Africans Investing in Africa

Understanding Business and Trade, Sector by Sector

T. McNamee, M. Pearson, W. Boer, T. McNamee, M. Pearson, W. Boer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137542809
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

Africans Investing in Africa explores intra-African trade and investment by showing how, where and why Africans invest across Africa; to identify the economic, political and social experiences that hinder or stimulate investment; and to highlight examples of pan-African investors.

Part I

Cross-Cutting Issues

1

The Wangara Trading Network in Precolonial West Africa: An Early Example of Africans Investing in Africa

Moses E. Ochonu

This study focuses on the extensive business and trading empire that Mande-speaking merchants, trade brokers, and financiers built and ran across West Africa between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Wangara feature prominently in the economic and mercantile history of West Africa because they pioneered intra-regional long distance trading and investments. They faced and overcame obstacles to trade and investments in diverse cultural and political settings, leaving a legacy that is instructive for current discussions about Africans investing and trading across Africa.

For roughly five hundred years, these pioneers of regional intra-African investment with ancestral origins in the old Mali and Songhai empires (modern-day Mali) mastered a uniquely African brand of product distribution, arbitrage, financing, manufacturing, credit, mining, currency swaps, bartering and long-distance trading (see Figure 1.1).

Referred to in different sources as Wangara, Juula, Mandinka, Malinke, Mande, Mandingo and Djula, the Wangara merchants built a vast regional economic network extending from the Sahel in the north to the Akan Forest in the south and from the Senegambia and the Mano River Frontier in the west to modern Benin Republic and Northern and Western Nigeria in the east.

The West African commercial empire that the Wangara built connected territories in modern-day Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria.¹ This trading and brokerage system involved many goods, including gold, kola nuts, cloth, salt, natron, leather products and others. It also entailed a vast investment portfolio that spanned arbitrage, cottage manufacturing, services and mining. The Wangara were versatile investors, buying into economic endeavours that connected to or had the capacity to enhance their long-distance trading. The Wangara commercial network was large but was held together by a trust system that developed over many generations, by strategic appeals to political power when necessary and by the Wangara’s skill in expanding the pool of participants in a growing trade system and its circuits of prosperity.

Figure 1.1 Trading routes and investments made by the Wangara

Source: Adapted by author from Longman School Atlas, 2000.

Wangara mercantile beginnings

The Wangara were a composite ethnic group comprising speakers of Mande languages (Malinke and Bambara) and a few speakers of the Azer dialect, a Soninke-derived ‘commercial lingua franca in Western Sudan’.² Medieval historical sources ascribe many mercantile attributes to the Wangara. Beginning with early Arab travellers’ accounts in the twelfth century through the mid-fourteenth century,³ various narratives associated the Wangara with the supply of gold from the medieval gold mines of Bure and Bambuk in the kingdom of Mali.

Exchanged for salt mined at the edge of the Sahara and salt brought by Arab, Berber and Jewish traders,⁴ gold was transported across the Sahara to North Africa. The Wangara then sold the salt, which was both a valued seasoning ingredient and a form of currency in several parts of West Africa, across a vast area in the kingdom of Mali, in Mossi country in present-day Burkina Faso, in the Guinea basin and in the Senegambia region. The Wangara organised and used camel-caravans to transport salt from the Saharan mines to Timbuktu, a major Wangara distribution hub, from where wholesale operations were coordinated. In Timbuktu, Wangara bulk purchasers bought blocks of salt to be caravanned to other West African commercial centres, from where the retail trade in salt took off in various directions.

By positioning themselves as the first link in the trade chain that transported West African gold to North Africa and distributed salt from Sahelian and North African salt producing areas to many parts of West Africa, the Wangara created a complex supply network that was a de facto monopoly. With this early, dominant involvement in commerce, the term ‘Wangara’ quickly became synonymous with ‘trader’ or ‘long-distance trader’, and vice versa, in much of West Africa. The process of mastering this trans-West Africa trade took time, but the spread of Wangara commercial influence from medieval Mali to other parts of West Africa was inevitable, given the importance of gold and salt to the economies of several states in West Africa.

Beginning probably in the late twelfth century, the Wangara began to expand their trading network to the Senegambia, to Guinea, and southwest to modern-day Ghana, Ivory Coast and eventually modern-day Nigeria. The logistics of this trading system became more complex as the Wangara sought out new commercial areas and invested in the extractive and manufacturing sectors. Some of the Wangara hired potters who carried salt and other Sahelian and North African goods on their heads; some relied on the familiar camel-caravan system. Others employed both means. After about 20 days of travel, the traders would arrive in either the forest states of modern Ghana or in Senegambia.⁵ As they made their way south and west, they would sell salt and other goods along the way to defray expenses and buy other trade goods from communities on the trade routes.

Over the next three centuries, the Wangara perfected this trading system and not only opened up a set of recognised trade routes connecting the Sahara to multiple West African hinterlands (see Figure 1.2), but also established permanent trading centres in the various areas of West Africa with which they conducted trade. At the peak of the Wangara’s commercial ascendance, their economic activities and investments encompassed product distribution, arbitrage, financing and credit, lodging, mining, manufacturing, bartering, brokerage and long-distance trading.

Overview of the Wangara trading and investment network

To the west of the Wangara’s Mali heartland lay the vast territory comprising the modern states of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. Given the contiguity of this region to Mali, the Wangara were very active here, setting up the social, political and economic infrastructures to support their lucrative commercial activities. Many Wangara migrated to this region, helping to found small city-states and to consolidate kingdoms like Kaabu.⁶ Many of the migrants were itinerant traders, going between east (Mali) and west and carrying goods back and forth.

A product of this commercial and political influence of the ‘Wangara [trade] Diaspora’⁷ in the Senegambia region was a strong kinship network that produced an ever-expanding circuit of confidence, which in turn facilitated business transactions and credit. Furthermore, some of the Wangara traders who settled permanently in the Senegambia region took to artisan pursuits, becoming cobblers and blacksmiths, manufacturing and supplying footwear, accessories and weapons to Wangara and non-Wangara warriors, political leaders, priests and long-distance traders. This group of Wangara artisans became valuable auxiliaries in the expanding trading system, supplying footwear, weapons and other products integral to professions like long-distance trading, which involved constant mobility in rough terrain.⁸ The trade system in turn sustained the Wangara artisans by keeping them employed. A small number of the Wangara may have also invested in agriculture, the product that catered to the commercial classes, supplying long-distance merchants with specially preserved foods.⁹ Wangara merchants and artisans in this region built a vast reciprocal system of exchange and trade and catered to the commercial demands of many communities in this region. In this way, they drew in several non-Wangara peoples into the emerging Wangara economy.

Figure 1.2 Trading routes and commodities made by the Wangara

Source: Adapted by author from Longman School Atlas, 2000.

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Wangara’s trading activities spread even further to the north of the Gambia river and probably all the way to the Lower Guinea Coast. This was probably due to increased Wangara out migration as a result of the decline and eventual collapse of the Songhai Empire. The Wangara began to broker trade in European manufactured goods between the Portuguese and Africans and to sell gold to the Portuguese in exchange for manufactured goods during this period.¹⁰ The Wangara traders from Gambia and Sierra Leone met at Badoora to exchange kola nuts, cotton and fabrics, which each group then distributed over its commercial territorial sphere.

Another important trajectory of the Wangara’s commercial expansion was southwards towards the Akan forest, the vast forested territory encompassing modern Ghana and Southern Ivory Coast. From their Middle Niger base in modern Mali, the Wangara traders began trading south as early as the early fifteenth century.

In the trade between Mali and the Akan forest states, Djene served as a hub. From Djene, salt was broken into smaller tradable units that could be carried by camels and human porters for the two–three weeks’ journey spanning some five hundred miles to the vast Akan goldfields.¹¹ In the Akan goldfields, the Wangara traded their salt for gold over a vast territory corresponding to modern Ghana all the way to the coastal region encompassing the famous European trading port of Elmina.¹² After exhausting their stock of Saharan salt through bartering, the traders commenced the return journey to Djene, and then to Timbuktu, where they sold Akan gold to Arab and Berber trans-Saharan merchants. The Wangara traders then used the proceeds to buy salt with which they would purchase their next supply of Akan gold.

The Wangara traders’ expansion to, and investments in, the alluvial gold mining production of the Akan region represented another strand in their fast-growing trading and investment repertoire. It was no accident that the extension of the Wangara’s trading network to the Akan region occurred in tandem with ‘the development of new centers of gold production’.¹³ Wangara capital investments, credit and the thriving Wangara gold trade with North Africa transformed Akan gold mining.

The Wangara’s investment in the Akan goldfield expanded in the subsequent centuries as more Mande-speaking traders moved south to partake in this lucrative trading system.¹⁴ By building a vast distribution network connecting the major West African centres of gold and salt production, and by creating a virtual monopoly over this trade, the Wangara ‘became ... the first link in a vast distributive network that extended northward from the goldfields to the greater entrepots of the Western Sudan and Sahel’.¹⁵ Being the first link in this network gave the Wangara the leverage to put their imprimatur on the subsequent expansions of this Akan-Sahel trade.

Another factor that gave the Wangara traders preeminence in the trade of the Akan zone is kola nut, a stimulant grown almost exclusively in the Akan forest,¹⁶ which enjoyed and still enjoys widespread recreational and ritual-use demand across West Africa and the Maghrebian lands north of the Sahara. This trans-West African and trans-Saharan market for kola nut and the Wangara’s tentacles and settlements in regions that produced it gave the merchants an opportunity to expand and consolidate their dominance over long-distance trading in West Africa.

Ever with an eye for emerging demands and new trading opportunities, Wangara traders were quick to spot the vast kola nut export potential that lay in the Akan forest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Cross-Cutting Issues
• Part II  Sectors with African Champions
• Part III  Emerging Pan-African Sectors
• Index