In November 1575, the army of Bornu encamped before the walled town of Amsaka, initiating what would become one of the best-documented episodes of siege warfare in pre-colonial West Africa.
Incredible article! I have always asked myself whether these facts have been appreciated enough in existing literature. As you show, states were more than capable of the immense logistical effort required for successful investments and sieges of large cities, which, as a comparison with medieval european/mid-eastern cases can attest, was no simple task.
Great article shared across multiple spaces, I wished you would've add the mother of all forts, the great fort of Buhen, first of it's kind? or maybe this was centered into West and Central Africa?.
This is an incredibly delicate and complicated point, but I think there's some relationship between fortification in savannah and northern woodlands West Africa and the military mobilization of the interior empires both against and in alliance to Islamic authority. That's not just a religion in the abstract--it's the relation between North African Islamic states, caravan powers, and the polities of the upper/central Niger which were both for and against various propositional forms of Islamic authority. But pre-Atlantic, it's hard to imagine that fortification would have been a widely selected or undertaken strategy if it weren't for Islamic ideas about the fusion of political and religious authority pressing into the region. And fortification in this sense was the double of retreat or fugitivity--peoples who went into remote or inaccessible areas to avoid intrusion on their own folkways.
the historical data certainly gives this impression but the broader archaeological and etthnographic evidence complicates it, the use of fortifications was more likely shaped by multiple local processess (low scale inter-polity warfare, competition, herder-farmer conflicts, ostentatious displays of power, etc), best example of this is the southern lake chad basin, on the surface, it looks like they were building forts to guard against bornu and other powerful islamic states (like the story in the introduction), in reality, the local histories and archaeological evidence shows that these northern factors were peripheral before the early modern period https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/a-political-history-of-the-kotoko
Incredible article! I have always asked myself whether these facts have been appreciated enough in existing literature. As you show, states were more than capable of the immense logistical effort required for successful investments and sieges of large cities, which, as a comparison with medieval european/mid-eastern cases can attest, was no simple task.
Great article shared across multiple spaces, I wished you would've add the mother of all forts, the great fort of Buhen, first of it's kind? or maybe this was centered into West and Central Africa?.
its a brief overview, so i had to focus on one region
This is an incredibly delicate and complicated point, but I think there's some relationship between fortification in savannah and northern woodlands West Africa and the military mobilization of the interior empires both against and in alliance to Islamic authority. That's not just a religion in the abstract--it's the relation between North African Islamic states, caravan powers, and the polities of the upper/central Niger which were both for and against various propositional forms of Islamic authority. But pre-Atlantic, it's hard to imagine that fortification would have been a widely selected or undertaken strategy if it weren't for Islamic ideas about the fusion of political and religious authority pressing into the region. And fortification in this sense was the double of retreat or fugitivity--peoples who went into remote or inaccessible areas to avoid intrusion on their own folkways.
the historical data certainly gives this impression but the broader archaeological and etthnographic evidence complicates it, the use of fortifications was more likely shaped by multiple local processess (low scale inter-polity warfare, competition, herder-farmer conflicts, ostentatious displays of power, etc), best example of this is the southern lake chad basin, on the surface, it looks like they were building forts to guard against bornu and other powerful islamic states (like the story in the introduction), in reality, the local histories and archaeological evidence shows that these northern factors were peripheral before the early modern period https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/a-political-history-of-the-kotoko
Great article as ever. One small quibble - was Mungo Park French or Scottish?