'Three Measures of Gold': The Rise and Fall of the Great Empires of the Sahel

The landscape of West Africa is filled with relics of a past that few today in or outside Africa know much about. On the north bank of the Gambia River lie the Wassu stone circles, built sometime in the last few thousand years by cultures of which there is very little awareness today. In the region of Dô, in what is now south-central Mali, huge fields of tumuli lie scattered across a wide area, some of them 50 feet in diameter. The large walled fortress of Loropéni, perhaps dating from the seventeenth century, or perhaps earlier, now lies scattered in the bush of southern Burkina Faso. In southern Nigeria, earthen defences known as eredos, 33 feet tall and over 100 miles in length, and dating from the fourteenth century, are found in Ijebu. In many coastal and riverine regions, it is easy to come across enormous shellfish middens, piled up over the centuries by peoples whose names and beliefs have by and large been forgotten.

For decades, outside a small circle of passionately dedicated scholars, these African pasts have suffered neglect. Yet they reveal ancient civilizations and a history whose relevance is absolutely contemporary. As early as the seventh century BCE, the Nok culture that grew around the plateau region of what is now central and northern Nigeria had developed agriculture and iron production. The settlement of Jenne-jenò in the inland delta of the Niger River had grown to a population of around 4,000 people by 400 CE, and had grown to as many as 26,000 by 800 CE. This growth was supported by rice production developed through iron tools smelted by local smiths. The iron ore was brought from around 30 miles away, while copper ornaments found in burial chambers probably came from much further afield, in the Sahara. Meanwhile, digs in the Upper Senegal River Valley have shown a similar trade in copper artefacts by around 500–700 CE, where they were traded for cloth produced on spindle-looms.

For most historians, though, Africa has always been 'outside history'. It is, after all, easy enough to dismiss something when you know little or nothing about it. Yet globalization came so early to many parts of Africa that one Chinese chronicle claims that ambassadors from the region of Ethiopia went to the Chinese Court around 150 BCE. It's hard to imagine the Celts or the Jutes before the time of Christ doing the same. African trade connections expanded rapidly, especially after around the year 700 CE. By around 1000, Madagascar was linked to China through the trading town of Kilwa, located on an island off the coast of southern Tanzania and founded by a Persian sultan in the eleventh century. Many artefacts of Chinese porcelain found in recent excavations of Kilwa have confirmed the very extensive long-distance connections here from an early time.

In West Africa, the pattern is similar. Early cave paintings from the era of Jenne-jenò reveal chariots with wheels, suggesting that this was a technology known in West Africa, either from long-distance trade to the Mediterranean or through local use. Analysis by archaeologists of the gold coins used in Tunis and Libya suggests a major change around the ninth century ce, when gold from the forest regions of what are now Ghana and Ivory Coast was dug out in large quantities and exported through networks of local traders. By the eleventh century, there were important mints in cities from Sigilmasa in Morocco to a variety of cities along the Mediterranean coast, and the trans-Saharan trade from the states of West Africa influenced the commercial and cultural worlds of Al-Andalus in Spain.

If this surprises some readers, it is because 'History' as a subject has developed a rather selective memory over the years. There was a time when this was well known to many. One example is the Catalan Atlas, compiled by the Majorcan Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques in around 1375. Here, the Emperor of Mali (rey Melli) sits enthroned with a sceptre and golden crown, dressed in elegant robes. In his right hand he extends a golden nugget to a North African trader, mounted on horseback, who emerges, his face wrapped in cloth, from the nomadic encampments of the Western Sahara. Across the Atlas Mountains, trade routes crisscross the desert towards North Africa, and some of them extend across the Mediterranean to the Iberian Peninsula. It is a powerful representation of the ways in which West African kings interacted with the Mediterranean worlds through the gold trade almost 650 years ago. It shows us how keen European rulers were to find out about Africa, and that, in fact, some of them already knew quite a bit about it.

From his Majorcan home, Cresques designed the Atlas using information from travellers who knew both North Africa and the trans-Saharan trading routes. Cresques also built on the well-known pilgrimage of the Emperor of Mali, Mansa Musa, to Mecca in 1324–5; and he relied on longstanding trade routes linking Jewish communities in Saharan oases such as Tuwat in Algeria and Sigilmasa in Morocco with both West African kingdoms further south and Jewishcommunities in the Iberian worlds. Looked at like this, the Atlas is the product of centuries of cross-cultural exchange. Cities of the Mediterranean world such as Cairo, Lisbon, Seville and Tripoli did not impose themselves on West Africa and dominate their peoples; instead, West African and Mediterranean societies emerged like the Catalan Atlas, through trade and reciprocal exchanges.

This chapter suggests how the histories of West African peoples and states before the rise of Atlantic trade require a rethink of embedded ideas. The Catalan Atlas speaks of networks and pathways of connection that have been covered over by the dust of time. The idea of Jewish mapmakers from the Balearic Islands having connections in distant Mali startles, just as, fifteen years ago, walking in the backyard of a house in Assomada, in the highlands of the largest Cape Verdean island of Santiago, I was startled to come across a Jewish tombstone inscribed in Hebrew – testament to a more recent movement and migration from Morocco to these African Atlantic islands in the nineteenth century. It turns out that, far from matching the Eurocentric stereotype of being static and responsive to external pressures, West African history embodies constant change, innovation and reciprocal influence with the outside world.

SAHELIAN EMPIRES AND THE GOLD TRADE

The keystone of these early connections was the gold trade. Why were so many North African traders willing to risk their lives in crossing the harsh desert, if not in search of 'the golden country'? It is not only in a European map such as the Catalan Atlas that the place of gold in such distant West African history is clear. The oral history transmitted even in the past twenty years in the Casamance region of southern Senegal describes how the King of the Bainunk people – themselves heavily connected to the Mande peoples, who founded the Mali Empire – always sat on a golden chair. Gold offered rulers masks of power, which they adopted very readily long before the era of 'European discoveries'.

In West Africa, historical memories speak to the importance of gold in distant history, attributing the birth of the Empire of Mali to gold: 'three measures of gold' (saba samun in Maninka), as some versions of the epic oral narrative of the life of Sunjata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire (fl. 1235), recount it. In the version of the epic recounted by the oral historian Lansiné Diabaté of Kela in present-day Mali, it is possession of the saba samun that enshrines power in the hands of Sunjata:

At this moment, Sunjata was in the bush. O tuma, Magan Sunjara waaden gwonyan na
He explained himself. K' i dantige a la
He said, A k' i dantige
'Your older brother has sent me.' k'i k?r? na a bila
Tali Mansa Konkon said, Tali Mansa Konkon ka
'Mansa Dankaran Tuman has sent me.' Mansa Dankaran Tuman na a bila
He said, 'I have come to see you. Ko n ka na ka na i magwe,
Tali Mansa Konkon Tali Mansa Konkon
and his younger brother are at war. K'a n'a dogo kelelen,
He asks you to take these three measures of gold k' ika wariya saba samun nin mina
and to cast the power on to him; and if the power stays k'ai ka sigi fili, koni sigi tor'a la
with him,
you kill him, k'i k'a faga,
and you seize these three measures of gold.' ka warinya saba samun ta

This is a representative oral narrative from this part of West Africa. It is elliptical, resonant, historical storytelling at its best: Sunjata Keita is in the bush, a hunter; he does not intend to become a famous ruler known throughout the world. But, when the opportunity comes, he must seize it, and the three measures of gold with it, to accede to the throne of power. The truth of the narrative lies in its symbolism and poetry, not in the 'facts' it contains. What is really at stake here may be the transition of West African kingdoms from those led by blacksmiths and their mystical powers to cavalry-led empires of warrior aristocrats.

Gold, therefore, mattered hugely both to Africans and to Europeans. But, when it comes to the gold trade, West African and European sources do not entirely match up. European expansion is often seen as the trigger for modern history. In the fifteenth century, the place of gold was central to the expansion project and the European image of Africa as the 'golden country', as, indeed, the Catalan Atlas suggests, with its depiction of the gold nugget held by Mansa Musa front and centre. In the 1490s, João II, King of Portugal, became known to Italian contemporaries as il rei d'oro, or 'the Golden King', because of his access to West African gold markets. The desperation of Europeans to trade in Africa was reflected in the journeys of figures such as Antonio Malfante, a Genoese trader who arrived in Tuwat around 1471 and described a thriving commercial centre marked by pragmatic commercial protectionism. The traders of Tuwat would perform no transaction without a commission of 100 per cent, and, when Malfante asked his North African guide where the gold came from, he received the reply that he had spent fourteen years travelling in these countries without ever finding out, which showed just how jealously the gold producers and trading middlemen protected their commercial advantage.

But why assume that it is European expansion from which modern history begins? The causes of these processes should be located in an earlier period. The reason that European traders such as Malfante were so eager to locate the source of West African gold was that for several centuries West African gold producers had provided the gold that financed the expansion of Mediterranean economies. Ever since around 1000 CE, the gold of Christian Europe and the Muslim world had come largely from West Africa, and it was the growth in production there that produced the ready-cash economy. The pilgrimage of Mansa Musa to Mecca, via Cairo, triggered a boom of gold production in the forests of the Gold Coast in which technologies pioneered by Akan peoples were crucial. An expanding gold trade in the late fourteenth century (evidenced in maps such as Cresques's) led to the consolidation of important new states in West Africa in the fifteenth century, such as Kano in northern Nigeria and Mossi in Burkina Faso. The Empire of Mali was then supplanted by Songhay. Instead of European actions shaping the emergence of a globalized world, Portuguese voyages into the Atlantic were in many ways a response to processes that had already begun in West Africa.

Where historical evidence from West Africa makes plain the place of long-distance trade in gold, in traditional European historical narratives it was the Portuguese 'voyages of discovery' along the Atlantic African coast in the fifteenth century that first brought West African communities into contact with global influences. Yet, as we have seen already, by the time that Mansa Musa made his pilgrimage to Mecca in the early fourteenth century, there was already a very long tradition of reciprocal influences. When the Portuguese arrived on the West African coast in the 1440s, therefore, the societies that they found had emerged from many centuries of trade and cross-cultural exchange with North African traders, scholars and craftspeople. The mixed urban cultures that had emerged in towns like Timbuktu, Kantora, Oualata and Gao were in many ways early harbingers of modernity.

Yet was it really the case that long-distance trade promoted urban growth and political complexity? There has often been a reluctance among historians of Africa to accept this, since it seems to suggest that social and material transformation came from outside – that Africans could not be builders of civilizations and their infrastructures. The archaeological evidence is, however, fairly clear that pre-contact cities such as Jenne-jenò and (further south) Mbanza Kongo appeared at the intersection of trade routes. An important context is to recall that trade was a driver for urbanization not only in Africa, but also in European cities such as Lisbon, London and Seville, all of which grew rapidly along with the rise of long-distance trade. Thus, urban growth everywhere – and not only in Africa – was dependent on influences from, and connections to, the outside world.

In fact, in West Africa itself, the narrative of how fifteenth-century kingdoms grew alongside the gold trade retains resonance. In Lansiné Diabaté's rendering of the Sunjata epic, it is through Sunjata Keita's control of the gold trade that he can then become the founder of a great kingdom, the originator, the one of whom account must be given even over seven centuries later. Sunjata Keita is:

He who gives form to the village Duguyoro
He who gives form to the village chief Dugutigiyoro
He who gives form to that which is inherited Kinyeyoro
He who gives form to he who inherits. Kinyetigiyoro.

These transformations are fundamental to understanding the relationship between West African history and the world economy since the rise of capitalism. But it is worth noting that, beyond West Africa, the consequences were equally profound. As Akan gold miners in the forests of the Gold Coast dug deeper into their mineral seams, and the caravans brought ever more gold across the Sahara to the north, more money was washing around in the cities of Algiers, Cairo and Tunis. This led to the transition from a credit economy to a bullion economy, which, with the growing valorization of coinage, set the terms for what would happen after the Spanish opening of silver mines in the New World. At the time, the expansion of gold production most clearly assisted the Ottoman Empire. In 1453, the Ottomans seized Constantinople, and Christendom's Eastern capital fell. Ottoman strength grew even further in the early sixteenth century, as Cairo also fell to them in 1517.

The explorations of the Portuguese and Italian adventurers in West Africa in the fifteenth century thus also rose out of a realization that it was vital for European traders to gain access to West Africa's gold supplies if they were going to withstand Ottoman expansionism. Like many empires in world history, the rise of the Portuguese Empire began as a kind of lashing out in response to a growing external threat. The existing dependence of the Iberians on this earlier gold trade emerges in numerous small, telling details: especially the derivation of the Spanish word for 'gold coin' from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries – maravedí – from the Sahelian Al-Murabitun coin minted by the Almoravid kingdoms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and known in Iberia through this trade from West Africa.

The commercial exchange between West Africa and Europe, when it began, was thus grounded in this currency trade. And it would be the inequalities that characterized this exchange of value that would come to be integral to the larger economic relationship between West Africa and the West. Mansa Musa wasn't just rich: according to an estimate in Time business magazine in July 2015, he was the richest person in world history, when the relative power of his wealth is compared with that of competitors across all time periods. And yet today, Mali, like many of its neighbours, is one of the poorest countries on earth.