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

by Martin Meredith

  In the 1690s, a Tukolor cleric named Malik Sy established control of Bondu, an area on the Upper Gambia River colonised by migrating Fulbe pastoralists, founding his own dynasty. In 1725, Fulbe clerics ousted Mande-speaking rulers in the Futa Jalon highlands. Their imamate turned into a slave-trading oligarchy, but they also gave serious attention to Islamic teaching and developed a literature in Fulfulde rather than relying on Arabic, translating the Koran into the vernacular for the first time in west Africa. They were followed by torodbe clerics in Futa Toro, the land of the old kingdom of Takrur, who took control from pagan rulers of the Tukolor in 1776.

  All this was but a prelude to a far greater Islamic revolution that took hold in Hausaland (now northern Nigeria). Since the seventeenth century, the walled city-states of Hausaland had become increasingly prosperous centres of commerce and craft production, well known in the region for cloth exports and traffic in kola nuts, with trade links across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast. Part of their prosperity was also based on systematic slave raids to the south. But Hausaland was often racked by intermittent warfare. Between 1600 and 1800, the city-states of Kano, Katsina, Gobir, Zamfara and Zaria fought dozens of wars, vying for supremacy, sometimes forming alliances, at other times fighting each other directly. Their rulers were nominally Muslim, but condoned many pagan practices.

  A sizeable Fulbe community had become resident in Hausaland, adopting the name of Fulani which the Hausa had given them. Among their number was a young scholar, Usuman dan Fodio, born in 1754 to a torodbe family in the city-state of Gobir who at the age of twenty set up his own school in his home district of Degel and began preaching on the need for a stricter observance of Islam. His sermons and writings, in both Hausa and Fulfulde, became increasingly critical of the ruling elites of Hausaland. He protested about taxation measures on pastoralists and condemned Hausa rulers for their habit of enslaving Muslim prisoners captured in warfare, contrary to Muslim law. ‘And one who enslaves a Freeman,’ he wrote in a poem, ‘The Fire shall enslave him.’ His writings eventually developed into an outright indictment of the greed, arbitrary rule and lax practices of Hausaland’s leaders. In his Kitab al-Farq – Book of Differences – he catalogued at great length ‘the ways of unbelievers and their governments’:

  One of the ways of their government is succession to the emirate by hereditary right and by force to the exclusion of consultation. And one of the ways of government is the building of their sovereignty upon three things: the people’s persons, their honour, and their possessions; and whomsoever they wish to kill or exile or violate his honour or devour his wealth they do so in pursuit of their lusts.

  Hausa rulers, he wrote, ‘worshipped many places of idols, and trees, and rocks, and sacrificed to them’. They lived in decorated palaces and ‘shut the door in the face of the needy’. They were preoccupied ‘with doing vain things’, by night and by day, ‘such as beating drums and lutes and kettledrums’.

  Usuman became the local head of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, a Sufi order calling for the purification of Islamic practice. In later life, he attributed his progression from preaching for reform to advocating jihad to dreams he experienced in the 1790s of an encounter with the founder of the Qadiriyya, the twelfth-century Baghdad mystic Abd-al-Qadir al-Jilani:

  He sat me down and clothed me and placed a turban upon my head. Then he addressed me as ‘Imam of the Saints’ and commanded me to do what is approved and forbade me to do what is disapproved. And he girded me with the Sword of Truth, to unshackle it against the enemies of God.

  By the turn of the century, Usuman had acquired a substantial following, mainly among the Fulani community but also including Hausa peasants and Tuareg nomads, equally resentful of city governments and taxes. When in 1804 Gobir’s rulers attempted to curb the activities of his movement, Usuman withdrew from Degel to new headquarters at Gudu, proclaimed an Islamic state there and declared war on Gobir.

  Usuman’s jihad swept away not only the ruling elite in Gobir but eventually most of the old dynasties in control of the city-states of Hausaland. Fulani emissaries arrived at his headquarters from all over Hausaland and beyond to secure his blessing, returning home with his flag licensing them to fight their own campaigns. Fulani clans provided both scholarly commanders – emirs – and a pastoralist military base. Zaria fell in 1804, Kano and Katsina in 1807. In 1809, they began the construction of a new city at Sokoto which became the principal residence of Usuman and other members of his family and the capital of a caliphate.

  The jihads did not stop in Hausaland, but were fought in neighbouring lands that were neither Hausa nor Muslim. The caliphate founded by Usuman and his son, Muhammad Bello, who succeeded him in 1817, eventually extended over some 180,000 square miles, encompassing some fifteen major Muslim emirates including Bauchi, south-east of Kano; Adamawa in the grasslands of northern Cameroun; the old kingdom of Nupe, south of Hausaland; and Ilorin in northern Yorubaland. It took a two-month journey to cross it from north to south and up to four months from west to east.

  The Sokoto Caliphate was essentially a Fulani empire, ruled according to Islamic law but retaining the structure of government which Hausa leaders had developed over several centuries. In effect, a Fulani aristocracy replaced a Hausa aristocracy, acquiring from them ownership of land and slave labour needed to make it profitable. The supreme authority of the caliphate rested with Usuman and his heirs who bore the title of shaykh (or shehu in Hausa). But most power lay in the emirates. Almost all the emirs and their senior officials were Fulani clerics and scholars who had been flag-bearers of jihad and their military commanders rewarded with state offices and landholdings. The new Fulani ruling class nevertheless saw the advantage of gaining Hausa collaboration, arranging marriage alliances with old Hausa families. Hausa rather than Fulfulde became the dominant tongue, the language of administration and the main medium of Islamic poetry.

  The Fulani system of government proved to be relatively stable. Under Fulani rule, the emirates of Hausaland prospered as never before. Much of the prosperity was based on agricultural slave labour. The jihad campaigns, frontier wars and slave raids on weak societies to the south provided a huge expansion in slave numbers. As much as half of the population of some emirates were slaves, mostly working on plantations owned by the aristocracy. Hausaland also became a major centre of scholarship, largely supplanting Timbuktu. Mosques and schools proliferated in rural areas as well as in towns. Both Usuman and his son Muhammad Bello were renowned Islamic scholars, producing between them scores of books and treatises on religion, law, politics and history and also volumes of poetry. Much of their work, in Hausa and Fulfulde, was written in verse so that it could be recited to non- literate audiences – women, slaves, farmers and pastoralists. Usuman’s daughter, Nana Asmau, was also a distinguished poet, composing works designed especially for women. ‘She probably accomplished more thoroughgoing Islamization in the north-western part of Hausaland than anyone else in the caliphate,’ wrote the historian David Robinson.

  While Sokoto became the locus of religious power, Kano prospered as the centre of commercial power. The era of Fulani hegemony allowed Kano to build on traditions of weaving, dyeing and leather-work for which it was already famous. Kano’s fine cotton cloth, dyed in many shades of indigo, was in high demand as far north as Tripoli, as far west as Timbuktu and as far east as Lake Chad. Its leather goods were equally prized. Much of the ‘Moroccan’ leather sold from north Africa to Europe originated from the Hausa craftsmen of Kano.

  A German traveller, Heinrich Barth, who visited Kano in 1851, described it as ‘the emporium of Negroland’. Encircled by thirty-foot-high walls of red clay, running for more than ten miles, it housed a resident population of 30,000 that doubled during the busy trading season. ‘The great advantage of Kano,’ wrote Barth, ‘is that commerce and manufactures go hand in hand, and that almost every family has its share in them.’ Its huge market was a labyrinth of narrow alleys, lined with stalls and sheds stacked wit
h an immense array of goods – everything from vegetables to slaves and an abundance of foreign products carried across the desert. Barth found calicoes from Manchester, silks and sugars from France, red cloth from Saxony, beads from Venice and Trieste, mirrors and needles from Nuremberg, razors from Austria, sword blades from Solingen in Germany, paper from Italy.

  Although the Sokoto Caliphate lost much of its early reforming zeal, slipping back into decadence and corruption, it held together as an Islamic state until the end of the nineteenth century. Like the rest of west Africa, however, it was eventually confronted by the growing encroachment of European powers.

  The example set by Usuman in Sokoto reverberated in other regions of western Sudan. News of his success inspired a Fulbe cleric named Ahmadu Lobbo to raise the banner of jihad among Fulbe pastoralists in Masina in the Middle Niger delta. Masina was controlled by pagan Fulbe clan heads who paid tribute to the Bambara rulers of Segu, an eighteenth-century pagan state to the south-west that had emerged after the collapse of the Songhay empire. In 1817, Ahmadu secured a flag of legitimation from Usuman and organised resistance against Segu hegemony. Within a few years he secured political control of Masina, built a new capital fifty miles north-east of Jenne that he called Hamdullahi – ‘Praise God’ – and instituted a rigid Islamic theocracy, compelling pastoralists to settle in designated areas, purging Jenne and Timbuktu of urban vices and banning dance, tobacco and all but the plainest clothes. After his death in 1845, his theocratic regime lost its Islamic fervour and eventually succumbed to a more dynamic Islamic power from the west pursuing its own jihad.

  The last of the great jihad movements to erupt in the western Sudan in the nineteenth century was led by Umar Tal, a Tukolor torodbe born into a clerical family in Futa Toro in 1796. Whereas both Usuman and Ahmadu belonged to the Qadiriyya brotherhood, Umar became a leading practitioner in the Tijaniyya brotherhood, a new Sufi order founded in Fez in the 1780s with a more exclusive and mystical outlook. Unusually for a west African Muslim at the time, in the 1820s he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where the Tijaniyya were notably active, obtaining a commission as head of the order in west Africa. On his slow return journey, he stayed for eight years in Sokoto and developed a close relationship with Muhammad Bello, marrying one of his daughters and leaving behind a small Tijaniyya community. Continuing westward in 1839, he passed through the jihadi state of Masina, founding another Tijaniyya community there. He spent most of the 1840s in Futa Jalon, completing a major work of scholarship on the order, but then turned his attention from writing and teaching to pursuing military struggle. His objective was not so much to purify the dubious practices of Muslim governments but to conquer new pagan territory for Islam. He built up a large body of well-armed followers, mostly Fulbe and Tukolor from his home region of Futa Toro. In 1852, he defeated the Mande state of Tamba, then took the Bambara state of Kaarta in 1855; Segu in 1861; Masina in 1862; and Timbuktu in 1863. Though successful at first, his military conquests encountered resistance from rival Muslim factions. In 1864, Umar was killed in Masina. But the Tukolor empire he had founded survived.

  The collective impact of Fulbe clerics and scholars who led the jihads of the nineteenth century in the western Sudan was lasting. Their campaigns helped transform a great swathe of west Africa into a part of dar al-Islam, as it remains to this day.

  17

  A MATTER OF FAITH

  As Islam advanced ever further into the interior of Africa, the highland kingdom of Abyssinia was left increasingly isolated, surrounded by adversaries but holding fast to its Christian identity. Its contacts with the outside world were limited. During the sixteenth century, Ottoman Turks established naval supremacy in the Red Sea, occupied Massawa, once the main port of entry for Abyssinia, set up a new province along the coastal region to the north and made numerous armed incursions into the old Aksumite heartland of Tigray. To the west, a new Muslim empire emerged along the lower reaches of the Abbai River (Blue Nile), based on the town of Sennar. At its height in the seventeenth century, the Funj kingdom of Sennar controlled trade routes running all the way from the Red Sea coast westwards to Kordofan and attempted to expand into Abyssinian territory. To the south, Cushitic-speaking Oromo pastoralists infiltrated into the highlands, founding settled communities there, adapting to agriculture and becoming a dominant element in the local population. As well as external threats, Abyssinia’s ruling elites were often engaged in their own interminable power struggles, frequently resorting to war.

  Despite the difficulties of reaching Abyssinia, the Portuguese still aspired to maintain a presence there. Once the campaign to defeat the armies of Adal had ended, several hundred Portuguese remained in the northern highlands, marrying and siring families, becoming absorbed in the local population. They were active as builders and craftsmen, bringing a new style of architecture to the construction of churches, castles, bridges and fortifications.

  Portuguese missionaries too were keen to retain influence, but their activities soon provoked internal dissension. Ignoring the deep attachment that Abyssinians held for their own Orthodox traditions, Portuguese Jesuits launched determined efforts to convert the country into a bastion of Roman Catholicism. Without any prior consultation, claiming that the Abyssinians had veered from the true path of Christianity, they consecrated a Portuguese Jesuit as patriarch of the Abyssinian church at a ceremony in Lisbon and then dispatched an envoy to the emperor Galawdewos to inform him of the appointment and to ask him to sever his connection with Alexandria. According to a Portuguese priest who witnessed the encounter in 1555, the emperor ‘looked so much out of countenance and was so disordered that when we spoke to him he answered nothing to the purpose . . . he went away to visit a grandmother of his, eight or ten days off, leaving us in an open field wholly unprovided for.’

  Galawdewos subsequently made it clear to the envoy that he had no intention of abandoning his Orthodox faith and, for good measure, asked the Coptic Church in Egypt to send him a new abuna.

  The Jesuits did not relent. In 1557, a Jesuit bishop, André da Oviedo, accompanied by five priests and a small party of servants, made his way uninvited to the emperor’s camp in Tigray. Designating himself archbishop, he told all Portuguese in the country that they no longer needed to obey the emperor’s edicts. Galawdewos responded calmly and tried to enlighten the Jesuits by compiling for them a document, which became known as his Confession of Faith, affirming his confidence in Orthodox teaching.

  His successor, Minas, was not so patient. When da Oviedo continued to preach about the corruption of his court and his failings as a Christian, Minas banished the Jesuits to a remote spot in the northern highlands called Maigoga. The Jesuits built a monastery there, naming it Fremona in honour of Frumentius, Abyssinia’s first bishop who had converted the emperor Ezana. But the life they led there was harsh and isolated. They were allowed to venture out only to minister to other Portuguese. Da Oviedo managed to send out messages to Rome and Lisbon appealing for military intervention, but to no avail. He died there in 1577.

  Still the Jesuits persevered. In 1589, a Spanish Jesuit, Pedro Paez, was sent from Goa as a missionary to Abyssinia. His first attempt to get there soon failed. En route he was captured by Turkish sailors, held prisoner in the Yemen and forced to work as a galley-slave. Seven years later, after payment of a ransom, he arrived back in Goa, emaciated and disconsolate. In 1603 he tried again, this time travelling as an Armenian merchant, using the name of Abdullah. By now fluent in Arabic, he slipped through Massawa and made his way to the Jesuit base at Fremona where he spent several months studying Amharic, Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of the Church, and Abyssinian customs. Summoned to the royal encampment at Dankaz, near Lake Tana, Paez impressed the young emperor Za Dengel with his careful explanations of Catholic belief and practice and persuaded him and several members of his retinue to convert. Aware of the difficulties that might ensue, Paez cautioned the emperor not to announce his new allegiance too quickly and returned to Frem
ona. When Za Dengel decreed changes in the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, he provoked a rebellion and was killed in the ensuing turmoil.

  Undaunted, Paez struck up a warm friendship with the emperor Susenyos who captured the throne in 1607. Invited to attend his coronation in Aksum in 1609, Paez recorded the event in his História da Ethiópia which he completed in 1620, noting the pomp and luxury that its emperors liked to display.

  The ground was covered with large and rich carpets, the great men drew up on both sides. The Maidens of Sion stopped the way crossing it with a silk line up to which the Emperor went three times and being asked by the Maidens who he was, the first and second time answered, ‘I am King of Israel.’ Being asked the third time who he was, he answered, ‘I am King of Zion.’ And then the air resounded with acclamations of joy, volleys of small shot, and the voice of trumpets, kettledrums . . . and other musical instruments . . . The Emperor had on a fine vest of crimson damask, and over it a Turkish robe of brocade like the ancient Roman gowns, the sleeves straight but so long that they hung down to the ground . . . girt with a broad girdle all of pieces of gold curiously wrought, and on his neck a thick chain of gold which went several times about hanging down on his breast and the ends of it falling deep behind, all which, he being a handsome man, became him very well.

  Susenyos was crowned by a Coptic abuna, recently arrived from Egypt, in accordance with Orthodox tradition, but he was keen to develop a closer relationship with the Portuguese, hoping that they might provide military assistance to help him eject the Turks from the north and deal with his internal adversaries in the highlands.

  Under Paez’s tactful guidance, Susenyos announced in 1612 his own conversion to Catholicism. As a mark of his esteem for the priest, he granted him a tract of land at Gorgora on the north shore of Lake Tana on which to build a Jesuit centre. Skilled in architecture as well as diplomacy, Paez built a stone church there and also a grand palace for Susenyos, with a commanding view of the lake. He was often chosen to accompany Susenyos on his campaigns against rivals and conspirators.