by Brian Fagan
The Mande (the term refers to a language common to many groups) are descended from Saharan peoples, and settled in the Sahel during a series of dry spells that affected the region about two thousand years ago, perhaps earlier. Today, Mande speakers flourish over a large area of West Africa from Gambia to Côte d’Ivoire. They were millet farmers and cattle herders, also traders, who exchanged copper, salt, and semiprecious stones with contacts in the desert. As they moved southward, many of them colonized the fertile basins of the Niger River.
Today, the annual flood inundates some 21,000 square miles (55,000 square kilometers) of swamps and lakes, but covered a much larger area at wetter times in the past.16 The floodplain environment is diverse, unpredictable, and made up of radically different landforms and soils packed closely together. The Mande who live there are the Bozo, who are fisherfolk, and the Marka, who cultivate many varieties of African rice (Oryza glaberrima). The Bozo are constantly on the move, their lives dictated by the breeding cycles of both small fish and the enormous Nile perch. Sometimes as many as 150 canoes will gather around artificial barrages where they harvest enormous catches. The Marka help with the major fish runs. In return, the Bozo assist the Marka, for the rice harvest comes during high flood, when fishing is poor.
The Marka, farmers, traders, artists, and musicians, farm in a remarkably stressful environment. A sudden flood and torrential rains can wipe out a year’s hard work in a week. Early or late floods can leave villages desolate. Irregular rainfall at the beginning of the rainy season, or arid years, play havoc with newly prepared fields, quite apart from the depredations of rice-eating birds and rodents. The Marka combat these uncertainties by growing several varieties of rice. But, above all, their success depends on a reservoir of weather-forecasting knowledge acquired over many generations. Whereas the unique qualities of the camel gave caravan leaders the ability to ride climatic punches, the people of the Niger basin adapted their society to their hostile and unpredictable environment with a brilliant combination of social engineering and ritual observance.
The societies that flourished in the middle Niger a thousand years ago thrived on constant change in a place where different cultures lived in an exceptionally heterogeneous environment. They thrived not only by cultivating a wide variety of crops, but also by making extensive use of social memory. Roderick McIntosh calls the middle Niger basin a “symbolic reservoir,” a place where a shared body of social values that originated in deep time survived over thousands of years to define history and society. This was not a world where highly centralized, authoritarian kingdoms flourished, with all power flowing to the center, as once was the case in ancient Mesopotamia with its competing city-states. There was no hierarchy of power, as there was among the ancient Maya or in medieval Europe. Here, powerful kin groups and people engaged in activities of all kinds, living together under a system of unspoken checks and balances that gave everyone considerable autonomy, mutual support, and enhanced chances of survival in the unpredictable desert-margin climate.
ONE OF AFRICA’S longest-inhabited archaeological sites provides a telling portrait of the developing Mande world. The ancient mound known as Jenne-jeno lies 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) south of the modern town of Jenne in the upper Niger basin.17 The site lies at a strategic location near basins where one could grow climatically tolerant Oryza glaberrima, close to pastureland and open plains, with access by boat to the Niger. Jenne-jeno probably came into being as the drying Sahara expelled people to its margins after 300 B.C. People continued to live there for over sixteen hundred years, at a location that remained dry even in the highest flood years. Few places anywhere, let alone in West Africa, have such a long history. The settlement expanded vertically and horizontally, from about 49 acres (20 hectares) in A.D. 300 to nearly double that size three centuries later. Jenne-jeno’s people lived off agriculture, hunting, plant gathering, and fishing; this generalized subsistence economy changed little over the centuries despite major population increases and rapidly changing climatic conditions. Through the town’s long history, its inhabitants resolutely maintained a highly diverse economy, exploiting numerous microenvironments rather than seeking to increase food supplies with irrigation works or raised fields, as was the case with the Maya, for example.
At one point in Jenne-jeno’s later history, no fewer than sixty-nine settlements lay within 2.4 miles (4 kilometers) of the main settlement. But why did the people here and elsewhere choose to live in clusters of villages instead of in densely inhabited cities like those of the Islamic world? The reason was climatic. The Mande lived with a constant backdrop of sudden, potentially disastrous climate change and they engineered their society around this reality.
For centuries, so excavations tell us, the Jenne-jeno people maintained a lifeway that involved agriculture, fishing, gathering, and moving within the local environment when necessary. But they were far from being stationary pawns affected by short-term climatic cycles. McIntosh believes the Mande were far more proactive, combating unpredictability by linking together farmers and specialized artisans such as metal-smiths into a generalized economy. People lived at separate, clustered locations, linked by ties of kin as well as by powerful myths and legends that provided rationales for decision making. No charismatic leaders, no cities or powerful elites, no armies to enforce law and order held this system together. Instead a “weather machine” of belief and ritual provided a framework for predicting rainfall and drought.18 Social memory, carefully preserved by select people, is the core of the Mande weather machine.
HOW CAN WE know how ancient communities responded to climate change, to perceived changes in their environment? We cannot reconstruct ancient minds. But we can examine Mande social memory, which couples their existence to the real world in complex ways. People surely had social memory of climate change, of catastrophic droughts and floods, perhaps, like today, associated in their minds with the names of individuals who were victims of the disaster and even named after them, or with a group of people, such as ironworkers, who are perceived to have occult powers. They preserve generations of knowledge about climatic shifts and environmental conditions, and often predict impending changes and offer strategies to combat them. At issue here is the question of authority to make decisions for the future, where climatic and other hazards wait unseen. Who can handle such matters? Who can be trusted not to abuse the dangerous knowledge of climate change and appropriate social responses for personal gain? In Mande society, climatic prediction is not the disinterested, scientific forecast of a climatologist. Every predictor also has responsibilities in the domain of social action, so his or her predictions are a critical link between climate change in the objective world and the perceived world on which people are going to act.
The dynamics behind the Mande weather machine are based on a set of familiar cultural values enshrined in many layers of legends and symbols. Numerous interest groups make up Mande society, all negotiating with one another constantly over land and the events of history, as they have done for centuries. The result is a powerful landscape of what one might call social memory, defined both by oral traditions and by recollections of climatic and other events. The fluid adaptability of their society has always depended on this familiar and ever-changing social landscape. The Mande had to be watchful and flexible in their responses to the very complex, variable, and unpredictable Sahel climate. Violent shifts from ample rainfall to drought, or modes in between, were part of the ecological and social crises that shaped core values and transformed authority. This is why the people of Jenne-jeno and other Mande towns lived in clusters, in a heterarchical society that created flexible and changing social landscapes more responsive to climate change than highly centralized contemporary societies such as the ancient Maya or the Chimu of northern coastal Peru.
The men and women who exercised the greatest influence in Mande society were members of secret societies. The komo remains a pervasive form of secret society, led by the komotigi, today often a blacksmi
th. The original secret societies were for hunters, long before metallurgy arrived in the Niger basin. A komotigi had the ability to see into the future; he was a curer and a protector against malevolent spells. An astrologer and weather forecaster, he studied the heavens and the most visible celestial bodies. A komotigi was expert in the behavior of animals and plants, which he used to predict whether rain would come when needed at planting time. The komo persists, as do extremely secretive hunters’ societies. Today, there are at least seven major secret societies in the middle Niger.
The earliest specialists in Mande country were hunters with occult powers and social authority. From very ancient times, such individuals traveled to special places that were imbued with spirits, and as such were powerful and dangerous. Here they harvested power, the ability to control weather and other aspects of life. Over two thousand years ago, with the coming of agriculture and ironworking, metalsmiths became important nyama holders. (Nyama can be loosely defined as the earth’s force.) The smiths were members of the first secret societies, the central actors in centuries of Mande resistance to hierarchy and centralization, armed with a symbolic and mythic repertoire that confronted environmental and social stresses. For centuries, Mande secret societies dispersed knowledge about the landscape over enormous areas.
The great Mande folk heroes harvested the power of nyama to navigate safely through a dangerous world. For instance, the smith-sorcerer Fakoli undertook quests to acquire the medicine items such as birds’ and snakes’ heads that hang from his sorcerer’s bonnet. Fakoli’s quest was also a knowledge journey, which took him on an expedition through a spiritual and symbolic landscape. Another mythic hero, Fanta Maa, a Bozo culture hero, learned how to become a proficient hunter while still in his infancy. Under threat of extinction, the animals came together and selected a gazelle to take the form of a young woman and seduce Fanta Maa, then lure him into the wilderness and to his death. But Fanta Maa used hunters’ paraphernalia to unravel the plot.
Nyama is malign, if controlled, energy that flows through all animate and inanimate beings. As the Mande perceived climate change, it was because of perturbations in nyama within the landscape. Generations of understanding how nyama perturbations affect the environment allowed Mande heroes and komotigi to predict climate change. The most powerful among them had the spiritual authority to manipulate the forces that bring on rains or drought—or to kill someone at a distance with merely a thought. Thus, charismatic individuals moved through a symbolic landscape in which they harvested power, authority, and knowledge. Hunters moved into the wilderness on tours of spiritually powerful locations. There they killed spirit animals. The killing released vast amounts of nyama that only the best hunters could control, and ensured well-watered lands for stressed communities.
Hunting lodges are still revered places where the accumulated climatic lore of generations, about resources within local areas, resides. Even famous hunters still go to such lodges to acquire more and increasingly obscure knowledge. Underground watercourses may also mark former north–south migration routes used in better-watered times. To Mande farmers, the landscape was, and still is, a catalog of names and places, a predictor of human occupations and climatic shifts that was very successful in combating drought and flood over many centuries.
The Mande weather machine worked well. By A.D. 800 to 900, Jenne-jeno was 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) long, with, by conservative estimate, as many as 27,000 people living in the town and in the sixty-nine satellite communities within a 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) radius. Between A.D. 300 and 700, local rainfall was about 20 percent higher than that between 1930 and 1960. After 1000, the climate was much more volatile and the town went into decline. The people abandoned low-lying rice-growing regions, then higher and lighter floodplain soils, and switched from rice to drought-resistant millet, displacements caused in part by changes in the river flood regime, at a time when drier conditions were setting in. In nearby Méma, large, clustered mounds near channels and water-filled depressions give way to smaller, more isolated settlements, often on sand dunes. Everywhere in the middle Niger, communities large and small adapted to new circumstances, not necessarily without suffering, but just as their ancestors had.
A Mande hunter with his snake avatar.
THIS, THEN, WAS the cultural environment from which Ghana emerged around A.D. 700, at the end of a period of relative climatic stability. Mande oral traditions tell of a great hero, Dinga, grandfather of the Ghanaian chiefs, a brilliant hunter, an extractor of nyama. Ancient tales describe his movements across the landscape, the power places where he triumphed over guardian and knowledge animals. Dinga settled at Jenne for twenty-seven years and took a wife, but had no children. Perhaps this was a time of forging solid alliances with Jenne, which was not under Ghanaian rule, but always friendly to its neighbor. Dinga moved on and settled to the northwest, vanquished a female protector spirit at Dalangoumbé, and patched together the kingdom of Ghana, probably through a long process of alliance building, of constructing agglomerations of social groups. The same thing happened again and again in the Sahel, the creation of loosely consolidated groups of chiefdoms that paid tribute to the core. Thus it was that the chief of Ghana was able to tax the trade in gold and other commodities from the south. At the same time, he maintained a standing cavalry to deal with hostile camel nomads and uncooperative chiefs.
Geographer al-Bakri’s descriptions of Ghana appear during a few centuries of stable and relatively favorable climate. The Ghana he described was a fluid kingdom, marked by its heterogeneous organization and by its flexibility, forged partly by conquest but more importantly by the constant checks and balances that had always been a part of Mande existence. Ghana indeed possessed great wealth, but its greatest riches came not from gold and material things, but from the rich practices and traditions of its native culture that enabled its members to thrive in a climate of pitiless and violent extremes.
At the end of his life, the traditions tell us, Dinga passed on his accumulated nyama to his son, the water snake Bida, twin of the Ghanaian founder chief Diabé Sissé. Bida agreed to provide sufficient rain and gold from Bambuk, several days to the southwest, if he was given the kingdom’s most beautiful virgin each year. One year, the virgin’s suitor killed the snake. The lopped-off head bounced seven times and landed in gold-rich Buré, much closer to Mali. Gold production moved away from Bambuk and toward Mali. Seven years of drought and famine devastated Ghana. The kingdom fell apart. Once the spirit animal died, malevolent nyama intervened. It was no coincidence that Ghana ran into problems with its desert neighbors just as the period of relative climatic stability ended.
Oral traditions are history filtered through fickle human memory. Perhaps the tale of Bida’s demise and the droughts that followed constitute a dim recollection of violent climatic swings, perhaps an epochal drought that caused an always flexible kingdom to evaporate. At a time of rising Muslim influence and conquest, Ghana remained pagan until 1076, when the Almoravid chieftain Abu Bakr captured Koumbi and imposed Islam on its inhabitants.19 A century and a half later, in the east, the kingdom of Mali rose to prominence, the golden empire made world famous by Mansa Musa’s hajj in 1324.
CHAPTER 5
Inuit and Qadlunaat
They made their ship ready and put out to sea. The first landfall they made was the country that Bjarni had sighted last. They sailed right up to the shore and cast anchor, then lowered a boat and landed. There was no grass to be seen, and the hinterland was covered with great glaciers, and between glaciers and shore the land was like one great slab of rock. It seemed to them a worthless country.
—Graenlendinga Saga (twelfth century)1
A.D. 1000. WISPS OF FOG HOVER OVER the wave tops of the Davis Strait west of Greenland in a delicate tracery against the surrounding gloom. The bearded Norse skipper peers into the gray, oblivious to the pervasive chill. His crew huddles in their thick cloaks, except for the helmsman manning the great steering oar at the stern. Two young men
fill the time by sharpening their iron swords, rubbing fat over the shiny surfaces to prevent rust. The square sail creaks and groans as the boat rises and falls in the ocean swell, the flexible hull twisting effortlessly with the waves. The ship sails slowly, a tiny island in a featureless wilderness of heaving waves and murk. A chill north wind whispers through the gloom, just giving steerageway, nothing more. The young crewmen have been through uncertain situations before—endless waiting hove to in a gale, days of drifting aimlessly in a calm far from land.
The hours pass slowly as the fog thickens, lightens momentarily, then returns. At last, the wind shifts to the east and strengthens. The light air becomes a good sailing breeze. The fog quickly dissipates to reveal a clear, hard horizon and a deep blue sea. The steersman shouts and points ahead. Jagged, snow-covered mountains stand boldly against the now bright sky, highlighted by the late afternoon sun. A collective sigh of relief passes through the ship. If the wind from astern holds, they will reach a sheltered anchorage among the islands to the west the next day.
When the Norsemen reach land, they know they will encounter Inuit hunters, who subsist as they always have off fish and sea mammals.2 They have come in search of walrus ivory, but have only one thing in common with the indigenous inhabitants—iron.
Eurasia and the Sahara may have suffered from drought, but the warm centuries were a boon to those in the Arctic. They brought less severe ice conditions in the far north, and saw a surge in Norse voyaging to the west, to Iceland and beyond. This is the story of how, during the warm centuries, favorable ice conditions in the North Atlantic and in the Canadian Arctic brought two completely different worlds into transitory contact—those of the Norse and of Inuit peoples whose ancestry extended as far west as the Bering Strait.3
