AFRICAN HISTORY-I

HISTORY

At some point between 130,000 and 90,000 years ago the first true human beings, Homo sapiens, evolved in eastern and southern Africa. These Stone Age humans had the same capacity for thought as modern human beings. They were capable of making tools such as hooks and needles made of bone, and precise stone blades. These stone blades could be used as scrapers and hand-knives, or attached to poles and sticks for use as spears or arrows. By 90,000 years ago Homo sapiens had begun to move out of Africa into the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, and beyond. All modern human beings are descended from these original African ancestors.

Early Africans

By 40,000 years ago people could be found hunting and gathering food across most of the regions of Africa. Populations in different regions employed various technological developments in adapting to their different environments and climates. The most notable adaptations occurred in response to major climate changes.

Spread of Languages and Cultures

Between 16,000 and 13,000 bc the climate of much of Africa was considerably drier than it is today. The Sahara expanded north and south at the expense of grassy steppe lands and woodland savanna, and the area of equatorial rain forest shrank. This put pressure upon human hunter-gatherer populations to improve their techniques and to more intensively use locally available food resources. Those who adapted most successfully spread their techniques, cultures, and languages beyond their home areas, while absorbing or influencing other populations. This period gave birth to the four great language families of Africa—Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan—from which all modern African languages are descended.

From Eritrea and the Red Sea Hills to the northern borders of Sudan, speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages specialized in collecting the seeds of wild grasses, which were ground into flour. Over subsequent millennia their descendants spread their languages and cultures northward into Egypt and westward over the whole of North Africa.

In the middle Nile region of central Sudan the speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages specialized in hunting large antelope, including the wild ancestors of Saharan cattle. Eventually these people also spread, moving south into East Africa and west across the southern Sahara.

In the savanna woodlands of West Africa, speakers of early Niger-Congo languages hunted with bow and arrow, fished with hook and line, and intensively collected the West African yam. Their languages and cultures eventually spread across the whole of West and Central Africa, and later, even to the southern reaches of the continent.

In East Africa, from what is now Kenya to northern Zambia, speakers of ancestral Khoisan languages made the most successful adaptations of this period. They developed a wide range of small, finely honed stone tools for hunting and many other purposes. Their adaptable tools and tool-making skills enabled the Khoisan to become excellent hunters and to spread throughout southern Africa, and partly explain why, through thousands of years of further climate change, they felt no need to domesticate animals and plants like their northern neighbors.

Origins of Cultivation and Herding

Between 11,000 and 3500 bc Africa experienced a wet climatic phase, which reached its peak between 9000 and 6000 bc. The Sahara became a grassland steppe surrounded by savanna woodlands, perennial rivers flowed from its mountain ranges, and Lake Chad expanded into a vast inland sea. The environmental changes opened huge new opportunities for Africa’s human populations. Farming originated in this period with the domestication of African plants and animals.

The Nilo-Saharan speakers of central Sudan adopted the grain-collection practice of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors. They applied it to wild sorghum, a tropical grass, which they domesticated and cultivated by 8000 bc. By this time, they had also invented techniques for making pottery, which was used to collect and store food and water. In the same period, Nilo-Saharan speakers domesticated wild cattle in and around the Nile Valley. Between 7000 and 5000 bc they also domesticated pearl millet, gourds, melons, and beans, and spread their farming and herding practices westward across the southern Sahara.

By this time, northern Afro-Asiatic speakers had taken wild seed collecting practices into Egypt, where they domesticated donkeys and pigs. They also spread into the Middle East, where tropical grasses would not grow. Instead, they learned to domesticate wheat and barley, and cultivation of these grains spread back westward through the Mediterranean regions of North Africa. Meanwhile, Cushitic speakers (an Afro-Asiatic subgroup) spread herding and grain cultivation throughout the Horn of Africa and into the central plains of East Africa. In the valleys of the Ethiopian Highlands, the indigenous crops teff (a grain) and enset (a banana-like fruit) were also domesticated.

Niger-Congo speakers in West Africa domesticated the yam and planted it in the expanded zone of savanna woodland by about 8000 bc. By 5000 bc their domesticated crops also included oil palm, raffia palm, peas, groundnuts, and kola nut, and they had also domesticated the guinea fowl. The domestication of West African rice, in and around the inland delta of the Niger, occurred slightly later, during a drier period after 3000 bc. By that time West Africans had developed polished stone axes for clearing woodland and were penetrating the rain forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin to the southeast.

Another important feature of the wet climatic phase was the development of fishing cultures around the numerous expanded lakes and rivers. From Lake Chad to the upper Nile and south to Lake Turkana and the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, fishers gathered in large settlements and traded dried fish for grain and other products from their neighbors.

Ancient Nile Valley States

By 3500 bc the favorable wet phase was coming to an end and the Saharan steppe again gave way to full desert. As the desert expanded, herders and cultivators concentrated in areas of perennial water sources, notably the Nile Valley. In what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, the north-flowing Nile forms a great S-shaped curve and passes through six cataracts (rapids or waterfalls), which are numbered from north to south. In this area, known as Nubia, the concentration of settlements between the first and fourth cataracts prompted the clearing of riverside vegetation and exposure of the fertile floodplain. Large-scale projects such as this required communal labor and, consequently, the development of political and religious authority capable of commanding large workforces. Clan chiefs became kings, with each king acting as the guardian of his kingdom’s god.

Ancient Egypt

Nubian concepts of kingship and religion spread northward to the Nile Delta region (known as Lower Egypt) as the desert encroached ever closer to the river. The navigability of the river from the delta to the first cataract allowed for easy communication and the expansion of political authority. Kingdoms along the Egyptian Nile merged until there were only two: Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. In about 3100 bc the two kingdoms were united by Narmer, king of Upper Egypt, who thus founded the earliest dynasty of Ancient Egypt. The old Nubian gods of the individual kingdoms became regional deities in a new polytheistic religion, and the creation of this regionally diverse religion helped cement the unification.

Egyptian unity prevailed for about 900 years. The first centuries saw a strengthening of central authority until, by the time of the Third Dynasty (about 2649 to 2575 bc), the king himself was recognized as a god. Egypt then entered the era referred to as the Old Kingdom (about 2575 to 2134 bc). Around the dawn of the Old Kingdom, Egyptians began constructing great burial pyramids for their kings. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in about 2500 bc as a tomb for Khufu, the second king of the Fourth Dynasty (about 2575 to 2467 bc), and is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World that survives intact today. Its construction required the mobilization of a huge, rotating labor force. The scope of manpower involved may have been the reason why the pyramids of Khufu’s successors were never quite as big. Grand pyramid building ceased by the end of the Sixth Dynasty (about 2323 to 2151 bc).

Farm labor by peasants, who made up the vast majority of the Egyptian population, formed the economic basis of Ancient Egypt. The annual flooding of the Nile renewed the soils of the valley with fertile silts carried down from the far-off Ethiopian Highlands. As the annual flood receded, the farmers moved back onto the floodplain, digging irrigation canals and planting their crops in the rejuvenated soil. They grew wheat, barley, flax, vegetables, and fruit. Peasants also herded cattle and goats, fished for Nile perch, and hunted wild birds in the marshes.

Every aspect of the peasants’ labor was overseen by government scribes and tax collectors, who developed hieroglyphs, possibly the earliest form of writing in the world. All agricultural surplus went to the state to support the king in luxury and to feed and clothe his huge army of government servants, artists, artisans, builders of pyramids and temples, priests, and guardians of religious shrines.

During most of the Old Kingdom, trade remained a monopoly of the state. During the Sixth Dynasty, however, wealth became more widespread among regional princes, merchants, and priests. Around 2200 bc northeast Africa experienced several decades of cooler, drier climate. The Nile failed to flood and Egypt suffered a devastating famine. Central authority collapsed and regional princes asserted their independence.

In about 2040 bc the kings of Thebes in Upper Egypt reestablished Egyptian unity and Egypt entered what is known as the Middle Kingdom (about 2040 to 1640 bc). In this period, Egyptian trade expanded down the Red Sea coast of Africa. This time, however, the trade was run by professional merchants, and the central government taxed the trade instead of running it as a royal monopoly. Middle Kingdom kings revived pyramid building, though on a much smaller scale.

In about 1640 bc Middle Kingdom unity was destroyed by an invasion of the Nile Delta region by invaders from the Middle East known as Hyksos. These foreigners, who introduced horses to Egypt, established a rival dynasty in the delta. In about 1550 bc Ahmose I, king of Upper Egypt, defeated the Hyksos and founded the 18th Dynasty (about 1550 to 1307 bc). In doing so, he reestablished Egyptian unity and Egypt entered an era called the New Kingdom (about 1550 to 1070 bc). For the first time, Egyptian kings maintained a standing army, and military conquest was used to build an Egyptian empire from Palestine and Syria in the north to the fourth cataract of the Nile, the heart of Nubia, in the south. Pyramid building was not revived, but massive statues and temples were built. Kings, now known as pharaohs, were buried in elaborately decorated tombs cut into solid rock in the Valley of the Kings across the river from the royal capital of Thebes.

Egypt’s power declined during the 20th Dynasty (about 1196 to 1070 bc). The New Kingdom empire broke apart as Palestine and Nubia reclaimed their independence. There followed a succession of foreign invasions and rebellions by Libyan mercenaries. From this point on, native Egyptian dynasties were interspersed by Nubian, Assyrian, and Persian ones, until the last Egyptian dynasty fell to Greece in 332 bc.

Nubian Kingdoms

By the time of the unification of Egypt in 3100 bc, several Nubian kingdoms had already been established along the middle Nile between the first and fourth cataracts. After an Egyptian invasion of Nubia as far as the second cataract in about 1900 bc, the Nubian kingdoms formed a loose unity, centered on the city of Kerma, just south of the third cataract. Little is known about this kingdom until it was brought within the Egyptian New Kingdom empire about 1500 bc.

As Egyptian control weakened after 1100 bc, Nubia reasserted its independence and became known as Kush. A new capital and religious center was established at Napata, near the fourth cataract, and Kushite culture flourished. Kush’s agricultural economy was based on cattle herding and cultivation of sorghum and millet. Through payments from subject provinces and trade in ivory, skins, and ebony from the south, the kings of Kush grew wealthy and powerful. In about 770 bc they invaded Egypt and established what is known as the 25th Dynasty (about 770 to 657 bc) at Thebes.

The Kushites were ousted from Egypt in the 7th century bc by an Assyrian invasion from the Middle East. The Assyrians wielded weapons of iron, a metal until that time unknown in North Africa. The Kushites withdrew to Napata, and again farther south to Meroë, following an Egyptian invasion in 593 bc (although Napata would remain the Kushite capital until 300 bc). At Meroë, between the fifth and sixth cataracts, the Nubians would found a new kingdom based in large part upon the new technology of ironworking (see the Meroë section of this article).

Dawn of the Iron Age

The first metal worked in Africa was copper, smelted and forged in Egypt before its unification in 3100 bc. Copper and stone remained the main tool-making materials in Egypt until the 17th century bc, when the Hyksos invasion from the Middle East brought bronze, a harder alloy, to North Africa. During Egypt’s New Kingdom, gold was forged into jewelry and elaborate furniture to decorate the pharaohs’ palaces and tombs. Far to the west of Egypt, in the Aïr Mountains of what is now Niger, copper working was independently invented some time after 3000 bc. These early metalworkers probably spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, perhaps ancestral to modern Songhai. By 1500 bc their copper-working techniques and furnaces were well developed and the technology had spread to other copper-bearing areas of the southern Sahara.

Iron is a much harder metal to smelt than copper, requiring larger quantities of charcoal and much higher temperatures. Its invention, therefore, required considerable expertise in furnace building. While the knowledge of ironworking was first brought to northeast Africa from the Middle East after 670 bc, the techniques had been independently invented in sub-Saharan Africa some 300 years earlier. Presumably building upon furnace techniques developed for the smelting of copper, metalworkers were smelting iron in Chad and the Great Lakes region (an area in East Africa between and around Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika) by 1000 bc. From these centers of development, ironworking spread among the agricultural peoples of West, Central, and East Africa, reaching southern Africa in the early centuries ad.

Development of Farming Communities in West Africa

The increasing use of iron tools and weapons helped West Africans clear woodland for cultivation and improved hunting efficiency. This accelerated the development and spread of farming communities. In the inland delta of the Niger River—where the river divides and spreads into a complex pattern of waterways—clusters of villages formed into larger settlements. Many of these Mande-speaking villagers specialized in the production of dried fish, rice, or cotton. Producing far more than they needed for themselves, they traded their surplus with their neighbors at large central markets. By about 250 bc Djenné, in present-day southern Mali, was perhaps the largest of these commercial centers.

Rice growing spread to the tidal estuaries of what is now Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. In these areas local farmers developed special water-control techniques that used tidal salt water to clear the land of weeds and fresh water from rivers to irrigate the rice crop. Centuries later, slaves taken from this region would introduce similar techniques to the plantations of South Carolina in what is now the United States.

Throughout the Niger-Congo societies of West Africa, craftspeople specialized in wood carving, producing dugout canoes and three-legged stools, as well as masks for use in festivals and religions rituals. A thriving, ironworking community, referred to as the Nok culture, established itself on the Jos Plateau of central Nigeria by 500 bc. Nok craftsmen combined carving and pottery-making skills in the production of finely sculpted terracotta clay heads.

Bantu Migration

By 2000 bc Bantu-speaking farmers of the Niger-Congo culture had begun to migrate from what is now Cameroon and eastern Nigeria into the forest regions of the Congo River Basin. Traveling in dugout canoes along the region’s numerous waterways, they established riverside settlements and supplemented yam and oil palm farming with hunting and fishing. By 1000 bc they had crossed the forests to reach the southern savanna lands of what is now Angola and reached the Great Lakes region in the east. In the Great Lakes region they adopted ironworking and learned techniques of cattle keeping and grain cultivation from their Sudanic- and Cushitic-speaking neighbors.

Bantu-speaking farmers thus developed a unique and wide-ranging combination of technological skills: planting yams, sowing grain, herding livestock, working iron, and making pottery. This adaptable set of skills enabled them to spread, in a series of small movements, over most of East, Central, and southern Africa between 300 bc and ad 300. In the process, they interacted with and absorbed existing, mostly Khoisan, populations. The only region the Bantu did not penetrate was the far southwestern corner of Africa, which was too dry for their agricultural practices.

Meroë

By the 3rd century bc the middle Nile Valley had a long history of agricultural settlement and political kingdoms. The kingdom of Kush formally moved its capital southward from Napata to Meroë in about 300 bc. In this island of savanna woodland between the ‘Aţbarah and Nile rivers the ruling elite built a powerful kingdom. The wetter climate of this region allowed the cultivation of tropical cereals, sorghum, and millet. With plentiful iron ore and wood for charcoal, the kingdom of Meroë became a major center for the production of iron. Iron spears and arrows helped the kingdom defend itself against any threat from Egypt and aided hunting as well. Meroë was also in an advantageous position for trade. With access to the ivory, ebony, and animal furs of the Upper Nile, Meroë’s traders were well positioned to trade with Egypt to the north and with Red Sea ports to the east.

At first, the culture of Meroë was strongly influenced by that of Egypt, but the kingdom soon evolved its own distinctive culture, language, and writing. Although their religion retained many of the Egyptian gods, they developed other gods with different characteristics, notably the lion god, Apedemek. They also buried their kings in small pyramids, long after pyramid building had ceased in Egypt.

By ad 300 Meroë was in decline. In feeding a dense population, intensive farming had worn out the land, while the widespread felling of trees for charcoal led to soil erosion. Furthermore, Meroë had lost its advantageous trading position to the rising kingdom of Aksum in the southeast.

Aksum

The kingdom of Aksum arose on the Red Sea coast of what is now Eritrea. By 500 bc mixed coastal communities of local farmers and immigrant traders from southeast Arabia had developed their own language and system of writing. These ports grew in strength, competing with Meroë for control of Red Sea trade. By the 1st century ad the ports had united and come under the control of a kingdom with its capital at the inland city of Aksum. As Meroë declined, Aksum became a prosperous city. It was noted for its monumental stone architecture, especially its carved, multistoried, solid stone pillars called stelae.

In the mid-4th century the Aksumite king Ezana converted to Christianity. The Aksumite church was affiliated with the Egyptian Coptic Church, and was also influenced by Syrian monasticism. With the spread of Islam in the 7th century, the Red Sea increasingly came under the control of an expanding Islamic state and Aksum lost much of its access to Indian Ocean trade. The kingdom disintegrated in the 10th century, but its unique, monastic church persisted as the state religion of the subsequent kingdom of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia, a Christian kingdom that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands after 800, was controlled by an aristocracy. The local Agaw peasantry owned and worked the land in the fertile valleys, but paid a tax from their produce to their governing aristocracy as well as to their local monastic church. In about 1150 an Agaw dynasty, known as the Zagwe, took over the kingship. The Ethiopian Christian Church flourished under Zagwe rule, as recorded in both manuscripts and architecture. The combination of Agaw belief in the sacred role of rock caves and the Aksumite tradition of grand stonework led to the creation of a series of unique churches carved into solid rock, many of which still survive today. The Solomonid dynasty succeeded Zagwe in the 13th century and established a monarchy and a political system that remained intact until the 20th century.

Early North Africa

The Greek conquest of Egypt in 332 bc tied Egypt more closely to the fortunes of the Mediterranean world. The new ruling class adapted many aspects of Egyptian culture, but Greek became the language of administration and trade. A new capital city was built at Alexandria, which, within a few centuries, became the greatest trading center of the ancient world. The Greeks founded the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, which persisted until the Roman Empire conquered Egypt in 31 bc.

Roman Africa

Under Roman rule Egypt became a province of the empire and a major center of grain production for the citizens of Rome. The rest of Mediterranean North Africa was incorporated into the Roman Empire between 150 bc and ad 200. Carthage, on the northeast coast of what is now Tunisia, had been a Phoenician trading colony since at least 800 bc. By the 5th century bc it rivaled Rome for control of the western Mediterranean Sea. After the century-long Punic Wars, Rome conquered Carthage in 146 bc. The Romans named their new Tunisian province Africa. To the west lay independent Berber kingdoms of mountain herders and settled coastal farmers. The Romans called these lands Numidia (modern-day northern Algeria) and Mauretania (now northern Morocco). Initially, these regions maintained their independence and entered into trading alliances with the Romans, but by ad 200 they too had been largely incorporated into the Roman Empire. Roman North Africa provided the empire with wheat and olives, grown on coastal plantations worked by Berber slaves.

The Roman Empire split in two in about 400 ad, and Rome declined in power. Carthage fell to Germanic invaders, known as the Vandals, in 439. After a period of Vandal rule, North Africa was recaptured by the Byzantine Empire (the eastern half of the Roman Empire) in 533.

Spread of Christianity

By ad 100 Alexandria had become the most important intellectual center of the early Christian Church. From Egypt, monastic Christianity spread south to Nubia and Ethiopia, and west to Berber North Africa. In the latter region, the Berbers adapted the new religion to fit in with indigenous beliefs. Subjugated by the Roman Empire by 200, Berber Christians maintained a strong tradition of religious independence from Rome, even after the empire had adopted Christianity as the official Roman religion in the 320s.

Trans-Saharan Trade

The Romans introduced the camel to North Africa in about 200, and in doing so unwittingly revolutionized trans-Saharan trade. North African Berbers and other residents of the central Sahara quickly adopted the use of camels, both as a source of food and as a means of transport. Where trade across the desert had formerly been sporadic, moving haltingly from oasis to oasis, it was now possible to take a camel caravan on a two-month journey directly across the Sahara. Trade and contact between the Mediterranean world and sub-Saharan West Africa flourished. Major traded commodities included horses, weapons, and textiles from the Mediterranean; gold, slaves, and animal products from West Africa; and salt mined from dried-up prehistoric lakes in the central Sahara.

Islam and the Arab Conquest of North Africa

The religion of Islam, founded in Arabia in the early 7th century, quickly united Arabs and inspired the expansion of a great Islamic empire across the Middle East and North Africa. By 641 Muslims had conquered Egypt, where they established a new ruling class of administrators and merchants. Over the ensuing centuries, and following further Arab immigration, most of the Egyptian population converted to Islam and adopted the Arabic language, leaving the Egyptian Coptic Church as a small Christian sect. In Nubia, the Christian kingdom of Makuria managed to maintain its independence, establishing important trade connections with its newly Islamic northern neighbors. Arab penetration south and conversion of Christian Nubia to Islam did not occur until the early 14th century.

The Arabs referred to North Africa west of Egypt as al-Maghreb (“the West” in Arabic). Muslims conquered Byzantine Carthage in about 700, and by 711 they overcame Berber resistance, extended their empire to Morocco, and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to southern Spain. In the Maghreb, the Arabs were initially confined to coastal regions. Here, captured Berbers were conscripted into the Arab army and converted to Islam.

Inland, among the Berbers of the mountains and desert, conversion proceeded at a slower pace. In addition, many Berber groups asserted their independence from the caliphs (the rulers of the Islamic empire) soon after being converted. Over the ensuing centuries, a number of independent Islamic Berber states rose and fell, until, in the 10th century, the Fatimid dynasty united the central Maghreb. In 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt and declared their independence from the caliphate.

Egypt Under the Fatimids, Mamluks, and Ottomans

The Fatimids established a new Berber aristocracy in Egypt. The main wealth of the country, as always, was derived from peasant agriculture. Fatimid rulers granted Berber aristocrats huge land estates from which they were to collect taxes from the peasants. A portion of this tax was paid to the state and the rest retained by the Berber landholder. As the Berbers settled into the role of landed elite, their former ranks in the Fatimid army were filled by legions of Turk and Mongol slave soldiers known as Mamluks.

In 1171 a Kurdish military officer named Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, also known as Saladin, seized the Egyptian throne and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. His action was prompted by the threat to Egypt posed by Christian Crusaders from Western Europe who had seized control of much of Palestine (see Crusades). Saladin reformed the army, imported more Mamluks, and placed the land estates and the collection of taxes in the hands of successful Mamluk officers. These Mamluks became the new Egyptian aristocracy and in 1250 they seized the throne from the Ayyubids. The Mamluk dynasty ruled Egypt for the next 250 years. The Mamluk period was a time of great religious and cultural revival in the Egyptian capital of Cairo. However, in the countryside—where the vast majority of Egyptians lived—the estate holders abused their tax-collecting powers and exploited the peasantry.

In 1517 the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt and made it an Ottoman province. The Ottoman sultan appointed the pasha, or governor, of Egypt, but otherwise Ottoman Egypt was largely able to act autonomously. Under the Ottomans, Egypt’s boundaries were extended south as far as the third cataract of the Nile and down the Red Sea coast as far as Eritrea. South of Egypt, a dynasty of black Muslims known as the Funj established a sultanate over the Sudanese Nile centered at Sannār (Sennar) and extending as far south as the highlands of Ethiopia.

Almoravids and Almohads of Northwest Africa

Across the Sahara, Islam provided the traders and herders of the remote desert oases with a common sense of brotherhood. Trans-Saharan trade expanded in response to the Islamic world’s demand for West African gold for its trading currencies. Muslim Berbers making their pilgrimages to Mecca—a duty of Muslims—were exposed to the vast differences between life in the remotest Saharan oases and the realities of the wider Muslim world. Scandalized by the wealth and luxuries of urban North Africa, a small group of Sanhaja Berbers in what is now Mauritania initiated an Islamic reform movement in the mid-11th century. Known as the Almoravids, they provided the desert peoples with a new sense of unity and reformist zeal. The Almoravids built up a mass army that swept north through the western desert and conquered Morocco.

After the deaths of early Almoravid leaders in the late 1050s, the southern desert regions broke away. In the 1140s another reformist movement, known as the Almohads, overthrew the Almoravids and established the Almohad empire over much of the Maghreb. In subsequent centuries the Almohad empire broke apart into three Islamic states, roughly corresponding to the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

Ottoman Maghreb and Morocco

In the decades following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the Ottomans seized the major ports of the Maghreb: Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Tangier. Ongoing conflict with Christian Europe, however, kept the Ottomans from extending their control of the Maghreb into the interior. In addition, the port cities—important bases from which to raid European shipping in the western Mediterranean Sea—remained largely autonomous from central Ottoman control

In the 16th century Morocco rose as an independent kingdom, reaching the height of its power under Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled from 1578 to 1603. In 1591 al-Mansur attempted to seize control of the trans-Saharan gold trade by sending an invasion force across the desert to occupy the West African empire of Songhai (see the Songhai Empire section of this article). The occupation of Songhai, however, was more of a drain on Moroccan resources than a benefit, and during the 17th century local West African rulers asserted their independence from Moroccan control.

The Age of Empires in West Africa

By the 10th century North African trading powers were clamoring for gold from West Africa to satisfy the Islamic world’s increasing demand for currency. This stimulated the growth in sub-Saharan West Africa of large trading empires, which accrued vast amounts of wealth and power by controlling trans-Saharan caravan routes.

Kingdom of Ghana

The Kingdom of Ghana arose among the Soninke-speaking farmers of the transition area between desert and woodland in what is now southeastern Mauritania. Ghana exploited its strategic position between the gold-producing peoples of the south and the camel caravans of desert nomad traders to the north. From their capital at Kumbi Saleh (Koumbi Saleh) Ghana’s rulers were able to tax the gold trade and build an empire which by 1000 stretched from the Sénégal River valley in the west to the great bend of the Niger River in the east.

The rulers of Ghana converted to Islam following the rise of the Almoravid empire in the 11th century, easing communication along the growing network of trade routes across the desert. However, these improved trade conditions also provided the opportunity for the growth of rivals to Ghana’s control of the gold trade. Increased competition combined with overexploitation of the environment at Kumbi Saleh led to the decline and eventual breakup of the Kingdom of Ghana in the early 13th century.

Mali Empire

Soninke and Mandinka (also known as Mandingo or Malinke) clans were among the first to break away from Ghana. In the 1230s Mandinka leader Sundiata Keita organized a coalition of clans in the fertile valley of the upper Niger River, and began bringing neighboring groups under his control. This growing state became known as the Mali Empire. Under Sundiata’s successors, known as mansas, the empire would grow far larger than Ghana had ever been. At its height in the 13th century, Mali stretched from the Atlantic Ocean coast in the west to beyond the Niger bend in the east, and from the goldfields of modern Guinea in the south to the major southern Saharan caravan stops in the north. Mali came to the attention of the wider world when Mansa Musa made a lavish pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Cairo from 1324 to 1325. In this period, the city of Tombouctou (Timbuktu), northwest of the Niger bend, achieved world fame as both a center of the gold trade and of Islamic learning.

Holding such a massive empire together required energetic and forceful leadership. When brief reigns and dynastic struggles weakened the rule of the mansas in the late 14th century, Mali’s outer provinces asserted their independence. From south of the Niger bend, powerful Mossi states raided the center of the empire, and Tuareg nomads from the desert captured Tombouctou. By 1500 the rule of the mansas of Mali stretched little beyond the Mandinka heartland of the upper Niger.

Songhai Empire

Songhai, with its capital at Gao on the east side of the Niger bend, had been a riverside trading kingdom since at least the 8th century. Songhai was one of the first states to break away from Mali’s imperial control, using an army of horsemen and a fleet of war canoes to assert independent control over the Niger bend by the end of the 14th century. Songhai became an empire in the second half of the 15th century, under the rule of military hero Sunni Ali. Expanding his territory through military conquest, Ali seized control of Tuareg Tombouctou and drove the Mossi south of the Niger bend. By Ali’s death in 1492, Songhai had completely eclipsed Mali and stretched from the Atlantic coast to what is now central Niger.

Ali was succeeded by Muhammad, founder of the Askia dynasty. A devout Muslim, Muhammad consolidated Ali’s conquests and strengthened the administration of the empire. He used Islam as a unifying force within the empire, once justifying a major raid against the Mossi by declaring it a jihad, or holy war. Trans-Saharan trade flourished under Muhammad, who extended the empire to incorporate the Taghaza salt mines of the central Sahara.

In the late 16th century Songhai suffered a series of dynastic conflicts that weakened central control. Rising states in the east—such as Bornu, the Hausa city-states, and the Tuareg sultanate of Aïr—drew trade away from the empire. At the same time, gold produced in the southern forest regions was being redirected towards the increasing presence of European traders on the West African coast. The unity of the Songhai empire ended with the Moroccan invasion of 1591.

Kanem-Bornu

In the Lake Chad region, far to the east of the Niger bend, trans-Saharan trade was controlled by the state of Kanem, founded by Nilo-Saharan Kanuri nomads in about 800. By 1000 Kanem came under the leadership of the Saifawa clan, who established an Islamic dynasty and a settled capital at Njimi, north of Lake Chad.

Kanem controlled the shortest route across the desert, by way of the highlands of Aïr (in what is now north central Niger) and the Libyan region of Fezzan. Its traders also had access, by way of the Sudanese regions of Darfūr and Kordofan, to the markets of the Sudanese Nile and ultimately to Egypt. Kanem traded copper and salt from the desert, horses from North Africa, and ivory, ostrich feathers, and slaves from the south. In the 13th century, Kanem’s army was 40,000 horsemen strong, and the state controlled trade as far north as Fezzan. Near the end of the century Kanem absorbed the state of Bornu, southwest of Lake Chad, and moved its capital to Birmi, in the grasslands of Bornu. In the 16th century the rulers of Kanem-Bornu strengthened their control over the region with firearms imported from Ottoman North Africa.

Hausa City-States

Between 1000 and 1200 seven Hausa city-states emerged as regional trading powers in the savanna lands west of Bornu in what is now northern Nigeria. These cities were centers of agriculture and manufacturing, and each developed its own specialized manufactured product, such as cotton cloth, dyes, or leather. The most important of these cities were Kano, Katsina, Zaria, and Gobir. In the south, Zaria raided the Benue River valley for captives to sell as slaves, either for internal Hausa use or for sale to Bornu and North Africa in exchange for horses and guns.

People of the West African Forest

South of the savanna, in the forest zone from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, political organization tended to be clan- or village-based. However, several larger states emerged: The Yoruba kingdom of Ife and the Edo kingdom of Benin developed deep in the Nigerian forest in the 11th and 12th centuries. The artisans of Ife and Benin produced finely crafted terracotta sculptures and elaborate brass, bronze, and copper castings. By the 15th century Benin had expanded to control the entire length of the Nigerian coast, while Ife had been surpassed by Oyo as the dominant Yoruba state.

Farther west, in the forests of what is now Ghana, Akan-speaking peoples mined gold and traded with Songhai from about 1400. By the 16th century a number of powerful Akan chiefdoms arose, exploiting new European markets for gold along the coast. In the late 17th century several of these states merged to form the Ashanti Kingdom, which soon rose to prominence as a leading exporter of both gold and slaves. By 1800 Ashanti controlled all of modern Ghana and dominated trade with the numerous rival European trading posts along the coast.

Rise and Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade

The collapse of Songhai in the late 16th century coincided with the emerging importance of European trading interests along the West African coast. The combination of the two stimulated considerable movement of inland peoples and the emergence of new states within the forest zone. Initially, Europeans sought West Africa’s gold, but by the 17th century demand had shifted to slaves for export to European colonies across the Atlantic (see Atlantic Slave Trade).

Slavery and other forms of involuntary human servitude had long been features of African economic life (Slavery in Africa). Usually these workers—outcasts, criminals, and war captives—were considered part of their captors’ societies, although at a subordinate level. Slaves had been marketable commodities for centuries in the trans-Saharan trade, but the European Atlantic slave trade introduced a much larger scale to the trade in human beings.

Initially, the supply of captives available for sale on the coast was generally the result of specific local wars connected to the rise and fall of states. For example, the forest kingdom of Benin supplied the Portuguese with captives as the kingdom expanded in the 1490s, but when the kingdom stabilized it stopped supplying captives. Similarly, wars waged by the expanding states of Fouta Djallon, Oyo, Dahomey, and Ashanti in the 17th and 18th centuries produced specific peaks of captives for sale into slavery. Basically, African rulers sold captives when it suited them, becoming rich and powerful in the process, and rarely took them from their own people.

In the 18th century, as European demand grew for products such as sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, and as more North American, South American, and Caribbean lands became available for European use, the need for plantation labor increased. Demand for slaves exploded, growing to between 50,000 and 100,000 a year. As African war leaders and merchants fed the increasing global economic demand for slaves, they altered the nature of the trade and also changed everyday African life all along the coast and far into the interior. Systematic slave raiding became common, warfare became much more widespread, and small, village-based communities suffered badly at the hands of powerful neighbors. From the mid-15th century to the late 19th century at least 12 million young adults were sent from Africa to the New World as slaves, some 2 million of them dying en route. Combined with the millions of African slaves sent to the Mediterranean and Middle East, and the millions more who died in the process of capture, transportation, and detainment within Africa, the total number of productive young Africans lost to the slave trade exceeded 20 million.

Early East Africa

Early Iron Age Bantu-speaking farmers spread their settlements widely along the Indian Ocean coast and throughout the better-watered and wooded regions of the East African interior during the early centuries ad. The drier regions largely remained the domain of cattle-herding peoples, many of them descendants of earlier Cushitic-speaking herders.

States of the Great Lakes

As woodland was cleared for cultivation, wider areas of East Africa became suitable for cattle keeping. In the centuries before and after 1000, Nilotic-speaking cattle herders pushed southward into the newly exposed grasslands of the Great Lakes region. Some retained their Nilotic language and culture, such as the Luo northeast of Lake Victoria. West of Lake Victoria, Nilotic herders integrated into Bantu society and adopted local Bantu languages. In this period local state structures began to emerge. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the states of Bunyoro, Ankole, Karagwe, and Buganda were established in what is now Uganda and northern Tanzania. By the 16th century Bunyoro had grown to dominate the region.

In the same period the hierarchical kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi emerged in the mountains bordering Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika. These kingdoms were ruled by a cattle-owning aristocracy, known as Tutsi, who exacted tribute from the farming population, known as Hutu. The distinction between Tutsi and Hutu was one of power and wealth rather than ethnicity, although so-called ethnic differences between the two would be distorted and exploited in modern times.

The kingdom of Buganda, located at the northwest corner of Lake Victoria, grew in stature by the early 18th century. The region’s rich, fertile soil and regular rainfall supported intensive banana cultivation, which in turn supported a dense population and allowed for the development of a powerful, centralized state. Power rested with the kabaka (king) who controlled his realm by granting land estates to regional chiefs. A sophisticated system of roads and administration was established and by 1800 Buganda rivaled Bunyoro as the major power of the region.

To the east, Nilotic herders moved into the Kenya highlands and the Eastern Rift of the Great Rift Valley. Absorbing southern Cushitic-speaking cereal farmers and herders, these peoples were the ancestors of the Kalenjin of Kenya and the Dadog of Kenya. Subsequent Nilotic migrations, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, created the Karamojong and Teso of northeastern Uganda, the Samburu and Turkana of northwestern Kenya, and the Masai of the central Kenyan rift valleys and northern Tanzania. The pastoral Masai traded with the Bantu-speaking Kikuyu (Gikuyu) and Kamba of the central Kenya highlands and maintained peaceful relations with them.

Most of the Bantu-speaking farmers of Kenya and Tanzania lived in small, clan-based chiefdoms, but sizeable states emerged among the Chagga, Pare, and Shambaa in the wetter hills of northeastern Tanzania. In central and western Tanzania, the Nyamwezi became experienced traders in iron and salt, establishing important links between the coast and the emerging states of the western Great Lakes region.

Swahili and East Coast Trade

About 2,000 years ago, the Indian Ocean coast was populated by Bantu-speaking farmers, cattle keepers, and fishers. These people established small village settlements on estuaries and islands and built small boats for fishing, communicating, and trading along the coast. This region was known to Greek and Roman traders of the early centuries ad as Azania. By this time Bantu settlements stretched from the Kenyan island of Lamu in the north to the Rufiji estuary near modern-day Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the south. These communities exported ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoise shell, and other goods.

With the ongoing spread of Islam, from the 8th century the communities of the East African coast became more directly connected to the long-distance trading network of the Indian Ocean. Muslim Arabic-speaking traders settled along the coast and married into local ruling families. The language and culture that developed remained distinctly African, but with Arabic and Islamic borrowings and influences. This language and culture, and the people in general, are referred to as Swahili. By 1000 Swahili trading settlements stretched from Mogadishu in the north to Mozambique, the Comoros archipelago, and northern Madagascar in the south. (By this time, Madagascar had been settled by Polynesian peoples from the eastern Indian Ocean.) Other major Swahili towns included Mombasa, Kilwa, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar. The more prosperous Swahili towns minted their own copper and silver coins. Gold from the southern African interior became a significant export in southern Swahili towns, while northern towns sold captives for slave labor. Most of these slaves were sent to the Middle East, many to work in southern Iraq collecting salt from coastal flats.

The growing significance of the Swahili gold trade prompted further Arab immigration in the 12th century. Wealthy Muslim elites ruled the Swahili cities, and their imports of fine Indian and Chinese pottery hint at the range and wealth of their Indian Ocean trading connections.

After Portuguese sailors first rounded southern Africa at the end of the 15th century, Portugal sought to seize control of this lucrative Indian Ocean trade, especially the gold trade. The Portuguese sacked several of the principal Swahili cities, built a string of fortresses along the coast, and dominated the coastal trade until an Arab force from Oman drove them out of the northern cities in the 1690s.

Early Central Africa

In Central Africa, the Bantu migration came full circle. By 1000 bc western Bantu-speaking farmers had crossed the Congo River and settled in what is now Angola. Approximately 1,500 years later, eastern Bantu-speaking groups—descended from groups that had spread throughout East Africa—met and intermingled with their distant relatives in what is now Angola, southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western Zambia.

Luba, Lunda, and Maravi Empires

In the Upemba Depression, in what is now southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the ancestors of the Luba people made up one of the earliest iron-working groups in Central Africa. This wet, fertile savanna woodland on the southern edge of the equatorial forest was ideally suited to the production of food and the development of settled communities. In addition, the upper Lualaba River provided the Luba with trading connections between the forest and the southern savanna. They traded salt, iron, and dried fish, and became expert craftsmen in copper imported from the south. By 1300 they had organized into prosperous farming and trading chiefdoms and were casting copper into cross-shaped ingots for use as trading currency. From these origins, a great, centralized Luba Empire emerged by the early 1400s.

According to traditional accounts, in the 1450s the growth of the Luba Empire inspired a sense of unity among the scattered Lunda chiefdoms to the west. New dynasties arose, but they recognized the authority of the existing Lunda rulers. The Lunda Empire that emerged in the 16th century was more like a confederation of tribute-paying chieftaincies than a single, centralized empire.

Luba and Lunda ideas of kingship and inheritance of power spread farther west, to present-day Angola, and southeast, to eastern Zambia and southern Malawi. The Phiri clan, which grew powerful in southern Malawi in the early 1400s, claimed to inherit its authority from Luba kings. The Phiris married into the local Banda clan and developed their own concept of kingship, based upon the authority of local religious cults. Over the course of the 16th century they founded the Kalonga, Lundu, and Undi kingdoms—known collectively as the Maravi Confederacy—in the rich elephant-hunting lands between Lake Malawi and the Zambezi River. They profited greatly from the ivory trade with the Portuguese at the Swahili coast. For a brief period between 1600 and 1650 the Maravi were united under the Kalonga dynasty as a single empire from the Shire and Zambezi river valleys to the coast of Mozambique.

In the early 18th century the king of the Lunda Empire sent a small force eastward to capture the Luapula River valley (on what is now the northern border of Zambia). The leader of the invasion was given the title Kazembe, with authority to extend Lunda tribute collection over the people of the region. In the fertile valley, which brimmed with fish and was close to the rich copper deposits in northern Zambia, this leader was able to build an autonomous Kazembe empire. By 1800 Kazembe still nominally acknowledged Lunda authority but, in practice, independently controlled a vast trading network that stretched nearly the width of the continent.

Kongo and Portuguese Interference

Before 1000 Bantu-speaking farmers had developed numerous small states in the hills and valleys of present-day Angola and in the woodland savanna country on either side of the lower Congo River. By 1400 a number of these states had merged to form the kingdom of Kongo with its capital at Mbanza Kongo, south of the Congo River. The nearby Pool Malebo, a lake formed by a widening in the river, was a major trading junction of the lower Congo region. By controlling the pool, the kings of Kongo were able to dominate trade on the river and regional overland trade as well.

Kongo was a federation of provinces and the king was elected by the hereditary rulers of the provinces. By the 1480s, when Portuguese explorers first visited Kongo, the capital housed 10,000 to 15,000 people, occupied in trading and in manufacturing iron and raffia cloth. This great concentration of people gave the king the power to challenge the local authority of the provinces. The power struggle between the king and the provinces was to be a dominant theme of Kongo’s history over the next 200 years.

The Portuguese emissaries and missionaries who arrived in the 1490s became one more element in the internal struggles. The Kongo king welcomed the Portuguese, seeking to gain strength from their weapons technology, and converted to Christianity. Kongolese Christianity retained distinctive African beliefs and rituals, despite the efforts of Portuguese missionaries to quash them. It became more of a royal religious cult than a religion of the masses. The king’s power declined in the 18th century, but the Kongolese form of Christianity persevered, incorporating further African qualities and strengthening indigenous African religious thought.

Politically, the Portuguese were arrogant and unreliable allies and refused to consider their relationship with Kongo as a meeting of equals. They intervened in dynastic struggles and entered into wars in the interior. By the mid-16th century it was clear that Portugal’s primary objective was to acquire slaves for their plantations on the island of São Tomé and, later, in Brazil. The kings of Kongo were prepared to wage war against rebellious provinces in order to acquire captives for sale, but they objected to the Portuguese dealing directly with the provinces, independent of royal control. The Portuguese fueled rebellions in the provinces, culminating in a civil war that virtually destroyed the kingdom in the 1660s and 1670s.

By this time the Portuguese had shifted the focus of their slave trading south to the port of Luanda, where they established the colony of Angola. Here, they continued their disruptive practices, clashing with the nearby kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba. Queen Nzinga of Matamba was one of their foremost opponents from 1624 to 1663.

From north of the Congo River, English, Dutch, and French traders tapped into the trade in Central African captives, and in doing so stimulated even higher levels of conflict in the region. The impact of the Atlantic slave trade was deeper and longer felt in this area than in any other part of the continent. By the 18th century the slave-raiding frontier stretched far into the forest to the heart of Central Africa.

Early Southern Africa

By 650 small Bantu-speaking communities of ironworkers and farmers had settled all over southern Africa, excluding only the drier regions of central and western Botswana, Namibia, and the Cape of Good Hope region of South Africa. In these drier areas, Khoisan hunter-gatherers and herders were dominant.

State Formation in Southern Africa

Some southern Bantu groups may have learned how to herd cattle by absorbing Khoisan herders into their societies. From the 7th century on, cattle keeping came to be associated with the rise of chiefs. Owners of large herds were able to lend cattle to poorer people for milk and, upon the consent of the lender, for consumption or sale. In this way, cattle-owning chiefs acquired subjects, dependent upon their wealth and continued goodwill.

Chiefdoms first developed into fairly large states in the cattle-raising regions of eastern Botswana. Archaeological evidence has shown that on several flat-topped hills in eastern Botswana there were large settlements of wealthy people surrounding enclosures that would have held several hundred cattle. In the areas surrounding each of these hills were numerous smaller hilltop settlements, not as rich in their possessions or in numbers of cattle. Scholars hypothesize that each of the larger hills was the capital of a kingdom, and the smaller hills represented subordinate chiefdoms. In the flat land between the hills lived the peasantry, probably Khoisan, who tended the cattle, hunted, and tilled the fields for their patrons. These states are collectively known as the Toutswe culture, named after Toutswemogala, one of the hills. The Toutswe people established indirect trading links with the Indian Ocean coast by way of the Limpopo River valley. The Toutswe hills were abandoned and the people dispersed in about 1300, for reasons that are not yet known. Other similar state systems were established in the Lake Ngami region of northwest Botswana.

A similar cattle-keeping culture developed on the western Zimbabwe plateau, near the modern city of Bulawayo, from about the 10th century. Here farmers terraced hillsides to retain moist soils for cultivation, and miners worked the region’s rich gold seams. This western Zimbabwean culture reached its height between 1100 and 1300 when it developed close links with Mapungubwe, in the Limpopo valley in what is now northern South Africa. Mapungubwe was a wealthy, cattle-keeping state that traded gold and ivory with the coast. After about 1250, however, the focus of trade, wealth, and political power shifted to the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe on the eastern edge of the plateau.

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Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe started as a hilltop settlement in the early 13th century. Possibly chosen for some religious significance, the location also had a number of distinct political and economic advantages. The land was fertile and well watered, and the site was strategically situated at the head of the Sabi River valley, midway between the goldfields of the western plateau and the Indian Ocean coast. With cattle forming the basis of the state’s power, its location on the edge of the plateau provided a range of upland and lowland grazing. There was a plentiful supply of timber for firewood, building, and the production of charcoal for smelting, and hunters collected ivory from the area’s abundant elephants. The volume of gold trading in Great Zimbabwe grew so large that Swahili traders built a new Indian Ocean port at Sofala, due east of Great Zimbabwe, to facilitate the trade. In exchange for gold, the Swahili traded pottery from East Asia and other luxuries to Great Zimbabwe.

At its height in the 14th century, the capital city of Great Zimbabwe housed up to 11,000 residents. The great stone walls for which Great Zimbabwe is famous were built with slabs of locally available granite carved so carefully that no mortar was required to hold them together. The Great Enclosure, built in the valley between 1300 and 1400, was constructed to enhance the prestige of the king rather than for defensive purposes. Great Zimbabwe was abandoned in about 1450, possibly due to the kingdom’s overexploitation of the environment, but its stone ruins remain to this day as a monument to this large and thriving early Shona state.

Mutapa and Other Zimbabwean States

Great Zimbabwe was quickly followed by the rise of Mutapa, a Shona empire at the headwaters of the Mazoe River to the north. Mutapa was likely founded by migrants from Great Zimbabwe itself. In the 15th and 16th centuries it dominated the gold trade between the plateau and the Zambezi River valley, notably with Swahili trading posts at Sena and Tete. In the 16th century the Portuguese established bases at both posts in an attempt to seize control of the trade and conquer Mutapa and the plateau. Mutapa resisted Portuguese intrusion until the mid-17th century, when the empire was at last subjugated. 

On the western side of the Zimbabwean plateau, Torwa (also called Butua) was founded in the 15th century as another successor state to Great Zimbabwe. At Torwa’s capital city of Khami, masons continued to refine Great Zimbabwe’s tradition of building precise stone walls.

In the 1670s a new power arose on the plateau led by a Shona military ruler called the Changamire. His army of followers, known as the Rozwi, seized control of Torwa, drove the Portuguese from the plateau in 1693, and established the Rozwi Empire (also called Changamire).

H4

Dutch at the Cape

In the mid-17th century a new force appeared at the southwestern tip of the continent. The Dutch East India Company established a trading station at the Cape of Good Hope to provision their ships heading to Dutch colonies in Indonesia. Subsequent Dutch and other European settlers used firearms to seize control of the region, subjugate the Khoisan, and strip them of their cattle. These white settlers established wheat farms and vineyards in the Cape region, worked by imported slaves or Khoisan forced labor. Other settlers moved into the interior, establishing large cattle ranges and hunting lodges before moving on when resources were exhausted. By the 1770s their settlements had reached as far east as the lands of the southernmost Bantu farmers. Here they met well-established and powerful Xhosa kingdoms that could command armies sufficient to halt the settlers’ advance. Thus began a century of conflict between the Xhosa and the Cape invaders.

I

North Africa to the 1870s

By the final decade of the 18th century Africans had survived several centuries of outside interference and remained largely in control of their own destinies. Ottoman control over North Africa had declined in the face of increasing European dominance of Mediterranean Sea trade. For the most part, Egypt and the coastal settlements and ports of the Maghreb acted independently of central Ottoman authority. To the west, Morocco remained an independent kingdom, but the king’s power did not extend far beyond Morocco’s major cities.

In the desert regions to the south, trans-Saharan caravans continued to ply their trade between the southern savanna lands, the salt mines and oases of the desert, and the Mediterranean world. However, the scale of trans-Saharan trade had declined considerably from its height in the 16th century. This was largely due to the rising importance of European seaborne trade along the West African coast.

I1

Egypt and Sudan

French general Napoleon Bonaparte invaded and conquered Ottoman Egypt in 1798. The Ottomans retook Egypt in 1801, but the French invasion sparked important changes in the province. A key figure in the Ottoman reconquest was Muhammad Ali, leader of an Albanian regiment of the Ottoman army. The French invasion had weakened the old Egyptian Mamluk aristocracy and Muhammad Ali seized the opportunity to establish himself as the ruler of Egypt. The position was recognized by Ottoman sultan Selim III, who awarded Ali the title pasha (viceroy) in 1805.

Determined to establish his own dynasty in Egypt, Muhammad Ali built a professional army to withstand any future foreign invasions. Soldiers were conscripted from the peasantry and from slaves brought north from Sudan. Muhammad Ali ordered the massacre of most of the leading Mamluks and took over their tax-collecting powers. Then he set up a professional civil service, whose principal role was to reap as much tax income from peasant farmers as possible. To this end, his new civil servants directed the rebuilding of irrigation canals and introduced modern agricultural methods to the peasantry. Egypt’s peasant farmers produced cotton and wheat in huge quantities, and the state took a large portion of the harvest in the form of taxes and exported it to Europe.

In the 1820s Muhammad Ali sent an army to invade and occupy the upper Nile. The army conquered the Funj sultanate and established the administrative capital of Khartoum at the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile. By the 1840s Ali had extended Egypt’s empire to include most of what is now southern Sudan. Rich in ivory and slaves, this area was a good source of wealth and of forced recruits for the Egyptian army. The Arab Egyptian merchants who set up their headquarters in Khartoum, using what were in effect private armies, chose to raid southern Sudanese settlements of Dinka, Shilluk, and Nuer peoples for goods rather than trade for them. In doing so they established a pattern and frame of mind for the relationship between Sudan’s Arabs and black Africans that was to persist all the way into the 21st century.

Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail Pasha, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, allowed European traders to settle in Egypt. Ismail encouraged Europeans to invest in the construction of railways and also in the digging of a canal to link the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at Suez. France financed the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869. Egyptian cotton production for the British market increased rapidly during the American Civil War (1861-1865), when cotton supplies from the United States were cut off. Overconfident of Egypt’s economic position, Ismail began undertaking costly endeavors such as building a railway to Khartoum and investing heavily in garrisons in southern Sudan to suppress Sudanese resistance.

By the mid-1870s it was clear that Ismail’s government had overstretched itself and was bankrupt. Britain and France—fearful that the Egyptian state might collapse and they would lose their huge investments in railways and canal—intervened, deposing Ismail in 1879. The two European powers established a system of “dual control” over Egypt’s finances. When an Egyptian army coup threatened to drive out the Europeans, Britain sent an army of occupation and took over sole control of Egypt in 1882.

I2

Algeria and the Maghreb

The rulers of Algeria supported the French in their 1798 invasion of Egypt and supplied Napoleon’s army with wheat, on credit, throughout the subsequent Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Thereafter, however, the French refused to repay their debt to Algeria and relations between them soured. In 1830 the French army occupied Algiers and overthrew the Algerian ruler. France annexed Algiers and the fertile coastal region in 1834 and invited in French settlers to occupy the land. Beyond the coastal regions, however, the French met the formidable resistance of Arab and Berber Muslims, led by marabout (Muslim holy man) Abd al-Qadir. By the 1840s the French needed an army in excess of 100,000 men to maintain their occupation and to wage the ongoing war. Although Abd al-Qadir was captured in 1847, French conquest of Algeria was not completed until the 1870s.

In the early 19th century the rulers of Libya and Tunisia, acting independently of Ottoman control, bought firearms from Britain and used them to extend their control into the interior regions of the Sahara. Libya took control of the Fezzan region in 1811 and thereafter stepped up the trade in slaves from the Bornu region by Lake Chad. The kingdom of Morocco maintained its independence throughout the 19th century, despite clashes with Spain along the Spanish-controlled northern coast and with France on the Algerian border. At the same time the Moroccan sultans extended more effective control over the remoter Berber regions of the interior.