SOCIOECONOMIC AND POLITICAL PROCESSES IN PRECONTACT SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

The massive export of people from Africa to the Americas occurred largely in western Africa—that part of sub-Saharan Africa bordering on the Atlantic, together with the immediate and distant hinterland. In order to correctly identify the main factors at play, two broad regions in western Africa must be distinguished—Atlantic Africa (the societies of the Atlantic coast and their immediate hinterlands, which were directly affected by the European presence) and the Savanna territories in the interior that had been the center of major precolonial socioeconomic and political developments before the establishment of regular seaborne contact with the Europeans.

From the ninth to the third millennium BCE, when climatic and ecological conditions were conducive to extensive human settlement in the Sahara region, African societies—from the Sahara to the Nile valley, and from Ethiopia to Egypt—were major players in the political and economic processes of the Afro-Asian world. However, long-term climatic changes turned the Sahara into a desert and severely limited interactions between western Africa and the Mediterranean and Afro-Asian regions. The use of the camel reestablished regular commercial and other links between western Africa and the evolving commercial centers in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. But the huge Sahara desert, with its unforgiving climate and terrain, dispersed populations southward and limited trans-Saharan trade to goods with high value-to-weight ratio, such as gold. Historians have yet to study in detail the impact of these developments on socioeconomic and political processes in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in a comparative global context.

From the latter half of the first millennium CE to the middle of the second, the first large state systems in western Africa—Ancient Ghana, Mali, Songhay, and KanemBorno—were established. From the mid-thirteenth century to 1591, a large part of western Africa’s total population was located in the territories that formed the Mali and Songhay empires. In the Songhay Empire, the three Niger-bend towns of Jenne, Timbuktu, and Gao had total populations of 30,000–40,000, 80,000, and 100,000, respectively, during the late sixteenth century.

The combination of population concentration, the openness of the savanna, the ease of river transportation over long stretches of the Niger, and the security provided by the governments of Ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhay made the interior savanna the center of manufacturing and trade in West Africa (western Africa from Mauritania to southeastern Nigeria) before seaborne contact with the Europeans in the fifteenth century. Differing population densities and natural resource endowment encouraged the growth and development of interregional trade between the interior savanna and Atlantic Africa. Gold and kola nuts, the main products of Atlantic Africa, were exchanged for the manufactures of the interior savanna, mostly cotton textiles and leather goods. Internal factors making for the growth of interregional trade in West Africa were reinforced by trade with the southern Sahara, North Africa, and the Middle East, particularly the trade in West African gold to meet growing European demand intermediated by Mediterranean merchants, who shipped the gold out of West Africa.

All of West Africa, from Mauritania to southeastern Nigeria, was involved in the precontact interregional longdistance trade between the interior savanna and Atlantic Africa that was centered in the Niger bend. But because of its extensive involvement in the production of the two main products in the trade, gold and kola nuts, the Gold Coast (southern modern Ghana) occupied a special place in the trade. The trade in kola nuts grew in volume as Islam spread in the savanna states (kola nuts being the only stimulant Muslims are allowed to consume). At the same time, the demand for gold in the trans-Saharan trade expanded with growing demand from Europe.

These developments created trade networks and a commercial culture that would facilitate the establishment of trade relations with the Europeans from the fifteenth century onward. But the sociopolitical organization of the societies in western Africa in the mid-fifteenth century would play a role in the procurement of the massive supply of captives for export to the Americas. In contrast to the relatively large centralized states in the interior savanna, in what geographers call the West African Middle Belt, there were a large number of small, kin-based autonomous political units. Further south, all along the Atlantic coast from Senegambia (modern-day Senegal and Gambia) to modern Namibia, political fragmentation was also the norm in the mid-fifteenth century. This was evident as late as the seventeenth century, for a Dutch map drawn in 1629 shows thirty-eight autonomous political units in the area of modern southern Ghana. In the sixteenth century, there were five independent political units in the small area of modern Republic of Benin; in modern Yorubaland, in southwest Nigeria, there were more than a dozen autonomous political units, even though the Yoruba kingdom of Ife was a relatively complex state system at the time. East of Yorubaland the political scene was much the same, apart from the kingdoms of Benin (in mid-western Nigeria) and Kongo (in West-Central Africa), which were already undergoing a process of expansion and the consolidation of state authority in the fifteenth century.

In terms of social structure, there was very little social stratification and class differentiation in the small kin-based societies of Atlantic Africa. Unlike the areas of the interior, there were no accumulated dependents (whether serfs or slaves). In West-Central Africa, where the Portuguese started exporting captives early in the sixteenth century, even the king of Kongo had no accumulated dependents for sale. The political economy of the kingdom was based on redistribution by the king: The provincial governors sent the staple products of their provinces to the king, and the king redistributed these products to the governors according to what each province lacked. This system made the accumulation of slaves or serfs by state elites unnecessary, given the relatively low level of commercial development.

The main authorities on the history of precontact West-Central Africa (Jan Vansina, Anne Hilton, Robert Harms) confirm that there were no slaves, and no slave trade, in the region when the Portuguese arrived in the late fifteenth century. Nor were there words for slaves or purchased people. When, in the early sixteenth century, the king of Portugal sent a trade mission to negotiate with the king of Kongo a switch from copper to captive export, the Kongo king had no slaves to give in return for the gifts sent by the Portuguese king. Instead, he had to raid weakly organized neighboring communities for the needed captives. Subsequently, following the growth of transatlantic slaving in the region, “loanwords” were applied to describe the new social phenomena that developed along the slave trade routes, spreading from the Atlantic coast to the interior.

In West Africa, evidence shows that in the interior savanna, where class differentiation developed, state rulers, Muslim clerics, and merchants used dependent cultivators (approximating serfs rather than slaves), in basically the same way that their counterparts in medieval Europe did. They were settled in villages, where they produced for themselves and paid dues in kind to their lords, who were generally resident in the cities. Large numbers of such villages existed in Mali, Songhay, Kanem-Borno, and the small city-states of the savanna from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Some writers loosely apply the terms slave and slavery to describe these populations. Consistent with the scientific precision in the use of terms that characterizes the writing of medieval European history, there can be no doubt that the more appropriate terms to apply are serfs and serfdom . The populations were built up over time by conquest, with captives that had been taken from the fragmented societies of the West African Middle Belt mentioned earlier. Some of these societies fed the trans-Saharan trade, which took a few thousand captives per year from the fragmented communities in the interior savanna. When historians make the point that African societies were involved in selling and buying people before the arrival of the Europeans in the fifteenth century, the point is valid largely for the interior savanna. But for most of Atlantic Africa that came into direct contact with Europeans in the fifteenth century, this was not the case.

It is particularly important to note that the elites in socially stratified societies in fifteenth-century western Africa were not involved in the accumulation of dependents as an end in itself. Contrary to the belief of some social anthropologists, economic rationality was involved. The growth of elaborate state systems—with a large number of specialized state functionaries (administrators and military men), religious leaders, scholars, and merchants— occurred at a time when the geographical spread of the market economy was limited, land was abundant and accessible to all cultivators, and, therefore, free wage labor was unavailable. Hence, the provisioning of the specialized elites on a regular basis required dependent producers whose labor could be exploited under conditions that did not involve high supervision costs.