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

by Martin Meredith

  Under Songhay rule, Timbuktu thrived both as a commercial centre and as a place of scholarship and religious teaching. The Sankore mosque of Timbuktu, built in the sixteenth century, played a prominent role in the spread of Islamic learning. Merchants imported a wide range of books and manuscripts from across the desert covering religion, law, literature and science, keeping schools well informed of contemporary thinking; scribes earned a living by copying them. A Moroccan diplomat and traveller, al-Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, who visited the city in about 1510, was favourably impressed, noting the wealth of its ruling class and the importance given to the trade in books. ‘Here are a great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men, bountifully maintained at the king’s cost and charges. And hither are brought divers manuscripts or written books out of Barbarie, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise.’

  His account of Timbuktu and his travels elsewhere in Africa were written in unusual circumstances. In 1518, returning to Morocco from a trip to Alexandria, he was captured by Spanish corsairs off the coast of Tunisia and presented to Pope Leo X as a slave of exceptional ability. The Pope duly freed him, persuaded him to convert to Christianity and gave him a Christian name: Giovanni Leone (John the Lion). Because of his wide experience of travel in northern Africa, he was commissioned to compile a detailed survey. The survey was written in 1526 and published in Italian in 1550, with the author named as Giovan Lioni Africano. In the English translation, entitled A Geographical Historie of Africa and published in 1600, the author’s name became Leo Africanus. As one of the few accounts available about the interior of Africa, it remained a standard work of reference for several centuries, establishing Timbuktu for foreign readers as a place of great wealth and mystery, at the furthest end of the earth.

  The Songhay empire was too valuable a prize for Morocco’s ambitious sultan Ahmad al-Mansur to ignore. In 1590, he dispatched an expeditionary force of 4,000 men, equipped with cannons and muskets, across the Sahara to seize control of Songhay’s trading centres, purporting to act on behalf of the entire Islamic world. ‘The Sudan, being a very rich country and providing enormous revenues, we can now increase the size of the armies of Islam and strengthen the battalions of the faithful,’ he told a state council on the eve of their departure. The expedition’s commander, Judar Pasha, was a blue-eyed Spanish eunuch, captured as an infant and brought up in the royal palace; and his army consisted of an assortment of Moroccan and Turkish cavalrymen, Spanish Muslim musketeers and Christian renegades and captives. A transport corps of 8,000 camels and 1,000 horses was needed to carry tons of ammunition, equipment, food and water across the desert.

  Leaving Marrakesh in November 1590, the Moroccan invaders reached Tondibi, thirty miles north of Gao, in March 1591. The Songhay army met them there with 20,000 men, but they were armed only with spears and swords and proved no match against muskets and cannon. According to one chronicler, ‘Juwadar broke the army of the Askiya in the twinkling of an eye.’ Gao fell first, then Timbuktu, then Jenne. All were plundered for gold and other loot. Thousands of captives were taken and marched north across the desert.

  But the Moroccans failed to extend their control beyond the three cities. Elsewhere, the vast empire that the Songhay controlled began to disintegrate. Subject groups broke loose. The rich province of Jenne was ravaged from end to end by hordes of pagan Bambara. Tuareg raids grew ever bolder. Recording the years of anarchy that followed the Moroccan invasion, the chronicler Abdurrahman as-Sadi wrote in his history of Songhay, Tarikh es-Sudan:

  Security gave place to danger, wealth to poverty, distress and calamities and violence succeeded tranquillity. Everywhere men destroyed each other; in every place and every direction there was plundering, and war spared neither life nor property nor persons. Disorder was general and spread everywhere . . .

  Born in Timbuktu in 1596, as-Sadi was himself an eye-witness to the destructive impact of Moroccan rule. ‘I saw the ruin of learning and its utter collapse,’ he wrote. To quell resistance in Timbuktu, the Moroccans sent leading scholars to Marrakesh in chains. The wealth of Timbuktu, Gao and Jenne was also stripped. Huge quantities of gold dust were shipped across the desert. When Judar Pasha returned to Morocco in 1599, his caravan included thirty camel-loads of gold valued by an English merchant at £600,000.

  Even though further tribute of gold and slaves was exacted year after year, the Songhay venture proved troublesome. In 1618, a new sultan, Moulay Zaydan, decided to abandon it altogether, handing over control of Timbuktu, Gao and Jenne to local Moroccan leaders who formed a self-perpetuating military caste known as the Arma (from the Arabic word arrumah meaning musketeers). But the Arma regime was both brutal and frequently disrupted by internal power struggles. Between 1691 and the end of the regime in 1833, no fewer than 167 pashas succeeded one another. The old trading system of the Middle Niger, built up over five centuries or more, began to break down. By the end of the seventeenth century, the impoverished merchants of Timbuktu were no longer able to support a scholarly community and leading scholars departed for exile. Timbuktu, according to one chronicle, ‘became a body without a soul’.

  In Morocco, the Sadian dynasty eventually collapsed, fragmenting into a hotchpotch of emirates and warlord territories. One of the most notorious was the ‘Republic of Bou Regreg’ set up by slave-trading corsairs at Salé, a port on the Atlantic coast with a commanding position on the Bou Regreg estuary. Many of the corsairs based there were Muslim refugees expelled by Spain in 1610 who took up piracy as a way of exacting revenge on Christendom. They began by attacking European ships, capturing their crews, holding them in underground dungeons in Salé, then selling them at slave auctions to merchants and dealers across the Islamic world. But they soon extended their raids to coastal areas of Spain and Portugal and parts of northern Europe, seizing men, women and children for sale as slaves. Known in England as the Sallee Rovers, they became a common threat to the fishing communities on the south coast. In 1626, Trinity House, a maritime guild, estimated that there were about 1,200 English captives at Salé, mostly taken in the English Channel.

  For much of the seventeenth century, Morocco was engulfed by internal conflicts. But in the 1660s, a young Alaouite sheikh, Moulay Rachid, led a Bedouin army from the eastern plains on a campaign of conquest, captured Fez in 1666 and two years later established sole control of the country. Like the Sadians, Moulay Rashid claimed descent from a shorfa clan that had travelled from Arabia to Morocco in the thirteenth century, settling at the Tafilalet oasis on the desert edge. Moulay Rashid was the first sultan of an Alaouite dynasty which survives to this day. But his own reign lasted only until 1672. Charging on horseback on a wild midnight ride through the gardens of his palace at Marrakesh, he struck the branch of a tree and died.

  He was succeeded by his 26-year-old brother, Moulay Ismail, a man of vaulting ambition and utter ruthlessness. Beset by internecine feuds and insurrections, he resolved to create a slave army of his own, drilled in total obedience. Year after year, he organised massive raids into the south-west Saharan uplands, the western Sahel and the upper Senegal River to collect boys and girls by the thousand. Led in chains to his capital at Meknes, they were given eight years of rigorous training. At the age of ten, boys were inducted into military college, girls were taught domestic skills. At the age of eighteen, boys were drafted into abid regiments, presented with a slave wife and encouraged to breed the next generation of slave soldiers. In 1699, Moulay Ismail expanded his regiments further by ordering the enslavement of all free blacks in Morocco, selected on the basis of their skin colour. His abid army eventually comprised 150,000 slave soldiers, all dedicated to serving him with fierce loyalty. From their ranks came his personal bodyguard, ready to carry out his every command, executing victims without hesitation and striking fear and terror among his courtiers. With this formidable fighting force, he was able to crush internal opponents and to drive out Portuguese and Spanish forces from their outposts on the Atlantic seabo
ard. He also encouraged corsair captains in Salé to continue their raids on European shipping, taking a large percentage of profits from slave auctions.

  Assured of national control, Moulay Ismail devoted decades to building a vast palace complex at Meknes, using European captives as slave labour. Its crenellated perimeter walls ran for miles, encompassing an array of palaces, pavilions, mosques, towers, arches, parade grounds, pleasure gardens and orchards. Its immense gateways were protected by elite units of the black imperial guard. The barracks within housed 10,000 foot soldiers; the stables were the size of a large town. In huge workshops, European slaves cast and smelted the weaponry for Moulay Ismail’s mighty army.

  Infamous for his cruelty and megalomania, Moulay Ismail ruled for fifty-four years. But his system of control worked only for as long as he was alive. He did nothing to prepare for an orderly succession. Upon his death in 1727, Morocco was plagued once more by continuing power struggles. Different factions of his abid army elevated and deposed sultans with bewildering frequency. And in 1755, an earthquake reduced much of his palace complex at Meknes to rubble. The court fled in panic, never to return.

  As a result of all the upheavals in Timbuktu, Gao and other parts of the western Sudan, trade routes across the Sahara shifted eastwards to the central Sudan. The ancient highway between Lake Chad and Tripoli gained increasing traffic. The southern terminus was still controlled by Saifawa kings, but since the fifteenth century they had ruled not from Kanem but from a new capital at Birni Ngazargamo in the former province of Bornu to the south-west of Lake Chad. Their main trade remained black slaves seized during raids on pagan tribes to the south which they exchanged mainly for horses acquired from Muslim merchants bringing them from the north. Leo Africanus described how the trade worked in the early sixteenth century:

  This king, having encouraged Barbary merchants to take horses to trade for slaves, at the rate of fifteen or twenty slaves for each horse, was in this way equipped to raid his enemies. The merchants were thus obliged to await the raiders’ return, which meant a delay [of] at least two or three months. In this time they lived at the king’s expense. When he returned from the raid he would sometimes have enough slaves to settle up with the merchants; but at other times they might have to wait a further year, if there were not sufficient slaves to pay them off, for these raids are dangerous and can only be made once a year.

  Slaves who survived the journey across the Sahara were worth as much as eight times more in Tripoli than in Bornu.

  During the late sixteenth century, Bornu emerged as the dominant state in central Sudan. With cavalry forces said to number 40,000, its ruler Idris Alawma prosecuted wars in neighbouring territories relentlessly, extending the boundaries of the state in all directions and enforcing tribute from agricultural communities. Through links with Ottoman rulers in Tripoli, he bolstered Bornu’s military prowess by importing muskets and Turkish mercenaries to help train his armies. Mounted troops clad in quilted cotton armour regularly embarked on slave raids far to the south, sweeping into the plains of the Benue, Shari and Logone river valleys. Slaves were either distributed as labour in Bornu or sent north along the desert highway.

  The route from Bornu across the desert to the Fezzan and the Mediterranean coast became the most active of all the Saharan highways at the beginning of the seventeenth century and it continued to play a dominant role for the next two hundred years. Wells along the way were surrounded by the skeletons of thousands of slaves, mostly young women and girls, making a last desperate effort to reach water but dying of exhaustion once there. The terminus at Tripoli grew into the largest slave market of the Mediterranean. Buyers there dispatched slaves to Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus and all over the western part of the Muslim world.

  The overall tally of slaves taken from the Sudan across the Sahara steadily grew. In the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, according to modern estimates, the number reached two million.

  16

  THE SWORD OF TRUTH

  Amid the turmoil of warfare, slave raids and collapsing empires that afflicted the western Sudan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a militant Islamic movement gathered momentum, seeking to expand Muslim law and order and incorporate a multiplicity of fractious states into the dar al-Islam – ‘the abode of Islam’. Hitherto, Islamic practices there had been taken up mainly by kings, royal families, ruling elites and wealthy merchants in towns and urban centres. The bulk of the population in rural areas had remained loyal to their ancestral religions. But the veneer of Islam at the top was often spread thinly. Even when rulers professed to uphold Islamic values, they continued to pay due deference to traditional customs and ceremonies and openly tolerated a wide variety of pagan practices, in particular in matters of marriage and sexual behaviour. When Mali’s king, Mansa Musa, visited Cairo on his way to Mecca in 1324, he was praised by an Egyptian official as ‘a pious and righteous man’, but taken to task for bedding the beautiful daughters of some of his Muslim subjects as if they were slave concubines rather than free women. When Mansa Musa was informed that this was not permitted to Muslims, he responded: ‘Not even to kings?’ ‘Not even to kings,’ came the reply. Songhay’s king, Sunni Ali Ber, observed the fast of Ramadan and gave abundant gifts to mosques, but he also worshipped idols, sacrificed animals to trees and stones and sought the advice and help of traditional diviners and sorcerers. Muslim communities in west Africa were accustomed to working either under or alongside non-Muslim authority.

  What was notable about the jihad movements that emerged in western Sudan was that their leaders came not from commercial towns or capitals but from pastoralist groups. A dominant role was played by Fulbe cattlemen who, over the course of several centuries, had filtered eastwards from their homeland in the Middle Senegal valley, establishing their own self-regulating communities across the Sahel as far as the central Sudan. The language they spoke, Fulfulde, belonged to the Niger-Congo family; it was closely related to Wolof and Serer and other languages of Senegal. But by appearance, the Fulbe had features more similar to Saharan peoples than west African people. Their migration eastwards from the ancient kingdom of Takrur began in about the eleventh century. Some Fulbe groups remained as sedentary settlers in Takrur, becoming known subsequently by the French as Tukolor. Others kept on the move with their cattle herds, maintaining a separate existence from the agricultural villages they encountered, neither displacing their inhabitants nor mixing with them, but residing as strangers on unused land. By the sixteenth century they had founded independent communities in the Futa Jalon highlands (in modern Guinea) and in Masina, part of the inland delta of the Middle Niger, upstream from Timbuktu, and had spread as far as Hausaland.

  The impetus behind the drive for Islamic rule came from widespread fears about increasing violence and instability in the region; from resentment about the arbitrary power wielded by ruling elites; and from outrage that Muslim men, women and children were often enslaved along with pagans, ending up in north African slave markets or sold into the trans-Atlantic slave trade: according to Islamic law, only the enslavement of pagans was justified. The demand for puritanical reform was spread by Muslim scholars and clerics and members of Sufi mystical brotherhoods. Among the Fulbe, a new Muslim clerical class emerged: the torodbe or ‘seekers’. In the western Sudan, the torodbe became leaders of Muslim scholarship. Islam, they urged, was the route that would lead to a more righteous society. If Muslims could not achieve Islamic rule by persuasion, then they were justified in prosecuting jihad, an armed struggle. As well as sermons, the torodbe made use of a rich tradition of oral poetry in the Fulfulde language to convey their message.

  The first link in the chain of jihads occurred in the late seventeenth century in the far south-western corner of the Sahara, just north of the Senegal River (now part of Mauritania). Preaching the need to purify the practices of Islam, a Berber marabout, Nasir al-Din, led a rebellion in the 1670s against the rule of the Banu Hassan, a nomadic Arab clan that had conquered
the area in the fourteenth century. His entourage of clerics gained a substantial following not only in the desert but among Wolof and Tukolor farmers south of the river, resentful of their own rulers. With the support of the torodbe, militant Islam became the basis of a popular resistance movement. In 1673, Nasir al-Din endeavoured to create a theocratic Muslim state, claiming for himself the title of Imam and amir al-Muminin, commander of the faithful, and demanding that secular rulers in the region surrender their powers to him or face jihad.

  At first, his success was spectacular. One by one, the ruling dynasties of Cayor, Wolo, Jolof and Futa Toro were swept away. Nasir al-Din replaced them with Muslim leaders ready to implement his vision of Islamic rule. But his movement soon faltered. He himself was killed in battle with the Banu Hassan in 1674. North of the river, the Banu Hassan reasserted their domination. South of the river, traditional elites regained power. Fleeing southwards, Fulbe clerics and scholars continued to spread the message of Islamic reform, organising and training disciples in rural locations far from the centres of power.