The Economics of State Operation

Sources

Horses. As early as the third-century Wagadu kafuU in the Sahel, which led to the Ghanaian empire, horses were a regular part of building and maintaining a state. For most of the Sudanic states, the cavalry was acknowledged as the best striking force. It had a military advantage over all other forms of fighting in the region until the introduction of firearms in the late sixteenth century. Cavalrymen rode locally bred or imported horses, but imported horses were considered superior mounts. Leo Africanus, who visited the Songhai Empire in 1513-1515, reported on the breeding of small, short horses in Ghana and Timbuktu. These horses were generally used as transportation for resident merchants and for sundry purposes by the ruler. Larger, better-quality horses were imported from the Maghrib and were used for royal ceremonies and parades, as presents for the ruler’s favorites, and as mounts for the state cavalry. Because of their relative rarity and military importance, imported horses often cost more than camels during the fifth through the eleventh centuries, and it was up to each ruler to pay for the animals. Despite their expense, documents from the period indicate that there were more than ten thousand horses in Mali, mostly for cavalrymen, including special mounts for cavalry captains. Songhai also had a large cavalry.

Portuguese Imports. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese discovered that horses were in great demand by the Wolof, Malinke, and other groups in West Africa and supplied them by the hundreds. The Portuguese, in fact, provided horses and guns to many coastal chieftainships, exacerbating a slave-raiding pattern that was already established before the Portuguese arrived in the area. Especially in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, horses and guns were most frequently exchanged for slaves. In Kanem-Bornu, the more horses and guns one had, the more slave raids one could conduct; and captured slaves were then traded for still more horses and guns.

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State Income from Trade. For the states of the Western Sudan, intra- and interregional trade, including trans-Saharan trade, was protected, monitored, and taxed by the government but operated by local and foreign residents. Taxes and fees on trade goods provided consistent government income. Ghana did not integrate the network of villages (the kafu system) and lesser states of the Sahel/ savanna into one unit of commercial interchange. Mali and Songhai, however, established and maintained a monetary system involving cowrie shells as currency for food and small items and gold—or frequently copper and iron bars— as the medium of exchange for long-distance intra- and interregional trade items. The use of cowries as currency in Mali and Gao was observed by al-Umari during the 1340s and Ibn Battuta during the 1350s. They were also widely used in urban centers such as Timbuktu. Other media of exchange were actual trade goods. Thus, salt was most frequently exchanged directly for gold; copper was an important currency in fourteenth-century Kanem-Bornu and Takedda; and pieces of cloth were treated as currency in Zawila, Takrur, and Kanem-Bornu. Also, since gold coins and gold dust were the standard medium of exchange throughout North Africa from the eighth century onward, gold was both the main currency for trade transactions and the primary item of trade in Audaghost, Tadmekka, Djenné, and Gao, as well as in other areas of West Africa.

Ethics and Economics. Government officials responsible for monitoring and protecting trade seem to have understood that a reputation for fair dealing was crucial for continuing to fill the state coffers with tax moneys. The Portuguese trader Fernandes described the regular process of trading with the Dyula-Wangara (Mande-speaking itinerant merchants) as a matter of great trust between the participants. No receipts or written agreements were necessary; credit was commonly extended for periods of up to a year, based on the Dyulas’ standard practice of going to commercial centers such as Niani, Djenné, and Timbuktu once a year for business transactions. If a debtor died in the interim, his son or daughter would make sure that the debt was paid. It was also a standard practice among the rulers of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai to protect the property of resident traders who died. The accepted procedure was for the ruler to contact a responsible person from the deceased’s clan to hold the property until a legitimate heir came to claim it, or, if the deceased were a Muslim, to have an Islamic cleric or qadi dispense the property according to Muslim law.

Fair Treatment. Rulers promoted the idea that complaints of unfair treatment and price gouging would be quickly investigated and resolved. Officials responsible for commercial transactions were held to a high standard. If they made financial miscalculations, they were dismissed and made to pay anyone they had shortchanged. Theft and dishonesty were typically punishable by death or forced enslavement.

State Operation and Land. The sort of feudal land management and serfdom that developed in medieval Europe did not occur in the Western Sudan. According to Nehemia Levtzion, the factors that caused such a system to occur in Europe did not exist in West Africa. Throughout the period 500-1590, there was no overpopulation or land shortage in West Africa, as there was in Europe. In fact, there was a recurring shortage of population associated with frequent migration, and one of the central necessities of state building in the Western Sudan was the ability to marshal concentrations of population over a sustained period of time through military might. In the states of the Western Sudan, a government’s ability to exact taxes, tribute, public service, and labor from constituents was never based on control and distribution of land but rather on access to loyal hunter and warrior clans armed with iron weapons and horses.

State Operation and the Slave Trade. The principal income producer for Kanem-Bornu in the Central Sudan was the slave trade. By the fifteenth century the city of Zawila, between Kanem and Tripoli, had become the bestknown slave market in the Sahara-Sudanic region, and it maintained that reputation through the eighteenth century. For most of the 500-1590 period, the slave trade was far less important in the Western Sudan. There it was necessary to maintain relative peace and security for the long-distance and regional trade routes so that gold, the chief source of state income, could be transported freely through the region and beyond. Slave raids created instability and a more or less constant state of hostilities. Little peace meant little trade. Too far east of the main goldfields to derive any income from the gold trade, the Central Sudanic states turned to slave trading to produce income. Repeated, intensive slave raiding, however, encouraged massive flights of populations, terror, relentless warfare, and institutional instability. For this reason there were far fewer states in the Central Sudan than in the West.

The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade. At least by the seventh century, West African slaves were being sent to North Africa. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, slaves from the Western Sudan were identified in Cordova and Algecira, Spain, and by the fourteenth century they were in Catalan, Valencia, Majorca, Marseille, Montpellier, Naples, Genoa, and Venice. Slaves from Kanem-Bornu, many of whom were captured in the neighboring Mossi-Dagomba region, were taken to Morocco. Slaves from Gao were brought to Tripoli. From there they were often traded to Barca, Tunisia, Sicily, the North African coast, and Andalusia, as well as to Portuguese planters on Arguin Island (off the coast of Mauritania). Large numbers of slaves from the Western Sudan became loyal bodyguards for various rulers in North Africa as well as house servants and eunuchs. They also served as soldiers for the Almoravids in the conquest of the Maghrib, the Sahara, and Spain.

Slavery in the Western Sudan. Slaves in the Western Sudan were usually captives from wars waged for purposes other than taking slaves, but there were some relatively limited slave-raiding forays, and slaves were also acquired through direct purchase and bartering. In the fifteenth century, Dyula merchants (Mande-speaking West African traders) even went to the Portuguese slaveholding castle at Elmina and bought slaves who had been captured elsewhere along the coast. More frequently, however, the Dyula sold slaves to the Portuguese. In his Tarikh al-Fattash (The Chronicle of the Seeker After Knowledge, begun in 1519), Mahmoud al-Kati wrote that Mali and Songhai established slave villages specifically to grow rice, millet, sorghum, and other products for the rulers. This history mentions a Songhai farm where more than two hundred slaves—under four slave headmen and a slave village chief—were assigned to produce at least a thousand sacks of rice for the reigning askia. Any amount over that obligation could be kept and distributed at the discretion of the slave village chief, so the farm chief and the headmen became quite well-to-do. However, when such slaves died, any assets they had accumulated went to the askia. Household slaves deemed loyal were frequently trusted with the utmost responsibilities in the Western Sudanic states.

The Atlantic Slave Trade. By the late fifteenth century the Portuguese and other European slave merchants had begun bypassing North African middlemen and buying slaves directly along the West African coast. Slave trading became more profitable in that region at the same time the Almoravids were once again disrupting the trade routes to the north. The results were increased warfare and instability and ultimately the fall of the Songhai Empire.

Sources

Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973).

D. T. Niane, “Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion,” in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, edited by Niane, volume 4 of General History of Africa (London: Heinemann / Berkeley: University of California Press / Paris: UNESCO, 1984), pp. 117-171.