The development of such major Sudanic kingdoms and empires as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, the Hausa states, and Kanem-Bornu along the southern fringes of the Sahara had a number of important consequences for the history of western Africa as a whole. For example, it provided the background for the expansion of the Fulani, the only pastoral western African people (also variously known as Fulbe, Fula, Fellata, and Peul). (See also Fulani empire.)

The fact that, uniquely in western Africa, the Fulani are pastoralists has led to suggestions that they were originally a Saharan people. The Fulani language, however, is classified as part of the Niger-Congo family of languages spoken by Black Africans, and the earliest historical documentation reports that the Fulani were living in the westernmost Sudan close to ancient Ghana. The development of this organized kingdom thrust pastoral peoples outward, and the ancestors of the modern Fulani seem to have chosen to settle to the southwest, toward the middle Sénégal valley. But there another settled, and (from the 11th century) an Islamized, Black kingdom evolved, that of Tekrur. Some Fulani participated in this kingdom and became Tukulor—the Tukulor and Fulani languages being practically identical. Some, however, chose not to accept the settled way of life and, to preserve their traditional pastoral and religious customs, migrated eastward over the savanna grasslands. Grazing land was available between the agricultural villages, and the growing towns provided the Fulani with markets where they could exchange their pastoral produce for agricultural and manufactured goods. Eventually some Fulani settled in these towns, no doubt initially as trading agents for their fellows in the countryside, where the bulk of the Fulani continued to live under their own leaders, aloof from the social and political life of the cultivators, though increasingly paying rent for their grazing and rendering military services to the settled authorities.

In this way, by the 15th century large numbers of Fulani had settled in the Fouta Djallon and in and around Macina, the inland delta country of the Niger upstream of Timbuktu, and they were beginning to appear as far east as Hausaland, where today many millions of their descendants live. By the 16th century the Fulani were appearing in Bornu, and by the 18th century large numbers of them were settling in the grassy uplands of the Cameroons. Although the bulk of the Fulani remained animists, gradually significant numbers of them became Muslims and indeed provided some of the leaders of Islam in western Africa.

The growth of organized statehood in the western African savannas also had important consequences for more southerly lands and peoples. Unsuccessful contestants for power in the major savanna states sometimes moved off toward the south. Traders from these states, especially from Mali and, later, from the Hausa kingdoms, also settled in the south as their trading networks developed, and they often had important political, as well as economic, influences on the groups with whom they came to live. The consequences of these two kinds of movement, which were sometimes interlinked, can best be considered in two sections—firstly, those deriving from developments originating in the Mande sphere in the western savannas, and secondly, those deriving from the Hausa-Bornu region in the east.

In the west one notable emigration was that of the Susu, a Mande group that had lost out to the Keita in the 13th-century struggle for the inheritance of ancient Ghana. This emigration created a wedge of Mande-speaking people close to the Atlantic in the modern Republic of Guinea and in northern Sierra Leone among peoples who had not advanced politically beyond the village level. With the subsequent growth of Mali’s power, other smaller groups—sometimes traders, sometimes conquerors, often both—also infiltrated these West Atlantic coastlands. They began to organize their people into petty kingdoms that tended to owe a nominal allegiance to Mali. Major incentives for these migratory movements seem to have been the desire to gain access to coastal supplies of salt and, from the 15th century onward, to the foreign merchandise brought by European sea traders.

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Africa: Western Africa

In the 16th century the West Atlantic coastlands were invaded by yet another Mande group, the Mane, who advanced westward parallel to the coast from Liberia onward. These were military bands that systematically attacked and overcame the villages of each group they came across. Some of them would stay behind to organize these conquests into small kingdoms, while others, reinforced by auxiliaries recruited from among their victims, would proceed farther west to repeat the pattern. Their advance was halted only when they came up against the Susu. South and east of the Susu, however, the West Atlantic social and ethnic patterns were considerably altered by the actions of the Mane. New Mande-speaking groups emerged, such as the Mende and Loko, while some West Atlantic peoples who retained their original language, such as the Temne, accepted a new aristocracy of Mane provenance.

The Mane advance into the West Atlantic coastlands from the east may have been connected with the growth of Mande influence in the Ivory Coast (modern Côte d’Ivoire) and in modern Ghana. This was commercial in origin; Dyula merchants developed trade routes in search of gold, slaves, and kola nuts, in exchange for which they offered salt, cloth, and other Sudanic or North African goods. It is known that by 1500 the Dyula were trading as far south as the coast of modern Ghana, and their first contact with the Akan peoples who populate almost all the southern half of this territory was probably one or two centuries earlier than this.

This development of trade by the Dyula in modern Ghana and in the adjacent Ivory Coast had important political consequences, and sometimes military implications as well. Ambitious Akan chiefs began to develop and expand their political power to secure the maximum profit from the exploitation of the resources of as much territory and as many people as possible. On the northern fringes of the forest, astride the routes along which gold and kola nuts were brought for exchange with the Dyula, important new kingdoms emerged such as Bono and Banda, both of which were probably in existence by about 1400. As the economic value of gold and kola became appreciated, the forest to the south of these states—which had hitherto been little inhabited because it was less favourable for agriculture than were the savannas—became more thickly populated, and the same principles of political and military mobilization began to be applied there. Village communities became tributaries of ruling groups, with some of their members becoming the clients and slaves needed for the support of the royal households, armies, and trading enterprises. By 1500 most of the Akan territory seems to have been organized in this way and, as trade increased, so the political units—initially very small—tended to increase in size.

Sometimes these political changes were not to the advantage of the Dyula, who employed Mande warriors to guard their caravans and, if necessary, could call in larger contingents from the Sudanic kingdoms. Tensions between the Dyula and the increasingly powerful animist monarchy of Banda erupted in the 17th century into a civil war that destroyed the kingdom and led its Dyula merchants to establish a new trading base of their own farther to the west at Bonduku (Bondoukou). In the following centuries there were at least two major examples of the Dyula taking political authority for themselves at strategic points on the trade routes running through the eastern Ivory Coast.

But the most interesting Mande political initiative along the trade routes south of Jenne was the creation in the early 17th century, just north of the Akan lands, of the new Dyula state of Gonja. This seems to have been inspired by a general worsening of the competitive position of the Mande traders, and it was occasioned by three factors: (1) the near monopoly in the control of the export of forest produce achieved by the Akan kingdom of Bono, (2) the rise to power farther north of the Dagomba kingdom, which controlled local salt pans, and (3) the arrival in the region about 1500 of rival long-distance traders from Hausaland. The Dyula seem to have tried to combat these developments by erecting a major kingdom of their own in Gonja—the territory that the northern traders had to cross to reach the Akan forestlands. But much of Gonja was barren, and its kings lacked the resource base to withstand the growth of Akan power.

Rather less is known about the nature of Sudanic influences in the more easterly zone south of Hausaland and of Bornu. However, it has already been suggested that Dagomba (and a number of similar kingdoms in the Volta basin, including Mamprusi) and the Mossi kingdoms—such as Wagadugu (Ouagadougou) and Yatenga (or Wahiguya), north of Dagomba and closer to the Niger Bend—were founded by conquerors coming from the east. The structures of these kingdoms, which were extant into the beginning of the colonial era, seem to have been erected about the 15th century by relatively small bands of immigrants who eventually merged with the autochthonous Gur-speaking inhabitants of the Volta basin. Their success in conquering and organizing the Gur villages into kingdoms seems to have been due to their possession of cavalry, which subsequently remained a badge of royalty and of aristocracy.

Somewhat earlier, and farther to the east, astride the Niger and closer to Hausaland, similar kingdoms seem to have been developed through the same kind of process by invaders who may well have been ancestral to the Mossi-Dagomba state builders. Examples of these survived in Borgu into colonial times. An interesting corpus of legends—such as that of Kisra, a character derived from the Sāsānian conqueror of Egypt, Khosrow II, who is supposed to have migrated southwestward from the Nile valley founding various kingdoms—suggests that state-building invaders also proceeded south of Borgu and Hausaland through Nupe, Jukun, Igala, Yoruba, and Benin territory (all in modern Nigeria) to as far as southern Dahomey and to the southeasternmost tip of modern Ghana. Much of this territory, however, was subjugated in the 19th century by Muslim Fulani and Hausa, and the legends as they survive often have an Islamic colouring, which makes it difficult to assess their historicity. It could well be that the traditions of the autochthonous pagans had become coloured by the folklore of incoming Muslim traders. But if the legends are really evidence of conquest, there can be no doubt that the conquered peoples had already achieved a high degree of cultural, economic, and—probably—political sophistication.

The archaeological evidence of the Nok culture shows that the inhabitants of central Nigeria engaged in agriculture and were using iron and other metals by about 500 bce. It is moreover generally accepted that the terra-cotta sculptures associated with Nok are precursors of the later court sculpture of southwestern Nigeria, in bronze or brass and stone as well as terra-cotta. The bronze or brass sculpture of Yoruba and of the kingdom of Benin is especially famous for its naturalism and for the high degree of metallurgical skill used to cast the figures by the lost-wax (cire perdue) process.

Tradition asserts that the Yoruba town of Ife (Ile-Ife) was the centre from which this art, and the type of monarchy that supported it, spread to other parts of the region. Modern archaeologists have found nothing to contradict this and have moreover provided evidence for the existence in Yorubaland of a high degree of urbanization by at least the 11th century. Thus in southwestern Nigeria urban civilization seems at least contemporary with the same development in Hausaland and in Kanem-Bornu, the point of departure for Kisra-type conquerors. The probability, therefore, is that if the Kisra and similar legends are evidence of conquering cavaliers, they were—like the Saharan invaders in the Sudan—exploiting rather than creating urban civilizations, though no doubt they may have welded smaller units into larger kingdoms.

It should be pointed out that the territory southwest of Hausaland toward Dahomey is often open country suited to the deployment of cavalry. The effectiveness of cavalry decreased southeastward toward the forest; in the Benin kingdom, horses were little more than residual symbols of monarchical and aristocratic power. Still farther east, in the forest on the other side of the Niger, where there are no traditions of invasion or of developed monarchical government, the archaeological finds at Igbo Ukwu revealed that ancestors of the modern Igbo (Ibo) had, as early as the 9th century, a sophisticated society with surpluses of wealth supporting considerable craft specialization, including a highly developed bronze art with a distinctive style of its own. Recent thinking suggests that the origins of the small, competitive city-states of the eastern Niger delta south of Igboland, with which Europeans were to develop flourishing commerce from the 17th century, may well be associated with earlier, purely indigenous trading activities of which very little is at present known.

On the available evidence, the establishment in eastern Guinea of the network of Hausa trade and trade routes in the form in which it has been known in modern times, essentially similar to the Mande system farther west, can hardly be dated earlier than about the 16th century. Yet the European traders arriving at Benin, in the Yoruba coastlands, and in the Niger delta, from the end of the 15th century, were able to secure regular supplies of goods, some of which (e.g., cloth and beads) clearly originated in the hinterland and seem to have had an already extant market among the Akan peoples of southern Ghana. This presupposes appreciable indigenous commercial development in eastern Guinea before the emergence of the Hausa system.