West Africa before the Colonial Era

A History to 1850

Basil Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317882640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This is a survey of pre-colonial West Africa, written by the internationally respected author and journalist, Basil Davidson. He takes as his starting point his successful text A History of West Africa 1000-1800, but he has reworked his new text specially for a wider international readership. In the process he offers a fascinating introduction to the rich societies and cultures of Africa before the coming of the Europeans.

Chapter 1

A Very Long History

Overleaf

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A rock painting from Tassili n’Ajjer, Sahara, depicting a horse and two-wheeled chariot. (Werner Forman Archive and Musée Bardo, Algiers)

A Very Long History

We know from scientific evidence and calculation that Africa is among the oldest of the world’s continents, and that it was there that humanity first evolved before spreading out across the world. Through countless forgotten centuries, modern Africa’s remote ancestors developed all the variations of appearance, of skin colour, of ways and beliefs in everyday life. However ancient in its origins, much of this story is new in our western world of today. Up to quite recent years, the world knew little or nothing about Africa’s extraordinary historical development. It has been mistakenly believed that the peoples of Africa have had no history of their own development. Therefore, it was said and widely believed that Africa’s peoples must somehow be inferior in their nature and capacities to other peoples who do have that kind of history. This false belief has been one of the bases of the myths and misunderstandings of various kinds of racism.

Especially through the past half-century, the progress of modern scholarship and research has undermined all such myths, and has brought to light the realities underlying human evolution. This notable progress has been rightly hailed as one of the great liberating influences of our time. New sources of knowledge have made this progress possible. Scientific archaeology is one of these new sources. A fresh look at old books and records is another. A third, no less important, has been finding out what Africans think or remember about their past development.

This book is therefore about the political and social history, in precolonial times, of the vast and famous region of Africa known by historical and conventional usage as West Africa. Coined in Europe by Europeans, this old regional name has no exact geographical meaning. It is simply a handy term for all the lands (and the offshore islands) between about 20° of latitude north of the equator down to the West African coast, and eastward to about 15° of longitude.

Map 1.1 West Africa

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In another summary and familiar usage, the huge area known as West Africa is south of the Sahara Desert, although here again there is no exact meaning, for where does the Sahara begin and end? The old Arab geographers had more logic when they coined a name for the broad belt of territory where the true desert of the Sahara runs into and encloses the beginning of the grassland plains: they called it the Sahel, and this term, meaning ‘shore’, is still sometimes used today.

In this quite arbitrary but general way, all the lands of North Africa, meaning those bordering on the Mediterranean sea, are omitted, although these have had countless links with West Africa since desert travel first began several thousand years ago. Eastward, the old label again runs into trouble, for where does West Africa end and East Africa begin? Convention disagrees with itself here, and compromise sometimes awards important countries such as Cameroun to West Africa, and sometimes not.

Map 1.2 Rainfall, vegetation, and areas affected by tse-tse flise in West Afria.

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No doubt these definitions will continue to change as history proceeds along its way. The famous West Africa news magazine, now in its sixth decade of publication, still moves with the times and already does homage to relatively new pan-African loyalties and interests by allocating weekly sections to other African regions. But for our historiographical needs it will be best to stay with the old definitions of West Africa while recognizing their limitations.

While geographical definition remains fuzzy and illogical, that is not true of its temporal application. What we are concerned with in this book is not the whole of West African history but with large and important periods before about AD 1850: before, that is, the onset of the European imperialist invasions and dispossessions of the nineteenth century. For a while, after those invasions, Africans were dispossessed of the right and possibility of making their own history.

This impact of the outside world, meaning essentially Europe and North America, was profound and enduring. Intentionally or not, it carried Africans into a world greatly different from their own world of precolonial times. Yet that old African world retained its influence and value, for Africans are the children of their past as much as any other branch of humanity. In the case of West Africa, accordingly, it can make no sense to study the situation and events of today without first understanding the long and eventful centuries that came before the colonial dispossessions.

This is why the history in this book has a necessarily powerful value for understanding the history of today. Its long and wonderfully varied record opens the doors on centuries of past achievement. The story of West Africa in historical terms has formed a central part in the taming of this enormous and difficult continent for the benefit of humankind. But for the Western world in particular, the story of West Africa has a very special significance. For it was from West Africa that the ancestors of most of America’s black people came across the Atlantic Ocean to settle and work in the New World.

While addressing the history of West Africa in the centuries before the European invasions and dispossessions of the nineteenth century, it will be helpful to stand back from recent centuries and consider, briefly, the distant origins and remote beginnings of humanity in this grandly productive region.

How many people, and how did they live?

Taking Africa as a whole, and summarizing a mass of more or less scientific data, we can say that the whole human population of Africa during the Early Stone Age – up to, say, about 50,000 years ago – had managed to grow in size to perhaps 200,000 persons. No matter what the exact number may have been – and the figure here derives from various calculations or guesses as to the numbers of humans capable of self-sustainment before the times of any systematic agriculture – humanity remained rare and its stability more than fragile. The total is only an estimate, but useful.

These rare communities, spread across their vast continent, nonetheless survived and, very gradually, set about the challenge of taming their lands for human advantage. They left few or no records of their presence outside the narrow scope of archaeological remains, but our scientific linguists of today consider from their researches that these early peoples developed several distinct ‘mother tongues’ which, in time, became the ‘distant parents’ of Africa’s principal language groupings, of which three – namely, Congo-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic – were to acquire dominant significance and developmental value.

But they acquired this significance and value in a very distant past. Most West African languages separated from their ‘parents’ an immensely long time ago. Emphasizing this ‘time-depth’ in a memorable lecture of 1964, the American specialist, Robert G. Armstrong, opined that ‘the language ancestral to the Niger–Congo family of languages’, sometimes referred to as Congo-Kordofanian, ‘cannot have been spoken more recently than ten thousand years ago’.¹ This indicates just how ancient is the process of diversification in African language groups.

As these early peoples multiplied and spread across the untamed lands, they increased in numbers; and as they increased in numbers, so also did their cultures begin to vary and endlessly divide into new identities. So the scientific linguists tell us, if with due warnings against the dangers of oversimplification, that by the time Africa was entering the Late Stone Age, around 3,000 years ago (and none of these numbers must be taken too literally), there were in Africa perhaps three to four million people speaking 37 distinct African languages; and, of these, half or more inhabited West Africa south of the Sahara Desert.

All these various communities, however divided by the processes of cultural diversification, may be reasonably said to have evolved broadly common ways of life in a multitude of local variants dictated by a corresponding multitude of ecological necessities. The so-called ‘ethnic’ hostilities or outright conflicts of our own time (or indeed any other time) have been the product of one or other rivalry for some real or imagined local gain. That is why the majority of such conflicts have been short-lived and eventually resolved. It remains, at the same time, that territorial ‘safety and possession’ became factors of generally persuasive influence even if frontiers between communities – and eventually between organized state formations – remained in the forefront of consciousness. One needs also to bear in mind, in considering all such matters, the binding force of ecological hazards and barriers in the form of tropical forests, deserts, and the like.

And so it continued as Africans improved their skills and farming under sub-tropical and tropical conditions; and the great project of taming Africa for human benefit went forward in gradual but stubborn steps. The next great advance in the mastering of Nature came after about 600 BC, with the development and spread of the basic technologies of metal production and the forging and smithing of metal tools, notably in iron. In West Africa this crucial forward step was well installed in several localities – one, for instance, in the Benue valley (of modern Nigeria), and another in the upper regions of the Niger river – and the development of metal technology continued with the local evolution of types of forced-draught furnace and the comparable technologies of forging and smithing iron. At the same time, population numbers and their diversification into different cultural and linguistic groupings continued as before. The whole grand project of populating and inhabiting this ‘empty continent’ had long since become one of the outstanding successes scored by humanity in these early stages of growth.

Progress in African metallurgical skills, locally invented and locally developed, continued after about 600 BC through centuries labelled by historians as the African Iron Age; and it is this Iron Age that has given us the bulk of the historiographical record we examine in this book. The whole period of the Iron Age, continuing in one or other degree of innovation until very recent times, is immensely rich in its human drama, while the conquest of Nature moved from one stage to another, with successive generations building, against whatever setbacks and disasters, on the cultures of their ancestral forebears. And it is in this complex but nonetheless coherent and understandable process of diversification from common origins that we shall be able, with patient research, to perceive the origins of Africa’s self-civilizing achievement, and come to grips with the cultural values of Africa’s self-evolved historiography.

Here is where we can find the keys to elucidating otherwise opaque questions of mood and temper, or trace the source and spur of African attitudes which, for instance, have stubbornly combined a firm respect for precedent – for ‘what our parents did before us’ – with the restless, onward-shifting readiness for experiment that has marked all pioneers, everywhere, who have pushed ‘beyond the known frontier’ to where anything may become possible as long as human courage and endeavour are ready to make it so. The records of African history – of West African history in our study here – are copious and insistent on the side of custom and convention; but they are also strong on the side of new initiative. The rules for successful community life, we see, are there and are well recognized. But the changes and chances of fate may at any time overturn them; and then a person must be ready to change course or shift response, no matter what the precedents may say or the traditional customs may advise.

Ideas and beliefs

Among the keys we can use to understand the ideas of ancient peoples are those of religious or spiritual belief. Modern historiography, nourished by a vast quantity of scholarly research into the ethnography of ancient peoples, has recognized the central importance of their concepts of spiritual power. This is difficult and controversial ground to cross. But we can take, for a safe guide, the nature of these ancient and evolving communities as they grew out of the mysteries of the Stone Age, came to grips with the realities of food production (as distinct from mere food collection) in the Iron Age, and built new kinds of community.

What emerges from the records of research, centrally, is that all these peoples awarded supreme power to an idea of God as controlling everything and everyone, but doing this indirectly through subordinate spiritual powers. From this governing concept they derived – in a multitude of various ways of explanation – a ruling morality for everyday life: the power of God, they held, would always reward right behaviour and punish wrong behaviour. And from this morality they went on, again in a multitude of different elucidations, to conceive the instruments that spiritual power might use in fashioning rewards and punishments. These instruments were largely those of magical or quasi-magical power: the power of sorcery or witchcraft. Here once more is a subject of great complexity. The central fact is that the all-compelling morality of these structures of behaviour rested in its ability to reward good social beh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Author's Note
• 1. A Very Long History
• 2. The Emergence of Trading States and Empires
• 3. Pioneers in Ancient Ghana
• 4. The Majesty of Mali
• 5. Songhay Achievement
• 6. Kanem-Bornu and the Hausa States
• 7. Early Senegambia
• 8. The Forest Kingdoms: in the Delta of the Niger and its Peripheries
• 9. On the Threshold of Modern Times: the Economy of West Africa in 1600
• 10. Religion, the Arts, and Learning
• 11. The Organization of Society
• 12. New Pressures from Outside
• 13. Origins and Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade
• 14. Senegambia after 1700
• 15. The Union of the Golden Stool
• 16. After Many Disasters
• Appendix: Table of Comparative Dates
• lndex