A History of the World (35 page)

This was all going on at much the same time as Norman England was being founded, in a similar process of military domination
followed by assimilation. Both Saxons and Slavs would change Norsemen into something different. In both places the bloody politics of dynastic succession would grind on for centuries, but meanwhile towns and traders were growing slowly bigger and richer, so that both England and Russia hugely outpaced the Vikings’ original homeland. Like their old gods, the Norsemen had become shape-shifters.

Mali and Musa

The history of Africa would be almost as strongly marked by the successes and failures of the Muslim expansion as Russia had been. Muslim traders and adventurers have given us much of what we know of the African civilizations – and they can be called that, being town-based – of sub-Saharan West Africa and the eastern seaboard.

At the time when Byzantium was hard-pressed by the Muslims and the world of the Rus was still expanding, West Africa was dominated by one Mansa (‘King’) Musa. He was fabulously wealthy. When he visited Cairo in 1324 on his way to Mecca for the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj, he handed out so much gold in gifts that the price collapsed. Musa would become known in Europe too, portrayed on a Catalan atlas like a European king, sitting on his throne, with gold crown, orb and sceptre. His empire of Mali was famous at a time when Europeans had relatively little gold of their own. Though there were many myths about Africa, this was not a myth. A modern African historian has argued that Musa’s empire ‘was far stronger, far better organized and even more literate than any Christian power in Europe’.
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Even if this is an exaggeration, it is not much of one.

And it provokes big questions. What was really happening in Africa south of the Sahara at this time? Were there other empires we know less of? And why, if Mansa Musa was a monarch to rival Christian princes and Arab caliphs, did Africa not go on to develop more powerful and sophisticated home-grown civilizations to rival Europe?

To begin to answer this we have to jump far back in time, because the African narrative concerns climate, minerals and luck. In prehistoric times the Sahara was not a desert but a damp, rich savannah. It was home to game and to great rivers. Cave paintings show giraffes and crocodiles: for thousands of years, this was rich terrain for human
hunters. Not until about five thousand years ago did it start seriously to dry out. This vast desiccation, across an area as big as the modern United States, had momentous effects for many societies. It divided the peoples of the Mediterranean and Near East from those of sub-Saharan Africa. An ocean of baking-hot grit proved almost as effective a barrier as the cold saltwater oceans. To the north of the Sahara, history was being written. To the south, in terms of writing, a stony silence prevailed.

There were fewer plants or animals that could be easily domesticated, as well as an abundance of game and berries that would have delayed the urge to farm. Archaeology can help fill in some gaps, and it is clear that human societies were developing quite fast in Africa too. By around 2000
BC
, it is likely that the farming revolution had reached the then wetter lands of West Africa on the edge of the Sahara, around Lake Chad, and the Senegal and Niger rivers. Ironwork and sculpture were being made from around 800
BC
, so although this part of the world moved from hunter-gathering later than Eurasia did, the familiar developmental steps were as clear here as in, say, France or Turkey. Knowledge of the new skills may have come from the Nubians, on the edge of the Egyptian territories; or from Mediterranean cities, such as Carthage. Though they left no written record, farmers were moving herds across the desert and small numbers of traders continued to risk the heat and aridity, using caravans of horses from around 1500
BC
.

There are ancient Greek accounts of chariot-using warriors from West Africa, and desert drawings of chariots pulled by horses. Hanno the Carthaginian may even have tried to establish African coastal seaports so as to make trade easier; but with oared galleys, rather than the later European sailing ships, it would have been difficult to get very far south. The Romans did not try to; but they heard stories of gold-rich people living down there.
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The earliest evidence of city life in Africa south of Egypt comes from the upper reaches of the Nile, in today’s Sudan and Ethiopia. There, a series of half-remembered kingdoms and empires – including Kush, then the Christian Aksum – flourished between ancient times and the mid-900s. The use of iron had spread across the continent within two hundred years of Aksum’s fall, reaching everywhere except deep forests where the pygmy people lived without metal, and the more arid savannahs of the Bushmen in the south-west.

After this, most African farming did not advance very far compared with Europe and Asia. Why not? One theory is the lack of strong draught animals to pull ploughs. The climate and the diseases were too much, it is argued, for horses or oxen to cope with – though today they seem to survive, perhaps better protected by man against microbes and carnivore predators. Most of Africa was left to herding, grazing and small-scale farming of root crops, which rarely produced enough surplus wealth for large societies. There were exceptions. One was Zimbabwe, an East African civilization using huge dry-stone walls for its palaces and towns, at its zenith between 1250 and 1450. These people had probably come from Mapungubwe, a kingdom of cattle-herders and gold and ivory merchants in today’s South Africa, who were already living in stone-walled townships. The Zimbabwean kingdom was built on a far greater scale, so great, indeed, that later European explorers refused to believe mere Africans could have been responsible.

Zimbabwe had been a participant in a thriving coastal trade, dominated by Islam, the religion and culture that most influenced pre-colonial Africa. There is evidence of a network along the East African coast going back earlier, to classical times: Greek, Byzantine and Persian coins have turned up in Zanzibar and Tanzania.
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The Africans with whom outsiders traded may have been Kushites who had moved south. But it was really Muslims who first opened up (and exploited) the wealth of sub-Saharan Africa. From the 700s Arabs had been raiding and trading south through the Sahara and down along the Indian Ocean coast of the continent, setting up enclaves and taking away with them the three things the Europeans would also later come after – slaves, gold and ivory. The written history of sub-Saharan Africa begins only when Arab traders start to record it; and it is thanks to them that we know about the other great exceptions, the empires in the sub-Saharan west.

There, the breakthrough had been the domestication of camels. Like horses, they had come originally from America, though there they died out. In Asia they had grown in size, and were probably first domesticated in Arabia around 2000
BC
. Archaeological evidence suggests they had arrived in Egypt by 700
BC
. Camels were being used by armies in classical times for transport, and by the Tuareg people to cross the Sahara by around the year
AD
200. Excellent carriers of both
men and cargo across desert, camels are also hard to tame and to manage. Though they mate all the year round, in the wild they reproduce slowly. A key breakthrough for early camel-using humans was learning how to artificially inseminate the beasts, to boost the size of their herds. Assisted in their reproductive duties, camels became the vital transport system that opened up the Sahara. Able to travel for up to nine days without water and to carry twice as much as an ox, they were soon bringing huge quantities of metal and cloth to the African peoples of the south.

The caravans were also bringing something humdrum, but rare in the south and essential to life – salt. Hunter-gatherers can get enough salt in the flesh of their kill, but once humans settled down to agriculture they needed extra salt, both for themselves and for their cattle. Salt was found in underground deposits in the Sahara, where it was mined in horrific conditions, often by slaves. By the
AD
700s, the town of Timbuktu had emerged as a seasonal centre for the trade, where the salt was loaded onto large river canoes (of a kind still being used) and taken deeper into Africa. In return, the Muslims of North Africa were bringing back gold, as either ingots or gold-dust. The gold came from an empire now called Ghana (though this was almost certainly not its original name) and from smaller, more mysterious kingdoms to its south. It is only thanks to this gold-for-salt exchange that the Muslim world came to notice West Africa, and recorded what happened there.

Ghana collapsed as a political entity when it dared to confront the Berber traders and herders of North Africa. The Berbers produced a formidable empire of their own, the Almoravids, whom we have already come across in Spain. In around 1076 they turned south and moved against Ghana. Though they could not hold onto the area for long, they brought their religion into West Africa and created an opening for a new empire, built by Mande-speaking Africans who would call their kingdom ‘Mali’, or ‘Mallel’. It would turn out to be the most formidable kingdom of sub-Saharan Africa so far. Even now, the area is agriculturally blessed compared with much of the rest of the continent. It lacks the near-impenetrable forests of further south. The great River Niger and its tributaries provide a lush belt of irrigated soil, where farming flourishes. The rivers were always an excellent transport and fishing resource. On the edge of Mali are rich goldfields, and
across much of the terrain mounted cavalry could police and extend the empire. By the end of the 1200s an African kingdom of Muslim converts was well established. Its influence reached far west, towards the coastal Africans in one direction, and deep into the heart of the continent, where today’s Nigeria is, in the other.

The former oasis trading camp of Timbuktu now rose to become a royal city; so did riverside Djenne to the south, which today possesses the world’s largest mud structure, its formidable mosque. In the 1260s one king, Mansa Uli, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and in 1324 the famous Mansa Musa did the same. It took him and his baggage train a year to cross the desert to Egypt. As soon as he arrived in Cairo with his royal standards, his parasols, his wealth, his open-handedness and his tall stories, he attracted the admiring attention of Arab writers. King Musa had apparently brought with him to Egypt eight thousand servants, many of them slaves. His army is said to have been 100,000-strong. Apart from being a religious duty, pilgrimage was a way of broadcasting the glory of the pilgrim and his country; and this certainly worked for Mansa Musa, whose fame reverberated very quickly.

Among the many Arab writers who described him, al-Umari from Damascus leaves a vivid portrait. ‘This man,’ he says, ‘flooded Cairo with his benefactions . . . The Cairenes made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.’ Musa was not averse to telling tall tales of his own. He told his host in Cairo that he had conquered twenty-four cities and that he ruled a country rich in cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules, geese, doves and chickens – which may well have been true. But he also claimed his gold came from a ‘gold plant’, which blossomed in springtime after the rain, and had gold roots. It is possible Musa was ignorant about the origins of his wealth, since he added that another kind of gold plant left its roots in holes by the river where they could be gathered up like stones or gravel. Musa confided to his host that anyone in his kingdom who had a beautiful daughter would offer her to him, ‘and he possessed her without a marriage ceremony, as slaves are possessed’. His host protested that this was not acceptable behaviour for a Muslim: ‘And he said: “Not even for kings?” and I replied, “No! Not even for kings! Ask the scholars!” He said: “By God, I did not know that. I hereby leave it and abandon it utterly!” ’
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Whether he really reformed we do not know, but during his reign (from around 1312 to 1337) Mansa Musa certainly reached out to the rest of the Muslim world in other ways, importing scholars and architects, and building mosques at home. After his death, in 1352/3, the greatest of the Arab travel-writers, Ibn Battuta from Tangier, visited Mali and recorded his impressions. He found it a place of reliable justice, safe and welcoming to travellers. Battuta had arrived after a long desert journey which even this hardened world-traveller remembered as particularly gruelling. Once, he recalled, he came upon a man who had lost his way and died of thirst, lying ‘with his clothes on him and a whip in hand, under a little tree . . . There was water a mile or so away from him.’
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Another time he had gone to defecate (‘to accomplish a need’) by the river and was offended by a local man coming to stand near by and observe him: it turned out that the man was worried that a crocodile he had spotted was likely to attack, and had nobly placed himself between them.

While in Mali, he was again offended. (Arabs seem to have found African customs as uncouth as European explorers would, a few centuries later.) As what would have been a welcome gift Ibn Battuta had been hoping for fine robes and money, but instead was presented by the new king with three loaves of bread and a piece of fried beef, plus some yoghurt. He soon cheered up, though, and goggled at the magnificence of the ‘Sultan’s’ court, with its gorgeously dressed and armed bodyguard, musicians, acrobats and dancers.

Like Christian missionaries, Ibn Battuta could not come to terms with the nakedness of African women – ‘their female servants and slave girls and little girls appear before men naked, with their privy parts uncovered’ – nor with the African habit of eating carrion, dogs and donkeys. But he was pleased to find a national obsession with the Koran, and that Malian citizens dressed in clean white clothes for Friday prayers. He noted a general lack of ‘oppression’ and found the country remarkably safe – though slaves and women might have disagreed. In the words of a later historian, ‘The general picture . . . is of a rich, prosperous, peaceful and well-ordered empire, in which effective government and organised communications and trade ran all the way from the Atlantic in the west to the borders of modern Nigeria in the east, and from the fringes of the forests in the south northwards into the desert.’
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