17 Empires and kingdoms of Africa

When European explorers first studied the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the later 19th century, they were convinced that this extensive royal palace-complex, with its high stone walls and towers, could not have been built by the local African people. The ruins must, they asserted, have been the work of Phoenicians or Arabs, and stories arose linking the site with King Solomon’s fabled mines and the Queen of Sheba.

It simply did not fit in with the European colonial project to consider black Africans capable of developing a society with the wealth and complexity necessary to produce such magnificence.

There was a similar sense of disbelief when Europeans first encountered the stunning brass heads from Ife in what is now southwestern Nigeria. Both aesthetically and technically these statues, dating from the 12th to the 16th centuries, exceeded or were on a par with anything being produced in Europe at the same time. But as the archaeological evidence accumulated, both in Ife and Great Zimbabwe, it became clear that in both these places prosperous and powerful indigenous kingdoms had flourished during the time of the European Middle Ages. And these were just two of a number of wealthy kingdoms and empires that thrived in sub-Saharan Africa in the precolonial era.

The cradle of humanity It was in Africa that our earliest human-like ancestors first evolved, around 4 million years ago. Some 2 million years later, Homo erectus, an early human species, began to spread out of Africa, reaching as far as Europe and eastern Asia. Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, also first evolved in Africa, around 200,000 years ago. From 100,000 years ago some of these modern humans began to migrate to Europe and Asia, and from there reached Australia, Oceania and the Americas.

Africa itself was affected by climatic change after 5000 BC, resulting in the formation of the Sahara Desert. This created a physical barrier between the peoples on either side of it, and those who lived to the north of the desert fell within the ambit of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Their history is mingled with that of ancient Egypt, of Carthage, of the empires of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks.

On the other side of the great divide, developments occurred largely independently. By 4000 BC farming communities had been established in the grasslands of the Sahel, the area just south of the Sahara, iron smelting emerged in West Africa in the 1st millenniumBC, and some substantial settlements arose, thriving on the trade with the desert nomads to the north and the forest peoples to the south.

Between 2,000 and 1,500 years ago Iron Age farming communities began to spread southeastward from West Africa, in what is known as the Bantu migration. The indigenous hunter-gatherers to the south were marginalized: the pygmies of central Africa took refuge in the dense tropical rainforest, while the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa were confined to the Kalahari Desert.

“Among the gold mines of the inland plains … there is a fortress built of stones of marvellous size … ”

Vicente Pegado, captain of the Portuguese garrison of Sofala on the coast of Mozambique, gives the first European description of Great Zimbabwe, 1531

Cultural contacts In places, contacts did occur between sub-Saharan Africa and the peoples to the north. The Nile provided a link between the Egypt of the pharaohs and the darker-skinned peoples to the south, in Nubia (northern Sudan). Nubia was conquered by the Egyptians early in the 2nd millennium BC, and some of the later pharaohs were actually of Nubian origin. It was the Nubians who, around AD 100, established the kingdom of Axum along the Red Sea coast. Initially Axum also ruled part of Arabia, but later the rulers moved further inland to form the kingdom of Abyssinia in what is now Ethiopia. Abyssinia adopted Christianity in the 4th century AD, and succeeded in maintaining its identity and independence against Muslim-Arab influence and European invasion until the Italian occupation of 1935–41.

Elsewhere in Africa, Islam began to dominate. Having spread rapidly across the north of the continent in the 7th century AD, it then began to percolate southward via the trans-Saharan trade routes, and was established in the Sahel by the 11th century. Arab seafarers also spread their religion and culture down the east coast of Africa, where they established a number of trading posts such as Mombasa.

“Here are great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king’s cost and charges.”

Leo Africanus, History and Description of Africa, 1550 describes Timbuktu, capital of the empire of Mali

Gold, ivory and slaves It was the trade in gold with the Arabs on the coast of East Africa that supplied the wealth necessary to build Great Zimbabwe in the 14th and 15th centuries. The export of gold, ivory and slaves via the trans-Saharan caravan routes also underpinned the wealth and power of a number of empires and kingdoms that successively dominated parts of West Africa and the Sahel. From the 8th to the 11th centuries, the empire of Ghana extended over parts of modern Mauritania and Mali, and it was said its rulers could muster an army of 200,000 men. In the 13th–15th centuries, the empire of Mali ruled over the upper reaches of the River Niger, and westward to the Atlantic coast. Other empires followed: Songhai in the 15th and 16th centuries, which was larger even than Mali; and Bornu, centered around Lake Chad, which reached its peak in the 17th century.

The munificence of Mansa Musa

Such was the wealth of the Mali empire that when its devout ruler, Mansa Musa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 he took with him tens of thousands of followers—soldiers, slaves, wives and court officials—together with 100 camels, each carrying 100 pounds (45 kg) of gold. When he reached Cairo, he spent so much gold, “flooding the city with his kindness,” that the cost of goods and services soared, and the local currency took some years to recover its value.

The commerce in slaves increased dramatically when from the 15th century the Portuguese established trading posts along the Atlantic coast of Africa. The Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, the French and the English, and a number of inland African kingdoms—Benin, Oyo and Ashanti—flourished partly by satisfying the insatiable demand for slaves. The slave trade—by which millions of black Africans were shipped across the Atlantic to work the plantations of the New World—had an appallingly destructive effect on traditional African society. This “African Holocaust,” as it has been described, left the continent ripe for the European colonial takeover of the later 19th century. Only a few African kingdoms—such as Ashanti in West Africa and the Zulus in southern Africa—were able to mount an effective resistance, and in the end even they were crushed.

the condensed idea

Wealthy and powerful empires once flourished in what Europeans called “the dark continent”