Download Week 4 – States of the Western Sudan: Ancient Ghana, Mali and

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Week 4 – States of the Western Sudan: Ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai
A. Islam in the Western Sudan.
1. Before discussing the emergence of the three great empires of the Western Sudan –
that area in the interior of West Africa that expanded both westward and eastward from
the area of the northern most stretches of the Niger River, today in the central area of
the Republic of Mali – I want to briefly discuss how the religion of Islam came to the
region. Islam, and the Muslims traders who brought it to the Western Sudan, had a
great influence on those three early African empires.
2. Basic terms:
a. “Allah” – the name of the Supreme Being of Islam.
b. “Muhammed” – the Prophet of Allah; the founder of Islam; b. ca. 570, d. 632 [There
are several ways to spell his name, two of which are “Mohammed” and “Muhammad”.]
c. “Moslems” or “Muslims” – those people who accept the teaching of Islam.
d. “Mecca” and Medina” – the two holiest cities, of great religious and historical
significance to all Muslims.
e. the Koran - this book contains the teaching of Muhammed (i.e. the revealed Word of
God)
3. Islam has five basic tenets (as I understand the beliefs and practices of Islam); if these
are followed the believer is ensured salvation. These are:
i. Repeat the Credo every prayer session: “There is no God but God; Muhammed is His
Prophet”.
ii. Pray five times a day – the praying person faces Mecca.
iii. The Hajj – a holy pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina; every Muslim should do this at
least once in their life.
iv. Fasting, from sunrise to sunset, during the holy month of Ramadan (the 9th month of
the Islamic year).
v. Give alms to the poor.
4. A general chronology of Islam:
i. In the month of Ramadan, 610, Muhammad began to receive revelations from Allah.
The fundamental message that was revealed to Muhammed was that there was “One God
(Allah) and total submission, or surrendering of the personal self, to Him was the only way to His
salvation.
ii. In 613, Muhammed began to public preach that he was a messenger of God, the
latest in a long line of holy prophets, and that people should surrender to God as that was the
only way to salvation.
iii. From 613 to 622 Muhammed taught in and around his home town of Mecca.
However, he was met by skepticism and outright opposition to his teaching. Both he and the
few followers he had managed to attract were openly-persecuted.
iv. In 622, to escape continued persecution by local tribes as well as officials in Mecca,
Muhammed led his few followers about 200 miles north to the city of Medina. This journey,
called “the Hijra” by Muslims is the starting date of the Islamic calendar.
v. From 622 to 630, Muhammed taught and attracted a much greater following than he
had in and around Mecca.
vi. In 630 he led his new followers in an armed assault on the area of Mecca, which
surrendered in that year.
vii. Over the next two years Muhammed brought most of the Arabian peninsula and it’s
peoples under his control and converted them to Islam.
viii. Muhammed died in 632. Following his death, those who had come to accept him as
the final messenger and prophet of God, began to spread his religion –Islam - and their political
control over areas outside the Arabian Peninsula.
ix. In 641, the great Egyptian city of Alexandria fell to Islamic forces.
x. By 711, Islamic forces had conquered the coastal zones of North Africa and a specific
Muslim group, the Moors, had conquered the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain). In 732
Islamic forces invaded southwestern France but were defeated at the Battle of Poitiers, and
then retreated to Spain and consolidated their control there.
xi. ca. 734 Muslims had advanced into the northern territories of the region that is today
the Kingdom of Morocco.
xii. From the time around their conquest of Morocco, Islamic traders from that areas, as
well as areas along the western regions of North Africa, began to follow routes into the Sahara
Desert and eventually not only penetrated that desert by emerged on its southern fringes,
particularly in the areas to the west of the northern most bend of the Niger River.
xiii. By sometime after 800, some of those Muslim traders – carrying goods that included
citrus crops like oranges and mangoes, sugar cane and eggplants, cotton textiles and knowledge
of how to cast brass and camels; and, of course, the teachings of Islam - had come into contact
with rulers of the Empire of Ghana, the first of the great ancient empires of the Western Sudan.
B. Sociopolitical Elements Brought With Islam
1. Islam was spread to the Western Sudan by Muslim traders who advanced into and across the
Sahara in search of trade. Some knowledge of past trading practices across the region would have been
know from age old stories (for instance, there was trade from the southern shores of the Mediterranean
Sea into the Sahara region before Rome conquered the coastal zones of North Africa). At first, it
appears that those traders were given permission by local rulers to establish residence and to trade –
often creating settlement sites adjacent to or, at least, close-by – existing towns just south of the desert.
2. Those societies were already accustomed to more regional local traders (a basic trade good
being salt, mined in different areas of the Sahara and then traded southward). The Muslim traders
would have been allowed to practice their religion and probably began to also teach it to local peoples.
It is generally accepted by historians that the first to convert to the new religion were some of the rulers
in the western regions of the Western Sudan – west of the interior bend of the Niger River.
a. Control of trade, and traders, was traditional among African rulers, so they would
have had greatest and most prolonged contact with the Muslim traders.
b. There is certainly the possibility that some local rulers “heard the Word of God” and
recognized it as such. However, this is virtually impossible for historians to determine, as religious belief
is a matter of faith in a belief system, and historians don’t possess the tools to determine an individual’s
internal beliefs.
c. What historians can suggest is that by converting those rulers could benefit
economically and therefore politically. For example, one of the teachings of Islam is that you do not
cheat a fellow Muslim. By converting, even nominally, the ruler may well have been able to attract
more traders to his court than could a neighboring ruler who was not Muslim – because the traders
could be reasonably certain that they would not be cheated. In other words, in addition to spiritual
reasons, there were several reasons a ruler might have converted to Islam.
d. With greater access to often exotic trade goods, a ruler could gain greater political
following as he could distribute those goods and by accepting the, other people accepted and
recognized his right to distribute gifts – that he had the right to control the trade; the authority to also
control the regions where the trade was occurring (with his approval). One of the most exotic of trade
goods that rulers would have wanted to develop a monopolistic control over was horses. Horses were
used by many rulers to expand their areas of rule by providing swift, mobile military forces. The wealth
that customs duties and other fees imposed on traders would have produced gave rulers a much grater
ability to build and arm military units.
e. the limited evidence that exist indicates that rulers were following this pattern by ca.
900 to 1,000 CE.
3. Additional sociopolitical aspects associated with the spread of Islam into the Western Sudan:
a. Literacy spread to the region, as it is a given that a Muslim can read the Word of God,
as found in the Koran; although often it was memorized by sitting with a literate teacher.
b. Larger political territorial units (states) developed. This was most likely the result of
control of trade as well as literacy giving rulers the ability to transmit the same commands over much
larger areas. The larges of these units – Ancient Ghana, Mali and Songhai – were empires (simply stated,
a kingdom controls several chiefdoms; an empire control many kingdoms).
c. Architectural styles were influenced, as North African Muslim merchants, and perhaps
traders from Egypt and even Islamic centers slightly further east, came to the Western Sudan and
helped build Mosques.
d. Local languages were altered as Arabic lent words to those languages – especially
words and phrases dealing with commercial activities.
e. Urbanization would have increased as trade centers attracted both more and more
traders but also local peoples.
f. After a while, settlements of Muslim traders would have produced some who did not
want to be involved in trade, but because of their literacy were very valuable to local rules as nascent
bureaucrats. Those men would have probably been very loyal to the local ruler, as their right to reside
in a given ruler’s territory rested on that ruler’s good will toward them. Another new class of people
would have been the development of a class of indigenous traders – one of the best examples of this
new group of indigenous traders was the Dyula traders of the Mande people.
g. Increased trade encouraged a greater exploitation of local resources, demanded
greater surpluses of food (to feed larger towns) and stimulated the creation and then expansion of local
industry (meaning “a particular branch of production”) – particularly a textile industry where local
weavers fashioned cloth using the world’s smallest looms (they are held in the weaver’s hands).
4. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of how local cultural practices reshaped
some aspects of Islam in the Western Sudan. For example, Islam allows a man to marry up to four
wives; whereas many traditional African cultures allow a man to marry as many wives as he can support
– for a commoner that may have been only one or two, while for some rulers the number could have
been in the hundreds (as many of their marriages would have been to cement political alignments). A
Western ruler would not have seen anything contradictory in being a Muslim and having many more
than four wives. Another example would be the veiling of women. In many parts of the Western Sudan
Islamic women did not wear veils (and in some societies did not fully cover their bodies with clothing);
this, again, would not be contradictory to local peoples, although it probably would have shocked
Muslim merchants from North Africa.
C. The Empires of the Western Sudan
1. [Ancient] Ghana, ca. 800 – 1203 CE
a. The background to the rise of the empire of Ghana goes back to before the time of
Christ. During the historical period around that time the savanna regions of Wes Africa experienced
something of an agricultural revolution, probably because of new grain crops being introduced to the
area from further east and certainly because of the spread of knowledge of iron making to the region.
These economic developments resulted in large population growth rates.
b. With larger agricultural populations, increased levels of trade developed – first more
local trade in commodities like dried fish from the Niger and salt from the Sahara; then regional trade,
with gold and probably types of natural dyes (from trees) and other forest products coming from the
south. That larger regional trade network was then joined to a much larger trading network through the
Western Sudan incorporation into the trans-Saharan trade that ultimately moved a commodity like gold
from the forest zones to North Africa. Archaeological evidence from the ancient town of Jenne (also
know as Jenne-jeno or Djenne), located on the Niger River in south-central modern-day Mali, indicate
that trade developed along the upper reaches of the Niger River very early. The site originated as early
as 250 BCE and had developed into a small, local trading center by ca. 500 CE, becoming a very large
regional urban trading site certainly by 900 CE.
c. Sometime prior to 800 CE a Soninke chiefdom expanded and gained control over the
“trans-shipment area” northwest of Jenne and west of the town of Timbuktu (see map in Falola, v. 1, pg.
139). A trans-shipment area is a geographical zone where forms of transport had to be changes. In the
case of the Western Sudan that meant changing from human portage in the forest to donkey carts and
boats on rivers in the southern savanna, to camels in the northern savanna and for shipment across the
Sahara. By gaining control of trade routes through the savanna and out into the desert this Soninke
kingdom was able to grow both in size and wealth and expand into the empire of Ghana.
d. At the height of its power and influence, Ghana stretched from the Senegal River in
the west to the upper bend of the Niger River in the east, the city of Awdaghost in the north and
Bambuk in the south. It would have been able to control this vast area because of its army of ca.
200,000 men, 40,000 of whom were archers.
e. Ghana was ruled by an emperor, who was advised by a council of ministers and the
governor of the capital city (which had two sections: the royal section and the Muslim traders section).
The provinces of the state would have been governed by vassal kings after their kingdoms had
submitted to Ghanaian over-lordship. The local vassal king’s allegiance would be ensured by keeping his
eldest son and heir in residence at the emperor’s court. While local justice would have been
administered by these local kings, the overall justice of the empire rested in the hands of the emperor.
f. Socially, the empire followed lines of matrilineal inheritance. Culturally, local peoples
would have believed in and practiced both magic and witchcraft and within the empire as a whole there
would have been many gods and the practice of “ancestor worship” or “veneration”.
g. By the late 12th century it appears that a large number of the vassal kings had
converted to Islam and conflicts between them and the center of the empire had developed; In
addition, there were still many vassal kings who were not Muslim and Muslim vs. non-Muslim factions
within the empire had developed to a serious level by the late 1100s. Then Almoravids (an Islamic
brotherhood made up of Berber pastoralists from the northwest region of the Western Sudan) captured
both the city of Sijilmasa (just of the northern edge of the Sahara) and the city of Awdaghost. The
disruption of trade that resulted certainly weakened the Ghanaian empire, as the loss of those two cities
deprived Ghana of large amounts of wealth from customs duties and other trade fees.
h. In 1203, the vassal state of Susu rebelled in an attempt to throw off Ghanaian rule. It
was probably not the first vassal kingdom to try to regain its independence, but because of the
weakened state of Ghana, it was successful. The rulers of Susu attempted to assert their own authority
over all the territory that Ghana had control, but were unsuccessful. After three decades of interregional warfare, Sundiata, the founder of the Malian empire, was able to defeat Susu and other
regional kings and turn the rulers of Ghana into vassals to his state.
2. Mali, 1235 – early 1490s
a. Sundiata founded the empire of Mali in 1235 CE. He was, and is, considered one of
the greatest political leaders produced from an ancient African culture. Stories are still told of his
strength of character, bravery, justice and overall brilliance – especially as a political leader; stories that
are used to demonstrate qualities of good character to children to this day.
b. Much of the social and cultural elements noted above for Ghana would also apply to
Mali.
c. Mali reached its political and economic apex in the mid-14th century, under the rule of
Mansa (Emperor) Musa. Mansa Musa is most for the Hajj he made to Mecca and Medina in the period
1324-25. Some reports say he took nearly 8,000 retainers and perhaps several hundreds of his royal
wives with him on the journey. He is reported to have spent, or gave as gifts, so much gold in the
several months he was in Cairo (the financial center of the Islamic world, which at that time would have
ranged from Spain in the west to Indonesia in the east) that the value of gold decreased by 12% for
several months, maybe as long as one year.
d. Mali ended in the late 15th century when one of its non-Muslim generals, Sonni Ali,
rebelled and captured the cities of Jenne, Gao and Timbuktu.
3. Songhai, ca. 1490 – 1591
a. In 1493, following the death of Sonni Ali and the one year rule of his son, the Muslim
general Mohammed Toure led a coup and established the Empire of Songhai. Toure ruled for the next
thirty-five years as Askia (Emperor) Mohammed.
b. In 1528 Askia Mohammed was deposed by his won sons. Over the next six decades
there were at least eight different Askias.
c. By 1591, after decades of fighting over control of the empire it had been weakened to
a very great degree. That year the northern reaches of the empire – which was centered down the
Niger River southeast from Timbuktu – were invaded by Moroccan forces, bent on gaining control of the
western regions of trans-Saharan trade networks and controlling them from the north; this was in part
in reprisal for Songhai attempting to control salt deposits in the Sahara as far north as southern
Morocco, thereby upsetting a trading system that had existed in balance for centuries. At the Battle of
Tondibi in 1591, a Moroccan force of 4,000 defeated a much larger Songhai army. They were able to do
that because the Moroccans were armed with firearms.
d. Due to changes in trans-Saharan trade routes – there was a general shifting eastward
– as well as political developments within the Islamic worlds of North Africa and further east and one
other major development, no state equal in size or influence emerged in the Western Sudan to replace
Songhai. The “other major development” was the refocusing of trade southward, through the
rainforests to the coastal regions of West Africa; a trade between coastal peoples and Europeans (this
will be discussed in greater detail in weeks 6 and 7).
4. Similarities of the Ghana, Mali and Songhai
a. Ghana, Mali and Songhai shared a number of characteristics. They all ruled over very
diverse empires – made up off many separate kingdoms that had different languages, different gods,
and different specific cultural beliefs and practices. With that said, it should be obvious that the only
thing that held these empires together, that united them, was force – or at the very least the threat of
force. As long as each empire controlled their territory’s trade – the routes into the desert as far as
possible – they could accumulate large amounts of wealth, and therefore build and maintain large
armies. Once something disrupted their control of the trade routes and they lost income, they began to
weaken, and once that happened they were increasingly vulnerable to either internal revolt or foreign
invasion.
b. As stated above, all three were very – extremely – diverse and diverse is always,
historically speaking, hard to hold together. Cultures that are different very often want to stay different.
Being ruled by a different people, especially when force is involved, makes the ruled even more
conscious of being different, and of wanting to assert their own identity.
c. Each of the empires controlled trade in its territory, and the trade routes into and out
of it as far as they could. At their separate heights of power, they would have controlled trade routes
deep into the Sahara, for instance. They did not control production of any commodities that were
traded. That made them vulnerable – if either supply or demand for particular goods decreased, it
negatively impacted the empires, and there was virtually nothing they could do about it. Or, if they lost
control of a route to were a commodity was produced, they also were vulnerable - as what happened
with the Almoravids’ and Moroccans’ taking control of salt producing areas.
d. Finally, none of the three empires ever development a succession system by which
political power passed peacefully from one ruler to the next. When a ruler died, there were succession
disputes – some of them apparently bordering on civil war. You can imagine, a ruler with perhaps
hundreds of wives, and who knows how many sons – each feeling that they could, or maybe should, be
the next emperor (regardless of whatever traditional succession practices were “official”). Wars at the
center of power are always bad for the continuation of power. Just because they happen they raise
questions about the legitimacy of whoever wins; they also take focus off of ruling, of efficiently
collecting customs fees and taxes, and the often provide out-lying areas more opportunity to rebel, and
perhaps be successful.