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A reasonable body of sources for the writing of western African history begins to be available about 1000 ce. Three centuries earlier the Arabs had completed their conquest of Africa north of the Sahara and so came into possession of the northern termini of trade routes reaching across the desert to western Africa. The lively school of geographers and historians that flourished in the Muslim world from about the 9th to the 14th century thus secured access to growing amounts of information about what they called the bilād al-sūdān, the territory of the Black peoples south of the Sahara.
This information has its limitations. The Muslim writers, contemptuous of non-Islamic societies, passed on little of what they must have known about the organization of pagan Black societies and tended to concentrate on and condemn what struck them as their more monstrous aberrations. Conversely, they doubtless exaggerated the importance of the Islamization that entered western Africa with the Muslim traders crossing the Sahara. The earliest firsthand account of western Africa is probably that of the world traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, who visited the western Sudan in 1352–53. Finally, the North African merchants did not penetrate into western Africa beyond the urban centres of trade and government that existed or came to develop on the northern fringes of the cultivable savannas fronting the Sahara. Their bilād al-sūdān was in fact only the northern marches.
Nevertheless, the picture of western Africa given in the early Muslim writings is of major interest. It is apparent that, right from the beginnings of Arab contact, the organization of the more northerly western African peoples was not solely tribal. They had considerable towns and cities that were supported by a developed agriculture. They had organized networks of markets and trade and a developed system of monarchical government. Kings, whose claim to power was based on descent from the mythical divine founding ancestors of their ethnic groups, taxed trade and levied tribute on the agricultural villages through their possession of bodies of retainers who provided them both with military force and with a hierarchy of officials.
It seems likely that there was an increase in the volume of trans-Saharan trade following the organization of North Africa under Muslim dynasties and that this growth of international trade with western Africa stimulated the growth there of internal trade, urbanization, and monarchical government. Certainly the control of trade, towns, and government in western Africa became increasingly Islamic in form. But it is quite clear that the foundations for the economic and political development of the western Sudan were in existence before the time of contact with Muslim traders or authors. Early Muslim interest was concentrated on two major western African kingdoms: Kanem, in the east, north of Lake Chad; and Ghana, in the extreme west, on the borders of modern Mauritania and Mali. The Muslim sources, which are broadly confirmed by local tradition, indicate that the kingdom of Kanem was being formed during the 9th and 10th centuries through an interaction between Saharan nomads and agricultural village communities. But ancient Ghana (not to be confused with its modern namesake, considerably farther to the south and east) had already reached levels of organization that presuppose several centuries of continuing development.
The earliest extant Arabic reference to a kingdom of Ghana dates from the early 9th century. In the middle of the 11th century, the Córdoban geographer Abū Uʿbayd al-Bakrī described its capital, court, and trade in some detail. The capital was made up of two towns, a stone-built town inhabited by the Muslim traders and a mud-built one of the local Mande in which the king had his walled palace. Their centres were six miles apart, and the whole of the intervening country was more or less built up. The considerable population was supported by the produce of surrounding farms, which were watered from wells. The court displayed many signs of wealth and power, and the king had under him a considerable number of satellite rulers. A principal part of his revenue was derived from regular taxes on trade. The mainstay of this trade was the exchange of gold, which Ghana’s own merchants brought from lands to the south, for salt, which the northern traders brought in from salt deposits in the Sahara.
Al-Bakrī’s description is broadly confirmed by archaeology. The region in which ancient Ghana was situated contains the ruins of a considerable number of stone-built towns that must have been supported by extensive agricultural and commercial activity; those at Koumbi Saleh are generally identified with the capital described by al-Bakrī.
The relatively extensive Muslim interest in Ghana was undoubtedly due to its importance as a source of gold. Kanem seems to have been less important commercially; the main interest of the Muslim authors seems to have been in the quasi-divine status of its kings, which offended their Muslim principles. Other western African kingdoms undoubtedly existed at this time, but the Muslim sources record little of them beyond their names and approximate locations. Thus between Ghana and Kanem was Kawkaw, perhaps the nucleus of the later Songhai kingdom of Gao. Malel, to the south of Ghana, may similarly have been a prototype of the later Mande kingdom of Mali, which ultimately was to eclipse and absorb Ghana itself.
There are perhaps three possible—and not mutually exclusive—explanations for the origins and development of the kingdoms that Arab trade and scholarship had revealed by about 1000 ce. The first is that they were the result of the invasion of agricultural territory by pastoralists from the Sahara who belonged to the Libyan Amazigh groups who spoke a non-Semitic language and were the dominant group of North Africa before its conquest by the Arabs.
This is the explanation often given in western Sudanese traditions and chronicles. From roughly the 15th century onward, many of these were preserved by local authors who wrote in Arabic and were Muslims, and who thus had some incentive to link the history of their peoples with that of North Africa and with the adjacent Middle East. It was also the explanation favoured by European historians of the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries when Europeans were themselves conquering and colonizing Black Africa. There thus evolved the so-called “Hamitic hypothesis,” by which it was generally supposed that any progress and development among agricultural Blacks was the result of conquest or infiltration by pastoralists from northern or northeastern Africa. Specifically, it was supposed that many of the ideas and institutions of tribal monarchy had spread through Africa by diffusion from the ancient civilization of Egypt and the Nile valley.
There can be no doubt that over the centuries pastoralists from the Sahara have indeed advanced and conquered southward. But not all of these were Libyan Imazighen; some, such as the dynasts of Kanem, were Black African in language and culture. Nor is it easy to understand how mobile desert pastoral groups could be effective transmitters of ideas and institutions from the settled civilization of the Nile valley to other agricultural lands in western Africa. It would seem more probable that conquering pastoralists who did succeed in establishing new kingdoms and dynasties in western Africa should do so by taking over existing monarchies, perhaps city-states or even “village-states,” and amalgamating these into larger units. Some early western African traditions can certainly be interpreted in this sense.
This leads to the second explanation for the origins and development of monarchical statehood among the western African groups. There is archaeological evidence for the evolution of a cattle-herding and agricultural economy among a mixed population of Libyan Imazighen and Black agricultural peoples (now called Ḥarāṭīn) in the Sahara by at least 4000 bce—i.e., more or less contemporary with similar developments in the Nile valley. The desiccation of the Sahara and the evolution of its present desert between about 8000 and 2000 bce must have occasioned an outflowing of population in which the Blacks concentrated in the savannas to the south of it. There, in favourable riverine or lacustrine environments, it seems reasonable to suppose that the same desire to avoid conflicts over land and water rights and to control and exploit agricultural surpluses, which had led in the exceptionally fertile but extremely constricted environment of the Nile valley to the dramatic kingship and civilization of the pharaohs, should have occasioned the evolution of similar if less spectacular monarchies.
It should be noted, however, that the major western African monarchies known to the Arabs by approximately 1000 ce were situated not in the well-watered lands along the Sénégal and Niger valleys nor around Lake Chad but north of these, in the less favoured agricultural territory between them and the southern edges of the Sahara. This suggests that a third factor in the evolution of these northern monarchies was the influence of long-distance trade. The western African kingdoms had their own resources of iron, which in some cases were being worked by about 500 bce, but they imported other metals, notably copper, together with horses, luxury manufactures, and—above all—salt, a vital commodity that was scarce in all of western Africa except the coastlands. In exchange they could offer gold, ivory, certain agricultural commodities, and slaves.
The exchange across the Sahara of such commodities probably goes back to times before the establishment of the modern desert. The emergence of the desert did not lead to the cessation of the trade but meant that its surviving pastoralists were encouraged to organize regular trans-Saharan expeditions for trade and plunder. It is known from Herodotus and other classical authors and from surviving rock engravings in the desert that horse-drawn chariots were in use in the Sahara by about 500 bce. Chariots would have been used for short raids rather than for trans-Saharan trade. But the fact that the engravings are deployed along two principal lines, from the Fezzan and southern Morocco toward the upper Niger and Sénégal rivers, suggests a North African interest in the alluvial gold of these rivers. This could well have occasioned the 6th-century Carthaginian expedition led by Hanno to explore the possibility of direct sea trade with western Africa along the Atlantic coast. Despite this expedition, the Carthaginians do not seem to have been capable of opening up a regular sea trade with western Africa. The links with western Africa remained firmly in the hands of the Saharan groups, although, at about the beginning of the Common Era, camels and other pack animals came into use to supplant the horse-drawn vehicles.
The profits to be obtained by distributing Saharan and Mediterranean produce in western Africa, and by controlling the collection and export of the western African commodities that were exchanged for them, must have been a powerful factor in encouraging the kings of communities on the southern fringes of the Sahara to extend their rule by conquest over adjacent similar communities. Control over more extensive territories meant that by tribute and taxation they could acquire greater stocks of goods for exchange with North Africa and the Sahara and more clients and slaves to extend their power at the expense of their neighbours. Some of their increased human power could be mounted on horses, obtained from the Saharan trade, to increase the mobility and power of their armed forces over the open savannas. It is tolerably certain that the power of the kings of ancient Ghana, controlling the export of gold from the Sénégal and Niger valleys, was built up in this way.