The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Modern researchers, endeavouring to estimate the scale of the trans-Saharan trade in the nine centuries before 1500, calculate that the level in the seventh century stood at about 1,000 slaves a year and that by the fifteenth century it had reached about 5,000 a year. This meant that the total number of slaves taken across the desert in that period was more than four million.

  Land of Zanj

  9

  ZANJ

  The Land of Zanj on the east coast of Africa was a familiar destination for Arab and Persian sea captains travelling the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. A narrow strip of coastal territory and offshore islands extending for more than 1,500 miles, Zanj was renowned for its valuable trade items of ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell, leopard skins, rock crystal, mangrove poles, slaves and, most notably, gold dust shipped from ‘the Land of Sofala’ far to the south. Merchant vessels from southern Arabia and the Persian Gulf set sail during the north-east monsoon season from November until March and returned home when the winds changed to the south-west from April. In The Thousand and One Nights, a ninth-century collection of Persian stories, Sindbad the Sailor recounts his adventures travelling in what was the Sea of Zanj. ‘Aided by a favourable wind, we voyaged for many days and nights from port to port, and from island to island, selling and bartering our goods, and haggling with merchants and officials wherever we cast anchor.’ But the passage to Zanj was always full of hazards. A Baghdad geographer, Abdul Hasan Ali al-Masudi, visited Zanj twice in the tenth century. ‘I have sailed on many seas,’ he wrote, ‘but I do not know of one more dangerous than that of Zanj.’ He listed the captains with whom had he had sailed, all of whom had been drowned, he said.

  Zanj was the homeland of Bantu-speaking coastal peoples who formed an integral part of the commercial world of the Indian Ocean, controlling trade between the African interior and ports on the coast. Arab merchants gave it its name, meaning ‘Land of the Blacks’, an east African equivalent to the Sudanic Bilad as-Sudan. Some Arabs settled there and intermarried, adding to the trading culture. A merchant class emerged as the ruling elite of an archipelago of independent coastal towns and islands – Mogadishu, Shanga, Manda, Malindi, Mombasa, Pemba, Zanzibar, Kilwa Kisiwani, and Sofala, a port south of the Zambezi River – which traded with each other and with visiting sea captains from Arabia and Persia. Through international trade, the towns became increasingly prosperous. The merchant elite used their wealth to construct grand houses built from coral stone and to purchase luxury items – pottery, glass, porcelain, cloth, beads and hardware such as cooking pots and brass oil-lamps – imported from Arabia, Persia and India and from producers as far distant as China and Indonesia. Among the plants introduced to the coast from south-east Asia was the banana, which became a staple food in many parts of Africa.

  Over several centuries, the peoples of Zanj developed a distinctive character. They became known as Swahili – ‘the people of the coast’ – a name taken from the Arabic word used for shore: sahel. Their language, KiSwahili, with roots that could be traced back to the Niger-Congo family, became the lingua franca of the coast, used by trading networks across the region. They were also increasingly influenced by the southward flow of Islam, conveyed by Arab traders. The first evidence of Islam comes from the remains of a rudimentary mosque built in the eighth century at Shanga, a settlement in the Lamu Archipelago on the northern coast of Kenya. Ninth-century silver coins exhumed at Shanga bear inscriptions of local Muslim rulers. During the eleventh century, the spread of Islam gathered momentum: at least eight coastal settlements built stone mosques at this time. The form that Islam took, however, incorporated many local traditions. Muslim families sometimes took part in rituals meant to control pepo – local spirits thought to bring illness and other manifestations of personal misfortune. Nevertheless, Islam, as adapted to ‘African’ conditions, became a central feature of Swahili society and identity.

  By the fourteenth century, some forty settlements in Zanj had developed into trading centres. The most prosperous of them was Kilwa Kisiwani, an offshore island about 200 miles south of Zanzibar. Once a fishing village, it lay at the southernmost limit for dhows from southern Arabia and the Persian Gulf wanting to return home in a single season of sailing once monsoon winds changed to the southwest. Further south, the monsoon winds diminished so dhows sailing beyond Cape Delgado risked a whole year’s delay in making their return. Kilwa thus served as a key port of transshipment dominating traffic from ports further south along the coast, principally Sofala, a trading post south of the Zambezi River, which handled gold shipments from the African interior. The trade in gold turned Kilwa Kisiwani into a major entrepôt.

  In the fourteenth century, Kilwa came under the control of the Mahdali clan, immigrant families from the Yemen and the Hadhramaut, who built a two-storey palace, a grand mosque with vaults and cupolas, public baths, a slave barracoon and two harbours to accommodate large ocean-going dhows. Slaves from Zanj were shipped to Arabia and the Persian Gulf – where they were known as zanj – to serve as labourers, soldiers and concubines. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited Kilwa in 1331, described it as ‘a great coastal city’. Most of the population, he noted, were Zanj, ‘extremely black’, with scarification marks on their faces. The sultan of Kilwa, he said, was ‘much given’ to raiding Zanj territory in search of slaves and booty but was generous in distributing a percentage of the spoils to visitors.

  Other visitors to Zanj came from China. Chinese merchant fleets arrived on the African coast during a series of expeditions made in the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433. Official relations were established between the Ming court in Beijing and officials in Mogadishu, Malindi, Mombasa and Kilwa. Envoys from Malindi arrived in Beijing in 1415 with a variety of gifts for the emperor, including a giraffe, which was given an enthusiastic reception.

  Many legends were told about the goldfields of the African interior from where supplies of gold dust arrived on the coast of Zanj. They endured for centuries and eventually were to have a dramatic impact on the fate of the highland peoples of southern Africa. Portuguese sailors venturing along the coast in the fifteenth century believed that the gold dust they saw loaded on Arab dhows at Sofala must have come from the land of Ophir, a city mentioned in the Bible as the place from which King Solomon’s ships brought back gold. Rumours of the fabulous wealth of Ophir gathered momentum in the nineteenth century. A best-selling novel by Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1885, gave popular status to the idea of an unexplored region north of the Limpopo River holding vast mineral riches.

  The riches were real enough. On the highland plateau between the Limpopo and the Zambezi lay a broad belt of gold ore contained in veins in quartz rocks close to the surface. Alluvial gold was also to be found in rivers running through the gold belt. Local groups organised mining as a communal activity in winter months to supplement farming, panning for gold in rivers and digging into surface rocks with picks; they lit fires to crack and loosen the quartz and built shafts, some descending as far as 80 feet or more below ground. The veins of gold they found, ranging from a few inches to four feet thick, were heavily fractured and fissured, difficult to follow, but spread over a wide area.

  The gold trade emanated initially from a hilltop settlement at Mapungubwe, the capital of a cattle-owning chiefdom based in the Limpopo Valley. The rulers of Mapungubwe began to channel gold and ivory to Swahili traders on the coast in the twelfth century in exchange for glass beads, porcelain and cloth. Gold was also melted to make jewellery and ornamentation for the local elite. Ruling dignitaries were buried wearing necklaces of gold beads with golden dishes and wooden sculptures sheathed in gold beside them.

  In the thirteenth century, Mapungubwe’s role was overtaken by the emergence of southern Africa’s first large territorial state centred on its capital at Great Zimbabwe. Located in the upper watershed of the Sabi River, between the mining areas of the highland plateau and the coast at Sofala, Great Zimbabwe prospered both fro
m its cattle culture and its pivotal position in the gold trade, gaining hegemony over a large number of surrounding Shona-speaking chiefdoms.

  To demonstrate their power, the rulers of Zimbabwe – a name derived from a chiShona term meaning ‘houses of stone’ – constructed a series of massive stone enclosures. Using local granite that split easily into building blocks, they started with a hilltop structure, filling gaps between boulders with rough drystone walls and levelling parts of the hillside to make terraces for living quarters. The skills of Zimbabwe’s masons steadily improved. In the fourteenth century, they began work in the valley below on a ‘Great Enclosure’ – the site of a king’s palace. Stone blocks were carefully matched and laid in courses that ran regularly and horizontally for considerable distances. Each course was stepped slightly back from the one below so that the walls sloped gradually backward in an elegant curve. In its final, magnificent form, the outer wall of the Great Enclosure measured 17 feet thick in places at the base, reached 35 feet high and extended for 830 feet. Inside, the area was divided into a number of smaller stone-walled enclosures. Outside stood the stone dwellings of the king’s court: relatives, officials and priests.

  The rest of the settlement, covering about a hundred acres, housed farmers, artisans and craftsmen, living in wattle-and-daub huts packed tightly together. Great Zimbabwe served not only as a seat of political power but as a centre of industry, producing pottery, iron hoes, ornaments of copper, bronze and gold and soapstone carvings of mysterious creatures, part bird, part beast. In its heyday in the fifteenth century, as many as 18,000 people lived there.

  The practice of building stone-walled enclosures spread across the highland plateau, standing like colonial outposts radiating out from a metropolis. But Great Zimbabwe itself fell into decline in the fifteenth century, only 200 years after it was founded, in part because environmental degradation meant it could no longer sustain such a large population. In its place, a new Shona state developed further north, nearer the Zambezi, led by a succession of kings known as Munha Mutapa. The gold trade remained a vital enterprise. Hundreds of new reefs were opened to meet the demand from the coast. The legend of Ophir grew ever stronger.

  In north-east Africa, the steady advance of Islam left Christian communities in the highlands of Abyssinia increasingly isolated and inward-looking. Coastal trade along the Red Sea, once their lifeline to the eastern Mediterranean, was now controlled largely by Muslim merchants. Arab settlers in the lowlands began converting to Islam local Cushitic tribesmen – Saho, Afar and Somali – and erecting Muslim states bent on expansion. In the north-west, the Christian kingdoms of Nubia succumbed to Arab expansion. Groups of nomadic Arabs infiltrated from the deserts of southern Egypt, dispossessing and enslaving Nubian farmers. The historian Ibn Khaldun, who was living in Cairo at the time, recorded:

  Clans of the Juhayna Arabs spread over their country and settled in it. They assumed power and filled the land with rapine and disorder. At first the kings of Nubia tried to repulse them by force, but they failed. So they changed their tactics and tried to win them by offering their daughters in marriage . . . So their kingdom fell to pieces and their country was inherited by nomad Arabs.

  Surrounded by adversaries, the rulers of Abyssinia made determined efforts to fortify their Christian identity. In the twelfth century, kings of the Zagwe dynasty, based at the monastic centre at Roha in the mountains of Lasta, began construction of eleven churches, hewed from solid bedrock, as part of a plan to create a new Jerusalem. The churches were located on either side of a stream known as the Jordan and near a hill named Calvary. The complex took its final form in the thirteenth century during the reign of Lalibela, the most renowned of the Zagwe kings, after whom their new capital was named.

  When the Zagwe dynasty was overthrown in 1290 by an Amharic clan claiming descent from the kings of Aksum, Christian clerics sought to bolster the authority of the monarchy by compiling an epic account of its historic origins, asserting that Christian Abyssinia was a direct successor to Israel as a nation chosen by God. According to the Kebra Negast or the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’, Abyssinia’s monarchs were the descendants of a union between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba which took place in Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. Hearing of Solomon’s great wisdom, Queen Makeda had travelled to Jerusalem, accompanied by a large retinue and a camel caravan loaded with gifts of gold, precious stones and spices. A description of their meeting is given in the Old Testament: 1 Kings Chapter 10.

  . . . And when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart.

  And Solomon told her all her questions; there was not anything hid from the king which he told her not . . .

  And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty.

  According to the Kebra Negast, Makeda was enthralled by Solomon’s display of knowledge and declared: ‘From this moment I will not worship the sun but will worship the Creator of the sun, the God of Israel.’ The night before she began her journey home, Solomon seduced her. Their son, Menelik, was born while she was returning to Sheba. At the age of twenty-two, Menelik travelled to Jerusalem, where he was acknowledged by Solomon as his son and crowned king. On leaving Jerusalem for Aksum, Menelik took with him the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred object of Old Testament times, which contained the tablets of stone recording the Ten Commandments. Two thousand years later, according to the Kebra Negast, the Ark was still being held in a sanctuary in Aksum. The legend continues to this day.

  Written in Ge’ez, the Kebra Negast drew on a number of ancient accounts circulating in Abyssinia of the links that once existed between the old kingdom of Aksum and the southern Arabian land of Saba or Sheba. The purpose of the authors was to provide Abyssinia’s kings with a long line of legitimacy and a manifestation of divine favour. The Kebra Negast came to be regarded as a sacred text and enjoyed wide popularity. The story of Solomon, Sheba and Menelik was passed by storytellers from one generation to the next and represented in paintings. Replicas of the Ark known as tabots became familiar items in church life and were carried in procession at festival time.

  Reports of a Christian monarchy besieged by Muslim and pagan adversaries gained wide circulation in Europe. The location of ‘the kingdom of Prester John’, as it was known from the twelfth century, was originally said to be in central Asia or India. But during the fourteenth century, Africa became the focus of attention. In 1306, a priest in Genoa, Giovanni da Carignano, interviewed a group of thirty Abyssinian clerics returning home from visits to Avignon and Rome and recorded that the patriarch of their church was named ‘Prester John’. Prester John became the name by which Europeans knew of the kings of Abyssinia. In 1400, King Henry IV of England sent a letter addressed to the ‘the king of Abyssinia, Prester John’. But the Abyssinians themselves had never used the name. It was a European myth. When delegates from Abyssinia attended the Council of Florence in 1441, they were perplexed when council prelates insisted on referring to their monarch as Prester John. Despite their admonitions, the name of Prester John continued to resonate across Europe and inspired the idea that he might be persuaded to join in a crusade against Islam.

  PART III

  West Africa

  10

  A CHAIN OF CROSSES

  In 1415, a Portuguese armada, carrying the largest army ever assembled by a Portuguese king, crossed the Mediterranean on a new crusade against Islam, aiming to capture the fortress town of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast. On board was Prince Henry, the ambitious 21-year-old son of King João I, determined to make his mark as a crusader and hoping that the capture of Ceuta would prove to be only the start of Portuguese military expansion in Africa.

  Ceuta was a valuable prize. It was one of the strongest fortresses in the Mediterranean, guarding its western approaches; it was a major commercial port, well known for its wheat exports; and it was one of the northern terminals of the tran
s-Saharan caravan trade routes bringing gold, ivory and pepper across the desert from the Muslim kingdoms of the Sahel. When Ceuta fell to the Portuguese in a single day in August 1415, its capture was greeted in Europe as a great triumph. Portuguese envoys proclaimed the town to be the ‘gateway and key to all Africa’. From wealthy traders captured at Ceuta, the Portuguese learned about the sources of gold shipments crossing the Sahara. Some traders spoke of a ‘River of Gold’ far to the south flowing into the Atlantic.

  But Ceuta remained no more than an isolated enclave on the north African coast, surrounded by Muslim adversaries and dependent on Portugal for supplies. The gold trade lay beyond reach. Henry’s attentions turned to other ventures in the Atlantic, to the Madeira Islands, the Canary Islands and the Azores. As Portugal’s sea power increased, however, he resolved to find a sea route to the goldfields of black Africa.

  Hitherto, sailors had ventured no further south along the Atlantic coast of Africa than Cape Bojador, a barren coastal landmark 130 miles further south than the Canary Islands, notorious for its fogs and heavy surf. The prevailing wind and current there, running from the north, made return journeys hazardous. Several ships probing southwards had never returned. Beyond the cape lay what medieval geographers knew as the ‘Torrid Zone’ – a treacherous sea and an inhospitable coastline stretching for hundreds of miles into the unknown. In Arabic, Cape Bojador was known as Bon Khatar: ‘Father of Danger’.

  Under Henry’s direction, Portugal pioneered major advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The Portuguese fleet was equipped with newly designed caravels, which were highly manoeuvrable and ideally suited for reconnaissance along unknown coasts.