads, the last of which remained in use at least until the Arab conquest in the 8th century.15

However, in the more southerly regions, the fact that rock-art depicting horse-drawn chariots from the Central and Western Sahara is almost never associated with images of Camels and Camel-riders is strongly suggestive of Bulliet’s hypothesis.16

Map showing the distribution of chariot and horse rock art from the Sahara.17

Rock Painting of Camel and Hunter, In Itinen, Tassili N’ajjer, S.E Algeria.

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The Camel in Nubia, the Horn and West Africa.

Beyond North Africa and the Sahara, Camels appear in Upper Nubia (Sudan) during the Meroitic period after the 3rd century BC, where they have been found in a number of archeological sites, and extensively depicted in Nubian Art.18

They were also adopted by the nomadic groups of the eastern desert region by the start of the Roman period, and appear in some of the early medieval Nubian records from the 5th century, associated with the Noubadian king Silko.19

Painted vessel decorated with an image of a camel. Meroitic period (270BC-360CE), Sudan. Smithsonian museum

Colour lithograph depicting Nubians on camelback as they travel through Egypt, circa 1850. Getty Images.

In the northern Horn of Africa, camels appear in the ancient rock art, alongside the relatively more numerous depictions of other domesticates such as long-horned, humpless cattle, human figures, sheep, goats, and dogs.20

The dromedary appears in Aksumite inscriptions from the 6th century CE, relating to the low-lying regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is also found in faunal assemblages from the site of Ceel Gerdi in Somaliland, dated to the 1st millennium CE.21

In the central Sahara, the dromedary appears at the end of the 1st millennium BC, during the era aptly named the “Camel Period”.

The earliest depictions show dromedaries mounted or used as pack animals. In later engravings which date from the early 1st millennium CE, era camels carry armed men, with some battle scenes mixing horse-riders and camel-riders together in both parties.22 In some regions, the images of camels are associated with the spread of the Libyco-Berber inscriptions (see rock painting above)

Engraved rock art depicting two riders on camels. Kozen Pass, Tibesti, Chad. British Museum.

The Camel appears in West African archeological sites between 250-400 CE at the site of Siouré along the Middle Senegal Valley, and at Tegdaoust (Mauritania) from the 8th to 13th century during the Islamic period.23

Dromedaries cannot thrive south of the Sahel zone because of their vulnerability to diseases spread by the tse-tse fly, but certain regional varieties used in trade were marginally more successful. Sculptural depictions of Camels in the Lake Chad region from the site of Houlouf (c.AD 1400–1600), corroborate written accounts on the presence of Camels in Bornu and parts of the Hausaland.24

Al-Yaˁqubi, writing in (c. 890), mentions camel nomads, the Anbiya, living south of Sijilmāsa in Morocco. After this date, there are numerous references to Saharan and West African camels by Arab writers, mentioning both its use as a pack animal in medieval Ghana by al Muhallabi (d. 990) and Al-Bakri (c. 1068), for carrying goods, as well as for meat and milk among the Zaghawa of Kanem (Chad) and the polity of Malal (Mali), according to Al-Idrīsī (c. 1154).25

During his journey through medieval Mali in 1353, the globe-trotter Ibn Battuta found camels across the region that were used as pack animals by traders, sold in markets, and at times consumed. His account suggests that they were bred locally, noting that they were cheaper than horses; with one horse costing 100 mithqals, compared to a camel at just 37.5 mithqals.26

Camel caravan approaching Timbuktu, Mali. ca. 1853. Image by Johann Martin Bernatz, based on explorer H. Barth’s sketches.

Más-eñá, (kingdom of Bagirmi, Chad) Return of the Sultan from the Expedition, 4th July 1852. By H. Barth.

Along the east African coast, camel bones were found at the medieval Swahili city of Shanga in the Lamu Archipelago of Kenya, around 1050 CE, even though the archipelago now lies beyond their range. The historian Mark Horton suggests that these camels were introduced by inland groups such as the Segeju, who were in contact with coastal and inland societies in northern Kenya and southern Somalia.27

By the 14th century, camels were extensively herded across Somalia's coastal and inland regions.

When Ibn Battuta visited the city of Zeila along the northern coast in 1331, he noted that “Their cattle are camels,” and many of these were slaughtered in the market, giving the city a disagreeable smell. Sailing down to Mogadishu, he mentions that “Its inhabitants are merchants possessed of vast resources; they own large numbers of camels, of which they slaughter hundreds every day [for food].”28

While Ibn Battuta doesn’t mention the presence of Camels along the southern (Swahili) coast, an eyewitness of the 1505 Portuguese attack on Mombasa mentions that the invaders captured “countless camels and a large number of cattle.” Unfortunately, this isolated account doesn’t indicate whether these were used in economic or military contexts.29

Camel at oil-mill work. Mombasa, Kenya. ca. 1910

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The military Camel in African history.

The Camel was employed in military contexts since late antiquity. When the Vandals invaded Africa at the end of the 5th century CE, the nomadic Berber groups of the Atlas mountains were already in possession of numerous camel herds.

They became undisputed masters of the Magreb, using camels to transport supplies and families, for both defensive and offensive military operations, but not as a military mount. According to Procopius, who described their 5th-century battles with the Vandals, the Berbers arranged their camels in concentric rings, protectively surrounding women and children in the center.

In battle, these pack animals were used to form a defensive wall. At the time of the subsequent Byzantine invasion of North Africa, the camel was described as carrying the fortune of the nomad on its back, the household furniture, and the women with supplies perched on its summit.30

The Almoravids, who built a vast empire extending from Mauritania to Spain in the 11th century, came from a section of Sanhaja Berbers who were camel drivers. They invaded Morocco with an army of 30,000 warriors mounted on camels. On the outskirts of Sijilmasa, they captured a herd of 50,000 camels belonging to the Bani Maghrawa, which were later used for trade with West Africa.31

A nomadic people of Algeria, the Bassari (les Bassours), traveling through the Sahara Desert on camels, enroute to a new home. c. 1900. Getty Images.

View toward the ancient city walls of Rabat, past a camel caravan. Morocco. ca. 1950s

In his description of West Africa, Al-Bakri (c. 1068) reported, with some exaggeration, that “The ruler of Awdaghust could put 100,000 camelry in the field.” Al-Idrīsī (c. 1154) mentions that the army of the ruler of the city of Gao (in Mali) included a unit that rode on camels and horses.32

The Egyptian chronicler Al-Umari suggests that the army of medieval Mali consisted of mounted horsemen and infantry, mentioning that “they have camels but do not know how to ride them with saddles.”33

This appears to be corroborated by the West African chronicler al-Sa’di (c. 1655), who mentions that when Sunni Ali of Songhai invaded Timbuktu in 1468, the city’s governor assembled 1,000 camels for its scholars. The latter, however, struggled to climb onto the beasts because their fathers never allowed them outside as children to learn how to ride them. They later vowed to teach their children how to ride camels.34

The Songhai empire, which succeeded Mali, employed camels more extensively. According to Leo Africanus’ description from 1520:

“The royal court is very well organized and magnificent. When the king goes from one town to another with his courtiers, he rides a camel, and the horses are led by grooms. If it is necessary to fight, the grooms hobble the camels, and the soldiers all mount the horses.”35

The armies of Songhai included camel units of about 2,000 mounted men, which were, in one instance, sent as far as Morocco in 1540 to conduct a raid in response to threats from the Moroccan sultan to seize the salt mine of Taghaza. When Songhai fell to the Moroccans in 1591, the latter’s army included a unit of 1,000 camel drivers for carrying military equipment and provisions. Many camels were also used to transport the estimated 4 tonnes of gold dust seized from the royal treasury.36

The Bornu chronicler Ahmad Ibn Furtu (c. 1576) suggests that camels were rarely used in Bornu’s military systems before the reign of his patron, Mai Idris Alooma, who “ordered his amirs and captains and chiefs and all, who were able, to buy camels, to make easy travelling in his reign.” However, most of the fighting was done on horseback or on foot, with the camels serving to transport troops.37

In the East, around 748 CE, the Nubian king of Makuria Cyriacus (Kyriakos) invaded Egypt with an army of ‘a hundred thousand horses and a hundred thousand camels.’ While these numbers are exaggerated, camel troops in the army of Makuria are mentioned by the 13th century writer el-Andalusi.38

Camels approaching Dongola, Sudan. sketch by Mr. Bakewell, 1883

During the 16th century Adal conquest of Ethiopia, Camels were used to transport troops and military equipment (cannons), but couldn’t travel through the narrow highland passes. The furthest inland settlement visited by camel caravans in the late Middle Ages appears to have been the town of Gendebelu or Gendabelo, in eastern Shewa, where the cannon of Adal were kept.39

Camels continued to be used in warfare in the post-medieval period, and were central to the tribute systems of kingdoms such as Sinnar and Darfur (Sudan), where they were used alongside horses in both military and commercial contexts.40

Horses remained the prerogative of military leaders and royalty, but the success of their campaigns depended on the pack camel. In the sphere of trade, however, the camel’s importance was virtually unrivalled, both in the Sahara and across the semi-arid regions of the Horn of Africa.

Northern Nigerian Emirs pictured riding camels to a meeting, circa 1960. Getty Images.

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The Historical Role of the Camel in African Trade and Industry.

The introduction of the Camel is associated with the rise of trade across the Sahara, especially between North Africa and West Africa, during the late 1st millennium CE.

Although claims for the existence of significant pre-Islamic trade across the Sahara have frequently been advanced, archaeological evidence from West African sites dating to before the Common Era has thus far yielded little indication of imported goods or sustained external commercial exchange. While a few items have been recovered from a handful of sites dating to the mid-1st millennium CE, the bulk of imported trade goods only appear in sufficient quantities after the 8th century CE.41

The archaeologists Sonja and Carlos Magnavita have dismissed such claims of ancient Trans-Saharan trade as ‘factoids,’ i.e., “a speculation or guess that has been repeated so often it is eventually taken for hard fact.”42

[This debate is examined in greater detail in my previous essay on ‘The Garamantian kingdom of the Central Sahara (300BC-500CE)’ ]

Material and textual evidence for trade across the Sahara only appears in the Middle Ages, when Camel carravans formed the basis for exchanges between Saharan communities. It was onto this regional trade system within the Sahara that long-distance trade across the Sahara was grafted, but the former remained more important than the latter.

Summarizing research by several historians, Judith Scheele observes that43:

“No camel ever crossed the Sahara in a straight line, as the distance travelled by one set of pack animals was in most cases limited to around 500 km. Camels are well adapted to the Saharan climate, but they are fragile and need specialist care, and much rest after each continuous effort.

Figures for historic Trans-Saharan and Saharan trade are sporadic and unreliable, but there seems to be no doubt that trade in locally produced and consumed goods regularly exceeded that of Trans-Saharan goods.

Salt is a case in point. Paul Lovejoy estimates that the regional salt trade on the southern edge of the Central Sahara by far exceeded Trans-Saharan trade in value – being worth up to four times as much – and even more so in bulk: in the nineteenth century, while the number of camels involved in Trans-Saharan trade through Tripoli fluctuated between 2,000 and 3,000, salt caravans focused on the mines of Bilma alone drained 20,000 to 30,000 camels a year.

Studying the registers of the Bayruk, a leading commercial family in southern Morocco, Ann McDougall describes the close integration of local, regional and Trans-Saharan affairs, again largely but not exclusively centred on salt. A similar conclusion can be drawn from Ghislaine Lydon’s research on southern Morocco, and from Ulrich Haarmann’s collection and translation of commercial letters produced by traders in Ghadamis in what is now south-western Libya.

Trans-Saharan axes explored at different periods between the 9th and the 17th century. A.D. Map by Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias.

The itineraries followed by caravan networks changed over time in response to shifting ecological conditions and the rise or decline of major economic centres.

In the central Sahara, regional trade between the Tuaregs of Air, the Teda/Tubu of Tibesti, the Kanuri of the Kawar oases (at Bilma and Djado), and the Hausa of Damergu and Zinder was heavily dependent on camels. Estimates for the caravan sizes in the 19th century vary dramatically, from 1,500 camels to over 70,000. A caravan of 3,000 camels had about 30 guides (madugu), and could extend over 25 kilometers.

Besides the trade goods, the caravan also carried camel feeds (bales of grass), some of which were at times left in the desert for the return journey. The main product exchanged was salt from Kawar, of which one basin could produce 4-5 tonnes a year, equivalent to 40-50 camel loads, which were exchanged for grain from the south. Elaborate systems of investment and risk-sharing were fundamental to this economy, and part of the surpluses were reinvested in purchasing camels.44

Estimated size of Salt caravans in the central Sahara, by Knut S. Vikør

Transport of peanuts in Senegal. ca. 1906. Edmond Fortier.

From North-West Africa to the Horn of Africa, Camels were central to the organization of long-distance trade and the interactions between nomadic and sedentary societies. Across many regions, different nomadic communities specialised in herding camels and hiring them out to traders along known caravan routes.

In Sudan, the Bishariyyin, Ja’ali, and Ababda hired out their camels to the Jallaba (traders), who dominated the routes linking the kingdoms of Sennar, Darfur, Ethiopia, and Egypt. The cost of hiring out the camels and equipping the caravan made heavy demands upon the capital and profit of the jallaba. Camels were bought with imported silver dollars in the Shendi region, while the commodities were obtained on credit and through loans and various forms of partnership arrangements.45

In a number of these societies, Camels were also used to drive water-wheels, an ancient water-lifting device with a compartmented body or rim. These devices first appeared in rural Egypt during the 3rd century BC, from which they spread across the Mediterranean world during the Roman Period.46

Water-wheels (sāqiya) spread to Nubia during the Meroitic period and remain in use to the present day. Like in Egypt, the Nubian sāqiya are mostly powered by oxen.47 It’s only those found across the Maghreb, especially in Morocco, that are powered by Camels.48 In the central Sahara, the 11th-century account of al-Bakri refers to agricultural irrigation by Camels in the town of Zawila in Libya.49

The Dromedary was also harnessed for agricultural labour across parts of Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and most of North Africa, especially Morocco and Tunisia, since the early 1st millennium CE. Modern studies on draught camels in Ethiopia and Sudan suggest that they are more efficient than oxen, but their labour requirement is generally higher.50

Camels at the local market in Massawa, Eritrea. ca. 1930

Plowing, Tesseney, Eritrea, ca. 1930. Getty Images.

Plough with camel team in Algeria, wood engraving, late 19th century

Camel-powered water wheel in Morocco. ca. 1930.

Illustration depicting water lifting from a well in Metlili, Algeria. By Couverchel, ca., 1863

A Nubian sakia wheel powered by bullocks. ca. 1847. Wikimedia Commons.

In East Africa, camels from Somalia were the basis of caravan trade to the interior region of the Horn, and were exported along the coast, where they were used to power sesame-oil mills in the cities of Mogadishu, Zanzibar, Mombasa, and Lamu.51

Historically, for the nomadic societies of Somalia’s mainland, there are considerable advantages to keeping large camel herds in the arid areas of East Africa. Camels give more milk than cattle, for a longer period, do not need frequent watering, travel quickly, and can take advantage of the saline browse of desert regions.52

According to the historian Lee Cassanelli53:

Historically, certain clans were regarded as outstanding breeders of camels, others of cattle, though one could find all types of livestock in virtually all parts of the country. The Garre, who were renowned as breeders of burden camels, supplied the Somali and Oromo caravaneers of the Jubba Basin in the eighteenth century. Coastal townsmen also possessed camels that were grazed in distant pastures by agnates or affines.

Estimates from the early 20th century suggest that an average nomadic family required 10-20 camels, 50-60 sheep and goats, or 15-20 head of cattle to subsist in the normally harsh environment of the Horn. Many family herds, however, were three or four times this size.

Given the low level of commercialization, the accumulation of livestock recorded by many observers of the Somali scene can best be explained as a form of social capital used in bride wealth payments, in collective diya compensation, and in attracting allies or clients, or as a hedge against hard times.”

According to the account of Charles Guillian, who visited the region between 1847-8, trade and transport between the coastal towns of the Benadir (Mogadishu, Merca, and Barawe) and the interior regions of Luqq, was almost entirely conducted on camelback.54

The coastal towns purchased their camels from the “indigenes of the neighboring Soumal tribes, the Abgal, the Odjourane, the Guel-Djaal, the Gogoun’dobé, and by those of the territories of Ganarié and Lébine.” He notes that the best camels came from the territory of Geledi, where they cost 4 to 6 piastres (silver dollars), the cheapest sold for 2 piastres, while the most expensive sold for 10 to 12 piastres.55

In Zanzibar, camels (mostly imported from Somalia) cost 8 piastres for a young animal and 25 or 50 piastres for a good working animal. The latter are employed to run the sesame oil mills all along the coast. The sesame oil obtained from camel-powered mills in Mogadishu and Barawe alone, which was estimated at 23 to 39 tonnes annually, was exported to Zanzibar, Yemen, Oman, and India, while the rest was bought by visiting English and American ships.56

Illustration in Guillain’s Atlas depicting a camel operating a sesame seed press in Mogadishu. ca. 1847-8. Somalia.57

Camels outside Barawa, Somalia. Illustration by G. Revoil, ca. 1888.

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Transport and Building technologies of Africa’s Camel keepers.

Many Saharan communities used camels to transport their temporary shelters, such as tents, palanquins, and house frames, which are disassembled, transported, and reassembled with each move. These structures were also modified during social events such as weddings, coronations, and religious ceremonies.

According to Labelle Prussin, the system of building is inseparable from the system of transportation. The components that make up the transport system, i.e., the “saddles,” the litters, and the palanquins, are the same as those that comprise the building system

Among sections of the Somali communities, marriage rituals include repeated processions of the groom and his party to the bride’s community (guro), accompanied by a pack camel loaded with house parts to house the groom’s wedding party at the bride’s community.58

A medjourtine gurgi at Kismayo, Somalia. Image by G. Revoil, 1888.

When camels are used as draft animals, their hump presents no problem, but when used as pack or riding animals, then saddle design becomes a challenge because a heavy load can be carried only if it is distributed so that the skeletal structure bears the brunt of the burden.

The simplest pack saddle is one composed of two forked poles, which in more complex formations, are crossed with other poles and joined with bentwood arches depending on the weight of the load and the type of structure. All subsequent litters and palanquins that carry women, as well as goods, consist of a superstructure of one kind or another fastened above this basic design.59

‘Rock painting. Ayou, Tibesti, Chad. The woman on the left is clearly riding in a litter.’ image and caption by L. Prussin

Saddles and Palanquins used by various nomadic groups. Images by L. Prussin

A camel palanquin (covered litter), used to transport wives and children across the arid desert of southern Algeria, each with a central ventilation shaft. ca. 1917

In Somalia, cameleers typically walked beside their dromedaries and only occasionally rode them using simple saddles. Women usually rode them only in the context of a marriage ceremony, when the bentwood members of the armature tent became the framework for a litter. In other nomadic communities such as the Teda, the Tuareg, and the Hassaniya of the Sahara, the palanquin structure is never dismantled.60

The use of palaquin structures on camels was most commonly observed among the Berber-speaking groups of the Maghreb and Western Sahara, as well as a variety of nomadic groups in Egypt and Sudan, such as the Beja and Kababish.

In most of their cultural traditions, each tribe had its palanquin, which served as a banner around which warriors rallied to battle.

In some traditions, the palanquin was occupied by a princess (daughter of the ruler of the tribe) who was adorned as a bride. Capture of the palanquin by the enemy symbolized defeat. But because the palanquin housed a daughter, embedded in the symbolism was a matrilineal heritage and the material accoutrements of the marriage ritual.61

According to Prussin62:

“In defeat, her palanquin, a singular political symbol of Berber unity, would have been confiscated or exchanged as part of the spoils of war. But her palanquin was also a metaphor for marriage, a symbol of matriliny, since she had gone out in it as a bride.

The exodus that followed her defeat may have looked very much like the early sixteenth-century exodus from the Tuareg city of Agades following its Songhay conquest by Askia Muhammed in 1515 which Barth recorded (1857, 5:461-62):

“It is explicitly stated that he drove out five tribes . . . and that a considerable number of Berbers, with five hundred jakhfa (cages mounted on camels, such as only wealthy people can afford to keep for carrying their wives), left the town.”

Some of the less elaborate jakhfa, which had been built as marriage palanquins, would have looked like those he subsequently recorded. In my mind’s eye, the more elegant ones could very well have looked like the noble Tuareg bride’s palanquin recorded in the early nineteenth century at a wedding south of Murzuq, Libya.”

(left) ‘Camel Conveying a Bride to her Husband’, 1821. Plate 16 from A Narrative of Travels in Northern Africa by Captain George Francis Lyon, 1821. (right) Egypt, women on the trip on a camel through the desert, veil, camel drivers, litter, ca 1850. Getty Images.

(left to right) Transport d’une jeune mariée sur un dromadaire au Tchad. Moorish wedding procession in Mauritania. Africa, Eritrea, decorated camel carries the bride hidden in the canopy, 1920.

Wedding procession near Siut, by A. Schonn, engraving from a drawing by Louis Libay, ca. 1857, Egypt.

An old-fashioned litter in the valley of Abu Sari’a, Sudan, ca. 1914

Marriage Pavilion carried by camels. Egypt. ca. 1910

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During the colonial conquest of the Sahara, these palanquins were commandeered by the French in their skirmishes with the Tuareg. The use of camels declined in the colonial period, which was marked by repeated rebellions among the Tuareg, as well as the re-orientation of trade to the south, where roads and railways displaced the dromedary in bulk transport.63

Yet despite these transformations, the camel has never been fully displaced. While modern technologies have taken over much of its former role in long-distance trade, it remains one of the most important domesticated animals across Africa.

Even in the contemporary era of motorised transport, camels continue to occupy a central place in the economies, value systems, and cultural practices of numerous nomadic and pastoral societies. Africa today hosts over 80% of the world’s dromedary population, with roughly two-thirds found in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti.64

In more recent times, camels have also been introduced into regions well south of their historical range, including the arid landscapes of Namibia, where they now roam across the deserts of southern Africa.

Nubian sports at the Alexandra Palace: 1. Loading and starting a caravan; 2. Some of the animals: 3. Camel racing; 4. Nubian assault of arms: Sword v. Spear; 5. Feeding a caravan in the desert; 6. Nubians at home. Images from The Graphic, 1877.

A Camel Race - waiting for the start. ca. 1910. Sudan.

A camel caravan walks in the Namib Desert close to the Sand Dunes at Skeleton Coast, Namibia. Getty Images.

In 1894, two explorers set out on the first transcontinental journey from the Indian Ocean coast through Rwanda to the Atlantic.

The two travelers : Abdallah bin Rashid from Mombasa and the German Count Gustav Adolf, wrote separate accounts of the journey, which can be read as a microcosm of the broader shifts in African and European co-production of knowledge about the continent during the 19th century.

My latest Patreon article reproduces the English translation of Abdallah’s journey from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, showing how it contradicts von Götzen’s published narrative about the societies of Central Africa on the eve of colonialism.

Please subscribe to read about it here:

A 19TH CENTURY AFRICAN EXPLORER

While passing through the territory of Sennar, one of his companions died near the city of Old Dongola, compelling the monk to remain in the city to arrange his burial. Takla ’Alfā stayed there for more than two months, during which he composed several theological works.

“‘This malkǝ’ to our Lord Jesus Christ and the malkǝ’ to our Lady Mary, I, Takla ’Alfā, the sinful and poor, composed while being in the land (mǝdr) of Dongola (dǝngwǝlā), amongst Muslims (maslǝmān), on my way to Jerusalem, without a camel to ride on, in order to come back to my region (hagar), the land (mǝdr) of Ethiopia (’ityop. yā), and also in order that I might go to Jerusalem. I resided in Dongola, amongst the Nubians (nobā) and Muslims (tanbalāt), on my own. And my son (i.e. disciple) kwǝllu ’andāʿāl(l)aňň, that is to say, Christ chose him, he died in Dongola.”

The text also refers to the presence of Muslim Nubians and Arab gelaba (traders) in Old Dongola, communities that formed important cultural and commercial elements within the Funj kingdom of Sennar and the riverine populations of modern Sudan.

This exceptional text provides direct internal evidence for the long-established intra-African networks that facilitated the travel of pilgrims, scholars, and merchants throughout this region.

These pre-existing networks would later be utilised by European travelers/explorers such as James Bruce, who is often thought to have “discovered” the source of the Nile in 1733.

Map of the journey by Takla ’Alfā (1596) and James Bruce (1773) across North-East Africa (left) Map by D. Dzierzbicka (right) Map by Tompaterson.

The medieval citadel of Old Dongola, Sudan.2

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Until the 1960s, much of African history was reconstructed primarily through the writings of external writers, whose accounts often reflected the interests and biases of their authors.

The bulk of these accounts emerged during the second “Age of exploration” or “discovery, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Africa was widely imagined in European thought as an unknown continent whose peoples existed only at the margins of history.

Since then, historical scholarship centred on Africa has fundamentally transformed this older historiography. Historians, archaeologists, and linguists have uncovered a vast body of textual, oral, and archaeological evidence that has made it possible to reconstruct the continent’s past on its own terms.3

This new scholarship has shown that since antiquity and through the modern era, African societies were never isolated from global processes. African explorers, envoys, merchants, and pilgrims travelled to and maintained contacts with peoples in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, as well as within the vast continent itself.

Africa has been at the center of various transnational and global processes of historical formation. Its traditions of travel, exchange, and exploration are foundational to how we understand global history today.

Many African societies were intimately familiar with both the outside world and their own continent. And it was their established intra-African networks that would be utilized by later European travelers to “discover” what was already known to their hosts.

In a few cases, some of the more famous explorers acknowledged the prior accomplishments of their African predecessors.

For example, David Livingstone, who is often described as the first explorer to traverse central Africa in 1855, noted that at least two African explorers known to him had completed the journey nearly half a century earlier and had left a written record of their expedition.4

These men belonged to the Ovimbundu trading communities from the kingdom of Kasanje, whose merchants had long dominated commerce across the inland empire of Lunda, and its extensive network of copper and ivory trade that linked the Indian Ocean coast to the Atlantic coast.

Livingstone emphasizes that “no European” had ever accomplished the journey before these two African explorers. He adds that while those who acknowledged this fact misidentified the traders as Portuguese, since they bore the Lusitanized names of Pedro Joao Baptista and Antonio Jose, they were in fact known as (os feirantes pretos) “the trading blacks”.

However, the aforementioned expedition was only the first journey across Central Africa, which was internally recorded. Earlier accounts indicate that interconnected networks of Yao, Swahili, and Nyamwezi traders moved goods across long-distance networks that, in some cases, directly linked the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts.5

In West Africa, such intra-African networks of trade, travel, and pilgrimage were of considerable antiquity, appearing in both the external and internal documentary record from at least the 9th century CE.

The medieval cities of the Sahara. Map by D. Mattingly

Trans-Saharan axes explored at different periods between the 9th and the 17th c. A.D. Map by Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias.

10th-13th century ruins at Awdaghust, Mauritania. Wikimedia Commons.

These networks, which were dominated by commercial diasporas such as the Wangara. The latter became known to Portuguese traders at both ends of the West African coast in the late 15th century, engaging in the lucrative Gold trade in both Ghana (at Elmina) and Gambia (Sutuko).

The Portuguese utilized the Wangara routes to dispatch the first European embassies to the inland empires of Songhai and Mali,6 shortly after African embassies from the kingdoms of Benin (1487), Kongo (1487), and Jolof (1488) had visited Lisbon and exchanged knowledge about the kingdoms of the interior.7

For this reason, many of the “external” European accounts of pre-colonial Africa were in fact derived from information obtained from Africans.

As explained by the historians Beatrix Heintze and Adam Jones, “A great deal of the material we have about pre-colonial African societies probably originated from information given by Europeanized Africans or Africanized Europeans; and this grey zone makes it almost impossible to distinguish neatly between external and internal sources.”8

Map of West Africa showing the dispersion routes taken by the Jakhanke (yellow), Juula (green), and Wangarawa (red)

Timbuktu from the terrace of the traveller’s house. Image by H Barth, 1853

Pre-existing African networks were also utilized by Mungo Park, the “first explorer” to “discover” the course of the Niger River.

Park himself acknowledged that much of his progress along the river, as well as his descriptions of regions beyond it, depended on information provided by African travelers and traders he identified as “Serawoolies” (Sarakhole/Wangara) and Mandingoes (Mandinka). Among these were his guides: Isaaco and Amadi Fatouma, who wrote down the last half of Mungo Park’s second journey, after he died in the interior in 1805.9

West African scholars also produced written accounts of their own journeys across the continent, particularly in the context of pilgrimage and advanced education.

Among the most notable include the rihla (travelogue) of the mathematician Muhammad al-Kashnāwi (d.1741)̄, who travelled from Katsina to Cairo and Mecca, Another important example is the more detailed account by the Tukulor leader El-Hajj Umar Tal, who travelled extensively through West Africa, Egypt, the Hijaz, and Jerusalem in 1827.10

Some European explorers who never travelled to West Africa, nevertheless relied heavily on information gathered from African sources.

The French explorer Stanislas d’Escayrac (d. 1868), for example, wholly appropriated the travel accounts of West African pilgrims he encountered in Cairo to compose his own travelogue, while omitting most of the intellectual contributions of his African ‘informants.’11

The British Captain George Francis Lyon (d.1832), who was meant to succeed Mungo Park in exploring the Niger River, failed to reach West Africa from North Africa in 1818-1819, but obtained information from West African pilgrims and traders of Bornu who routinely travelled through Murzuk (Libya).12

This information was utilized by Hugh Clapperton as a roadmap on his journey to the Lake Chad region in 1827.

Libya: Tubu people of Qatrun, by George Francis Lyon, ca. 1819

Color Lithograph Showing Native Women of Sudan (West Africa) by Denis Dighton and Charles Joseph Hullmandel after George Francis Lyon, ca. 1819

Unlike earlier explorers such as James Bruce and Mungo Park, whose expeditions to the African interior were largely dependent on pre-existing networks and systems of knowledge, the armchair explorers d’Escayrac and Lyon developed more asymmetrical relationships with the African travellers they encountered.

In these contexts, African interlocutors were often treated not as fellow explorers or co-producers of knowledge, but rather as informants whose testimony was selectively recorded and reframed.

By the late 19th century, the expansion of European imperial rule further intensified these asymmetries, extending them into the African interior itself. The production of geographical and ethnographic knowledge increasingly privileged European epistemologies, while marginalising local African sources.

African travelers whose expertise about their own societies had been disregarded employed various strategies of resistance and negotiation in these decreasing spaces of agency. One such strategy involved producing their own written accounts alongside the European explorers, who were essentially tourists using local infrastructure.

The most exceptional of these conflicting narratives is provided by the East African caravanner Abdallah bin Rashid, who travelled with the German Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen in 1894 during the first transcontinental journey from the Indian Ocean coast through Rwanda to the Atlantic.

Abdallah’s account, which was written in Swahili, provides an alternate perspective of the cross-continental expedition. In particular, he draws a stark contrast between the “clean” settlements of the independent African kingdoms in the interior, and the “filthy” colonial settlements of the Belgian King Leopold’s Congo “Free State”.

While Götzen praised King Leopold’s armies and presented the colonial settlements as exemplars of the “civilizing mission,” he largely ignored the extensive depopulation caused by colonial warfare, as well as the poor sanitary conditions that characterised many of these urban spaces.

By contrast, these realities are explicitly foregrounded in Abdallah’s narrative, which preserves a critical perspective absent from Götzen’s published account.

Abdallah became ill shortly after returning from the “worm-infested” towns of colonial Congo and passed away just two years after completing the expedition. Götzen, on the other hand, became governor of German East Africa and oversaw the brutal counterinsurgency operations against the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905-7.

The contrasting perspectives and trajectories of the two travellers can be read as a microcosm of the broader shifts in African and European co-production of knowledge about the continent during the 19th century.

My latest Patreon article reproduces the English translation of Abdallah’s journey from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, showing how it contradicts von Götzen’s published narrative about the societies of Central Africa on the eve of colonialism.

Please subscribe to read about it here:

A 19TH CENTURY AFRICAN EXPLORER

These models, which later became highly influential among social scientists studying non-Western societies, were based largely on research conducted among Luo-speaking communities in South Sudan, Northern Uganda, and Western Kenya.

The Luo constitute one of Africa’s most widely dispersed population groups, following a major wave of migration during the 16th century that profoundly reshaped the cultural and political history of East Africa.

Initially classified as “stateless” societies situated on the periphery of the centralised, mostly Bantu-speaking states of the Great Lakes region, Luo societies later became the archetypal examples of “segmentary” political organisation.

However, the history of the Luo societies suggests that these classifications do not sufficiently describe the evolution of their political systems since the 16th century. These models instead describe societies already transformed by the external disruptions of the late 19th century, such as the Turkish-Egyptian invasions, which altered pre-existing forms of social organisation.

This article outlines the history of the Luo migrations and examines the evolution of their political systems since the 16th century, showing how Luo forms of social organisation shifted between these different systems over time.

Distribution of Western Nilotic languages in East Africa. Map by Anne Storch

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Shilluk and the End of Medieval Nubia: Reconstructing the Luo Migrations

In 1497, an enigmatic African group known as the Funj overran the medieval Nubian kingdom of Alodia and established their capital at Sennar, near modern Khatourm in Sudan.1

The Funj were a Nubian group whose northward movement was triggered by the arrival of the Shilluk, a section of Luo-speakers whose expansion across Eastern Africa created one of the continent’s most widely distributed population groups.

In linguistic classification, the Luo languages form the Western branch of the Nilotic languages, which are in turn part of the Nilo-Saharan family, one of the four language phyla of Africa, the others being Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, and KhoiSan.

Western Nilotic is divided into three main clusters: Luo, Dinka–Nuer, and Burun. Among these, the Luo languages are the most widely spoken. They are divided into the northern languages of Shilluk, Anuak, Pari, Thuri, and Bor. And the southern languages of Acholi, Alur, Dhulou (Kenyan Luo), Copi, Adhola, Labwor, Kumam, and Lango.2

An overview of the geographic distribution of these languages is provided in the map by Anne Storch. It should be noted that the map is based on their settlement patterns from the early 20th century, but may not reflect modern population distribution, given the political upheavals since then.3

While other Nilotic groups, such as the Maasai, Dinka, and Kalenjin, also underwent major movements, the Luo expansion was particularly significant for its enduring influence on the dynastic histories and settlement patterns of both the riverine Sudan and the predominantly Bantu-speaking Great Lakes region, a process that reshaped the political landscape of East Africa.

In his landmark study of southern Luo history, the historian Bethwell Allan Ogot analysed the historical traditions of twenty-two Luo-speaking groups across eastern Uganda and western Kenya.

Oral evidence in the form of genealogies, toponyms, migration narratives, religious systems, and histories of social organisation was systematically examined, cross-checked, and comparatively dated through linguistic and ethnographic research. Ogot’s work laid the foundation for subsequent scholarship, which revised many of the older structuralist interpretations and was later supplemented by archaeological research.4

The original homeland of the Luo languages is generally thought to have been located in the Bahr el-Ghazal region of north-western South Sudan. From this region, communities of semi-sedentary peoples began to expand during the mid-2nd millennium CE.

The northernmost groups, such as the Shilluk and Anuak, expanded eastwards to Wipac on the banks of the Bahr-el-Ghazal tributary, and further on to the White Nile at the start of the 16th century. Here, the Shilluk kingdom’s founder Nyikang’o’, drove out the Funj of Sennar and established his own state near Fashoda. The Anuak, who had separated from the Shilluk at Wipac, moved further east to the South Sudan/Ethiopia borderlands and founded a number of polities.5

View of the mosque and houses in Sennar, Sudan (bottom), and the ruins of the house of the Funj King of Sennar (top) on the Blue Nile. Coloured engraving ca. 1834, based on a drawing by F. Cailliaud ca. 1824

Remains of the mosque at Sennar, ca. 1910.6

View of Fashoda from the river. ca. 1871. Image by Georg Schweinfurth

Backview of Fashoda, ca. 1910, South Sudan. Pitt Rivers Museum

Sudan provides the oldest written accounts of the Luo migrations. Historical traditions about the role of the Shilluk in the kingdom of Sennar were first transcribed by the explorer James Bruce when he visited Sennar in 1772.

Bruce recorded two conflicting accounts; the first one, which he preferred, since it came from Aḥmad Sīd al-Qom, a high officer in the Funj court and matched his own observations of Funj society, claimed that the Funj were originally non-muslim Shilluk. The second account, only found in his private journal, suggests they were Muslim converts who moved downstream from the white Nile. Later travelers would dismiss the Shilluk origin but maintain that the Funj came from the White Nile.

The Funj chronicle mentions a cradle known as Lul (Walool) along the white Nile, before their later shift to the Blue Nile region. Parts of these accounts are corroborated by traditional histories of the Shilluk, first written in the early 20th century. These describe their migration to the white Nile, as well as the displacement of the Apfuny (Funj) from their hilltop settlements to the Blue Nile.7

The Shilluk kingdom was centered at Fashoda since the reign of Reth (King) Tugo (r. 1690-1710), who also introduced the royal cult of the founder king Nyikang. Political institutions were centralized under the kings and nobility (kwareth ), who monopolized power, accumulated wealth, engaged in regional diplomacy and trade, and maintained an army mobilised from the lower classes and war captives.8

Their forces of war canoes and infantrymen ensured that the kingdom remained a major regional power able to hold off the Funj and their Arabised subjects.

In the early 17th century, the Dinka, another Western Nilotic group (but not Luo-speaking), expanded into the southern Gezira at the expense of both the Shilluk and Sennar kingdoms. These expansions, often gradual but occasionally resulting in war, lasted until the 18th century. While the Dinka were formidable fighters who outnumbered the armies of Sennar, they lacked a central political institution, and large-scale co-operation among the clans was impossible to maintain for long.9

The Dinka incursions forced Shilluk and Sennar into an alliance during the reigns of the Funj sultan Badi II and the Shilluk king Duwat (r. 1635-1650). This alliance was retained by their successors, particularly Reth Tokot (r. 1670-1690), a contemporary of the sultans Badi II, Unsa b. Nasir and Badi III.

This king also aided Sennar in crushing rebellions in the northern provinces, according to the Funj chronicle. The establishment of more peaceful relations between Sennar and Shilluk resulted in some acculturation, with the latter adopting some of the coronation practices, dress, and political institutions of the former.10

Bruce’s informants stated that the White Nile was the frontier between Funj and Shilluk in 1772; this agrees with Westermann’s (1912) Shilluk tradition that the Funj were not finally expelled from the east bank of the White Nile opposite the Shilluk country until their defeat in about 1775. When Sennar fell to the Turco-Egyptian forces in 1821, the Shilluk briefly resumed their northward expansion.11

Leaving aside the northern groups, the main party of the Luo-speaking peoples expanded southwards along the Nile, dividing at Pubungu, near Lake Albert in Western Uganda, during the 15th-16th century.

The Kingdoms of the Great Lakes and the Luo Migrations.

One group led by Nyipir moved westwards across the Nile, established a pattern of dominant lineages and chiefdoms over the preexisting Lendu-Okebo-Madi. Another group, under Labong’o, traveled southwards, invaded the kingdom of Bunyoro, and established its ruling Bito dynasty. From Pawir in Bunyoro, the Luo expanded across Acholi and Lango regions, and south-east to the kingdom of Busoga. The last group moved east beyond Mount Elgon, forming the ancestral populations of modern Padhola of Eastern Uganda and Dholuo of Western Kenya and northern Tanzania.12

The impact of these Luo expansions on the Inter-Lacustrine Bantu-speaking world has been the subject of several studies, for it was a process that occurred well within the period for which historical evidence is abundant

In most anthropological literature, the Western Nilotic-speaking groups are characterized as acephalous (stateless) societies of mobile herders, in contrast to the Interlacustrine Bantu-speaking groups, who are sedentary and formed several centralized kingdoms.

However, this generalization is complicated by the presence of various forms of social organization among the Luo-speakers and their transition from nomadic herders to sedentary farmers in different contexts.

The diverse forms of Luo social organisation examined here included: centralised Kingdoms (e.g., Shilluk and Bunyoro’s Bito dynasty); “segmentary states” famously identified by the anthropologist Southhall among the Alur; and chiefdoms headed by a Ruoths/Rwoths among the Ugandan Acholi and Kenyan Luo.13

According to the historian Roland Oliver:

By the fifteenth century there were no more broad ecological gaps occupied only by hunter gatherers and inviting settlement by food-producers equipped with cattle and hardy cereals. Successful migration by this time usually involved the conquest of existing states and some kind of subsequent accommodation whereby the conquerors became the rulers in the political systems of the conquered. Hence the Lwo, though politically acephalous in their own homelands, emerge in Bantu history as kings and nobles in systems built up by others. And very soon, much sooner than their Southern Nilotic predecessors [eg Kalenjins of Kenya], their migrations ran out of steam.14

The most significant cultural synthesis occurred in the kingdom of Bunyoro, and the semi-legendary “empire” of Kitara.

Traditional histories of Bunyoro’s Babito dynasty were first recorded (and infamously conflated with the Hamitic myth) by John Speke in his 1855 visit to the court of King Kamurasi (r. 1852-69).

They were later described in greater detail by educated court historians like Nyakatura, who removed the Hamitic myth from Bunyoro’s dynastic history very early on. He detailed the divine origins of the empire, how it was inherited from the godly Batembuzi dynasty by the semi-divine Bacwezi, who then transferred power to the immigrant Luo-Babito.15

The historian Renée Tantala argues that pre-colonial Babito synthesized many traditions, emphasizing their position as heirs to an ancient empire, in order to increase their legitimacy at home and abroad. King Kamurasi asserted to Speke that he was ‘the father of all to the kings’ of the region, and Baker was assured soon afterwards that Bunyoro’s proper name was Kitara. In 1875, another European visitor heard the king of Bunyoro, two rebel Nyoro princes, and the king of Buganda each claim to be the only true descendants of the princes of Kitara.16

According to the historian Shane Doyle:

This regional scramble to assert direct links to a state called Kitara does make it likely that some such kingdom did once exist. Accepting the probable reality of Kitara, however, does not require belief in the Bacwezi as a dynasty, the territorial extent claimed for Kitara, nor even the images of a centralized, homogenous administration conjured up by Europeans’ fixation with the notion of an ancient empire. Kitara almost certainly would have been held together more by ideological power, trading links, personal ties and clan alliances than by systematized, bureaucratized government.

Kingship is an ancient feature of this region, and almost certainly predated the arrival of the Babito clan from the Luo-speaking areas of Bukedi or Lango, which probably occurred around the late 16th century. Nyakatura refers to a hereditary official who was named after the interpreter of the first Bito king, who did not know the presumably Bantu language of Kitara. Although many Bito personal names are Luo, Bunyoro’s political terminology features only two words of Luo extraction, ekikali and dyangi. The predominance of Bantu political terms strongly suggests that kingship preceded Bito rule.17

Besides the Bito, the kingdom of Bunyoro interacted with other Luo-speaking groups, most notably the Palwo/Alur to its north, some of whom intermarried with the ruling lineage, and harboured rival candidates such as Ruyonga. The Bunyoro king Kabarega (r. 1870-1899) also traded ivory, copper, and guns with the Acholi chiefdoms to the north.18

When the Turco-Egyptian expeditions were sent against the Acholi chiefs in 1886 for refusing to pay their tax, Kabarega supplied the chiefs with soldiers and guns to support revolts north of the Nile and west of Lake Albert. The Acholi, alongside the Alur and Langi, later formed the core of the trained army of riflemen formed by Kabarega in the 1880s that would fight the British colonial forces for about two decades.19

19th-century Bunyoro showing the neighbouring Luo-speaking societies (highlighted in red), and the Turco-Egyptian stations (highlighted in blue). Based on a Map by Shane Doyle.

The concept of the segmentary state was developed by the anthropologist Aidan Southall in 1956 in order to characterize and explain the political system he encountered among the Alur during the late colonial period.

He defined the segmentary state as “one in which the spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible, changing periphery. The latter is confined to the central, core domain.” In the case of Alur societies, they recognized a ruling clan known as the Atyak, who achieved domination without the advantage or application of force, but rather from ‘the impact of belief in more potent supernatural power.’20

Southall positioned his concept of the ‘segmentary state’ between what the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard (1940) classified as centralized “state systems” and acephalous or “segmentary lineage systems”. Southall subsequently applied the segmentary state model elsewhere, including to the ancient kingdom of Kitara (not Bunyoro), the Yoruba, Anglo-Saxon England, and 11th-century France.21

The segmentary model was largely a product of its time, developed during a period when historical research on African societies remained limited. As archaeological and historiographical evidence has expanded, the model has come under sustained criticism, particularly in the very regions where it was first formulated.

The archaeologist Peter Robertshaw argues that Kitara was not a segmentary state, nor was the political system of the Alur. His examination of archaeological data from the late Iron Age earthworks, settlements, and hilltop shrine sites in Bunyoro, dated to between the 14th and 16th centuries, suggests competing nodes of instrumental and “creative” authority that resemble the state structures of 19th-century Bunyoro.

In 19th century Bunyoro, kingship was the center of secular power, from which political authority was delegated in the form of grants of estates to great chiefs and lesser chiefs. The King, however, was not a divine ruler nor an intermediary with spiritual powers. This role fell to the priests of the Cwezi shrines scattered across the kingdom, who represented competing yet ultimately subordinate centers of power.22

According to Robertshaw, this indicates that centralized authority in 19th-century Bunyoro was circumscribed in various ways, even under the powerful monarch, Kabarega, who brought the breakaway Toro kingdom back under Nyoro control by force of arms.

It should also be noted that the Alur were not entirely independent in the 19th century, since, as Southall acknowledges, they recognized the suzerainty of Kabarega as late as 1879.23

This was before the Turco-Egyptian forces of Emin Pasha, and later colonisation by the Belgians and British profoundly altered the region’s political organization. Southall was therefore describing a situation largely as it appeared in the 20th century, long after these changes, rather than the earlier historical configuration of Alur political authority.

At the time of Emin Pasha (1885-9), there were originally three large Alur chiefdoms (ultimately under Bunyoro’s suzerainty), but these had fragmented due to political upheavals associated with the Turco-Egyptian expansion.

Emin notes that the authority of the Alur rulers was greater than among the neighbouring Acholi chiefdoms, and their administrative systems were more formalised. Nevertheless, similar forms of tribute, taxation, courts, and inheritance existed in both Luo-speaking groups.24

It should also be noted that Emin was describing an Acholi society after it was devastated by Turco-Egyptian expeditions, of which he was partially responsible.

He acknowledged in his private journal that the invasions “inflicted quite unnecessary cruelty… When I came here 11 years ago, Acholi land was well populated, rich in corn, honey, etc., and its inhabitants friendly and peaceful. Every station has indulged in plunder, all my exhortations have been disregarded.”25

Similarly, the pioneering anthropological work of Evans-Pritchard among the Luo-speaking Anuak (South Sudan/Ethiopia) and the Luo of Kenya during the 1930s and 40s was also criticized by later scholars for downplaying the authority of rulers in these societies during the pre-colonial period.

They argue that his work ‘contradicted prevailing interpretations of their political significance, with little regard for the value of historical documentation and ethnographic factors to the contrary’.26

Among the Luo of Kenya, Evans-Pritchard’s opinion was that there were no chiefs among the Luo, and claims that the Rwot ‘was an influential person, but no more’.27 This contradicts both earlier accounts and later historiographical research.

The colonial administrator Geoffrey Northcote, considered chieftainship as key to Luo social organization: ‘Each chief ’, he wrote, ‘subdivides his territory, placing each portion under a sub-chief.’ The missionary Walter E. Owen also wrote that ‘in the tribal organization, the central figure around which all the tribal life revolves, and who embodies the tribal loyalties and welfare, is the ruoth or tribal (or clan) head’.

Their views are shared with the Historian Bethwell Ogot, who wrote that ‘each oganda [tribe] was an independent economic, political and ritual unit. Each had its own Ruoth (chief). The Ruoth was the jural-political leader of the “tribe”.’ The oganda itself, of which the Luo in Kenya had around thirteen, was composed of groupings of patrilineal clans or large lineages, which in turn were subdivided into smaller patrilineal segments.28

Arguably, what muddied the waters considerably in his interpretation was the extent of change and disruption caused to Luo society as a result of nearly forty years of colonial rule (since 1895), and how much it could represent the pre-colonial forms of social organization.

Like in Bunyoro, archaeological research can provide some clues regarding the organisation of these societies.

While archaeological studies have been relatively limited in most of the Luo-speaking regions examined in this essay, a number of them have been undertaken across numerous stone-walled settlements in South-Western Kenya. This research provides additional data to corroborate some of the historical traditions.

Approximately 138 stone settlements containing 520 structures have been surveyed across the region, along with an additional 500 walled settlements/“forts” that feature free-standing earthen walls and moats.

The largest and most complex of the stone ruins is the site of Thimlich Ohinga, where the main monument consists of an outer compound wall, 115 m in diameter and 2.5-3.5 m high. Between the enclosures are passageways and corridors lined with low stone walls that designate residential spaces, cooking areas with hearths, kraals, and industrial areas for iron smelting, including furnaces and iron tools.

[see my essay on The Stone Ruins of Thimlich Ohinga ]

Ruins of Thimlich Ohinga and a Map showing the distribution of stone-walled settlements in western Kenya.

Historical traditions of the societies near Thimlich indicate that the region was successively occupied by different groups belonging to both the Bantu and Nilotic speakers. Most of the pottery found in excavations at the main enclosure was decorated with a knotted cord-roulette, with motifs similar to those used in the modern pottery traditions of the Nilotic-speaking Luo. Charcoal samples from the sites yielded a date range of 1650 to 1900 CE.29

The archaeologists Onjala and Kamaru suggest that 17th-century Thimlich was a village complex with a single leadership, and that the site became a center from which territorial conquests into neighboring areas were conducted. It likely developed as an administrative center where leadership consultations and the organisation of labour were undertaken.

The monuments suggest the emergence of a more complex society where labour was highly organized to meet the demands for gathering and transporting the raw material, and control of the construction efforts. The political and cultural importance of the site ensured its occupation until its eventual abandonment during the upheavals of the early colonial period.30

In the western Interlacustrine region, the Luo had been acculturated into the pre-existing and more dominant Bantu-speaking kingdoms of Bunyoro and Busoga. But in South Western Kenya, the pre-existing societies were not as socially stratified. Lineage groups (clans) initially served as the main social institutions for mediating exchanges and conflicts, as well as integrating incoming groups.

Both the Luo and Bantu-speaking societies in this region used the clan as a device for social integration, some of which became socially stratified to form chiefdoms by the 17th and 18th centuries. Only one of these chiefdoms, Wanga, was primarily Bantu-speaking. The important early Luo-ruled chiefdom in those centuries was nearby Alego. It has been suggested that the intensity of social interaction in this region created pressures and conflicts that could best be resolved by the integrative factor of chiefship.31

As in most regions described in this essay, the Luo-speaking groups transitioned from a mobile pastoral lifestyle into a strong sedentary community, practising a mixed economy of agro-pastoralism.

External pressure from the neighbouring state of Busoga to the west and the larger kingdom of Buganda may have also influenced the formation of nucleated settlements and the construction of defensive architecture across the region.

In 17th century Busoga, several polities in its north and east developed around the dominant, albeit temporary, positions of Luo lineages, mostly notably the Owiny Karuoth, who were acculturated into Bantu-speaking Soga society. Institutions became increasingly centralised as appoitive and hereditary offices emerged in the 18th to 19th centuries, especially in the Bantu-speaking south. The kingdom became more socially stratified, influenced by the expansion of Buganda’s hegemony.32

By the late 19th century, the armies of Buganda’s expansionist king Mutesa (r. 1856-84) were campaigning as far east as Western Kenya, mostly using its navy against some of the walled settlements in the region. These campaigns may have restricted the territorial expansion of the nascent polities.

The explorer Joseph Thomson in 1883-5 writes: “About Massala we observed numerous deserted villages, and on inquiry we learned that they were the result of raids of Mtese’s warriors, who were in the habit of making descents on the Samia coast. The neighbouring state of Akola to the west had lately fallen a victim to that potentate’s imperial policy, and his name was held in great terror. We ourselves on more than one occasion were mistaken for Waganda, and the alarm and war-cry spread accordingly.”33

“War canoe of the Wavuma advancing to battle.” ca. 1890. by D. M. Kelsey. Illustration based on H.M.Stanely’s drawing of the war canoes used in the battle between Buganda and Buvuma.

Thomson also provides the first description of the walled towns of “Kavirondo” in western Kenya. Later travellers and colonial administrators often distinguished between the “Nilotic Kavirondo” (later known as the Luo) and the “Bantu Kavirondo” (later known as the Luhya). The differences in the settlement patterns of the two groups were, however, not particularly pronounced, and it’s clear that such walled constructions were found in many different groups.

In his description of the Luhya, Thomson mentions “chiefs” ruling over several walled settlements like Kwa-Sundu, Massala, and Masawa, with large populations, cultivated farms, and the capacity to absorb a large section of Maasai refugees. The abundance of trade goods at Kwa-Sundu, its importance relative to other walled settlements, and its chief’s alliance with Swahili traders who attacked Masawa, equate it to other towns in the East African interior like Tabora and Ujiji that played a central role in the emergence of states among the Nyamwezi of Tanzania.34

Various walled settlements in S.W Kenya. (clockwise) The walled village of Kabaras, Kavirondo. illustration by Joseph Thompson, ca. 1883. A walled village in Kavirondo, north of Nzoia River. Image by H. Johnston, 1902. A Kach village, image by G. H. Gorges, 1899. Doorway in the wall of a Kavirondo village. Image by John Bland-Sutton, 1911.

The first description of Luo political structures in this region comes from Charles Hobley, who was writing in 1896, long after the upheavals mentioned above.

He notes the presence of “chiefs”, whose authority over their subjects was, however, relatively limited: “they are assertively independent, and to such a degree that it is but rarely one finds a chief who has any real control over his people.” The office was mostly hereditary, and its function was concerned with organising defense against the attacks of the neighbouring Nandi and Masaai.35

A description of walled settlements of the Luo comes from G.H Gorge, who visited the south-east coast of Winam Gulf in 1899. He observed that settlements of the Kach (NyaKach, a section of Luo-speakers) were “surrounded by walls built of stone and mud” to defend them against attacks by the Kosova [Kissi] and the people of South Kavirondo from the north.36

Sir Harry Johnston (1902), who uses the now more common term of “Ja-luo”, mentions that they used to build stone and earthen walls “in imitation of the Bantu Kavirondo to the north. But this is a custom which has now died out.”37

Charles Eliot (1905) noted that while the northern settlements continued to build earthen walls, the “Ja-Luo” now surrounded theirs with a “thick-set hedge of euphorbias and aloes.”38 Sir John Bland-Sutton (1911) attributed the earthen and stone walls of the Kavirondo to the threat posed by the Nandi.39

C.H. Stigand also mentions stone walls among the Nilotic (but non-Luo speaking) Kisii, whose settlements were fortified by a high wall of rubble or earth, surrounded by a ditch, and were “more formidable than the low Kavirondo earthworks.” 40

The defensive function of both stone and earthen fortifications was widely noted by early travellers to the region. These structures later played a significant role in resisting the British colonial invasion of 1895.

Minyere Hill, Part of Wall of Boma No.3, interior. Minyere Hill, Boma No. 3, interior of Main Entrance. Images and Captions by N. Chittick, 1965.41

Stone structure on Minyere Hill, Kanyamkago, South Nyanza. Main entrance to Boma. Image by N. Chittick, 1965.

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The Turco-Egyptian irruption and colonial rule in 19th-century Luo History.

The Luo-speaking world experienced profound political upheaval in the second half of the 19th century, as a series of foreign armies and merchant groups entered the region, conducting extensive raids before its eventual occupation by colonial forces.

The northern areas were particularly affected by these disruptions. The Shilluk were able for some time to hold the Funj at bay, until the Funj kingdom itself was invaded and absorbed by Turco-Egyptian forces. Initially, Turkish and Arab incursions were limited in scale, largely consisting of cattle raids and slave-taking expeditions, with only a single recorded expedition penetrating Shilluk territory in 1830.42

From the 1840s onward, however, the activities of Turco-Egyptian government (Turkiyya) and commercial agents in the southern regions became increasingly predatory. They set up zaribas (fortified residences) from which they raided their southern peripheries for slaves. The southerners often resisted the presence of these foreign traders in their land, producing a persistent and destructive cycle of conflict between the two.

A large group of Shilluk men in a line brandishing hide shields and spears at a dance gathering. ca. 1928. Pitt Rivers Museum

In 1860, Shilluk’s King Kwatker expelled many Arab traders from his kingdom. The latter, under the leadership of Muhammad al-Khäyr, responded by sacking the royal capital, Fashoda. Contemporary visitors in 1862 wrote of the aftermath of this devastation, describing how ‘the once-powerful Shillooks have been scattered far and wide’. The Shilluk counter-attacked in 1863, killing Muhammad al-Khäyr.

In late 1863, the Khedive Ismail of Egypt (r. 1863-79) established a garrison in Shilluk country as part of his ambitious southern expansion up the Nile. The relationship between Shilluk and the Turco-Egyptian authorities deteriorated rapidly. The administration levied a heavy tribute, compelling the Shilluk to rebel by attacking garrisons at Kaka and Fashoda. Turco-Egyptian reinforcements crushed the Shilluk armies in 1876, and turned the kingdom into a province until their expulsion by the Mahdists in 1881.43

The Khedive extended his influence south into Acholi territory. Here, the Turco-Egyptian presence was primarily seen as an occupation force protecting their traders, who were not inclined to involve the Acholi in trade except as menials, porters, and interpreters. Unlike the situation among the previously “stateless” Nyamwezi of Tanzania, where external trade encouraged state-building, the foreign presence was almost entirely destructive.

In response, some Acholi states migrated away from areas of alien concentration, and others, such as Patiko, fragmented into insignificant political units. The exception was the Acholi state of Padibe, whose Rwot (king) Ogwok expanded its borders, developed a new bureaucratic structure, set up new industries such as weaving, began the adoption of Arab dress styles, and organized a standing army.44

A vignette upper body profile portrait of an Acholi chief, identified as Aguen, wearing a patterned shirt with a disk hair ornament. January 1879, photo by Richard Buchta, Acholi, Uganda. Pitt Rivers Museum.

The Turkiyya collapsed in 1881-5 under the Mahdist revolt, which quickly took over much of Sudan but failed to hold any of the southernmost regions for long. Their influence was ultimately reduced to the single isolated station at Bor. In September 1898, the Mahdist state was defeated by the British colonial armies, who would by 1899, occupy Shilluk and Acholiland. The last independent Shilluk monarch was deposed in 1903.45

In the east, the Anuak territory wasn’t colonised until two decades later

The Anuak, like most Luo-speakers, had also transitioned to sedentary farming. They lived in nucleated settlements under a headman who recognized the authority of the nobility, which in turn belonged to a royal clan headed by a King. However, the Anuak king’s authority was relatively limited. Succession was marked by fierce competition between nobles for possession of the royal emblems. They were thus vulnerable to expeditions of both the Ethiopians and Nuer.46

By 1911, the Anuak acquired firearms from Ethiopia, allowing them to shift the balance of power against the Nuer. At least three kings, Akwey, Oodial, and Uliimi, were known at the time of the British arrival in 1912.47 The border between British Sudan and Ethiopia cut through Anuak territory, splitting the two kingdoms of Akwey and Oodial on either side of the border. Rival candidates often fled to Ethiopia to recruit followers, prompting the Colonial administration to forcefully install one ruler but stripping him of most authority, and paying him a salary as a civil servant.48

Riverine settlement of the Baro Anuak, ca. 1935, South Sudan. Pitt Rivers Museum.

In western Kenya, the Bukusu “forts” of the predominantly Luhya (Kitosh) communities became the sites of fierce anti-colonial resistance in 1895 at Lumboka Fort (near modern Bungoma town) and Chetambe (near modern Webuye town). After their defeat, the colonial officers insisted on the demolition of the Bukusu forts, although many walled settlements were still occupied a decade later.

Photographs from the 1910s and 1930s nevertheless show that many of these settlements had been abandoned, their moats were overgrown with vegetation, and the clay walls were gradually melting away in the humid climate. It was during this time that the walled settlements of the Luo in southern Nyanza were also being abandoned.49

Remains of a walled settlement in Kitosh, northern Kavirondo. ca. 1910-1920. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Liverpool.

Conclusion: Colonial reorganisation and colonial Anthropology.

After the British formally established colonial control over western Kenya in the early twentieth century, they undertook a comprehensive reorganisation of local administration.

Each region had a government-appointed chief over a specific territory, but was ultimately subordinate to the district officer. These titled figures, created by the British in 1902, were not like the pre-colonial rulers, but were essentially civil servants who received a monthly salary but were stripped of all traditional authority.50

By the time Evans-Pritchard was hired by British colonial administrators to intervene in the succession disputes of Anuak and (briefly) the Kenyan Luo, both societies had undergone significant internal changes in their political organisation that aren’t fully addressed in his anthropological study.

Similarly, Aidan Southall’s description of Alur society in the late colonial period largely reflected more recent forms of social organisation shaped by the exigencies of colonial administration.

Taken together, the work of these two highly influential scholars, which is still widely cited by social scientists today, is largely detached from the pre-colonial contexts to which their models of political organisation are often retrospectively applied.

The historical evidence of Luo migration and state formation reveals the complexity and variability of social organisation in pre-colonial Africa, as well as the profound impact of external forces during the 19th century that reshaped the continent’s political landscape into the forms we recognise today.

Thimlich Ohinga, Western Kenya.

Among the most significant beneficiaries of the economic growth and political changes in 19th-century Africa were the Chokwe of Central Africa, who went from a relatively obscure group on the margins of the great kingdoms of the Savannah to becoming the region’s most dynamic economic and military forces.

The history of the Chokwe Revolution, Trade, and Artworks is the subject of my latest Patreon article. Please subscribe to read more about it here:

THE CHOKWE REVOLUTION

Over the course of the century, these developments completely reshaped the political and cultural geography of the continent, such that the forms of social organization found across much of the continent on the eve of colonial rule cannot be uncritically projected into earlier periods.

While some parts of the continent saw the continued expansion and consolidation of existing states without regional upheaval, such as the Gold Coast (Ghana) and the Great Lakes region of East Africa, much of the continent was significantly transformed by processes that amounted to a political revolution.

New models of leadership emerged, often based on merit rather than on dynastic inheritance alone. Political authority increasingly rested on qualities such as ideological vision, military skill, material ambition, and the administrative capacity to mobilize and sustain power.

A revealing example comes from the 19th-century Empire of Massina (in present-day Mali). In response to a nobleman’s request for appointment as a provincial governor, the state’s Governing Council wrote in reply:

“The Council does not contest your illustrious birth, nor your military achievements. However, it would be an issue to give you an office in which neither military merit nor origin matter. From administrators, we require piety and science. And, without insulting you, your piety is mild, and your science is non-existent.”1

Revolutionary Africa in the nineteenth century. Map by Richard Reid.2

Map of Africa on the year 1880 AD.

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PATREON

The political revolutions of 19th-century West Africa have been examined in greater detail by the historian Paul Lovejoy, who argues that they resembled contemporaneous revolutions across Europe and the Americas. In his interpretation, these movements were driven in part by efforts to curtail the social and political disruptions associated with the Atlantic slave trade.3

The establishment of theocratic states in this region, which began in the Senegambia and Upper Guinea region with the kingdoms of Futa Jalon and Futa Toro in 1775-6, accelerated in the 19th century with the founding of Sokoto in Northern Nigeria after 1804, and the empire of Massina in Mali in 1817.

The consolidation of these states generated far-reaching transformations in the political institutions, economic systems, and settlement patterns of neighboring regions.

In the old empire of Bornu in the Lake Chad Basin, the ancient Sayfawa dynasty was supplanted by the theocratic government led by Sheikh Al-Kanemi. In the Bambara empire of Segu (Mali), the ailing Diarra dynasty became a vassal of Massina and was ultimately absorbed by Umar Tal’s Tukulor state.

In S.W Nigeria, the weakening of the Oyo empire was intensified by Sokoto incursions, contributing to the rise of large Yoruba city-states like Ibadan, which attained a population of about 100,000 in 1851.4

New patterns of economic exchange stimulated significant growth in production, especially in the textile trade and the caravan trade in Kola. The ensuing prosperity was such that for the first time since the collapse of Songhai in 1591, large cities in the West African savannah rivaled the population of its former imperial capital, with Kano boasting a population of over 100,000 in 1896.5

Aerial view of Kano, Nigeria, with the emir’s palace at the center. ca. 1930. Northwestern University.

In Sudan, the Turco-Egyptian era (1821-1885) and the Mahdist revolution (1881–1898), which succeeded it, represented new forms of political organization and administration that diverged significantly from the pre-existing monarchical systems of Funj and Darfur.6

Their economic structures were shaped by expanding global commercial networks and were more directly integrated into the Red Sea trade through the port city of Suakin.7 The governments were centralised in the twin cities of Khartoum and Omdurman, the latter of which boasted a population of over 150,000 in the late 19th century,8 while regional cities like El-Obeid numbered about 100,000 residents in 1891.9

In the northern Horn of Africa, a century-long period of regionalism in Ethiopia ended with the restoration of imperial authority under Tewodros II and his successors.

Although these rulers drew upon established traditions of political legitimacy, their reigns were profoundly shaped by the growing influence of foreign powers and shifting commercial and political dynamics in the Red Sea region during the first half of the 19th century.10

State consolidation and expansionism generated far-reaching changes among neighboring societies, including the Oromo kingdoms to the south, producing divergent outcomes that significantly altered their cultural and social institutions.11

These processes further stimulated external trade, contributing to the revival of established urban centers such as Massawa and Harar, while also encouraging the emergence of new cities, including Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa, the former of which had an estimated population of around 60,000 by 1903.12

Abyssinian troops in the field. ca. 1839-1843, by Charlemagne Theophile Lefebvre.

Massawa, Eritrea. ca. 1891

The rise of the Red Sea port of Aden (Yemen), and the Indian Ocean entrepot of Muscat (Oman), which became the capital of a major maritime empire, inaugurated a new era of commercial expansion in the early 19th century. The effects of this expansion were felt across a wide region, extending from Somalia and Mozambique to the interior of East Africa.13

In the north, the sultans of Majeerteen, who controlled a chain of fort-towns along the coast of Somaliland, signed commercial treaties with the sultans of Oman and Mukalla in Yemen, as part of the growing trade in grain and spices to the city of Aden.

In Southern Somalia, a new economic system linking the coastal towns of Benadir (Mogadishu and Brava) to the fertile hinterlands of the Shebbelle river, transformed the region into the “grain coast” of Southern Arabia, supplying the regions of Hadramaut and Oman.

The two coastal towns had experienced centuries of decline and were home to only a few hundred residents by 1811. Over the following decades, however, they underwent a marked revival: by the end of the century, each had grown to between 6,000 and 10,000 residents, and by 1935, the population of Mogadishu had expanded further to around 40,000.14

Brava (Barawa), Somalia.

Along the East African coast, the shift of Oman’s imperial capital from Muscat to Stone Town, Zanzibar (Tanzania), transformed what had been a relatively small Swahili town into a major commercial metropolis. The city rivaled and ultimately surpassed the older cities of Mombasa, Kilwa, and Lamu, growing to an estimated population of 100,000 by 1871.15

Zanzibar exerted a profound influence on the organisation of long-distance trade in ivory and textiles into the interior, which induced related developments among societies such as the Nyamwezi, where a number of states emerged during the mid-19th century, from central Tanzania to South-Eastern D.R.Congo.

In the kingdoms of the Great Lakes region, internal processes of political centralization were further intensified by these external commercial currents, especially in the kingdom of Buganda, whose capital at Mengo/Kampala, housed an estimated 70,000 residents in 1890.16 Caravans from Zanzibar travelled further East to Congo, where merchant-rulers like Tippu Tip established new forms of political authority over extensive territories.

Zanzibar from the Sea, 1883

In Southern Africa, pre-existing patterns of social complexity contributed to the emergence of large, agglomerated capitals among the Tswana in the early 19th century. Towns such as Pitsane of the Ngwaketse kingdom (Botswana)17 and Kaditshwene (South Africa) rivaled the colonial capital of Cape Town, with about 20,000 residents.

These internal developments were further elaborated among neighbouring Nguni-speaking societies, where ambitious rulers introduced a series of political and military innovations that resulted in the formation of expansive states such as the Zulu and Ndwandwe kingdoms.18

Although external influences were relatively more muted in this region, the effects of expanding export trade through Delagoa Bay, as well as the movements associated with Boer migration from the Cape Colony, remain subjects of ongoing historical debate regarding their role in the political consolidation of the later kingdoms.19

The consolidation and expansion of these states during the so-called mfecane, influenced concurrent changes and population movements among neighboring societies.

The Tswana states of Ngwaketse, Kwena, and Ngwato became more centralized, as did the Swazi and Pedi kingdoms. New Nguni states of Matebele and Gaza were founded in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, while Sotho-speaking groups like the Makololo briefly ruled the old Lozi kingdom of Zambia.

Aerial view of Kaditshwene Hill. image by Gernot Langwieder

Kaditshwene ruins.

Economic growth and shifts in Africa’s political landscape created opportunities for groups that had previously been marginal, to become central actors in the revolutions that preceded the imposition of colonial rule.

This is best exemplified by the Chokwe of Central Africa (in present-day Angola and D.R.Congo), who went from a relatively obscure group on the margins of the great kingdoms of the Savannah to becoming the region’s most dynamic economic and military forces.

Originally, the Chokwe inhabited small, dispersed communities in what is today North-Eastern Angola. With the onset of the early 19th-century commodities boom, however, they emerged as the main suppliers of ivory, wax, and rubber to coastal markets, while also serving as mercenaries for the rulers of the Lunda Empire.

Within the span of roughly half a century, the Chokwe developed into one of the most formidable military forces in Central Africa. Their population expanded through processes of acculturation and migration, and they established large chiefdoms with fortified capitals.

By the 1870s, they had become influential power brokers within the Lunda political system, appropriating established aristocratic titles in what amounted to a political revolution.

The ascendency of the Chokwe as a regional power during the precolonial era was articulated by their artists, who created sculptures of their leaders in the form of heroic, physically commanding, semi-legendary figures.

According to the art historian Alisa LaGamma, “this imagery positioned them as heirs to an earlier established regional ideology of enlightened leadership.”

The Chokwe are today best known for their extensive corpus of sculptural works, many of which are now held in Western museum collections. These include representations of legendary founders and historical figures, alongside a wide range of utilitarian and ceremonial objects that offer insight into the cultural life of Central Africa during this period of transformation.

The history of the Chokwe Revolution, Trade, and Artworks is the subject of my latest Patreon article. Please subscribe to read more about it here:

THE CHOKWE REVOLUTION

In a recent publication the American political scientists Soeren Henn and James A. Robinson argue that Africa remained decentralized relative to Eurasia because Africans were highly averse to living in politically centralized communities.

They claim that Africans saw state structures as antagonistic to maintaining the valued institutions of the local community, and thus devised mechanisms to block centralization.1

These claims have been amplified in more popular venues, including by ‘The Economist,’ under the headline: How anarchic was Africa?

Robinson is also widely known as the co-author, with Daron Acemoglu, of “Why Nations Fail,” which advances the argument that institutional differences account for long-run disparities between the Western world and other regions. That thesis, like their more recent claims about African state-building, has attracted sustained criticism.

One critic advised Acemoglu and Robinson to “stop by the history department, grab a book, and read the whole thing.” In my previous essay reviewing the African sections in ‘Why Nations Fail’, I showed that Acemoglu and Robinson misrepresented their sources in order to support theoretical claims that weren’t grounded in historical evidence.

In this article, I examine the claims of Henn and Robinson concerning centralized states in precolonial Africa. I demonstrate that their analysis contradicts their sources, flattens history, and advances an essentialist interpretation of African political development that posits a uniform ‘preference for decentralization’ over time.

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PATREON

Misreading Jan Vansina’s “Equatorial Tradition” and Decentralisation in Central Africa.

In the introduction, Henn and Robinson begin with the claim, one that is far from uncontested**, that the path of state formation took a different arc historically in Africa. They argue that Africa did not develop the type of large bureaucratized states common to Eurasia, and political power remained largely decentralized.

**A critique of these reductive and impressionistic claims would require far more space than is available here. Their veracity relies entirely on the reader’s unfamiliarity with the historical development of state systems in Africa and Eurasia, and on whether societies within each continent were ever sufficiently uniform internally, or sufficiently distinct from those of the other, to justify treating them as separate analytical categories.2

This problem is especially evident in the authors’ reliance on a selective reading of regional case studies, to which I now turn.

For their main interpretative framework, Henn and Robinson draw on the work of the historian Jan Vansina, and his research on societies in ‘Equatorial Africa’ (mostly in present-day D.R.Congo), in the book titled: ‘Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa’ (1990)

The authors reproduce a truncated quotation taken from Vansina’s work in a way that significantly distorts its context and meaning. Since this passage serves as a central pillar of their analysis, it is worth quoting in full, with the omitted sections restored:

“In the final analysis, the [Equatorial] tradition retained its ability to determine the future, to reject unwanted innovations, and to invent institutions, ideologies, values, and concepts to cope with its new environment. It maintained its own criteria of significance.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its retention of the cherished principle of local autonomy and decentralization, even while creating the institutions necessary to accommodate the rise of a single huge economic space around an integrated system of distribution. This feature cannot just be dismissed by pleading the corrosive effects of the Atlantic trade on centralizing authority.

This remarkable achievement again emphasizes that the ability to refuse centralization while maintaining the necessary cohesion among a myriad of autonomous units has been the most original contribution of western Bantu tradition to the institutional history of the world.”

This passage comes from the conclusion of Vansina’s five-chapter analysis of social organization in the regions within and adjacent to the Equatorial Forest, excluding the savannah regions to the south, where large centralized polities such as the Lunda and Luba kingdoms emerged.

Read in its proper context, Vansina’s argument is not that states in this region remained small. Rather, he is highlighting the most distinctive form of social organisation among a wider range of institutional forms that developed in the region, some of which included classical state formations such as large chiefdoms and kingdoms.

Map showing some of the kingdoms described in Vansina’s work. Based on the maps provided by Jan Vansina and John Thornton, which are included in this essay.

While the reader may be misled by Henn and Robinson into thinking that Vansina was writing about the history of small communes resisting centralization, his study is in fact a survey of the development of socio-political institutions in the region.

Like most works of history, Vansina’s book ultimately traces processes of social differentiation and the expansion of political scale, even as he seeks to emphasize the diversity of alternate paths to social and political change.3

Much of the historical material in the book is concerned with the concentration of power among rulers, and the transformation of “House-societies” into Villages, Districts, Chiefdoms, and Kingdoms.

In anthropology and historical literature, a “House” is the basic level of social organisation. In Vasina’s schematic model, the “Village” was an aggregate of Houses whose leader was assisted by the leaders of the other Houses in a council. A “District” comprised a collection of villages, united by an alliance of Houses. In some regions, a successful leader of this alliance transformed the district into a “Chiefdom.” A ruler who subjugated multiple chiefdoms founded a “Principality.” And once principalities conquered others, they became “Kingdoms,” representing the highest territorial level.4

Therefore, rather than ‘othering’ African forms of state-formation like Henn and Robinson do by setting Africa in opposition to Eurasia, Vansina’s work reveals the shared trajectories of state formation in Central Africa and Eurasia that, in some cases, resembled classical models about the origin of the state.

So similar was state-building in the Lower Congo region to Eurasia, in fact, that Vansina acknowledges this resemblance in order to illustrate the dynamism of what he calls the “Equatorial tradition”:

“The tale of relentless territorial centralization from big man to king that has been told in this section seems to confirm long-held and beloved stereotypes about the origin of the state. Many a reader may conclude that this is how social scale is enlarged, this is how complex societies necessarily arise.

But that is simply not true, as the institutional history of all the other societies of people in the rainforests show… The next chapter will show very different paths toward achieving greater social scale and will document yet two other pathways of development in the rise of kingdoms.”5

Engraving of São Salvador (M’banza-Kongo) by John Keyse Sherwin, 1782. It is miscaptioned as a city of South America, but is infact based on a famous engraving of Kongo’s capital by Olfert Dapper in 1668.

King and Queen of Kongo. King Garcia II of Kongo (seated) receiving a Dutch embassy in 1642, engraving by Olfert Dapper, colourized in 1843. Traditional costume. “Mani-Monbada, Queen of Congo” ca. 1780. engraving by Pierre Duflos

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According to Vansina’s research on the Lower Congo region, “the dominant process in the institutional history of this area has been one of increasing centralization”. Here, large kingdoms such as Kongo, Loango, and Tio had emerged by the 14th century, with an estimated population of 500,000 for Kongo, in contrast to earlier House-societies of just 40 people. These large kingdoms were surrounded by smaller kingdoms and chiefdoms, whose institutions they influenced and became centralized.6

He also explains what he means by centralization. Placing the kingdom of Kongo at the top of the spectrum as the most centralized kingdom in terms of tribute collection, judiciary, military organization, and the possession of a national currency.

Next was the kingdom of Loango, which, like Kongo, had “officials in charge of departments of government such as justice, revenue, and the army, and officials of the royal household”. Last was the Tio kingdom, where the king received tribute, but military campaigns were organized by local princes.7

The city of Loango. Taken from ‘View of Loango & Congo, Africa’ by Henri Abraham Chatelain 1718, based on engravings of Olfert Dapper, 1668.

He then explains how the effects of the Atlantic system later resulted in the decentralization of the region. He starts with Kongo’s disintegration in 1678 and its partial restoration in 1709. Power then fell into the hands of a few new “big men” among the former aristocracy, each ruling small chiefdoms.

In Loango during the 18th to 19th century, Kingship became sacralized as central authority devolved into the hands of a few families, each of which was the center of a large House, led by a titled merchant. In Tio during the same period, the spiritual preeminence of the king was maintained, but the lords became nearly autonomous. The kingdom was only saved from complete disintegration by a settlement between the king and the lords in 1840, a few decades before colonization.8

According to Vansina’s research, decentralization of the Lower Congo in the 18th and 19th centuries was a product of specific historical processes. It was not because the inhabitants were highly averse to living in politically centralized communities.

Further inland and along the coast from Western D.R.C to the coast of southern Cameroon, where large centralized territorial polities had never existed, local groups began organizing themselves into House-societies during the 17th and 18th centuries. These grew into “Business Firms” with populations ten times larger than an ordinary House.

But the legitimacy of their rulers was precarious, being based solely on their wealth, and was vulnerable to changes in military strength, ideology, and religion. While associations and traditions of common origin provided some social cohesion, there were no centralizing institutions. For purposes of defence and trade, some firms settled together to form a town of up to 10,000 people, like Kinshasa, but without a single formally acknowledged leader.

After the region became more closely integrated in the Atlantic trade system during the 19th century, competition between the “Business Firms” became rife, and the relative strength of each Firm shifted dramatically, such that no chiefdoms or kingdoms emerged, even as trade expanded and economic exchanges grew.9

It’s in this exact section that Vansina provides the quotation that was misrepresented by Henn and Robinson. He explains that while the Atlantic trade system overwhelmed the “Equatorial tradition,” it did not destroy it but forced it to adopt, using pre-existing institutions, such as the House, the matriclan, and the association.

The Equatorial Tradition thus proved resilient throughout the 19th-century period of social upheaval and economic growth.

This is the time period and geographic region that Vansina emphasizes in his “final analysis” in the quote mentioned in the introduction above. This was a time when social organization was dominated by “Business Firms” that “refused centralization while maintaining the necessary cohesion among a myriad of autonomous units” such as agglomerated towns.

It’s this specific system of Central African “Business Firms” that Vasina chose to highlight as the Western Bantu’s contribution to the institutional history of the world, and it is evidently the only one that Henn and Robinson thought could be extrapolated to represent the rest of Africa, even though it barely represented the Equatorial Region!

For his part, Vansina stresses that these “Business Firms” were not the only forms of social organization in the region. His chapter on the north-eastern D.R.C returns to the more classic outline of state-building, bringing forward the first of the “two other pathways of development in the rise of kingdoms,” mentioned earlier.

These pathways deviate from the type of state-building witnessed in the Lower Congo that resembles similar patterns in Eurasia, but nevertheless produced centralizing processes in the earlier periods, before they were later reversed in the late 19th century.

In this region, he mostly follows the evolution of the Mangbetu kingdom. Initially a “House” polity, it expanded through matrimonial alliances and overran larger “House-chiefdoms” to become a substantial “kingdom.” These House-chiefdoms had previously subdued weaker Houses using specialized semi-mercenary warriors. They were internally differentiated and had established an orderly succession of leadership that was ultimately subverted by Manzinga, the Mangbetu founder.10

King Munza and the Mangbetu queens in the public hall, ca. 1870, illustration by Schweinfurth.

According to Vansina, the political innovations found in the House-chiefdoms were induced by the loss of equilibrium of military strength between the preceding House-polities. By the mid-18th century, these House-Chiefdoms would in turn be subjugated by King Manziga, who founded the Mangbetu kingdom. His son and successor, King Nabiembali (r. 1800-1859) , would then expand the state through military conquest.

However, this expansion did not keep pace with institutional growth, which ultimately led to the kingdom’s disintegration and the region’s reversion to small-scale polities.

“Mangbetu political institutions remained those of a House chiefdom. Nabiembali continued to gather kin, wives, clients, and slaves around him. Political relationships continued to be tagged with kinship terms, and relations between House-chiefdoms within the state were still though of in matrimonial terms…

Nabiembali also failed to create new judicial, military or financial institutions. The core of the military remained the royal bodyguard comprising professional mercenaries, close relatives, and dependents of the king. After the 1850s, income from tribute and trade became more important, but tribute was still explained in terms of gift giving. No centralized and hierarchical judiciary system developed at all.

As long as Nabiembali kept his sons in check the system worked. But when his eldest son Tuba rebelled and deposed him in 1859, the system collapsed. Tuba lacked both the military power and the prestige to align the other chiefs behind him. A series of civil wars followed and the last king, Mbunza, fell in battle in 1873. The kingdom broke up and was replaced by a number of smaller entities which began expanding into new lands shortly after Tuba took over.

By the 1870s, general unrest was extreme, because both Azande princes and slave traders from the Sudan became active in the area. So serious was this situation that an older war charm, the nebeli, now evolved into a secret self-help association to protect its adherents against both outside enemies and chiefs.”11

In this account, the centralization and later decentralization of the North-Eastern D.R.C isn’t attributed to some essentialist African attachment to small-scale polities, but is instead a product of historical processes unique to the region.

Henn and Robinson assert that Africans created internal mechanisms to ensure polities remained small by avoiding the concentration of power in one lineage or ruler. But the historical evidence shows that it was only after the collapse of centralised authority that subjects repurposed a pre-existing war charm used by centralising kings in the earlier periods into a protective association against petty chiefs.

Moving to the Eastern region, Vansina provides the second alternative to state formation, which also created centralized societies that were later broken up by the 19th century, but this time, due to external influences.

He divides it into two regions: Northern Maniema and Southern Maniema. (These more accurately correspond to the West and East as shown in the map he provides below.

In Southern Maniema, the lands were rich in trade and contained nodes of sizeable population density, which allowed for the accumulation of wealth and the emergence of an overarching hierarchical sociopolitical association. These were graded associations that borrowed the political tradition of centralization based on a sacred kingship from neighbouring groups, which became the framework for their kingdoms.12

Village in Manyéuma (Manyema/Maniema), Congo. Illustration from Across Africa by Verney Lovett Cameron, 1877

However, this occurred relatively late, with such states only emerging in the 19th century. According to Vansina, the region extending from the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika to the west of Lake Edward was dominated by kingdoms that resembled smaller, earlier versions of the large kingdoms of the Great Lakes region:

“They strike us as theater-like states, because their minuscule size was matched by elaborate rules of succession, accession to the throne, and royal burial, by a complex titulature surrounding the royal office, and by intricate royal rituals and a plethora of emblems, as if these district-sized kingdoms were the equals of the great kingdoms that lay beyond the rift itself.”13

In contrast to the rest of the equatorial region, Vansina observes that social organization in Northern Maniema was the most egalitarian and least socially differentiated. House-societies grouped in villages were widely dispersed, and rules of exogamy limited the ability of leaders to accumulate power through marital alliances, while high mobility further restrained their ability to create larger communities based on shared clan traditions.

He suggests that this decentralization wasn’t internal to the region, but was instead directly caused by the domination of merchant-rulers from Zanzibar (notably, Tippu Tip and Rumaliza), who, in the closing decades of the 19th century, subsumed pre-existing societies into a vast state, and forced great changes in settlement patterns, leadership, and cultural traditions in the area.14

Ruins of a Swahili-style mosque in Isangi, eastern D.R.Congo, ca. 1894. NMVW.

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On the Evolution of State Building in Equatorial Africa.

Vansina explains that, contrary to unilineal social evolutionists, the “Equatorial Tradition” produced multiple pathways to social complexity that included kingdoms, associations, and segmentary lineage societies. In all cases, the basic units of social organization: Houses, Villages, and Districts, survived because the overarching institutions were built upon them, rather than displacing them.15

Vansina identifies several other regions in the central and western parts of D.R.C where different pathways of development led to the rise of kingdoms such as Kuba, Boila, and Ngwi in the 17th century.

Their emergence followed an uneven concentration of resources between Houses, accompanied by an ideological exaltation of leaders and military conquests. These states created new administrative and judicial institutions, maintained firm central control over external trade, and survived well into the colonial period.16

It turns out that the Kuba kingdom, which is singled out by Acemoglu and Robinson for its supposedly unique level of centralization and bureaucratic institutions compared to most of pre-colonial Africa17, was in fact not exceptional, even in the Equatorial region, where numerous kingdoms with a greater level of complexity and territorial scale could be found.

In an excellent summary, Vansina outlines the conditions that enabled the emergence of centralized kingdoms in Equatorial Africa:

“A kingdom could emerge out of a whole social and political system when people had come to accept the idea of a supreme title as a desirable outcome to the dynamic drift of their political institutions. No doubt both population density and insecurity played a role in the rise of the kingdom, but they were only background factors among others…

The ancestral system [the Equatorial tradition] had been well adapted to low densities of population and limited trade. When these conditions changed, innovation had to follow. Once trading exchanges became frequent in areas across ecotones with very different resource bases or over longer distances… certain localities became strategic spots for settlement. The Houses and villages which occupied them grew rich, attracting dependents and at the same time facing more challenges than others.

Over time systematic inequality developed among Houses and their big men and led to innovation. The changing environmental and economic base clearly was crucial for the

dynamics of innovation. It would be dangerous, however, to reduce the dynamics of innovation to an environmental determinism of the sort that claims that kingdoms arose only in open landscapes with diversified resources.

The only defensible generalization is that centralizing societies began in areas of rich resources. Even so, not all areas-with rich resources provoked centralization. The correlation between centralizing innovations and areas rich in resources is only apparent and superficial. It takes no account of the fact that resources exist only in the eye of the beholder.

Innovations responded to shifts in environmental bases and economics, but the latter do not wholly explain the phenomenon. Historical accident was important. A particularly attractive or effective personality, luck in trade or in war, a new tactic in battle, a particular incident during a ritual—all could happen by accident and provoke change.

Yet although incidents in physical reality occurred all the time—the weather is never twice the same—innovation took root only when it moved from the physical realm to conscious acceptance in the cognitive realm.”18

The emergence of centralized states in the region was therefore the outcome of multiple human and environmental factors, and must be understood as historically contingent. States arose whenever the underlying conditions and political innovations were favourable.

From this overview, it becomes difficult to sustain Henn and Robinson’s claim that they used Vansina as a “jumping off point” for a broader theory of African state formation without having engaged with the work in its entirety.

Vansina’s celebrated historical research on the “Equatorial Tradition” is not without its critics from among his peers, especially concerning the origins of matriclans and the effects of the Atlantic trade system on political and economic developments in the Equatorial region.19

However, nothing in his work suggests that decentralization was a historical constant. The evidence instead points to the dynamic nature of social and political changes that were generated by historical processes unique to each region.

Central Africans did not create mechanisms to keep the scale of political society small, but instead created multiple forms of social organization that, depending on historical circumstances, included both small-scale and large-scale polities.

This political evolution is excellently illustrated in John Thornton’s maps of West Central Africa from 1650 to 1750 to 1850.

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The Centralization and Decentralisation of Somalia in Historic Perspective.

Henn and Robison provide examples of how non-centralized societies, such as the Igbo (Nigeria), the Kikuyu (Kenya), and the Somali (Somalia), innovated a plethora of mechanisms to preserve the autonomy of the community and the clan, supposedly to protect it from the state. (pg 16-17)

Much of their explanation for the persistence of decentralization in these cases relies on anthropological studies conducted in the early to mid-20th century. While valuable in their own right, these sources generally lack the historical depth required to assess whether decentralization was a long-term structural constant, as the authors imply.

Fortunately, in some of these societies, such as the Somali, there’s sufficient historical data since the late Middle Ages which demonstrates that earlier processes of centralization and expansion of political scale were reversed after the 17th century.

The highly decentralised communities described by anthropologists in Somalia during the early 20th century do not reflect the long-term historical organization of societies in the region.

Henn and Robinson draw heavily on I.M. Lewis’ anthropological study of Somali society in the mid-20th century, which emphasizes the segmentation of political units in the absence of formal administrative hierarchies or institutionalised offices of authority, and the ease with which political alliances could be reconfigured to preserve clan autonomy. (pg 16)

However, the authors disregard historical scholarship on Somali society by scholars like Lee V. Cassanelli, who reconstructed traditions about the Ajuraan sultanate, vast territorial state that dominated Southern Somalia from the 16th to the 17th century. Its rulers, the Gareen imams, established a theocratic government, appointing emirs and naa’ibs as agents, and relied on holy-men from Yemen in judicial matters and tax collection.

Marriage alliances reinforced ties of agnatic and religious loyalty among the leading families. The administration collected tribute from cultivators, herders, and traders and conscripted a servile labor force to undertake an unprecedented program of construction of stone wells and fortifications. Alliances with the coastal city of Mogadishu bolstered the imam’s power by providing an outlet for surplus grain and livestock, and a source of the luxury goods that symbolized his high status.20

According to Cassanelli:

“A series of local and regional alliances underpinned and legitimized the apparent concentration of power in the hands of the Gareen imams. From this perspective, the phenomenon of Ajuraan “domination” represented not a break with the typical Somali system of clan alliances and patron/client links but an extension and elaboration of it. What gave the polity its overall cohesiveness and unusual longevity were the rudimentary administrative procedures and the theocratic ideology introduced by the Gareen.”21

Cassanelli also observes that the emergence of the Ajuraan state coincided with similar developments in the northern part of the country (Somaliland).

From the 15th to the late 16th century, the medieval empire of Adal (Barr Sa’d al-Din), briefly dominated the northern Horn of Africa, subsuming much of the Ethiopian empire. Its rulers, known as the Walasma dynasty, had been displaced from the kingdom of Ifat by the Christian Ethiopian monarchs in the early 15th century.

The Adal sultans imposed their power over many pre-existing Muslim polities, including Hūbat, the coastal city of Zaylaʿ, the Ḥārla region surrounding Harar, and parts of northern Somalia. An emir was appointed by the sultan to head each territory, with the prerogative of levying taxes (ḫarāǧ and zakāt) on the population.

An impressive network of stone settlements was built in this period, whose function was mostly associated with agriculture, indicating that, like in Ajuraan, sections of the pastoral Somali communities had become sedentary, with populations concentrated in large, nucleated settlements.

16th century Map of the Northern Horn of Africa showing Ethiopia, Adal, and the ruined stone settlements of Somaliland.

Miḥrāb and niches of the Maduuna congregational mosque. image by StateHorn

However, by the early 17th century, both the Ajuuran and Adal empires had disintegrated, the processes of centralization were reversed, and later polities which emerged in the region during the 18th and 19th centuries were relatively small.

These dramatic changes are captured in the archaeological and documentary record.

In the north, imports of trade goods ceased at the end of the 16th century, the stone settlements were abandoned, and their semi-sedentary inhabitants reverted to a nomadic lifestyle.22

When Richard Burton encountered the ruined settlements in 1854, his local informants noted that their abandonment followed the collapse of a “kingdom” three centuries earlier. It’s from Burton that we get some of the earliest descriptions of what later anthropologists would associate with the Somali’s timeless aversion to centralised authority:

“The Bedouins have lost none of the characteristics recorded in the Periplus: they are still “uncivilised and under no restraint.” Every freeborn man holds himself equal to his ruler, and allows no royalties or prerogatives to abridge his birthright of liberty.23

Burton’s prejudiced account describing an unchanging Somali society since the time of the Periplus, nearly 2,000 years ago, is echoed in Henn and Robinson’s uncritical reliance on mid-20th-century anthropological literature.

In both cases, relatively recent configurations of social organisation are retrojected into the deep past and interpreted as evidence of an enduring cultural preference for clan autonomy and decentralisation.

However, this clearly wasn’t the case during the Adal period, but only reflected changes in social and political processes that emerged across Somali society in the more recent periods.

Similarly, in southern Somalia, descriptions of the region during the early 19th century suggest changes in political alliances, social organization, and settlement patterns, such that even the coastal cities were nearly abandoned.

The once bustling city-state of Mogadishu, whose multistory buildings and thriving port are described by the Portuguese in the 16th century, had by this later period lost much of its commercial hinterland network and had become depopulated.

According to one visitor in 1824, it’s “massive buildings are principally the residences of the dead, while the living inhabit the low thatched huts by which these costly sepulchres are surrounded.”24

Although the region underwent a significant economic revival in the late 19th century, these new patterns of exchange occurred under a decentralized system that relied on pre-existing intuitions of patron-client relations.

Like the House-Firms and agglomerated towns described by Vansina in Equatorial Africa, Cassanelli notes that each Somali clan in this new system maintained its segment of the operation with its own interests, and those of its allies, in mind.25

The Jama’a mosque in 1910, image from Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte

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Centralization in 19th century Tanzania.

It would be misleading, however, to generalize the 19th century as a period of increasing decentralization in Africa. While several older kingdoms were disintegrating, new centralized polities emerged in their place, even among societies that previously had no traditions of centralized leadership!

Chief among these are the Nyamwezi of central Tanzania, who lived in small polities headed by an ntemi. But in the 19th century, the combined expansion of the caravan trade from the East African coast, the Ngoni migrations from southern Africa, and the introduction of firearms resulted in the reconfiguration of pre-existing patterns of social organization.26

The Nyamwezi kingdoms of the late 19th century. Map by Tom Cooper, after Rex Parry. Note that part of Unyanwembe fell under Mirambo’s state but later reverted to its dynasty After his death.

New personalities, such as Mirambo, Fundakira, Nyungu ya Mawe, and Msiri, who were at times called “emperors” by contemporary European visitors due to the scale of their military conquests and authority, created large, hegemonic states by subsuming neighbouring chiefdoms.

Within a single generation, their Kingdoms (Urambo, Unyanyembe, Ukimbu, and Garanganze/Katanga) began regulating tribute collection from caravans and peasants, centralized the military, appointed subordinate chiefs, built large capitals, and formalised diplomatic relationships with older, neighbouring kingdoms like Buganda and Luba. Some of the kingdoms lasted until the onset of the colonial period.27

The example of the Nyamwezi again demonstrates that centralized states emerged when conditions for state formation were favourable. Neither their prior absence nor their subsequent disintegration can be attributed to any inherent African preference for small-scale polities, but instead reflects historically contingent processes specific to particular regions and periods.

Village of Nyamwezi, ca. 1891. Likely based on an illustration of a settlement in Unyanyembe by Verney Lovett-Cameron, ca. 1873-5.

“Tribal” Maps and Speculations.

Lacking this historical perspective, Henn and Robinson devote a substantial portion of their article to speculative arguments concerning population estimates, pre-colonial warfare, and economic systems, while collapsing a wide range of societies into the analytically problematic category of “Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Many of these arguments are undermined by the fragility of their central premise regarding precolonial state formation, which, as I have argued above, is not supported by the historical evidence.

The authors’ population estimates, which they admit to be largely extrapolated from colonial-period data and projected backward (pg 38-45), are of limited value as proxies for the size of precolonial states and communities, which fluctuated significantly.

To date, only John Thornton and Linda Heywood have provided detailed population estimates from the pre-colonial period, using baptismal records and state archives to compute the population of North-Western Angola since the 17th century.28 Yet even this important body of data is not without its critics.29

Such population data cannot be captured by the “tribal map” and “Ethnographic Atlas” of Murdoch (1959, 1967), on which the authors nevertheless rely heavily, despite its criticism in the specialist literature.

The major criticisms of Murdock’s map have been usefully summarised by Cogneau and Dupraz (2015). They include glaring factual errors such as the omission of important populations, confusion or dissociation of certain ethnic groups, and in other cases, some groups are repeated in several different and incompatible chapters.

Researchers using Murdock’s data take as given the “societies,” “cultures,” “tribes,” or “ethnic groups” of the map and the Atlas. However, Murdock’s groups are neither linguistic groups nor political groups corresponding to precisely dated Chiefdoms, Kingdoms, or Empires.30

Murdock’s “Ethnographic Atlas” doesn’t represent the territorial limits of any state or society in any period of pre-colonial Africa, and is of limited analytical value even for the 1960s when it was created.

A cursory examination of the map by anyone familiar with African historical geography or contemporary ethnolinguistic distributions reveals significant inaccuracies, suggesting that Murdock had a limited understanding of both the historical and contemporary realities he sought to classify.

Detail of Murdock’s Tribal Map (1959) showing the people groups of Nigeria.

Official Map of Nigerian Languages, by the National Library of Nigeria (NLN). Note that the languages are in lower case, while the State names are in upper case. Zoom in to see which Languages are spoken in each state.

Pre-colonial map of Nigeria in the 19th century. Map by Paul E. Lovejoy.

Contrary to Henn and Robinson’s claim that warfare didn’t contribute to the centralizing process (pg 18-19), the above outline explains how warfare was central to the emergence of most large-scale polities.

The rise of large kingdoms in Equatorial Africa, Somalia, and Central Tanzania was in part based on changes in the organization of military systems and warfare. European visitors in the 19th century recognised this dynamic, for example, H.M. Stanley, who referred to Mirambo as the ‘African Bonaparte’.

The authors admit that the historical literature shows that African economic systems varied systematically with political centralization in Africa, yet they generalise the example of the Tiv, “an acephalous society completely lacking political centralization”, as “typical in Africa”. (pg 24)

However, as we have examined above, economic systems could vary considerably over time, even in a single society. There was no such thing as a “typical” African system.

The organization of market systems in the Lower Congo during the 16th-17th century bore no resemblance to the economic exchanges of the 19th century. Neither did the nature of commercial control of the Ajuran period of Somalia resemble that found in the decentralised communities of the 19th century. The Nyamwezi systems that existed before the 19th century were entirely dissimilar to those implemented by Mirambo and Msiri in the later period.

Fruit market in Zanzibar, Tanzania. ca. 1888. Koloniales Bildarchiv, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main.

Market scene in Gorée, Senegal. ca. 1842-1867. Quai Branly

Conclusion: on the limits of Grand Theories.

In Summary, there’s no convincing historical basis for Henn and Robinson’s assertion that pre-colonial Africans were inherently predisposed toward decentralisation. The evidence instead demonstrates that states and centralizing institutions arose whenever the underlying conditions and political innovations were favorable.

As Jan Vansina demonstrates in the case of the Equatorial region during the early second millennium CE, these conditions did not produce a linear or predetermined trajectory of political development:

“There never was a single inherent program that automatically forced people to expand the scale of their societies continually and continuously from village to region so as to wrest power relentlessly from a multitude of villages in order to concentrate it in a single capital.

Nor was it a matter of taking authority away from the many family heads to centralize it into the hands of a single paramount, even though some societies did end up as large kingdoms.

What happened was that in different regions people developed their incipient societies by recognizing and implementing additional choices as further solutions to issues of common governance. As these choices and solutions were different in each region, each region went its own way.”31

Henn and Robinson’s argument thus rests on a reductive and methodologically weak reading of African political history.

It reflects a broader tendency in non-specialist writing to neglect sustained engagement with the historical literature in favour of generalist theoretical claims that repurpose outdated theories as groundbreaking discoveries.

A more adequate understanding of African state building requires careful engagement with the historical literature, rather than imposing grand theories that are poorly defined, flatten history, and are inapplicable to Africa’s social realities.

Contrary to popular theoretical claims that Africans only recognised “Wealth in People”, recent research across Multiple societies shows that Africans also valued their Landholdings, and that Land was neither abundant nor socially insignificant.

My latest Patreon article examines the research by the historian Mariana Candino, who uncovered internal documentary evidence for Land ownership and Control in West-Central Africa since the 17th century.

Please subscribe to read about it here and support this newsletter.

LAND AND WEALTH IN CENTRAL AFRICA

Many scholars advanced the argument that was abundant in Africa, which meant that wealth was accumulated through the control of labour. Within this interpretive framework, the accumulation of dependents, known as “wealth-in-people,” was identified as a key organizing principle in the lives of pre-colonial Africans.1

According to this interpretation, the main goal of rulers was to accumulate followers through patronage, clientage, marriage, apprenticeship, servitude, etc. The wealthy increased productivity by controlling labor or by converting goods into followers/dependents, rather than amassing land, which was imagined to be free and abundant.2

However, such theories positing a surplus of land or “unoccupied land” were not derived from an empirical examination of the historical data on pre-colonial land tenure systems. Rather, they drew heavily on assumptions formulated by colonial administrators, who were seeking to justify the expropriation of African land.

Scholars repeated the idea that Africans lacked property rights or notions of individual ownership produced by colonial bureaucrats, without critically examining how this colonial knowledge was created and for what purpose. Yet, the evidence available in the same colonial archives reveals that African rulers claimed jurisdiction and occupation rights over their lands.3

As argued by the anthropologist Steven Pierce, colonial administrators and anthropologists created the myth of static African societies with atavistic systems of land tenure. They invented new forms of land tenure, which became codified as “traditional land tenure” but were anything but traditional. “Tradition” became something other than legacies from the past.4

This dynamic reflects a broader pattern identified by Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, whereby Western knowledge systems constructed Africa through a series of oppositions.5

In this case, the reimagined notion of “traditional” African land tenure was contrasted with an equally misleading depiction of Europe as having long possessed the modern concept of land as a tradable, privately owned commodity, which was in fact only developed in the 18th and 19th centuries.6

Some scholars, particularly those ignorant of more recent African historiographic research, have cited the lack of written records on land tenure as evidence for the absence of land ownership.

This perspective is also derived from outdated colonial tropes that perpetuated images of African societies as isolated and excluded from global processes, overlooking the substantial body of written evidence on land tenure from Christian and Muslim African societies since the Middle Ages.

In a previous essay, I outlined the land tenure systems of medieval Nubia, Ethiopia, the Sudanic kingdoms of Darfur and Funj, and the West African empires of Bornu, Sokoto, and Masina. These societies produced written records that document landholding practices, including charters, grants, judicial proceedings over land disputes, and contracts of sale.

An example of these is a land document from the pre-colonial kingdom of Darfur, which contains a comprehensive listing of a grantees’ rights in his estate as such: “...as an allodial estate, with full rights of possession and his confirmed property... namely rights of cultivation, causing to be cultivated, sale, donation, purchase, demolition and clearance.”7

On the East African coast during the 19th century, a range of historical evidence from Comoros, Mombasa, Malindi, Zanzibar, and Brava demonstrates that land, estates, houses, and other forms of property were subject to well-established systems of ownership, exchange, and inheritance. These records also indicate that property rights were not confined to a narrow segment of society, but included women as well as free and enslaved persons among the property owners.8

land charter of Nur al-Din, a nobleman from the Zaghawa group originally issued by the Darfur king Abd al-Rahman in 1801 and renewed in 1803.9

It is important to emphasize that written documentation represents only one category of historical evidence for land tenure systems. Its privileging by colonial administrations and later scholarship has often obscured the significance of oral legal traditions, which structured and transmitted norms of landholding across many parts of the continent.

Multiple oral sources suggest that control over land provided a means to control people, and that the two cannot be separated.

Rulers, officials, and wealthy commoners accumulated wealth through land grants that conferred rights over territory as well as claims to the labor, tribute, and rents of those residing upon it.

The Lozi kingdom (Barotseland) of Zambia maintained a highly structured territorial system of administration, in which offices or title-holders (indunas) were tied to specific tracts of land (silalo) and the settlements on them, which were given to the indunas upon their appointment.10

This system underwent a significant transformation in the 19th century when the kingdom was invaded by the Kololo from the south, who were later deposed by the native dynasty. The latter rulers, specifically Lubosi Lewanika (r.1878-84, 1885-1916), instituted a land settlement policy known as the Muliu or redemption law, in which all landholders were required to resettle their ancestral lands occupied before the Kololo invasion.11

This policy displaced some of the indunas who had taken possession of land not formerly attached to them and naturally resented the proposal to allow such property to be reclaimed by its original owners. Despite this opposition, it revived the old territorial division of the kingdom into administrative units (Lilalo) and was later adopted by the Colonial administration.12

The Lozi concepts of land tenure and ownership have been known to Africanists since Max Gluckman’s publications in the 1940s-60s, but were surprisingly overlooked by the wealth-in-people theorists.

A strikingly similar form of territorial administration was also found in the kingdom of Asante (modern Ghana), but with added complexity. Titleholders could transfer/sale their tracts of land, along with the rents/tribute derived from the settlements on the land, to other titleholders in exchange for substantial payments in gold, or used as collateral for high-interest loans, also denominated in gold.13

This active, albeit restricted, real estate market was fairly well documented in the 19th century, but the historians Ivor Wilks and T. McCaskie have shown that it dates back to the 18th century. It was a system of land control that was closely tied to the central government at Kumasi and was often manipulated by the court for political ends.14

The king of Ashantee’s palace at Coomassie. ca. 1874

Even among African societies where land was not transferred through market mechanisms, the historian Assan Sarr argues that the inability to sell land isn’t evidence for the absence of ownership, but is instead evidence for its lack of commodification.15

He offers a more nuanced analysis of the changing values of land and labor in the pre-colonial Gambia from the 18th century, where rulers and members of prominent lineages acted as landholders (bankuttiyolu: “owners of the land”). They augmented their wealth by renting land to their followers, junior relatives, subordinates, and strangers, who cultivated it and paid taxes to the landholders.16

Some of the proponents of the wealth-in-people theory extend it to African political history, presenting illogical arguments about African warfare in which states supposedly invested insurmountable resources in raising armies whose objective wasn’t to occupy more land or expand borders, but to control and accumulate dependents.17

However, military historians and other specialists on warfare in pre-colonial Africa have long argued against such reductive interpretations. They emphasize that the fundamental cause of most wars in Africa, like in any part of the world, was territorial expansion.18

The overwhelming internal and external documentary evidence demonstrates that large-scale wars were frequently aimed at establishing control over neighbouring polities, strategic cities, lucrative trade routes, and economically productive lands.19

In many examples, most notably the Oyo empire, medieval Mali, and the Lunda empire, conquest was followed by the establishment of administrative structures designed to secure and regularize control over newly incorporated territories.

As in any part of the world, state expansion inevitably led to border conflicts, some of which were negotiated in writing or resolved by the establishment of boundary settlements/forts, and in some cases, such as between the kingdoms of Wadai and Darfur, physical borders made of stone cairns, large iron spikes, and walls were erected that resembled modern borders.20

All of this indicates that control over land mattered as much as control over people.

Ruins of the walled complex at the 17th-century capital of Wara/Ouara in Chad

Besides landholdings, Africans also accumulated “wealth-in-things” that could be traded, transferred, and bequeathed to heirs.

Even defenders of the “wealth-in-people” framework, such as Jane Guyer, emphasize that Africans produced and acquired wealth-in-things of value, such as gold objects, metallic currencies, luxury cloth, ivory, and artworks, which “moved easily into Western categories of wealth.”

She argues for a nuanced relationship between African concepts of wealth, observing that not all wealth-in-things was converted into wealth-in-people, because we know of vast storehouses of gold, cowries, and grave-goods that were taken out of circulation, rather than being used for accumulating dependents.21

Guyer also notes that many scholars tend to borrow concepts developed in equatorial Africa and generalize them for the rest of the continent.

In a line of reasoning that echoes Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, she observes that this process, whereby attributes of Central Africa become metonymic of Africa-in-general, is largely a product of Western metaphorical constructions of Africa, in which “the forest remains Europe’s image of Africa.”22

funeral of Andris Poucouta, a Mafouk of Cabinda on the Loango coast. 18th-century engraving by Louis de Grandpre. His coffin, made entirely of bundles of textiles, was 20 feet long by 14 feet high and 8 feet thick; the whole was transported by a wheeled wagon pulled by at least 500 people over a road built for the purpose.

Recent scholarship on land tenure systems in pre-colonial central Africa has uncovered internal documentary evidence from the 17th century showing that, even in this region, where theories of “wealth-in-people” were first formulated, land was neither abundant nor socially insignificant.

According to the historian Mariana Candino, evidence from the pre-colonial archives of various kingdoms and societies in what is today Angola demonstrates that societies in West-Central Africa placed value on land and other material forms of wealth, yet only their ownership of dependents was recognized by scholars.

She criticises the singular focus on the accumulation of dependents in scholarship of the region, which perpetuates colonial claims that the lands were devoid of legitimate occupants, and created historical narratives that rationalized dispossession in the name of “effective occupation.”

As in medieval Nubia, Ethiopia, West Africa, Sudan, the East African coast, and Barotseland, the empirical evidence demonstrating that political elites and commoners in Central Africa competed for land and territorial rights clashes with the colonial and scholarly trope of abundant land.

By emphasizing the absence of landed property as a central feature of African societies, scholars have overlooked how vital land was in securing social belonging, obligation, and protection.

The history of land and wealth in West-Central Africa is the subject of my latest Patreon article. Please subscribe to read about it here and support this newsletter.

LAND AND WEALTH IN CENTRAL AFRICA

The rise of the Mossi states during a period marked by the spread of Islam challenges older theories of state formation and trade in medieval West Africa, illustrating the development of complex societies with diverse religious communities under “traditional” authorities.

The Mossi kingdoms were a group of polities that extended across much of present-day Burkina Faso and northern Ghana. Despite the political and commercial transformations that reshaped neighbouring regions, these cavalry-based states retained many of their traditional institutions until the colonial period.

This essay outlines the history of the Mossi states from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

Map showing the Empires of the West African Savannah/Sahel and the Mossi states.

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PATREON

A brief background on the early history of the Mossi.

The traditional accounts of the Mossi, of which numerous versions have been recorded, diverge in many points of detail while displaying a broad convergence.1

The Mossi conceptualise the relationship between their various kingdoms in terms of the descent of the founders of the dynasties from the semi-legendary ruler Na Gbewa.

The latter had three sons: Tusugu, Sitobu, and Nmantambu, and one daughter, Yanenga. The princes are associated with the southern kingdoms of Mamprugu, Dagbon, and Nanumba, and the princess with the northern kingdoms of Yatenga and **Wagadugu.2

[**not to be confused with the medieval Ghana empire/Wagadu]

In these accounts, the founders of the Mossi kingdoms “entered” the region as conquerors. They were the nakomse, ‘possessors of political power’, a class of nobles who established their lordship by force of arms over the autochthonous fegbisi, ‘the owners of the land’, from whom they appropriated tributes.3

Initially thought to have come from the eastern bend of the Niger River, more recent analysis suggests an origin from northern Ghana. And, rather than a wave of immigrant warriors, the political revolution that gave rise to the Mossi states was a gradual process involving a shared effort between the established populations and the incoming warrior groups.4

The power of the early Mossi was based upon their possession of horses and their command of the techniques of cavalry warfare. This period of Mossi expansion is reflected in internal written accounts describing the late medieval period, when they competed for control over the northern merchant cities of Timbuktu and Walata, and occasionally drove off the armies of medieval Mali and Songhai.

Expansion of the Mossi. Map by I Wilks.

Boukary and his escort. In the vicinity of Wagadugu. Image by L. Binger, ca. 1888.

The Moro Naba of Wagadugu. ANOM. ca. 1930-1960.

The Mossi versus the empires of Mali and Songhai

According to the Tarikh al-Sudan, a chronicle written in Djenne (Mali) during the 17th century:

In 1343, the ‘sultan’ of Mossi set out for Timbuktu at the head of a large army. The armies of medieval Mali fled in fear and abandoned the city to them. The Mossi sultan entered Timbuktu, sacked the city, and looted it before returning to his land5

In the 1430s, the Mossi army came very close to Timbuktu but was driven back by a force made up mostly of the city’s residents and scholars.6

In 1480, the Mossi besieged the town of Biru/Walata (in Mauritania) for a month. The Mossi ruler asked the people of Biru for a wife, and they gave him in marriage the daughter of sayyid Anda-n-Allah ‘Ali b. Abi Bakr. At the end of the siege, the Mossi defeated the forces of Walata and took many captives, although some of these were later rescued.7

This battle is also referenced by the Genoese merchant Antonio Malfante, who travelled to Tuat (Southern Algeria) in 1447, and mentions the attack of a town called ‘Vallo’ (identified as Walata) by a ‘pagan’ king ‘with five hundred thousand men’.8

This battle at Walata coincided with the conquests of Sunni Ali (r. 1464-1492), founder of the Songhai empire.

Joao de Barros, writing in the reign of Joao II of Portugal (1481-95), told how the Portuguese had tried to establish contact with the king of Mossi, a country which, according to reports received in the Senegambia, ‘began beyond Timbuktu and extended towards the Orient’. At the time, the Mossi were said to be at war with ‘the king of Timbuktu Uli Mansa’, ie, Sunni Ali.9

Street scene in Timbuktu, Mali.

In 1483, Sunni Ali defeated the Mossi ruler while campaigning in the direction of Walata.10

According to the Tarikh Ibn al-Mukhtar, another 17th-century chronicle, the Mossi ruler was nicknamed Kumdāghu. He pursued the ruler until the land of the Bambara, but the Mossi king managed to flee and establish his new capital at Arqum. Sunni Ali’s army later returned with an army from the direction of Gao, advancing south to Barkuna, which is described as a town that contains the palace of the Mossi king. He destroyed the palace and killed the Mossi.11

This battle marked a decisive shift in the balance of power in the region. While the Mossi had previously sought to control the rich trading cities of the north, the situation had changed by the end of the 15th century, as Songhai took the initiative in curbing Mossi ambitions.

In 1498, Askiya Muhammad of Songhai campaigned against the Mossi, ostensibly as part of a holy war (the only one of its kind according to the chronicler of the Tarikh al-Sudan). Initially, he sent his envoy, Mori Salih Diawara, to the Mossi ‘Sultan’ Nasiri with a letter urging the latter to embrace Islam. Nasiri responded that he needed to consult his ancestors.

The two then went with the ministers of Nasiri to the house of the priest, who compelled the king to reject Askiya’s offer to become Muslim and urged him to go to war with Songhai. The Mossi were defeated, and many were taken to Gao, where a special quarter for artisans was made for them.12

In 1549, Askiya Dawud campaigned against the Mossi. But by 1562, the Mossi had re-established their military and were able to repel a major assault from Songhai. In a third campaign in 1578, the Songhai retreated without taking anything. The Mossi are also reported to have briefly imposed themselves over the Fulbe kingdom of Masina, before they were ultimately expelled.13

THE exact relationship between the Mossi of the late medieval period and the Mossi of the early-modern period remains a subject of intense debate.14

Most historians and translators of the Timbuktu chronicles argue that the two are the same group. Ivor Wilks, who belongs to this camp, includes a tradition from the southern Mossi kingdom of Dagbon that points to an eastern origin of a hunter-founder from the direction of Lake Chad to Zamfara and thence to ‘Malle’; a country west of Hausaland and east of Gurma.15

Origins of the Mossi. Map by M. Izard

Others posit a break between the written and oral tradition, pointing to two other chronicles (an obscure 15th-century text by Abkal Ibn Awdar and a 19th-century Hausa chronicle by Malam al-Hassan), which locates the Mossi origin in the eastern bend of the Niger River. The former identifies it as Diamare (east of Niamey, the capital of Niger) while the latter pushes it further east to Zamfara (N.W Nigeria).16

Michel Izard, on the other hand, argues that the two groups were not the same; based on a comparative analysis of the oral traditions of the northern and southern kingdoms that point to a common, southern origin, and the absence of references to conflicts with Songhai. He maintains that the proto-history of the modern Mossi, as far as it can be reconstructed, is a proto-history of Mamprugu in N.E Ghana, from where the other Mossi states emerged.17

The Mossi kingdoms from the 16th to 18th centuries

According to the king lists recorded by Izard, the southern Mossi kingdoms were in place by the late 15th century, followed later by the northern kingdoms of Wagadugu in the early 16th century and Yatenga by 1540.

He suggests that the two groups, the Mossi of the 17th-century Tarikhs, and the Mossi from Mamprugu, represent two separate historical traditions. The first came from the Niger Bend region around Gurma and established their hegemony westwards along the river until it was destroyed by the Songhai wars. The second came from the Mamprugu to eventually control the upper Volta. Any relationship between the two is in the distant past, in the vicinity of Gurma, where some traditional histories seem to converge.18

The pre-existing languages of the Upper Volta belong to the ‘Gur’ language family, including the Lobi-Dogon, Grusi, Gurma, and Mole-Dagbane, the last of which was adopted by the Mossi. The autochtons presumably lacked any centralised political institutions but were organised based on areas of ritual jurisdiction (‘parishes’), each with its tengasoba/tengdana (land priest) having custody of the earth shrines.19

These priests were often left in office and sometimes vested with symbols of political authority. The communities were integrated as tengdamba/tegbisi (commoners) and assigned roles in the army. Conversely, chiefly lineages that failed to secure office in time lost their entitlements and entered the ranks of the commoners.

Their economies were predominantly agricultural ones. Surpluses were appropriated, through various forms of tribute, by local village chiefs appointed from the ranks of the nakomse. Part of these tributes was transferred to district chiefs of higher rank, who in turn passed on a share to the king, the na or naba.20

Succession in the kingdoms of Wagadugu, Dagbon, and Mamprugu was limited to one royal family, while other kingdoms had polydynastic systems where kingship rotated between two houses, each with its own capital, subordinate officials, and patronage systems.21

To counter the threat of rebellious chiefly lineages, rulers assigned new administrative functions to palace officials recruited from outside the chiefly class, a process that seems to have begun in the early 18th century.

These changes are associated with the reigns of those rulers identified in the oral histories as strongly committed to political innovation, namely, Na Atabia of Mamprungu (r. 1690-1741), Na Zangina of Dagbon (r. 1700-1714), Naba-Warga of Wagadugu (r. 1737-1744), and Naba Kango of Yatenga (r. 1757-1787).22

At least one of these figures, Na Atabia, is known from a contemporary chronicle known as the Gonja chronicle: ‘in that year [A.H. 1154] Atabia king of Ghabagha died. He is said to have reigned for fifty-odd years.’ Ghabagha/Gambaga was the capital of the kingdom, which also appears in Binger’s account in 1888.23

The chronicle also mentions a war between the kingdom of Gonja and Dagbon in A.H. 1125 (1713 CE), in which the former was defeated at Tunuma, western Dagbon. The king, while left unmentioned, was Na Zangina, a contemporary of Na Atabia.

The kings of Dagbon are known in multiple written sources. Zangina’s successors, Na Gariba and Na Andani (Aldani), are known from written accounts from Asante; while the later kings, beginning with Na Ziblim Kulunku (Kirgangu in H. Bath’s account from 1853), are known from European sources, as are other Mossi kings of the late 19th century.24

All of these rulers founded their own royal capitals. Na Atabia moved his court from Gambaga to Nalerigu, Na Zangina chose to establish his court at Agbande rather than at the older site of Yendi Dabari, and his successor Na Andani Sigili moved his court to Chele, the present-day Yendi. Na Kango of Yatenga is said to have founded Wahiguya and to have built there an imposing ‘soudanese’ palace that remained in place until 1895.25

Burkina Faso, earthen houses. ca. 1930. This has been identified as a palace belonging to a royal Mossi family on the central plateau of Upper Volta.

Outside the residence of the Moro Naba, Wagadugu. ANOM. ca. 1930-1960.

The Moro Naba and his court. Wagadugu. ANOM. ca. 1930-1960.

Trade and Islam in Mossi country

In the 18th century, there were about twenty Mossi kingdoms (Moogo) in what is today Burkina Faso, the principal ones being Wagadugu, Yatenga, Busuma, and Tenkodogo. There were two major zones of political influence: the Northwest, dominated by Yatenga, while the Central and Southern kingdoms recognised the nominal suzerainty of the ruler (Mogho Naba or Moro Naba) at Wagadugu, when it came to arbitrating conflicts.26

The Timbuktu chronicles and the early European/Portuguese reports suggest, by the very absence of comment, that in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Mossi kingdoms enjoyed little commercial importance.

It was only after the political reforms of the 18th century that an influx of muslim traders (Dyula from Mali, and Hausa from N.Nigeria) placed Mossi country at the crossroads of major West African trading routes. Most of these traders belonged to the Suwarian tradition of pacifism and were more concerned with trade in Kola and gold from the Vola basin than in proselytization.27

Dyula/Juula families, such as the Baghayogho, who were first established in Dagbon by 1660 CE and in Wagadugu by the 18th century, while Na Atabia of Mamprugu gave the imamate to the Hausa and Gurma immigrants in the latter half of the same century. Many of these merchants served as the kings’ commercial agents, while the bulk of Mossi society remained largely non-Muslim, including the royals, who resided in separate capitals away from the market towns.28

A Mossi merchant, ca. 1892.

The originally Mande-speaking merchants soon adopted the Mossi languages and were known locally as the Yarse. They dominated the trade routes extending from Timbuktu in the north to Salaga in the south, exchanging the usual staples of kola, donkeys, horses, textiles, captives, and salt. Barth in 1853 pointed to the importance of Mossi pack animals in the caravan trade.29

A number of Hausa dignitaries are also known, especially in the southern kingdoms of Dagbon and Mamprugu, where they provide arguably the only known internal written sources. One notable example was Malam al-Hassan, of Gobir, who translated the Qissãt Salaga Tãrikh Ghunjã into Hausa, and compiled the histories of Mamprugu, Mossi, Dagbon, and Grunshie in the 1890s.30

The Muslim influence appears to have been stronger in the southern kingdoms of Dagbon and Mamprugu, where Dyula and Hausa merchants were closely integrated in court politics, and capitals like Yendi developed into substantial trading towns.

According to information collected from traders in the Fezzan (Libya) by Simon Lucas in 1788/9, and by the British envoys Bowdich (1817) and Dupuis (1820) in Kumasi (Asante, Ghana), the city of Yendi, which was the capital of Dagbon, was four times larger than Kumasi and ‘enjoys great celebrity all over the African continent for its riches and manufactures.’31

Yendi’s fame as a commercial centre also carried the idea of Dagbon as a Muslim kingdom. Lucas called it ‘the Mahometan kingdom of Degombah’, but added that ‘there is reason to believe from the Shereef’s account that the Musselman and the Pagan are indiscriminately mixed’. In Asante, the British envoys’ reports that the king of Dagbon was sending muslim amulets to the Asante king have been confirmed by the discovery of an Arabic letter, now among the Copenhagen manuscripts, that was sent to the Asantehene by Na Andani of Dagbon.32

While Yendi’s importance as a merchant city was taken over by Salaga, its Muslim tradition left a deeper imprint than in other Mossi states.

Prayer at Sakhaboutenga, a muslim town near Wagadugu. Image by L. Binger, ca. 1888: “The religious ceremony takes place in a plain to the east of the village; it is quite an impressive sight. A profound silence reigned in the assembly. The faithful, arranged in rows some twenty deep, prostrated themselves and rose with perfect unison and imposing slowness. From time to time, the imam’s voice rose, and in the deepest contemplation, an “amen” could be heard from the congregation. There were approximately three thousand people of both sexes present, almost all dressed in white. The burnouses, the chechias, and this collection of black faces gave the ceremony the grandiose character of oriental festivals.”

Various manuscripts from Asante, Ghana. (left) Instructions for reading the Kīmīyā-yi Sa’ādat (’the Alchemy of Happiness’) by Persian philosopher al-Ghazali. British Library. (center) number table and instructions on how to fill it. British Library. (right) talismanic manuscripts Musée d’ethnographie, Genève

The Mossi states in the 19th century

The centralizing processes that had defined Mossi politics in the 18th century broke down in the 19th century, as the military weakness of the dominant kingdoms allowed for the smaller kingdoms to assert their autonomy.

In Yatenga, the kingdom’s military organization had largely failed to incorporate the technological innovations adopted by its neighbours. Like a feudal military, each Nakomse/nobleman answered the king’s call to arms by bringing their own forces, mostly cavalry units, that remained under their command.

Its defense relied on a series of fortified settlements manned by Mossi lineages that had been excluded from power. According to the chronicle of Yigane, few of these frontier chiefs lived to fight more than a few battles, although peace prevailed at the center.33

In the mid-19th century, Wagadugu’s territory was reduced by the emergence of Busuma to the east and Lalle to the west, each with its own Naaba/ruler. In Yatenga, a long succession crisis followed the reign of Naaba Tuguri (1806-22) but ended with the ascension of Naaba Totebalbo (1834-1850) and Naaba Yemde (1850-1877). It was reignited under Naaba Bulli (1895-1899), devolving to such an extent that in 1894, he requested military assistance from the French.34

It was in this context of political upheaval and disintegration that the French captain Louis-Gustave Binger travelled through Mossi country in 1888.

Waghadougou Residence. (Palace of King Sanom). Image by L. Binger. ca. 1888.

According to Binger, the Mossi capitals were substantial towns with a diverse population drawn from across the region.

Waghadougou (Wagadugu) had a population of about 5,000 inhabitants, while the other centers of Mani, Yako, Boussomo, Sakhaboutenga, Pisséla, Koupéla, and Ganzourgou have 3,000 inhabitants.

Waghadougou proper includes: the residence of the Naba, the group of Muslim villages (of Mandé origin), the group called Zang-ana, inhabited by Marenga (Songhay), of the Zang-ouér’o or Zang-ouéto (Hausa), some Tchilmigo (Fulani), and other non-Muslim Mossi groups.35

The ruler of Wagadugu was Naba Sanom/Sanem (r. 1871-1889), who had won the succession dispute against his brother Boukary. Apparently, the Muslim Mossi, who referred to Sanem as Alassane, claimed that the king is a Muslim and that he does his prayers hidden from the eyes of his subjects. The traditionalists, however, “say the opposite and speak with pride of their naba, who drinks dolo (beer) like them.”36

Most of the horses in Wagadugu came from Yatenga, which had two breeds of horses: an ‘Arabian’ type, and a ‘Yatenga’ type standing at up to 1.62 m, which Binger favourably compares to the French dragoons’ mount. Donkeys were bred in most Mossi regions and sold for about 30-35,000 cowries, equivalent to 60 gold francs in Kong and Bobo-Dioulasso. These were exchanged in Salaga (Ghana) for kola, cowries, and textiles.37

Horse breeds in Wagadugu. Image by L. Binger, ca. 1888.

Binger also visited the southern kingdom of Mamprugu, whose two most important centers were Oual-Oualé/Walwale and Gambakha/Gambaga, each with 2,500 to 3,000 inhabitants. The kingdom had greatly diminished in size; its ruler was apparently a Traouré (of Mandé origin), but he didn’t reside in the two main centers, which were imamates (societies led by an imam) headed by Imam Seydou Touré at Walwale, and Imam Baraga at Gambaga.38

The historian Nehemiah Levtzion suggests that the Traouré patronymic was simply adopted by the traditional rulers of Mamprugu as a praise-name, but it didn’t reflect a change in ethnicity. It was Na Atabia who moved the capital from Gambaca to the walled town of Nalerigu, partly to be safe from attacks by the neighbouring kingdom of Gurma, but also because rulers preferred to live apart from Muslims while also retaining the ability to control them.39

The existence of an imamate at Gambaga is also confirmed by the Copenhagen manuscripts from Asante, which contain manuscripts and letters written by the imams of Gambaca, dated to 1820.40

The transfer of the court to Nalerigu left Gambaga as the most important town in Mamprugu. Outsiders regarded it as the capital because that’s where they were received. Early British reports from 1898 mention that the proud Mamprugu king Nayiri Na Berega (d. 1902) refused to deal with the white men, leaving that job to Imam Baba of Gambaga. This arrangement caused some confusion in the minds of the Europeans as to the realities of political authority in Mamprugu.41

In any case, Maprungu was even less unified and more heterogeneous than other Mossi kingdoms, as reported by Binger, who observed that there were many nearly-independent Naba between Mamprugu and Dagbon, such as the Naba of Karaga. “Although his territory falls under the jurisdiction of Dagomba of Yendi, he maintains a somewhat independent position, wages war on his own behalf, and appears to care very little for the Naba of Yendi.”42

Visit to the Naba of Karaga. Binger, 1888.

Epilogue

Binger’s account suggests that the Mossi states were already in decline during the 19th century, while his expedition itself foreshadowed the colonial partition of Mossi territories in its final decade.

Around the same time, British and German reconnaissance missions from the south converged on the Dagbon and Mamprugu kingdoms in 1896-8, began to intersect with French incursions from the west. The French had already intervened in Yatenga between 1894 and 1895, and subsequently launched a campaign against the kingdom of Wagadugu from 1895 to 1897.

The last ruler of Wagadugu, Naba Wobogo, reportedly told the French officer, Captain Destenave:

“I know that the whites wish to kill me in order to take my country, and yet you claim that they will help me to organize my country. But I find my country good just as it is. I have no need of them. I know what is necessary for me and what I want.”43

The kingdom was occupied in January 1897 and incorporated into what would become modern Burkina Faso. The capital of the modern country remains the old city of Wagadugu (Ouagadougou), where horse races are still held in honour of Princess Yenenga, founder of the northern Mossi Kingdoms.

‘L’Empereur des Mossis le Morgho Naba et ses chefs de province’ Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

The first Africanists (specialists who study African languages, societies, and history) were not colonial researchers, as is often assumed, but African intellectuals who were actively engaged in the production of knowledge about their own societies.

My Patreon article examines the works of al-Hajj Musa of Zinder (ca. 1870-1930), a pioneering Africanist and ethnographer.

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THE FIRST AFRICANISTS: AL-HAJJ MUSA

These pioneering scholars and cultural translators provided much of the ethnographic, linguistic, and historical information that later appeared in works of colonial writers.

Their contributions shaped a substantial portion of the documentary record on Africa, challenging the conventional distinction between “external” and “internal” sources.

This intellectual collaboration produced new epistemological frameworks for organizing and interpreting knowledge about African societies, laying the foundations for the academic disciplines that today constitute African studies.

IN June 1905, the Ethiopian scholar Aläqa Tayyä arrived at Seminar für orientalische Sprachen (School of Oriental Languages, SOL) in Berlin, Germany, to assume a position as a Lektor (Lecturer) of the Geʿez and Amharic languages.1

The 45-year-old däbtära (scholar) had received his early education in the monastic schools of the Lake Tana region before travelling to the coastal town of Imkulu in Eritrea, where he worked as a teacher for the Swedish Evangelical Mission.

He later returned to Ethiopia to complete his advanced studies, during which time he gained the acquaintance of the emperor, who subsequently recommended him to the German government for a teaching position at the SOL.2

(left) Dajazmach Gabra Sellase Barya Gabr (1872-1930), who collaborated with the German scholar Enno Littmann during the German Aksum Expedition of 1906. (right) The Swedish mission station at Imkulu, Eritrea, where Aläqa Tayyä was a teacher and translator for about 6 years, and used its printing press (the first in the Horn), to publish his first book Maṣḥafa Sawāsew (1889)

The mission station in Monkullo/Imkulu.

African lecturers and translators played a central role in the founding of the SOL and in establishing its reputation as one of the first Western institutions to lay the scholarly foundations of modern African studies.

This birthplace of academic African studies was built upon the often-unacknowledged intellectual labor and collaborative effort of African scholars, which were later subsumed by European imperial interests.

Among these was the collaboration between the Swahili ethnographer Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari (at SOL from 1900-1905) and the German linguist Carl Velten, as well as the Duala prince Njo Dibone, who, from 1885, worked with Carl Gotthilf Büttner.

The contributions of these and several African lecturers at the SOL are summarised in my previous essay on ‘The Hidden Founders of African Studies in Europe.’

Swahili lecturer at the SOL in Berlin, ca. 1911, collection of Carl Velten & Alice Carnwath. Rooftop view of Zanzibar, Tanzania, ca. 1936, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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The Ethiopian scholar Aläqa Tayyä's lectures attracted both ordinary students and learned orientalists.

The most notable among the latter was Eugen Mittwoch (1876-1942), who is described as ‘one of the most prominent representatives of German Orientalism during the first decades of the twentieth century.’3

After his encounter with Tayyä, he also became a leading specialist in Ethiopian languages at the SOL and transmitted his work to his students, some of whom became prominent ‘Ethiopists’ as well.4

The collaborative efforts of Eugen Mittwoch and Aläqa Tayyä between 1905 and 1907 resulted in the publication of at least three foundational texts on Ahmaric literature, for which Mittwoch properly acknowledged the contribution of Tayyä.5

Through his collaboration with Mittwoch, Tayyä gained access to Western collections of Ge’ez manuscripts that had been taken from Ethiopia, whose historical information would influence his composition of the first general history of Ethiopia published by an Ethiopian author.6

In his correspondence with Menelik, the Ethiopian scholar wrote:

“I was burning [with envy] when Europeans displayed their manuscripts in their libraries for visitors. Your majesty, I am sending you a list of Ethiopian manuscripts stolen and taken to Germany so that you can get them returned. So that the coming generation would be proud of you not only as a hero of Adwa, but also as a hero of collecting and preserving heritage and history.”7

Just like the Xhosa writer Tiyo Soga (1829-1871, South Africa), Owusu-Ansa (1851-1910) of Asante (Ghana), and many African proto-nationalists of the 19th century, Tayyä was a reformist who recognized the need to modernize Ethiopian institutions if the country was to retain its autonomy.

He urged Menilek to send young Ethiopians to Europe to study science and technology, as the Japanese and Moroccan governments had done. He advocated for the introduction of compulsory education, the establishment of a printing press, the replacement of the Maria Theresa thaler with a national currency, and the elevation of the status of craftsmen.8

Gold coin of Menelik II, ca. 1897. British Museum.

Upon returning to Ethiopia in 1907, he brought with him a collection of more than 130 books and soon began composing an extensive and ambitious account of Ethiopian history. Part of this work was eventually published in 1922 under the title YäʾItyoppʾya Hizb Tarik (“History of the People of Ethiopia”).9

As its title indicates, the book wasn’t based on the model of the ancient royal chronicles, but was a history of the people of Ethiopia as a ‘nation.’

Like Samuel Johnson’s history of the Yoruba (1899, Nigeria), which combined the historical traditions of diverse sub-groups into one ‘nation’, Tayyä describes the diversity of languages and cultural traditions of Ethiopia, and outlines the history of its different components.

He doesn’t exclude the information provided in traditional historical accounts, but instead expands and reframes this pre-existing narrative framework with additional perspectives and materials acquired during his travels in Europe.10

This ‘History’ long constituted the sole reference for Ethiopian students who lacked access to the manuscripts of royal chronicles or to the publications of Western scholars. Its wide circulation is reflected in the numerous reprints it received, appearing in 1927, 1953, 1955, 1962, 1965, and 1971.

Although Tayyä succeeded in publishing only two of his works, the Maṣḥafa Sawāsew (1889) and the ‘History’ (1922), he was a prolific writer with wide-ranging interests. He left behind a substantial corpus of unpublished manuscripts, including original compositions on ethnography, theology, and other subjects.11

In this respect, he may be compared to his near contemporary, the Bornu scholar al-Hajj Musa of Zinder (in present-day Niger), who, after travelling to the Hejaz and Jerusalem between 1900 and 1904, eventually settled in Cairo at al-Azhar University.

Between 1904 and 1914, the intellectual collaboration between al-Hajj Musa and the German Orientalist Rudolf Prietze resulted in the creation of a veritable corpus of Hausa and Kanuri publications that would influence modern studies of both languages.

Over several years spent between Cairo and Jerusalem, Prietze and al-Hajj Musa met daily and worked together, with the latter composing hundreds of pages in Ajami Kanuri and Hausa on a variety of topics. These include traditional tales, fables, songs, and historical narratives that have been translated and published by the historians Ari Awagana and Camille Lefebvre.12

These unique works of literature originally belonged to the oral rather than scribal world since the bulk of West Africa’s intellectual heritage mostly consists of theological works, grammar, law, royal chronicles, and scientific writings.13

They represent some of the earliest transcribed works of West African popular literature. According to the historian Louis Brenner, the Kanuri folklore transcribed by al-Hajj Musa was a ‘repository of insights and comments on social and political life in the nineteenth century.’

In this interpretive framework, folklore and other forms of popular literature could serve to legitimize, negotiate, or subvert political authority and social hierarchies.

The ethnographic data provided by al-Hajj Musa offer an alternate perspective of the relationship between different social groups in pre-colonial West Africa, especially the non-elites, whose presence in royal chronicles often appears only at the margins of narratives celebrating the exploits of rulers and other prominent figures.

Building on this insight, my latest Patreon article examines the ethnographic meanings of the Kanuri folklore and historical narratives of al-Hajj Musa, drawing on comparative analysis of related traditions collected by European and African scholars in Bornu during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Please subscribe to read about it here and support this newsletter:

THE FIRST AFRICANISTS: AL-HAJJ MUSA

Gold mined in the region supplied the mints of North Africa and southwestern Europe, and the lure of this precious metal helped stimulate early European exploration along the Atlantic coastline of Africa.1

While the external demand for West African gold is well documented, far less is known about its internal demand within the continent. As a result, it is often erroneously assumed that the metal held little value for the communities that produced it.

External observers frequently imagined that the medieval empires of West Africa controlled vast mines worked by their subjects. The historical reality was quite different.

Although many of these states built their wealth on the gold trade, control over the gold fields remained in the hands of small-scale communities on the periphery. The political relationship between the mining communities and the large states was one of economic alliance rather than vassalage.

This arrangement created an internal market for gold. The metal circulated widely enough to support the use of gold currency, the creation of state treasuries that regulated its distribution, and, in some cases, the minting of gold coinage.

Beyond its economic utility, gold served as a definitive marker of royalty and social status, fueling urban growth and the development of specialized artisanal production, including goldsmithing, many examples of which were later removed to museums in Europe and North America.

This article examines the historical significance of gold within West African monetary and cultural systems from the medieval period

The goldfields of West Africa and the empire of Mali.

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PATREON

The State treasuries of medieval West Africa.

The region of the West African Sahel and savannah, known in medieval Arabic sources as Bilād al-Sūdān, first appears in written accounts from the 8th-9th century.

These early references describe the kingdom of Ghana (today in southern Mauritania) and its fabled gold mines,2 but most accounts remain fragmentary until the 11th century, when the Andalusi historian al-Bakrī (d. 1094) provides a more detailed description of the region.

He reports that the king of Ghana maintained a royal treasury in order to regulate the circulation of gold arriving from the mines located south of his domains.

According to al-Bakrī’s account, the kings of Ghana retain large gold nuggets while allowing only gold dust to circulate in trade, a practice intended to prevent an oversupply of gold and the consequent depreciation of its value:

“The nuggets found in all the mines of his country are reserved for the king, only this gold dust being left for the people. But for this the people would accumulate gold until it lost its value. The nuggets may weigh from an ounce to a pound. It is related that the king owns a nugget as large as a big stone.”3

This practice is well-documented in the 19th century kingdom of Asante on the Gold-Coast (modern Ghana), which maintained a monetary system based on gold as well as a state treasury, but it’s clearly of significant antiquity, as shall be examined below.

Al-Idrisi, in 1154, also reports, based on information received from Moroccan merchants, that the king of Ghana possessed a “brick of gold weighing thirty pounds made of one piece.” Ghana was later subsumed by the Mali empire in the 13th century, which also controlled the gold routes but not the mines themselves, reportedly because production would decline every time the Mansa (ruler) of Mali extended his authority southwards.4

The above account came from Mansa Musa (r. 1312-1337) while on his famous pilgrimage through Cairo to Mecca in 1324, during which he carried about 100 tonnes of gold, according to several contemporary accounts.5

These accounts don’t explain whether the gold came from the treasury or Mansa’s own wealth (or if there was any distinction between either). As I examined in my previous essay, West African pilgrims visiting Egypt and Mecca often carried significant quantities of gold for their journey, and it’s possible that their assets could have been included in the total estimate.

Detail from the 14th-century Catalan Atlas showing Mansa Musa holding a gold nugget.

The globe-trotter Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali in 1353, doesn’t mention a treasury but describes the gold ornaments found at the court of Mali, and the use of gold dust for paying court officials. He adds that near the end of the Ramathan fast, Mansa Sulayman (r. 1340-1359) “distributed money to the qadi, the preacher and the jurists” and gave 133 1/3rd mithqals of gold to the traveller.6

According to information obtained by Ibn Khaldun from a qadi of Gao, it was Mari Jata (r. 1360-1374) who reportedly “squandered the treasure” and ruined the empire.

“His extravagance and profligacy, reached such a point that he sold the boulder of gold which was the prized possession of their treasury. It was a boulder weighing twenty qintars … They regarded it as the rarest and most precious of treasures because its like is so scarce in the mines.” He adds that “In his loose living he squandered other royal treasures.”7

The Songhai empire under Sonni Ali (r. 1464-1492) ultimately conquered most of Mali’s territories and assumed control of the gold routes.

The correspondence between Askiya Muhammad (r. 1493-1528) and the Maghrebian scholar Al-maghili (d. 1505) refers to a public treasury which had been left by Sonni ‘Ali, consisting mostly of gold dust. The 17th century Timbuktu chronicle Tarikh al-Sudan reports that 300,000 mithqals of gold (approx. 1275 kg) were recovered after Sunni ‘Al’s death, some of which was spent by Askiya Muhammad on pious works during his pilgrimage.8

Leo Africanus reports that the Askiya of Songhai “possesses great treasure in coin and gold ingots. One of these ingots weighs 1,300 pounds.” He adds that the Askiya collected tribute of 150,000 ducats/mithqals from the city of Agadez (W. Niger). According to Hunwick, much of this gold likely came from the Akan gold fields via Hausaland.

He also mentions that while the king possessed a lot of gold, some of which he used to gild his furnishings. However, the King refused to pay merchants with this gold, and for this reason, Leo Africanus refers to him as ‘mean’.9

‘gold merchants’ in Timbuktu, Mali, ca. 1896

Internal and external accounts suggest that this royal treasury was spent on redistributive exchange between rulers and subordinate officials, on pious donations, and on maintaining the army.

This system of redistribution, which has been explored in greater detail in anthropological and historiographic literature on Africa (especially in Asante and Dahomey), is explicitly described in al-Umari’s account of Mali:

“The emirs and soldiers of this king have fiefs and benefices. Among their chiefs are some whose wealth derived from the king reaches 50,000 mithqals of gold every year, besides which he keeps them in horses and clothes. His [the king’s] own ambition is to give them fine clothes and to make his towns into cities.”10

The Tarikh al-Sudan reports that the invasion of Timbuktu by Songhai’s Sonni Ali in 1468 was instigated by the Timbuktu-koi (governor of Timbuktu, an official from the era of imperial Mali) because he had not been given his share of the taxes collected by the city’s Tuareg ruler Akil, which amounted to a third of the 3,000 mithqals in one day.

The chronicle explains that, traditionally, the Timbuktu-koi used this sum to buy textiles for the nomadic Tuareg (likely for redistribution rather than just apparel) and for entertaining them when they came from their camps to Timbuktu. Akil, who had seized the town after the withdrawal of medieval Mali, initially left the Timbuktu-koi in charge before he decided to assume direct control.11

With regards to pious donations, the same chronicle provides an account of the pilgrimage of Askiya Muhammad, who donated about 100,000 mithqals in the Hejaz, apparently more than Mansa Musa’s 20,000 mithqals. Neither of these figures is accurate, but they were, in all likelihood, intended to glorify the Songhai ruler, especially considering that Mansa Musa’s wealth and generosity are much better documented in external sources.12

In external accounts, the Askiya’s pilgrimage is confirmed by a letter from 1511, based on information from Jewish merchants in the Maghreb. It mentions a ‘Negro king of Guinea’ named ‘azquya’ (ie, Askiya) at the head of a bi-annual caravan from ‘Takrur’ (Muslim West Africa) that arrived in Cairo carrying a lot of gold.13

Although there is some evidence that the Askiya had funds of his own that were different from the state treasury, in practice, there was probably not a very fine distinction. Leo Africanus claims that the officials of Timbuktu, the qadi, and the major scholars were supported by the Askiya Muhammad, probably similar to the tradition described by al-Umari. 14

According to the Tarikh al-Sudan, Askiya Ishaq (r. 1539-1549) reportedly collected 70,000 mithqals of gold from the merchants of Timbuktu by ‘extortion’ (ie, more than the Zakat he was entitled to). The chronicler adds that “No one mentioned this during the askiya’s lifetime for fear of harsh punishment.” According to Hunwick, this figure is equivalent to about 315 and 350 kg of gold.15

During the reign of Askiya Dawud (r. 1549-1582), the Songhai ruler sent 10,000 mithqals of gold to the Moroccan/Saadian sultan al-Mansur (r. 1549-1603). The text indicates that this was a goodwill gift, but the latter may have interpreted it as a remission of taxes accruing from the salt mine of Taghaza, which was controlled by Songhai but claimed by Morocco.16

Dawud also donated money for the reconstruction of the Great Mosque of Timbuktu that was undertaken by the qadi al-Aqib.17 The Tarikh Ibn Mukhtar, another 17th-century chronicle, mentions that the qadi spent about 66.67 mithqals (283 grammes) on the construction.18

After his death, disputes between the Saadian ruler al-Mansur and the Songhai rulers over the ownership of Taghaza ended with the invasion of 1591.

The invading army seized large amounts of gold from Songhai, estimated to be about 100,000 mithqals, or 500kg, with other amounts arriving over the course of about a decade. Much of it was from the Askiya’s treasury, and the rest was taken from the homes of the scholars of Timbuktu and even from the soldiers, mostly in the form of gold dust and jewelry.19

There are numerous accounts (West African, Moroccan, and European) which describe the capture of this gold, virtually all of which was seized from the royals of Gao and scholars of Timbuktu, rather than obtained through trade.

To give just two examples; an English merchant, Lawrence Madoc, writes of the arrival in July 1594 of princes from Gao along with “thirty mules laden with gold.” Another English merchant in Morocco, Jasper Thomson, reported the arrival of Jawdar Pasha on 28 June 1599 with 30 camel loads of gold dust, as well as pepper, horses, captives, and some of the royals of Gao.20

For context, Mansa Musa took about 100 camel-loads (about 12 tonnes) of gold on pilgrimage, so the quantities of gold taken from Songhay must have been equally significant.

Map showing some of the empires mentioned in this essay.

After the collapse of Songhai, imperial administration was reconstituted in the 18th century following the rise of the Bambara empire at Segu, and the Tukulor empire of Umar Tal, which conquered Segu in 1861.

Like their medieval predecessors, the rulers of Segu reportedly kept a state treasury, part of which consisted of gold. Most accounts describing this gold come from after Umar Tal’s conquest of Segu.

At Segu, Umar found storehouses full of treasure, which he distributed among his army. The value of the gold alone was reportedly worth 20 million francs, according to an account by the French traveler Eugene Mage, who visited Segu in 1864, although he later suggests that the figure may have been exaggerated.21

In his travel account, Mage notes that a gold gros from the Bouré gold fields south of Tukulor is worth 12.50 to 18 francs, and that 12 grams of gold in Segu was worth 36 francs. This suggests that the treasure was worth between 110,000 and 160,000 gros, or 666.7 kg of gold.22

He provides other figures he consideres more reliable, including a gift of 800 gros of gold from Umar Tal (r. 1854-1864) to the Kunta shaykh of Timbuktu; a trader who had received 340 gros of gold from the king and gave it to Mage for safekeeping; and a departing gift from Umar’s successor Ahmadou Tall (r. 1864-1893) of two gold bracelets, each worth 100 gros.23

Palace of Amadou at Segou, Mali. ca. 1863-8, Engraving by Eugene Mage.

Chronicles of Umar Tal’s conquest, which were written in the late 19th century, describe this treasure in more detail:

“When the Shaikh came to his [Ali’s] private chambers, he found his [uneaten] food. The bowl was made of gold, the soap dish was gold, the wash basin was gold, the carpet was of woven gold, his walking stick was gold, ... even his bed was made from gold. The Shaikh entered the storehouse and found it partitioned into various apartments. He found stores of gold of such an amount that no one had ever counted its value.”24

It’s suggested that the Tukulor rulers also kept a treasury, containing gold obtained through tribute. According to the French traveler Paul Soleillet in 1878, the Bure gold-producing region initially paid al-Hajj ‘Umar a tribute of 10,000 gros of gold, but later stopped after he had shifted his campaigns northward. (c.1855).25

Another chronicle recounts that Umar distributed a large number of gold and silver coins (possibly imported Thalers) and great quantities of cowries, salt, and cloth to the talibés (his followers/soldiers).26

Umar also kept the gold and wooden ‘fetishes’ from the palace of the defeated Bambara rulers to serve as a proof text, in the religiously couched ideological dispute he had with their ‘protectors’; the Muslim state of Massina/Hamdallaye and the Kunta of Timbuktu. Ironically, Umar spent a large sum of gold recruiting the non-Muslim Dogon of Bandiagara shortly before he was defeated by the Massina and Kunta.27

The gold and wooden objects kept by Umar Tal at Segu had been used in annual rituals that recalled the founding of the Segu state in the 18th century, and it was this treasure that would later be seized by the French and carried off to Western museums after the colonial conquest.

At the time of its capture, the treasure contained just 75kg of gold, as well as over 160 tons of silver.28 ( $10m worth of gold, $351 m of silver based on current prices)

Gold necklace from Ségou, Mali. Taken as spoils of war by Colonel Archinard, 19th century. Quai Branly.

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Gold as currency in medieval West Africa: gold coins, gold dust, and measurements

There are also several references to the use of gold coins in West Africa from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, whose corroborating archaeological evidence has only recently come to light.

The first of these comes from al-Bakri in the 11th century, who mentions that in the medieval town of Tadmekka (Mali) “Their dinars are called “bald” because they are of pure gold without any stamp.”29

Leo Africanus’ description of Djenne in the early 16th century also mentions that “the coinage used by these blacks is unstamped gold,” while iron was used for smaller purchases. He adds that Timbuktu, “instead of coined money they use pieces of pure gold,” while cowries were used for smaller purchases.30

Excavations at Essouk-Tadmekka in Mali have uncovered evidence of gold-coin moulds and crucibles from occupation levels from the 10th to 12th centuries CE. Similar coin moulds had also been found during excavations at the site of Tegdaoust in Mauritania.

The gold from Essouk’s crucibles has a high level of purity (atleast 98%), and given the absence of refining waste, was likely obtained in its natural form, which fits with analyses of modern West African nuggets. The Archaeologist Sam Nixon suggests that the Almoravids brought an end to Tadmekka’s coinage as they tried to reduce the importance of competitor coinages to their own.31

Map showing Essouk, Gao, Bentyia, and the goldfields of S.W Niger. Map by Paulo de Moraes Farias

Fragment of ceramic mould for producing gold coin blanks, excavated at Tadmakka, shown together with radiograph (top right) and close-up of individual prills trapped in surface. Images by S. Nixon.

East-west view across the central area of ​​the Tadmekka ruins. Image by S. Nixon.

It’s been suggested by Paulo de Moraes Farias that the mint at Essouk was supplied with gold from the mines south of Bentyia, rather than the better-known mines of Bambuk and Bure. Bentyia was a medieval town south of the Songhai city of Gao, which was later also associated with the Wangara gold trade. Archaeological surveys have recovered small clay crucibles at some of these sites, suggesting that the metal was smelted in the area.32

In addition to these finds, a 10th-century gold dinar was found at Gao (Mali), six Almoravid gold coins were found near Tegdaoust, and at least five silver coins and a copper-alloy coin were recovered from excavations at Essouk. The origin of these silver coins is unclear, but they may have also been of local manufacture.

It’s relevant to note here that silver coins are also mentioned as currency in al-Umari’s 14th century description of the Kanem empire, which was east of Essouk and was apparently its suzerain in the previous century. A 15th-century account also describes the presence in Egypt of silver coinage from ‘Bilad al-Takrur’, a generic name for West Africa. These imported coins were considered illegal in Mamluk Egypt and were brought to be melted down.33

These archaeological discoveries, which are fairly recent, suggest that historical references to indigenous West African coinage should now be more seriously considered.

According to Sam Nixon, given the historical evidence from Djenne and Timbuktu, it shouldn’t be surprising that the presence of abundant gold and exchange with coin-based economies led to the production of coinage.34

Copper-alloy and silver coins from medieval Essouk-Tadmekka, images by Sam Nixon.

The empire of Kanem during the late Middle Ages.

In the post-medieval period, the most suggestive of this historical evidence of local coinage comes from the 19th century, describing the ‘Nikky dinar’ of the Wangara traders in Borgu (Benin) and the gold dinars of Araouane (Mali).

According to the British consul Joseph Dupuis, who visited the kingdom of Asante (Ghana) in 1820, from where he obtained two of the gold coins minted at Nikky. He explains that in the eastern neighbours of Asante, the mithqal was simply a “nominal coin” for they are not manufactured there, “they are only partially current from the influx of specie brought by the northern traders.”

He then adds that “Nikky, the capital of Bargho or Killinga, is the great mint of Soudan, south of the Niger, as Bornou is that of the north; such was the similitude used by my informers, who shewed me two pieces of money of the description, which were stamped, as clearly as I could discern, with characters similar to the mitskal of Morocco, although the impression, from the purity of the metal, was too much defaced to enable me to trace the year or the whole of the writing. I was told they were the coin of Kilinga [Borgu] and that they were current not only in Wangara, but also in Bambarra, Maroa, Fillany, Haussa, some parts of the desert, and even in Egypt.”35

Dupuis suggests that the gold from which the Nikky mithqal was minted came from Bonduku; from there it was sent to Salaga, Yendi, and other towns to the north-east of Asante, from which it reached Nikky by way of Zogho [Djougou] and other intermediate towns. At Nikky, which Dupuis calls ‘the great metropolis of the great kingdom of Bargo’, he states ‘it is transformed into trinkets and ducats (mitskal)’.36

Dupuis notes that its value was reckoned at thirteen to the Ashanti benda, about 11s. 2d. Sterling. and that it never varied ‘from the standard that passed for currency in all parts of the continent.’

The coin was used along the routes used by the Wangara traders, but the social upheaval of the era was beginning to disrupt the trade at the time Dupuis was writing. Nikky eventually came under the control of the emirate of Katsina (a province of the empire of Sokoto), and by mid-century had evidently ceased to mint gold coins.37

Archaeological research in this region, which remains limited, has yet to recover the Nikky coins, which may have been melted or converted to jewelry. Recent excavations at the site of Bogo-Bogo in northern Benin yielded a number of metal objects from occupation levels dated to the 19th/early 20th century, including a coin made from an unidentified metal, with one surface decorated, that was seemingly used as a pendant.38

These dinars could have been a relic of an older monetary system of the medieval period (described in Tadmekka, Kanem, and Songhai) that was quickly becoming displaced by the mass importation of cowries, which only reached the interior in significant sums during the 18th and 19th centuries.

When Hugh Clapperton visited Kano in 1822-4, which he described, with some exaggeration, as the best-regulated market in Africa, he mentioned that the governor of the market fixes the exchange prices between the two main currencies: cowries and silver.

He notes the “great convenience of the cowrie, which no forgery can imitate; and which, by the dexterity of the natives in reckoning the largest sums, forms a ready medium of exchange in all transactions, from the lowest to the highest.”39

Further east in Bornu, the Sheikh al-Kanemi reportedly requested that Dixon Denham, Clapperton’s companion, send equipment for minting gold, silver, and iron coins to replace the cloth-currency that was in use at his capital, Kukawa.40

Further east in the town of Logone-Birni, where both gold and silver were unavailable, and cowries hadn’t been adopted, Clapperton reported that the traditional currency was thin, horse-shoe-shaped plates of iron, for which there was a lively currency market.

“The money market of Loggun, has its fluctuations: the value of this “circulating medium” is settled by proclamation, at the commencement of the weekly market, every Wednesday; and speculations are made, by the bulls and bears, according to their belief of its rise or fall.”41

Reception of Monteil by Bornu’s courtiers, army, and spectators at Kukawa, Nigeria. ca. 1891

Aerial view of Logone-Birni, Cameroon. ca. 1932 Quai Branly

Aerial photo of the city of Kano, Nigeria in the early 1930s

At the time of René Caillié’s visit in 1828, the only market in which solid gold currency prevailed was the town of Araouane, north of Timbuktu:

“Cowries, which are the current money of Soudan (West Africa), do not pass at El-Arawan. There, nothing circulates but gold and silver —neat pieces of the value of a mitkhal, in imitation of the money of Morocco. The gold mitkhal increases in value as you approach the coasts.”

He adds that the value of the gold ‘mitkhal’ is about twelve francs, and the silver mitkhal about four.42

The Austrian explorer Dr. Oskar Lenz, who traveled from Morocco to Timbuktu between 1879 and 1880, found that gold coins had disappeared from both Morocco and Araouane.

He explains that the mithqal in use at El Arouan and at Timbuktu was a unit of weight, not a coin, weighing ‘about 4 grams’. By his time, the gold-dust currency had ceased to circulate, such gold as was in circulation being in the form of rings, small gold plaques, and small grains.43

Lenz observed that because the Moroccan gold coins were made of very high-purity gold, they were hoarded or exported to Europe for profit, leaving only debased or common metal coins in circulation. A similar fate had likely befallen the Nikky dinar and the unstamped coins of Tadmekka and Djenne before them.

Remains of the old town of Araouane, now largely abandoned and partially submerged by the surrounding dunes. Image by Anthony Ham

Timbuktu from the terrace of the traveller’s house. H Barth, 1853

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The measures of Gold currency in West Africa

The mithqal, which is derived from the Arabic word for weight, was the standard measure for weighing gold dust, averaging 4.25 grams; any variations were due to custom and weighing techniques. It was the only pre-colonial Western African measure corresponding to an actual weight as opposed to a quantity, and was also used as a standard unit of account.44

One of the earliest references to the use of scales/weights in the conduct of West African gold trade comes from the Portuguese trader Andre Alvares de Almada, who described trade in Sutuko (Gambia) in the 1560s:

“At the village of Sutuco there are transactions in gold, which is brought there by Mandinga traders who are also men of religion. The gold is of good quality, most of it golddust but some of it in pieces. These traders are very knowledgeable regarding weights and everything else. They have very sensitive balances ... and silk-thread strings. They [also] have little writing desks made of leather, without fasteners, in the drawers of which they keep the weights. These are in brass and look like dice; [but] the marco [eight ounce weight] looks like a sword pommel.

The gold is brought in quills of big feathers and bones of cats, hidden and strapped in their clothing. These traders spend much more than six months on the trip;... they travel in obedience to the orders to the Black Emperor, whom all the Blacks of this Guinea we are talking about obey. He is called Mandimanca [king of Mali] ..The inhabitants of the Mina (El-mina in Ghana) refer to this king as ‘Big Elephant’.”45

Gold scales with weights 18th-19th century, Akan, Ghana & Cote D’ivoire. Houston Museum of Fine Arts

Jeweler’s scale. Trarza, Mauritania. ca. 1938. Quai Branly

While variations in certain measures rendered comparisons difficult, the gold weight or mithqal was apparently a stable 4.25 grams across most African markets, and it served as a common unit of account from Kumasi to Cairo, which formed the basis of currency exchanges between silver, crowries, and salt bars.

The price of the cowrie shell money remained stable in the region from the late 17th until the early 19th century, with an exchange rate of around 3,000 cowries to the gold mithqal. In the mid-19th century, the price of cowries varied greatly even within West African markets. But in the course of the century, the shell money progressively lost value due to import-led inflation.46

At the time of Leo Africanus, a camel-load of salt (about 250 lbs) was worth eighty ducats/mithqals of gold.47 When Mungo Park visited the region in 1795, he reported that most of the gold was exchanged for salt and other merchandise. He provides an exchange rate of one slab (2.5ft long) for 2 pounds 10 shillings sterling (ie, £2 10s. 0d sterling), and one mithqal at I2s. 6d. sterling. Meaning 4 mithqals of gold bought one slab of salt.48

Changing value ratios of gold, silver, and cowries in the ‘western Soudan’. image by Philip Curtin.49

He mentions that each trader carried his own small balances for weighing gold, and that both gold dust and wrought gold had the same value. The unit of measurement was the minkalli/mithqal, valued at I2s. 6d. sterling. It could be subdivided further for small purchases measured using a teelee-kissi (black bean), of which six were equivalent to a mithqal.50

René Caillié found that merchants at Kankan (Guinea) used gold dust as both currency and a trade item, and carried “small scales made in the country.. Which are as accurate as ours.” The weight of the gold was measured against the black seeds of a particular tree, two of which were equivalent to six francs. The gold at Kankan came from Bure, often shaped into earrings valued at between 6 and 25 gourdes (Spanish silver), or as gold dust kept in quills.51

Gold weights at Djenne, Table by Marion Johnson.

It’s relevant here to note that in Europe and Asia, the mithqal, like the ounce, was usually subdivided into grains, and often also into larger divisions, also based on common fruits or seeds. Most of the European grains resolve themselves into three groups, based on the troy grain, which is the barley grain (0.0648 grams); the wheat grain/ Roman grain, about 0.75 times the weight of the barley grain; and an intermediate grain, about five-sixths of the barley grain.52

The English troy weight system, and some of the Arab systems, are based on the barley grain; the Dutch use the ass, a wheat grain three-quarters of the weight of a barley grain. The Spanish grao used in gold weighing was about the same size as the Dutch; but in gold weighing, there were only 600 to the ounce. The French used the intermediate size of grain, about 0-82 of the troy grain, counting 576 grains to the ounce.

In West Africa, the seed of Arbrus precatorius formed the basis of a grain-mithqal system. It has a conventional weight of about I.25 troy grains, and is the basis of the Akan gold-weights system, being usually 1/24 ackie. In the Fezzan (Libya), this was known as ‘ain el Dik and had the conventional weight of half a Kharub (carob) bean, 2 wheat grains, or I.5 barley grains. Interestingly, the Fezzan seed was reported to have been brought from West Africa, and is associated with a dynasty claiming West African origins.53