Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800

John K. Thornton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135365837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 investigates the impact of warfare on the history of Africa in the period of the slave trade and the founding of empires. It includes the discussion of: * the relationship between war and the slave trade * the role of Europeans in promoting African wars and supplying African armies * the influence of climatic

Chapter One
Cavalries of the Savannah

The core of the northern half of west Africa was a broad open savannah, gradually giving way to the scrubby semi-arid lands of the Sahel as one moved north, until eventually one came to the vast expanse of the Sahara desert. The savannah region and part of the Sahel were penetrated by two great rivers—the Senegal on the west and the looping Niger on the east, as well as a host of shorter rivers that all emerged from the highlands of Futa Jallon in the south and found their way to the sea. The rivers brought water to the tricky and variable climates of the Sahel and the bend of the Niger passed through land that might otherwise have been desert. Even further south, where rainfall was adequate for full time agriculture, the rivers and streams provided a vast transportation network that not only allowed irrigation but permitted the concentration of agricultural resources over larger areas and underwrote chains of towns and, on the Niger, thriving significant cities. As one neared the coast, especially the coast around the Gambia and south of it, the network of rivers thickened and combined with forests to became a complex riverine environment of creeks, estuaries and small rivers, promoting a unique flora of a semi-flooded environment. This environmental break also provided a significant break in the nature of warfare and separates the Guinea coast south of the Gambia from the great savannah and desert to its north and east.

Desert, savannah and river created three environments for politics and warfare. The desert’s thin population, unfavourable conditions for agriculture, and open country made it a land of cattle-, horse- and camel-raising nomads and hence pre-eminently of cavalries. In the savannah and Sahel environments, with denser populations of peasants living along rivers or in villages favoured with sufficient water, leaders raised infantry as well as cavalry, though they still strove to use cavalries to master their flat and open country. On the larger rivers, like the Niger, boats might make navies that added a third branch of service to the armies of those places.¹

War and Politics: Background

These military forces were commanded by leaders of a wide variety of political organizations, which were determined partly by the environment and partly by a long political history stretching back to before the time of Christ. Perhaps the greatest political contrast was between the extensive and powerful empires of the western Sudan anchored in the basins of the Niger, Senegal and Gambia rivers, and the nomads of the desert. The two bordered on each other, and warfare was endemic, though often small in scale, along that border.

In the desert, there was no permanent political organization of any scale. Although Antonio Malafante, listening to people from the desert in the oasis of Tuat in 1447, believed that they were ruled by “kings”,² in fact, military capacities and control were largely personal, deriving from the wealth and status of individual people. As Alvise da Mosto, an Italian visitor to the coast of Senegal, noted in 1455, in the desert the richest had the largest following and the poorest the least, and it was wealth rather than lordly obedience that induced supporters to come.³ It was probably this perceived status that created leadership and determined policy even though formal organization was tribal, and certain families were the source, no doubt, of the desert “kings” who were expected to lead them.⁴ This was a constant feature of the desert culture, for the same sort of leadership by the richest with their following of clients and others following prestige was still a factor in the late seventeenth century,⁵ and was re-affirmed by late eighteenth-century sources which show that desert military strength still relied on voluntary enlistment of free people with their own equipment.⁶ Thus, the desert was more or less permanently led by people whose military power and prestige was largely achieved through their own merits with followers who waxed and waned according to success.

The rule of Malafante’s kings, while probably real enough at any given moment, was temporary in the longer run and always subject to challenge, hence his contention that they often had great wars among themselves. Da Mosto thought that wars occupied them in 13 out of every 15 years.⁷ These internal wars might shift wealth quickly and end the power of a strong man in an instant; the French traveller de la Courbe noted in 1685 that “the stronger make sudden irruptions on the land of the weaker to pillage and take up all they meet, then retire until their victim finds an opportunity for revenge”.⁸ A cycle of raid and revenge, a constant recirculation of wealth, slaves and followers formed an endless constant of desert life in this period.

At the same time, this cycle of raiding within the desert was complemented by routine military incursions on the Sahel and savannah regions to the south, usually to raid, and capture slaves, which João Fernandes, a Portuguese visitor of 1446, noted were sold to north Africa.⁹ At times, however, raiding might be met with more permanent relationships of tribute taking and influence, especially if there was weak or divided authority in the Sahel and savannah. Such nomad demands did not involve direct government, more often tribute taking and even raiding without interference, but not day-to-day decision making. When Malafante was visiting Tuat in the mid-fifteenth century, he learned the nomads who “live in tents like Arabs” were masters of the desert and “all the towns of blacks that border them”.¹⁰

The fifteenth century was a time of division in the Sudan, when the Empire of Mali had declined and the new power of Songhay had not yet ascended. The consolidation of the kingdom of Jolof in the late fifteenth century, followed by the establishment of Songhay’s control over the Niger bend after 1464 and then the implantation of a powerful Fulbe state on the upper Senegal, ended the period of nomad domination. But the nomads returned to power in the eighteenth century when civil war weakened the powers who dominated the Sahel and, by century’s end, they were calling the tune on the Niger and the Senegal as they had in the fifteenth century.

The great savannah with its rivers was the political opposite of the desert. There rule was firmly in the hands of hierarchically organized states which were of varying size and strength. The building block of the region was a small, regional polity of great durability, typically though not always (the lower Senegal valley was a notable exception)¹¹ anchored by a large settlement (often called a town or city in European languages and Arabic) and ruled by a well established family. From these basic blocks the savannah rulers sometimes built large empires that united dozens of these units under a single rule, often anchored on the rich resources and transportation potential of a river valley. Large armies under a permanent chain of command could be raised from these states and warfare typically involved expeditions to expand the empire, or punitive actions to ensure the loyalty of the incorporated smaller polities.

The empire of Mali, which was at its height in the mid to late fourteenth century, controlled virtually all the lands west of the Niger bend in the valleys of the Niger, Senegal and Gambia.¹² When empires weakened, these smaller units broke away and became independent, perhaps integrated into more modest regional powers, or dominated by desert nomads. Malafante spoke of a division of the “land of the blacks” (as the Sahel and savannah were known to the desert people and north Africans) into “civitates” and “castra” and described the then shrunken empire of Mali as possessing nine of them at the time. In this time of division, the desert nomads had established their particular sort authority over many of the independent northern towns such as Timbuktu and Es-Souk.¹³

The last part of the fifteenth century witnessed the rise of Songhay, from east of the Niger bend, expanding along the Niger around the bend and down into the heartland of Mali, which was raided sporadically but not conquered. Songhay’s grasp reached eastwards, but was never established on the Senegal river, where it was met by a newly established Fulbe dynasty of Koli Tengala, who died in 1512 fighting Songhay forces. The Fulbe state (in Futa Tooro), in turn, bordered on a newly emerging kingdom of Jolof that dominated the lower river and the coast.¹⁴

This situation changed in turn when the kingdom of Jolof broke up following a succession dispute in the mid-sixteenth century, and Songhay was subjected to a successful attack from Morocco culminating in the battle of Tondibi in 1591. As a result, although Songhay power was broken, the Moroccan army that arrived was unable to assert itself effectively outside the Niger bend region and smaller polities re-emerged.¹⁵ As Jolof declined in power, the Fulbe of the middle Senegal expanded both east and west, taking over the whole of the Senegal and extending their power eastward almost to the Niger by the early seventeenth century to form the Empire of the “Great Fulo”.¹⁶

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the situation had changed again. No great power dominated the Sahel, the Great Fulo was confined to the middle Senegal region of Futa Tooro and was soon to be divided by civil war, while the lower Senegal was contested almost constantly between Waalo, Kajoor and Bawol, three states that had once been provinces of the kingdom of Jolof and had thrown off the rule of the Great Fulo. The Moroccan Pashalik of Timbuktu replaced Songhay as a great power for a time, but in the middle of the eighteenth century the Pashas entered into a long-lasting civil war that sapped its influence. Mali had undergone a last decline as a great power after it failed to take Jenne in 1599, but was partially replaced as the dominant power on the upper Niger in the early to mid-eighteenth century by the Empire of Segu in the upper Niger region. None of the new regional powers—the Moroccan Pashalik anchored at Timbuktu on the Niger bend, the Empire of Segu, or Futa Tooro— provided the sort of overarching authority that the great empires had done in earlier centuries.

As a result, the eighteenth century was a great period of military conflict. Civil wars disturbed several of the regions, sometimes matching rival pretenders to the throne, sometimes between states, and sometimes the two types of conflict merged, with pretenders seeking assistance from nearby rival states, as took place frequently in Waalo, Kajoor and Bawol along the lower Senegal valley, and in Futa Tooro and Gajaaga along the middle valley. This situation gave great advantages to the nomads of the desert, and they intervened freely in the civil wars and inter-state struggles to their south, sometimes as invited participants by the losers, sometimes on their own when they sensed that no one could mount an effective resistance to them. After 1722 the situation was confused by the attempt of the ruler of Morocco to use the desert nomads to his advantage. He dispatched his own nomadic troops to intervene, but as his predecessors in the sixteenth century had learned from their adventure in the middle Niger, these Moroccan cavalry, known locally as “Ormans”, followed their own course, fitting into the prevailing nomadic culture and participating in the affairs of those further south.¹⁷

Civil wars between rival branches of the ruling body established a similar dynamic on the middle Niger, when the Moroccan Pashalik was routinely divided by rivalries that were often exploited by the nomads of the nearby desert. As on the Senegal, the nomads sometimes invaded by invitation of the rivals, sometimes on their own. On rare occasions, Moroccan forces penetrated the desert in hopes of using the nomads’ own rivalries to punish them.¹⁸

Further south along the Niger, however, a much more powerful and centralized Segu empire emerged at the start of the eighteenth century to dominate the region and in time to extend its power northward towards the Senegal, where it encountered another regional power in the state of Khasso. Segu, and a rival dynasty established on the lower Senegal in Kaarta, and Kaarta’s neighbour Khasso contested control of the region between themselves for most of the eighteenth century, while raiding the upper valley to such a degree that the people of Khasso were called the “black Ormans” in imitation of the Moroccan troops of the desert.¹⁹

Europeans visited this coast from the sea for the first time in the middle decades of the fifteenth century, and after a few trial raids on coastal populations were resoundingly defeated in the 1450s by naval forces from Mali’s Gambian states, and Great Jolofs Saalum and Siin using their shallow-draught watercraft to attack Portuguese parties seeking to land in longboats. As a result of these losses, the king of Portugal dispatched his courtier Diogo Gomes in 1456 to patch up relations with the people of the region, and by 1462 Portugal had negotiated a relationship of peaceful trade throughout the area. European presence in the region was confined to the offshore Cape Verde islands, which grew as colonial societies on previously uninhabited islands. In later periods, they occupied a few more islands along the coast which were more secure trading posts than colonies. They also were allowed to build and maintain trading posts along the coast in which they exercised limited but generally effective sovereignty, and sometimes erected fortifications.

Although no longer interested in raiding the coast, Europeans took a keen interest in the complex politics of their African neighbours, and sought to use their own naval capacities to shape these politics as much as possible to their advantage, to exclude their European rivals, and to enhance their own trade. Beginning with the abortive attempt to assist a defeated candidate to Great Jolof’s throne to power in 1488,²⁰ Europeans sought to influence Africa’s politics by judicious alliance with one or another state or rival. From the beginning of their establishment in Senegal in the late seventeenth century, the French sought to intervene and meddle whenever the opportunity presented itself in the politics of Kajoor, Bawol and Waalo during their many interstate wars and civil wars, often through supplying weapons or commercial credits, sometimes co-operating with the desert nomads and Ormans in the process.²¹

For most of the eighteenth century the French company manned a fleet and held several small forts along the Senegal River from which they pla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction: African War and World History
• Chapter One: Cavalries of the Savannah
• Chapter Two: War in the Rivers: Senegambia and Sierra Leone
• Chapter Three: War in the Forest: The Gold Coast
• Chapter Four: Horses, Boats and Infantry: The Gap of Benin
• Chapter Five: War on the Savannah: West Central Africa
• Chapter Six: War, Slavery and Revolt: African Slaves and Soldiers in the Atlantic World
• Conclusion
• Notes