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# The Lives of the People of West Africa Wives and children were highly desired in African societies because they could clear and cultivate the land, and because they brought prestige, social support, and security in old age. The results were intense competition for women, inequality of access to t...

# The Lives of the People of West Africa Wives and children were highly desired in African societies because they could clear and cultivate the land, and because they brought prestige, social support, and security in old age. The results were intense competition for women, inequality of access to them, an emphasis on male virility and female fertility, and serious tension between male generations. Polygyny was almost universal. As recently as the nineteenth century two-thirds of rural wives were in polygynous marriages. # Chapter 20: Africa and the World: 1400-1800 ## Salt Salt had long been one of Africa's most critical trade items. Salt is essential to human health. The Hausa language has more than fifty words for it. The salt trade dominated the West African economies in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The main salt-mining center was at Taghaza in the western Sahara. In the most wretched conditions, slaves dug the salt from desiccated lakes and loaded heavy blocks onto camels' backs. Tuareg warriors and later Moors traded their salt south for gold, grain, slaves, and kola nuts. Cowrie shells, imported from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean by way of Gujarat, served as the medium of exchange. Gold continued to be mined and shipped from Mali until South American bullion flooded Europe in the sixteenth century. Thereafter, its production in Africa steadily declined. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, gold mining revived in Mali. Mali is now Africa's fourth-largest gold producer, after South Africa, Ghana, and Tanzania, and ranked sixteenth in the world in 2011. ## West African Arts West African peoples engaged in many crafts, such as basket weaving and pottery making. Ironworking became hereditary in individual families. * The textile industry had the greatest level of specialization. * The earliest fabric in West Africa was made of vegetable fiber. * Muslim traders introduced cotton and its weaving in the ninth century. * The Wolof and Mandinka regions had professional weavers producing beautiful cloth by the fifteenth century. * Women who spun cotton used only a spindle and not a wheel. * Women wove on inefficient broadlooms, men on narrow looms. ## Cross-Cultural Encounters Along the East African Coast * How did the arrival of Europeans and other foreign cultures affect the East African coast? * How did Ethiopia and the Swahili city-states respond to these incursions? East Africa in the early modern period faced repeated incursions from foreign powers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ethiopia faced challenges from the Muslim state of Adal, and then from European Jesuit attempts to substitute Roman Catholic liturgical forms for the Coptic Christian liturgies. The wealthy Swahili city-states along the southeastern African coast also resisted European intrusions in the sixteenth century. Cities such as Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Sofala used Arabic as the language of communication, and their commercial economies had long been tied to the trade of the Indian Ocean. The arrival of the Portuguese in 1498 proved catastrophic for those cities, and the Swahili coast suffered economic decline as a result. ## Muslim and European Incursions in Ethiopia, ca. 1500-1630 At the beginning of the sixteenth century the powerful East African kingdom of Ethiopia extended from Massawa in the north to several tributary states in the south, but the ruling Solomonic dynasty in Ethiopia faced serious external threats. Alone among the states in northeast and eastern Africa, Ethiopia was a Christian kingdom that practiced Coptic Christianity, an orthodox form of the Christian faith that originated in Egypt in 451. Christianity had first come to Ethiopia from Egypt when the archbishop in Alexandria appointed Saint Frumentius the first bishop of Ethiopia in 328. By the early 1500s, Ethiopia was an island of Christianity surrounded by a sea of Muslim states. Adal, a Muslim state along the southern base of the Red Sea, began incursions into Ethiopia, and in 1529 the Adal general Ahmad ibn Ghazi inflicted a disastrous defeat on the Ethiopian emperor Lebna Dengel. ## The Swahili City-States and the Arrival of the Portuguese, ca. 1500-1600 The word Swahili means “People of the Coast” and refers to the people living along the East African coast and on the nearby islands. * Although predominantly a Bantu-speaking people, the Swahili have incorporated significant aspects of Arab culture. * The Arabic alphabet was used for the first written works in Swahili. * Roughly 35 percent of Swahili words come from Arabic. * By the eleventh century the Swahili had accepted Islam, which provided a common identity and unifying factor for all the peoples along coastal East Africa. * Living on the Indian Ocean coast, the Swahili also felt the influences of Indians, Indonesians, Persians, and even the Chinese. ## The Portuguese Presence in the South * Alliances made between 1502 and 1507 * Portuguese erected forts at the southern port cities of Kilwa, Zanzibar, and Sofala. * Portuguese commercial restrictions * Residents deserted the towns, and the town economies crumbled. * The gold flow from inland mines to Sofala slowed to a trickle. * Swahili noncooperation successfully prevented the Portuguese from gaining control of the local coastal trade * In 1589, Portugal finally won an administrative stronghold near Mombasa. Called Fort Jesus, it remained a Portuguese base for over a century. * The collapse of Portuguese influence in Africa. * A Portuguese presence remained only at Mozambique in the far south and Angola on the west coast. ## The Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia 1500-1630 * In the late twelfth century, tales of Prester John, a powerful Christian monarch ruling a vast and wealthy African empire, reached western Europe. * The search for Prester John, as well as for gold and spices, spurred the Portuguese to undertake a series of Bantu-African expeditions that reached Timbuktu and Mali in the 1480s and the Ethiopian court by 1508. * Although Prester John was a mythical figure, Portuguese emissaries triumphantly, but mistakenly, identified the Ethiopian emperor as Prester John. It was their desire to convert Ethiopians from Coptic Christianity to Roman Catholicism that motivated the Portuguese to aid the Ethiopians in defeating Adal's forces at Wayna Daga in 1543. * The Galla moved northward in great numbers in the 1530s, occupying portions of Harar, Shoa, and Amhara. * The Ethiopians could not defeat them militarily. * The Galla were not interested in assimilation. * For the next two centuries, the two peoples lived together in an uneasy truce. * The Ottoman Turks seized Massawa and other coastal cities. * The Jesuits arrived and attempted to force Roman Catholicism on a proud people whose Coptic form of Christianity long antedated the European version. * The overzealous Jesuit missionary Alphonse Mendez tried to revamp the Ethiopian liturgy, rebaptize the people, and replace ancient Ethiopian customs and practices with Roman ones. * Since Ethiopian national sentiment was closely tied to Coptic Christianity, violent rebellion and anarchy ensued. * In 1633, the Jesuit missionaries were expelled. * For the next two centuries, hostility to foreigners, weak political leadership, and regionalism characterized Ethiopia. * Civil conflicts between Galla and Ethiopians erupted continually. * The Coptic Church, though lacking strong authority, survived as the cornerstone of Ethiopian national identity. ## Map 20.2 East Africa in the Sixteenth Century In early modern times, the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, first isolated and then subjected to Muslim and European pressures, played an insignificant role in world affairs. But the East African city-states, which stretched from Sofala in the south to Mogadishu in the north, had powerfully important commercial relations with Mughal India, China, the Ottoman world, and southern Europe. ## Chapter 20: Africa and the World: Continued ### **Men and Women** Men acquired wives in two ways. In some cases, couples simply eloped and began their union. More commonly, a man's family gave bride wealth to the bride's family as compensation for losing the fruits of her productive and reproductive abilities. She was expected to produce children, to produce food through her labor, and to pass on the culture in the raising of her children. Because it took time for a young man to acquire the bride wealth, all but the richest men delayed marriage until about age thirty. Women married at about the onset of puberty. The easy availability of land in Africa reduced the kinds of generational conflict that occurred in western Europe, where land was scarce. Competition for wives between male generations, however, was fierce. On the one hand, myth and folklore stressed respect for the elderly, and the older men in a community imposed their authority over the younger ones through painful initiation rites into adulthood, such as circumcision. On the other hand, in West Africa and elsewhere, societies were not based on rule by elders, as few people lived much beyond forty. Young men possessed the powerful asset of their labor, which could easily be turned into independence where so much land was available. “Without children you are naked” goes a Yoruba proverb, and children were the primary goal of marriage. Just as a man’s virility determined his honor, so barrenness damaged a woman’s status. A wife’s infidelity was considered a less serious problem than her infertility. A woman might have six widely spaced pregnancies in her fertile years; the universal practice of breast-feeding infants for two, three, or even four years may have inhibited conception. Long intervals between births due to food shortages also may have limited pregnancies and checked population growth. Harsh climate, poor nutrition, and infectious diseases also contributed to a high infant mortality rate. Both nuclear and extended families were common in West Africa. Nuclear families averaged only five or six members, but the household of a Big Man (a local man of power) included his wives, married and unmarried sons, unmarried daughters, poor relations, dependents, and scores of children. Extended families were common among the Hausa and Mandinka peoples. On the Gold Coast in the seventeenth century, a well-to-do man’s household might number 150 people, in the Kongo region in west-central Africa, several hundred. In areas where one family cultivated extensive land, a large household of young adults, children, and any bably priced most fficient. Stil, although children might be born, many also died. Fami-lies rarely exceeded five or six people; high infant mortality rates and short life spans kept the household numbers low. ### **Agriculture** In agriculture, men did the heavy work of felling trees and clearing the land; women then planted, weeded, and harvested. Between 1000 and 1400, cassava (manioc), bananas, and plantains came to West Africa from Asia. Cassava required little effort to grow and became a staple food, but it had little nutritional value. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese introduced maize (corn), sweet potatoes, and new varieties of yams from the Americas. Fish supplemented the diets of people living near bodies of water. According to former slave Olaudah Equiano, the Ibo people in the mid-eighteenth century ate plantains, yams, beans, and Indian corn, along with stewed poultry, goat, or bullock (castrated steer) seasoned with peppers. However, such a protein-rich diet was probably exceptional. ### **Disease** Disease posed perhaps the biggest obstacle to population growth. Malaria, spread by mosquitoes and rampant in West Africa (except in cool, dry Cameroon), was the greatest killer, especially of infants. West Africans developed a relatively high degree of immunity to malaria and other parasitic diseases, including hookworm (which enters the body through shoeless feet and attaches itself to the intestines), yaws (contracted by nonsexual contact and recognized by ulcerating lesions), sleeping sickness (the parasite enters the blood through the bite of the tsetse fly; symptoms are enlarged lymph nodes and, at the end, a comatose state), and a mild nonsexual form of syphilis. Acute strains of smallpox introduced by Europeans certainly did not help population growth, nor did venereal syphilis, which possibly originated in Latin America. As in Chinese and European communities in the early modern period, the sick depended on folk medicine. African medical specialists, such as midwives, bonesetters, exorcists using religious rituals, and herbalists, administered a variety of treatments, including herbal medications like salves, ointments, and purgatives. Still, disease was common where the diet was poor and lacked adequate vitamins. ### **Famine** The devastating effects of famine, often mentioned in West African oral traditions, represented another major check on population growth. Drought, excessive rain, swarms of locusts, and rural wars that prevented land cultivation all meant later food shortages. In the 1680s famine extended from the Senegambian coast to the Upper Nile, and many people sold themselves into slavery for food. In the eighteenth century “slave exports” reached their peak in times of famine, and ships, according to one chronicler, from 1738 to 1756, when, according to one chronicler, the poor were reduced to cannibalism, also considered a metaphor for the complete collapse of civilization. ### **Trade and Industry** As in all premodern societies, West African economies rested on agriculture. There was some trade and industry, but population shortages encouraged local self-sufficiency, slowed transportation, and hindered exchange. There were very few large markets, and their relative isolation from the outside world and failure to attract large numbers of foreign merchants limited technological innovation. For centuries black Africans had exchanged goods with North African merchants in centers such as Gao and Timbuktu. This long-distance trans-Saharan trade was conducted and controlled by Muslim-Berber merchants using camels. The two primary goods exchanged were salt, which came from salt mines in North Africa, and gold, which came mainly from gold mines in modern-day Mali and, later, modern Ghana. As elsewhere around the world, water was the cheapest method of transportation, and many small dugout canoes and larger trading canoes plied the Niger and its delta region. On land, West African peoples used pack animals (camels or donkeys) rather than wheeled vehicles. Only a narrow belt of land in the Sudan was suitable for animal-drawn carts. When traders reached an area infested with tsetse flies, they transferred each animal's load to human porters. Such difficulties in transport severely restricted long-distance trade, so most people relied on the regional exchange of local specialties. West African communities had a well-organized market system. At informal markets on riverbanks, fishermen bartered fish for local specialties. More formal markets existed within towns and villages or on neutral ground between them. Markets also rotated among neighboring villages on certain days. People exchanged cotton cloth, thread, palm oil, millet, vegetables, and small household articles. Local sellers were usually women; traders from afar were men. ### **Salt Making in the Central Sahara** For centuries, camel caravans transported salt south across the Sahara to the great West African kingdoms, where it was exchanged for gold. Here at Tegguida-n-Tessum, Niger, in the central Sahara, salt is still collected by pouring spring water into small pools dug out of the saline soil. The water leaches out the salt before evaporating in the desert sun, leaving deposits of pure salt behind, which are then shaped into blocks for transport. ### **West Africa in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries** The diseases common in Europe, Africa, and Asia were unknown in the Americas before the Europeans' arrival. Enslaved Africans taken to the Americas brought with them the diseases common to tropical West Africa, such as yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, and hookworm. Thus the hot, humid environment in the American tropics, where the majority of enslaved Africans lived and worked, became more "African." On the other hand, cold-weather European diseases, such as chicken pox, mumps, measles, and influenza, prevailed in the northern temperate zone in North America and the southern temperate zone in South America. This difference in disease environment partially explains why Africans made up the majority of the unskilled labor force in the tropical areas of the Americas, and Europeans made up the majority of the unskilled labor force in the Western Hemisphere temperate zones, such as the northern United States and Canada.