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FIGURE 3.2 Timeline: Early Modern Africa and the Wider World. (credit “800–1400”: modification of work “Map
showing the main trans-Saharan caravan routes circa 1400” by T L Miles/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain;
credit “1200s”: modification of work “Great Mosque of Djenné” by JM/Flickr, CC BY 2.0; credit “1482”: modification
of work “St Jago fort in Elmina Ghana” by Edward Kamau/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0; credit “1500s”:
modification of work “Group of Kanem-Bu warriors” by New York Public Library Digital Gallery/Wikimedia Commons,
Public Domain)
FIGURE 3.3 Locator Map: Early Modern Africa and the Wider World. (credit: modification of work “World map blank
shorelines” by Maciej Jaros/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
76 3 • Early Modern Africa and the Wider World
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3.1 The Roots of African Trade
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
• Identify the main trade routes across the Sahara in the sixteenth century
• Analyze the ways in which Islam facilitated the development of trans-Saharan trade
• Identify the factors that contributed to the decline of the Mali Empire
Beginning in ancient times, trans-Saharan trade routes united many markets and products, linking the
commodities, buyers, and sellers of North and West Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Trade networks
spanned thousands of miles of sea and land and connected the distant trading centers and cities at their far
ends. In the Sahara, such cosmopolitan settlements as Awdaghost, Sijilmasa, and Djenné, all part of the Mali
Empire, linked desert trade routes. These trading centers made possible not only the widespread distribution
of raw materials and finished products necessary for commerce to thrive but also the diffusion of cultural
influences, including religion, to other civilizations.
Saharan Trade Routes
Camel caravans from North Africa began trekking across the Sahara Desert in antiquity (the period Before the
Common Era, or BCE). The trade reached a peak during the ninth to the fifteenth centuries of the Common Era
(CE), when lines of thousands of camels traveled a web-like network of trade routes that spanned the whole of
North and West Africa. They moved a variety of goods, including copper, salt, ivory, enslaved people, textiles,
and gold, northward from sub-Saharan West Africa to the Mediterranean coast, eastward to the Horn of Africa
and Egypt, and southward into the Sahel, the semiarid region between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanian
savanna to the south (Figure 3.4).
FIGURE 3.4 Trans-Saharan Trade Routes. The trans-Saharan trade routes of the ninth to fifteenth centuries (red
dotted lines) stretched like a web across the vast expanse of North Africa. (attribution: Copyright Rice University,
OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)
Long before the trans-Saharan trade route’s golden age, commerce in the Sahara was relatively localized and
consisted of the exchange of agricultural products like rice, sorghum, and millet for the products of new
technologies such as iron goods or rare commodities such as salt. These early inter- and intraregional
exchanges were made possible by pack animals like mules, horses, and donkeys, but trade was limited because
these animals were biologically ill-suited for the extremes of the Saharan environment. When the Romans
conquered North Africa in the second century BCE, they introduced the camel, which was already a beast of
3.1 • The Roots of African Trade 77
burden in Egypt. Capable of lasting days without water and having feet and eyelashes adapted for travel in
sandy environments, camels enabled the people of North Africa to carry on regular long-distance trade across
the Sahara for the first time beginning in the eighth century CE. The camel saddle, invented by the Tuareg
people of North Africa, enabled camels to be ridden, which furthered their usefulness to trans-Saharan trade.
The introduction of the date palm also helped make systematic long-distance trade possible. The fruit of the
date palm is high in sugar, a natural preservative, and when dried it provided a high-calorie, easily
transportable food supply to fortify traders on long journeys.
Trans-Saharan trade was also critically dependent on highly paid nomadic North African Berber (Amazigh)1
intermediaries and the string of oasis towns that connected distant parts of the network in an otherwise
unforgiving landscape (Figure 3.5). Oasis towns provided traveling merchants with places to rest, water their
animals, and acquire provisions for the next leg of their journey. They served the same function as the
caravanserais, inns for travelers that existed throughout the Islamic world, including along the Silk Roads in
Asia, in the Middle East, and in Egypt and Morocco. The Imazighen’s skills as caravan leaders and go-betweens
facilitated the movement of everything from gold ingots to ostrich feathers across thousands of square miles of
desert. Yet Amazigh traders were responsible for much more than the movement of goods and commodities.
They were also devout believers in Islam who spread Islamic culture, law, custom, and tradition and helped to
fuse a network of local and regional trade routes into a truly continent-spanning enterprise.
FIGURE 3.5 A Saharan Oasis. This photo shows the Saharan oasis city of Taghit, ringed by sand hills in modern-day
Algeria. (credit: “Mountains of sand loom over the oasis village of Taghit in the Sahara” by The Central Intelligence
Agency: The World Factbook/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
A principal commodity exchanged during this early stage of trade was salt, which acted as a sort of currency.
Not only is salt necessary to human and animal life, but it also helps to preserve foods, an important concern
of people in an age before refrigeration technology existed. Communities on the edges of the desert acted as
intermediaries in this trade, trading salt to forest tribes to the south that had access to goldfields. Only over
time were other highly valuable trading goods introduced, such as gold and copper, which were then passed
across the desert from tropical West Africa to the far reaches of the North African coast and beyond.
1 There is a growing awareness about the use of the term Berber to describe indigenous North Africans, many of whom self-identify
as Amazigh, or Imazighen (plural). With this understanding, although we have introduced the term Berber as the most commonly
used name in English, we have generally preferred to use the term Amazigh in this text.
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Trade across the Sahara gradually intensified between the fifth and seventh centuries CE, and in the eighth
and ninth centuries, a series of main links became established. These developments were made possible
primarily as the result of two important changes. First, the Ghana Empire of West Africa emerged as the
earliest large-scale political entity in the region, and second, the Islamic conquest of North Africa led to the
rise of Muslim states and a general cultural unification of the region. Combined, these developments brought
people with shared interests and similar characteristics together in conditions that enabled them to
consolidate and expand their economic interests, particularly as demand increased for gold from the Sudan.
As trade grew, Arab merchants in Morocco and in Islamic states in North Africa began to buy sub-Saharan
gold. By the eleventh century, the gold trade was so successful that it was influencing commerce and society in
the Mediterranean (Figure 3.6). For the first time, West African gold was used to mint European coins. This
growth in the market for gold spurred the expansion of new links in the trans-Saharan trade route and resulted
in the opening of a major trade artery between the towns of Sijilmasa, north of the Sahara, and Awdaghost to
the south.
FIGURE 3.6 West African Trade Routes. The network of medieval trade routes in West Africa (red dotted lines)as
mapped in the 1960s by French historian Raymond Mauny. Although they were not connected directly, Sijilmasa in
present-day Morocco and Awdaghost in Mauritania were indirectly linked by routes that united other trading cities in
the surrounding region. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)
One of the greatest early Sudanic empires, the powerful states that emerged in the region of West Africa south
of the Sahara Desert, was Mali. Mali brought together the key components that had contributed to the earlier
expansion of trans-Saharan trade. On the one hand, its rulers were Muslim, and the fact that they shared the
3.1 • The Roots of African Trade 79
same religion with many trans-Saharan traders strengthened the ties between these groups. On the other
hand, these rulers exerted direct control over the goldfields at Bure. The vitally important trade centers of
Timbuktu and Gao were part of the empire, as were the trading centers of Awdaghost, Oualata (Walata), and
Tadmekka. Although both gold and salt remained the principal commodities of exchange, other commodities
such as textiles, enslaved people, ivory, precious stones, and shea butter (a vegetable fat from the shea tree
nut) were also regular exports.
During the ninth to fifteenth centuries, caravans routinely plied the sands of the Sahara, moving goods from
distant West Africa to Egypt and centers of trade in North Africa, and from there onward, either across the
Mediterranean to southern Europe or overland by way of the Sinai Peninsula to the region of the Levant in the
Near East (modern Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel). From there, West African commodities could arrive at
one of the land-based western terminals of the Silk Roads in such trade centers as the coastal city of Tyre in
Lebanon, and farther inland, at Aleppo in Syria. Africa at this time was a key player in the vast commercial
enterprise that laid the foundation for the first global economies.
The Spread of Islam
The Arab conquests of North Africa and the gradual advance of Islam into West Africa from the eighth century
did much to unify what had been largely regional trade into a truly cross-desert system of commerce. The
spread and adoption of Islam by nomads, such as the Tuareg and Sanhaja of the Niger region, helped expand
the networks of exchange. Shared values and rules established by Islamic tradition and law engendered a
sense of mutual trust and respect among devout Muslim traders and caravanners. African traders and
merchants recognized other benefits of conversion beyond the spiritual, which included guarantees afforded
by contract law that was based on Islamic law and made possible by widespread Arabic literacy. They also
enjoyed the extension of credit and promissory notes between multiple parties, who were all investors in a
caravan, and an increasingly extensive information network in which oasis towns acted as centers of
communication and exchange.
Africans may also have been led to convert to Islam by other factors. A significant motivation was likely the
harsh terms the conquering Muslims imposed on non-Muslims, which included exorbitant taxation as well as
demands for hundreds (according to some sources, thousands) of enslaved people. These people, the majority
of whom were probably Amazigh, were then shipped to markets in Damascus or Baghdad to be sold or
transported onward to other market towns in the east. Since Islamic law forbade the enslavement of fellow
Muslims, countless Amazigh people decided to convert to avoid being taken captive.
Once Islam reached the savanna south of the Sahara, ruling African elites adopted it, and in some cases they
blended it with their traditional beliefs, a process called syncretism. Muslims, who could read and write Arabic
script, were sought after as administrators by rulers whose languages did not have their own alphabets. The
tendency of non-Muslim kingdoms to employ Muslim merchant-scholars as advisers and scribes (as, for
example, in the kingdom of Ghana) in turn helped raise the profile of Islam among Africans and further
encouraged conversion.
As commerce expanded, Islam gradually spread along the trans-Saharan trade routes and created a network of
believers who trusted each other, thanks to a common language—Arabic—and shared values, traditions, and
customs such as regular daily prayer. These shared social bonds and trust allowed trade to increase among
peoples at some considerable distance who were otherwise unknown to one another. Another social
interaction crucial to the widespread diffusion of Islam was intermarriage between Muslim traders and local
women, who raised their children as Muslims. By the thirteenth century, Islam had spread into the region of
Lake Chad and the Kingdom of Kanem by way of trans-Saharan trade (Figure 3.7).
80 3 • Early Modern Africa and the Wider World
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	Chapter 3 Early Modern Africa and the Wider World
	3.1 The Roots of African Trade