Africa

Ringmar, Erik

Published in: History of International Relations

2016

Link to publication

Citation for published version (APA): Ringmar, E. (2016). Africa. Manuscript submitted for publication. In History of International Relations Open Book Publishers.

Total number of authors: 1

General rights Unless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply: Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal

Read more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

LUND UNIVERSITY

PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Lund, Sweden, March 18, 2016.

Dear reader,

This is a first draft of the chapter on Africa for the textbook on the history of international relations that I'm working on. I have never been and will never be an expert on Africa and I very much need your help. Could you please let me know 1) what I'm getting wrong; 2) what I should have mentioned. Remember that this is meant as a very general overview and that the book deals with world history before the Europeans arrived — colonialism is consequently not discussed in this chapter. I'm very grateful for any contribution to the Academia.edu session you might have, and I will thank all contributors individually in the preface to the book. Or just email me: [email protected]

The book will be published by Open Book Publishers in Cambridge, hopefully next year. It will be freely downloadable as a pdf but you will also be able to buy it as a regular book. All the material I have written so far is available at http://irhistor y .info/ yours,

Erik

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 1 Africa

All human beings are Africans. It was in today's Ethiopia, some 200,000 years ago, that the first settlements of homo sapiens were established and from this origin we gradually came to migrate to every corner on the planet. Africa is an enormous continent, occupying a fifth of the world's landmass, and it includes a number of radically different climates and environments: from dense jungles to extensive grasslands, and it includes the Sahara too, a desert the size of Europe. Africa is actually larger than we think since the Mercator projection used for most world maps underrepresents the true size of territories around the equator — and Africa straddles the equator. In addition, Africa has at least a thousand languages and many more ethnic groups. In order to talk sensibly about this all diversity, we have to divide the continent into regions. The most commonly made distinction is between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Saharan desert dividing the two.

North Africa has a coastline along the Mediterranean Sea and from the very beginning people here have interacted with people in the Middle East and Europe.

Pharaonic Egypt, one of the world's oldest civilizations, dating back to 3,000 BCE, is located in North Africa and so is Carthage which for hundreds of years was Rome's main adversary. [Box: Black Athena] Northern Africa was also an early center of

Christianity and the kings of today's Ethiopia converted to Christianity already in the fourth century CE. The Berber were the original inhabitants of North Africa and they were either farming along the Mediterranean coast or eking out a living on the edge of the desert. In the eighth-century North Africa was overrun by the expanding

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 2 Umayyad caliphate and the Berbers converted to Islam, although they often maintained their language and much of their pre-Islamic culture.

South of the Sahara — in “Sub-Saharan” or “Black” Africa — Bantu speaking people predominated. [Box: Oral and literate societies] The Bantu speakers originated in western and central parts of the continent but started moving east- and southward already in the first millennium BCE, spreading their language and cultural practices together with agricultural techniques and crafts such as iron-making. The political organization of Sub-Saharan Africa has been strongly influenced by nature and by the climate. Human beings can make themselves more or less independent of the climate – nature is not fate after all – but as long as the economic resources are limited this is difficult to do. In North Africa the boundary between desert and pasture often moved and desertification would lay waste to large cities; and in Sub-Saharan Africa there was a great difference between the kinds of societies that could be established in the rainforest and on the savanna. [Box: The Kingdom of Nubia]

Along much of the coast of Sub-Saharan African there were rainforests that could stretch up to 300 kilometers inland, and in addition there was jungle in a continuous band around the equator — in what today is Congo. In the rainforest the climate was hot and humid, vegetation was dense and light was often blocked by trees that could grow to be up to fifty meters tall. The jungle was a generous environment in many ways, despite the presence of scourges such as the tsetse fly, and there were plenty of animals that could be hunted and plants that could be gathered. And that is exactly what people did — they were hunters and gatherers.

But the communities were not very large, certainly not larger than a thousand people, and they had little by means of political institutions. [Box: “Stateless societies”] Instead the communities were structured around family and kin and held together by social ties rather than by political coercion. Since the people living in the

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 3 jungle moved around in response to the seasonal variation in game and plants, they were not tied to any particular territory. Occasionally they would come into conflict with other groups over access to economic resources such hunting grounds, but these conflicts are better described as raids than as wars.

Away from the coastal regions and the jungles around the equator, there was savanna, less dense woodlands and in eastern Africa also high mountains. The savanna with its grass was an ideal environment in which to raise animals and throughout much of Africa cattle herding has been a chief occupation. On the savanna it was also a lot easier to grow things and people would often settle down to become farmers. As a result, far larger societies could be established, comprising many tens of thousands of people who were not united by ties of kinship. These societies had a far more elaborate division of labor, meaning that people could take up specialized tasks and professions. Services and goods which they could not provide for themselves, they could buy from others. Trade flourished both within each state and along trade routes that often extended across the length and breath of the entire continent. In addition the savanna-states had far more elaborate political institutions. Indeed, savanna-states that grew rich from trade and manufacturing were able to tax the people subject to them and they built flourishing capitals administered by public bureaucracies and ruled by laws. The savanna-states had kings with courts which became centers of learning and the arts. In many cases, the savanna-states expanded their power over their neighbors, either by outright occupation or by tying them together in networks of allies and tribute- bearers. Here regular wars were fought involving large armies. In this way a number of empires were created — including Nubia in today's Sudan; Benin, Mali and

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 4 the Asante in West Africa; Ethiopia, Bunyoro and Buganda in east Africa; and

Zimbabwe in the south.

North Africa

In the seventh-century, North Africa was overrun by the armies of the expanding

Umayyad caliphate. [Read more: The Arab expansion] In 640 CE the Arabs conquered Egypt and continued westward. The North African terrain was easy to move across since the population was sparse and there were few proper towns. Much of it was desert of course, but many of the Arabs were Bedouins and they and their camels were used to the environment. The people the Arabs ran into in North Africa were in many respects similar to themselves. A majority were Berbers, and many of them were nomads too, including the Tuaregs of the Saharan desert which is a

Berber tribe. Instead of putting up a fight, however, the nomads simply moved away from the path of the invaders, and the Berbers who lived along the Mediterranean coast were assimilated into the new elite. To this day we tend to think of the people of North Africa as Arabs but many of them would prefer to be known as Berbers and at least some still regard the Arabs as invaders and dream of establishing an independent country. [Box: Independence for Azawad]

Yet the Berbers would soon reassert themselves. In the early eighth century, when the Arab armies continued their expansion into the Iberian peninsula, many

Berbers went with them, and together they established a capital in Córdoba in the province they were to call Al-Andalus. In addition, many Berbers who lived in what today is southern Morocco went on missions to convert pagans living further south, in Mauritania and in Ghana. In general, the nomadic Berbers seem to have taken

Islam very seriously indeed, and in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries two revivalist movements arose among them led by leaders who declared themselves disgusted by

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 5 the lack of religious zeal among their fellow Muslims. The first of these movements, the Almoravids, was led by Abdallah ibn Yasin, a preacher who formed an army made up of nomadic tribes, left the desert and began to move northward. In 1054 CE the

Almoravids captured the city of Sijilmasa, the western terminus of the caravan routes which crossed the Sahara and one of the largest market towns in all of Africa.

When Ibn Yasin died in 1059, he was succeeded by one of his generals, Yusuf ibn

Tashfin, who was to rule the Almoravids for the next fifty years. In 1062, ibn Tashfin built a new capital for himself in the city of Marrakesh, on the northern side of the

Atlas Mountains. It was during Ibn Tashfin that the Almoravids created an empire which included all of today's Morocco but also vast areas of the deserts to the south and a broad strip of land along the Mediterranean coast into today's Algeria. The

Almohads proceeded to impose sharia laws on the territories they occupied, banning the sale of alcohol and pork and, unusually for Muslim rulers, they sought to convert the members of other religion by force.

Before long the Berbers had occupied Spain too. By the middle of the eleventh- century, the political power of the Caliphate of Córdoba had disintegrated and a number of smaller Muslim kingdoms, known as the taifa, had made themselves independent. However, they were often at war with each other and with the Christian kingdoms in the north of Spain. In 1086, as a way to restore peace and unity on the peninsula, the Almoravid armies were invited to Al-Andalus by the taifa kings. This is how they came to expand their African empire into Europe. Much as in North Africa, the Almoravids were appalled by the lack morals of the local elite and before long they had imposed strict Islamic laws in Spain too. Yet the Almoravids were unable to maintain the purity of the faith. When Ibn Tashfin died in 1106, almost one hundred years old, he was succeeded by rulers who clearly had less of an interest in both

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 6 religious and military matters. Instead his successors seem mainly to have focused their attention on building projects. With the help of architects imported from

Muslim Spain they turned Marrakesh into a fortified city filled with sumptuous palaces and mosques. [Box: The Wonders of Marrakesh] Clearly, the Almoravids were now city-dwellers, not nomads, although they continued to wear the distinct headgear -- the tagelmust -- typical of the men of the desert.

This was when the second revivalist movement, known as the Almohads, began gathering in opposition to them. The Almohads were not from the desert but from the high Atlas mountains, but they were if anything even more serious about their religion than the Almoravids originally had been. Their leader was a man called Ibn

Tumart, who regarded himself as a mahdi, a savior who would rid the world of evil and prepare the way for the return of the Messiah. From their mountain stronghold they undertook increasingly successful military campaigns and in 1147 they captured

Marrakesh. This was the end for the Almoravid regime. The military expansion continued and in 1159 the Almohads had conquered all of North Africa and in 1172 all of Al-Andalus. They made Sevilla into their second capital, although they too regarded Spain as little more than an outpost of their empire. The Almohads proceeded to impose strict Islamic laws on the lands they controlled and this had severe consequences for the cosmopolitan culture of cities like Córdoba. Many

Christians fled northwards, and many Jews went eastwards to Cairo, ruled by the

Fatimid Caliphate, a far more liberal regime [Read more: Maimonides]

Yet the Almohads too mellowed with time, and they too became more interested in architectural projects than in imperial expansion. This was when the city of Fez was turned into a center of religious learning and scholarship. In fact, during Almohad rule, Fez with its population of some 200,000 people must have

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 7 been one of the largest cities in the world. The medina of Fez — the market quarters of the city — were particularly famous. They also turned the city of Rabat, on the

Atlantic coast, into a major port and a fortified naval base. Yet their empire began crumbling already in the first part of the thirteenth-century. In 1212, only forty years after the initial occupation, the Almohads in Spain were defeated by an alliance of Christian rulers. Córdoba fell to the invaders from the north in 1236 and Sevilla in

1248. After that assorted provincial governors in North Africa too started asserting themselves and by 1269 it was all over for the Almohads. When the historian Ibn

Khaldun in 1377 sat down to write a history of the Berbers, he started reflecting on the nature of politics and on the curious way in which powers tend to rise and fall.

[Box: Ibn Khaldun and asabiyyah] It was asabiyyah — “group solidarity” — which made all the difference, Ibn Khaldun concluded. The Berbers had initially had a lot of asabiyyah — they had grown strong in the harsh conditions of the desert since they had to stay united in order to survive. But once they had come to power and moved into the cities they begun indulging in luxuries and they grew weak and started fighting with each other. After five generations, each new regime was ready to be overthrown by a successor.

Consider next the partners the Berbers traded with on the other side of the

Sahara. These were the people of the empire of Mali, 1235–1600 CE. Since much of

Mali then as now is desert, agriculture should really be impossible here and we would consequently not expect there to be any settled communities. Yet the presence of the river Niger changes that calculation. Curiously, much of the rain that falls in the highlands of Guinea, along Africa's Atlantic coast, flows north and eastward, straight into the Sahara, forming an inland delta with enough water to allow farmers to irrigate their fields and to raise cattle. Planting rice at the beginning of the rainy

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 8 season in June and July, the farmers could harvest the crop in December by means of canoes. It is in this inland delta formed by the Niger that the cities of Timbuktu,

Gao and Djenné are located, and it was more than anything with these cities that the

Berbers conducted their trade. Two commodities were more important than all others — gold and salt — although ivory, copper and slaves were traded too. Salt was used for preserving food and it was almost as valuable as gold. Much of it was hacked out of the rocks at Targhaza, a desolate salt mine in the middle of the desert.

Gold was traded by a rather mysterious guild of merchants known as the Wangarans.

Although the Wangarans were reluctant to reveal the exact source of their supply, it is clear that it originated south of Mali, in today's Ivory Coast and Ghana, where there still are important gold deposits. This was the gold which, thanks to the trans-

Saharan trade eventually ended up in the Middle East and Europe. During this time something like half of all gold in the known world came from Africa.

As one would expect, the rulers of Mali were quick to take their cut of this lucrative trade. Indeed, in the first part of the thirteenth-century a powerful empire was established here, funded above all by taxes on trade. The Mali Empire had a well-trained army, comprising some 100,000 soldiers supplied by each village in the empire. Before long they had conquered a large area stretching from the Niger river westward to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, in the thirteenth-century, Mali was the second largest empire in the world — only the Mongol empire was larger. Yet the founder of the empire, Sundiata Keita, was not only a ruthless military leader but also a wise politician. In 1235, at a meeting of notables, a constitution was adopted, known as the Kurukanfuga, which gave the empire a legal system and a decentralized, federal, political structure. [Box: Kurukanfuga] Women were protected by law and were given a role in politics, and guilds of craftsmen were

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 9 granted monopolies on crafts such as the smelting of metals, woodworking and tanning. There were guilds of djeli too, “masters of speech,” responsible for recording the history of the empire.

At the time, Mali may have been the richest country in the world, at least if judged by the wealth of its rulers. The most famous of these was Mansa Musa.

After having conquered some 24 cities and expanded the empire to three times its original size, Mansa Musa went on a hajj, a pilgrimage, to Mecca in 1324-25. People in the Arab world were astonished to see Mansa Musa's procession which is said to have included camels, elephants, slave girls, no fewer than 60,00 men and 12,00 slaves carrying gold bars. Along the way, gold nuggets were handed out to local dignitaries and gold dust to beggars. In Cairo, Mansa Musa's lavish gifts were sufficient to cause an inflation which is said to have lasted twelve years. But Mansa

Musa was not only generous but also devout. When he returned to Mali he rebuilt

Timbuktu and established the city of as a center of Muslim scholarship and learning.

The Sankore Madrasah, or university, in the city had 25,000 students at the time and one of the largest libraries in the world. For many subsequent centuries, Timbuktu was to remain a center for the international book trade. [Box: The libraries of

Timbuktu] It was more than anything as a result of Mansa Musa's largess and his subsequent building program that Timbuktu established itself as a city of mystery and wonder.

The Kingdoms of West Africa

If we follow the river Niger all the way to Nigeria where it flows into the Atlantic Ocean we come across another vast delta. Today this is the heart of the Nigerian petroleum industry and a territory largely inhabited by the Yoruba which, together with the Igbo and the Hausa, is one of the largest of Nigeria's 500 ethnic groups. It was here in the Niger

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 10 Delta, some nine hundred years ago, that a number of flourishing city-states came to be established. There were at least 16 large such cities — including Ife, Ijebu, Katunga and

Ibadan — and many smaller ones besides. Between the twelfth- and the eighteenth- centuries this must have been the most highly urbanized part of Africa and one of the most urbanized parts of the world. Katunga was a very large city indeed, with perhaps

100,000 inhabitants.

The Yoruba city-states in the Niger Delta were all organized in much the same fashion. They were built like fortresses, with high walls and moats surrounding them and gates that could be closed to visitors or to approaching armies. In case of the larger city- states, these wall and moat constructions could become very extensive indeed, reaching several hundreds of kilometers in length. All Yoruba city-states had an elaborate structure of associations and professional guilds and there were many social clubs, religious sects and secret societies. Each city-state had a leader, the oba, who lived in a large palace in the center of the city with a market place, the king's market, in front of it.

The obas were elected from an often quite extensive pool of royal princes. Some of them ended up as autocratic rulers but others were restrained by the power of their councilors and some city-states were in effect more like republics. In Egba, a gerontocratic council

— a council of elders — controlled the oba and in Oyo the oba was handed a parrot's egg in a covered calabash bowl when the councilors had decided it was time for him to abdicate.

The political, administrative and architectural structure was similar in the neighboring city-state of Benin, which, despite its name, was located in today's Nigeria, not today's Benin. In the fifteenth-century the obas of Benin grew particularly powerful, and during Oba Ewuare the Great, 1440-1473 CE, the city-state expanded into a full- fledged empire. Oba Ewaure taxed trade and established a military force which included a navy made up of canoes that operated in the waterways of the Niger Delta. The Benin army was also skilled in the art of siege warfare which was crucial in this world of

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 11 fortified cities. The enemies who were captured in these wars were turned into slaves and the slaves were made to participate in various construction projects, of which the very extensive system of moats and walls was the most remarkable. The walls built by the

Benin Empire not only protected existing cities, but also prospective cities which one day might be built, and in addition to being fortifications they were unequivocal statements of the power of the Benin rulers. All in all the structure of walls and moats built in Benin extend to some 16,000 kilometers, and are thereby almost as long as the Great Wall of

China. [Read more: “The Great Wall of China doesn't exist”] Despite being one of the largest man-made structures in history, the walls of Benin are not as well-known as they should be. Instead the Yoruba city-states and the Benin Empire may today best be remembered for the remarkable statues of obas and the depictions life at the obas' courts which their artists created. [Box: Benin bronzes]

Further west, in what today is Ghana and the Ivory Coast, we find the Akan people.

The Akans lived in the rainforest which they, through painstaking labor, managed to control. In order to cut down the enormous trees they too relied on slave labor and the slaves were bought in gold. Akan territory, that is, was gold country, and thereby the ultimate source of much of the wealth of all of West Africa. The gold that existed here must have been the largest known deposits in the world at this time. Yet gold did not only pay for slaves but also for soldiers and in the year 1701 CE, the Akan established an empire of their own, known as the Asante. The Asante was a confederacy of assorted rivaling groups skillfully united by Osei Tutu, 1660-1717 CE, the first Asante ruler. The

Asante Confederacy had Kumasi, in today's Ghana, as its capital. The alliance was more than anything held together by symbolic means. Osei Tutu took a stool made of gold as a symbol of the unity of the country, and the occupant of the golden stool was to be the ruler of the confederacy. [Box: Golden Stool of the Asante] In general the Asante kings surrounded themselves with much pomp and circumstance and they were often carried around in public procession wearing their gilded paraphernalia. A bit less symbolically,

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 12 the empire was held together by drums. Although drums are common all over Africa, the drumming of the Asante is particularly famous. Asante drums were talking drums. That is, they were not only beating out a rhythm but conveying entire messages which, with their help, quickly could be transmitted from one part of the empire to the other. In the jungle, where mobility is blocked and visibility is limited, nothing travels as quickly as sound.

As we have seen, both Benin and the Asante Confederacy owned and traded in slaves. Indeed slaves, together with gold, were the main sources of wealth for both empires. Land, by contrast, was not considered as a form of private property. Land had no value since there quite simply was far too much of it. Instead it was what the land produced, and those who could be forced to work on it, which were considered as property. Thus a man would count his wealth in the number of slaves he owned, and throughout West Africa taxes were levied on slaves and paid in terms of slaves. In addition, enslavement was a punishment which could be meted out against those who violated the law or were unable to settle their debts. Slaves were also given as tributary gifts by a subordinate state or by a neighboring state which sought to avoid occupation.

In general there was a strong connection between warfare and slavery, and prisoners of war were usually enslaved. In a sense, slavery was a continuation of war by other means. By enslaving the people who had been defeated, their inferiority and humiliation were made manifest to all. But slaves were of course a commodity too, and it was as a commodity that they were traded across West Africa and along the caravan routes crossing the Sahara. The revenue derived from the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean, which began in the sixteenth-century, was more than anything what helped make both

Benin and the Asante into powerful empires. They did not suffer from the slave trade but benefited greatly from it [Box: The slave trade]

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 13 East Africa and the Indian Ocean

It is the so called Bantu migration which will take us from West Africa to the south and the east of the continent. The Bantu migration accounts for the fact that people in much of the rest of Africa speak related languages and share a number of cultural practices as well as agricultural techniques, the use of iron and pottery. People speaking Bantu languages seem originally to have lived in today's Nigeria and Cameron and it was from here that they started migrating sometime in the first millennium BCE. There seem to have been two waves of migrants. In the first wave, people moved both across the continent to East Africa and down along the West African coast. Some time around 300

CE they may have reached today's South Africa. The second wave, starting perhaps a thousand years later, spread the Bantu speakers from what today is Congo and into central and eastern Africa. These migrations seem to have been spontaneous movements but exactly why they took place is less clear and debated among scholars.

[Box: The Bantu migration] Some suggest it was due to overpopulation while others cite disease or changes in the climate. Many Bantu speaking peoples took up cattle herding in their new locations and everywhere they went they pushed away the original inhabitants, such as the San bushmen of southwestern Africa, who were forced to leave their original lands and eke out a living in more inhospitable places.

In East Africa the migrants eventually arrived at the shores of the Indian Ocean and here they came across people and influences from entirely different parts of the world — the Middle East, Persia, India and beyond. Communications across the Indian Ocean were greatly facilitated by the monsoon winds — the “trade winds” — which turn with the seasons and thereby take travelers in an eastward direction in the summer and a westward direction in the winter. [Read more: “Indianization”] Arab traders had traveled up and down this coast at least since the first millennium CE and they had established trading ports in places like Lamu, Mombasa, Malindi and Zanzibar. Malindi, in today's

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 14 Kenya, traded with the Indian subcontinent and it was from here that a giraffe in 1414 traveled first to Bengal and then onward to China. [Read more: “A giraffe in Beijing”]

The most important state along the coast was Kilwa Kisiwani, a sultanate located in today's Tanzania, which flourished between the thirteenth- and the fifteenth-centuries

CE. Ibn Battuta visited Kilwa in 1331 and he commented favorably on the splendors of the sultan's palace and on the mosque which was made made entirely out of corals.

[Read more: “Ibn Battuta, the greatest traveler in the world”] The main language spoken along this coast today, and in all of East Africa, is Swahili which is a Bantu language mixed with loanwords from Arabic, Hindustani and assorted European languages. In fact, Swahili was not originally anyone's native language but was instead used by merchants as a lingua franca and its vocabulary was limited to the words you need in order to trade. To this day Swahili has no more than perhaps 15 million native speakers while it is understood by ten times as many people.

A state which benefited greatly from the trade conducted across the Indian Ocean was the kingdom of Zimbabwe, 1220–1450 CE. Although its capital, Great Zimbabwe, was located inland, on the savanna, it was connected to the sea through well-traveled trade routes and by the Limpopo river which flows from today's Botswana to

Mozambique. There are some two hundred trading-posts — smaller “zimbabwes” — scattered between Great Zimbabwe and the coast which all feature the same kind architecture. [Box: Manyikeni and Chibuene] Not all that much is known about the

Zimbabwe kingdom, but the ruins of the capital leave no doubt regarding its power and wealth. Great Zimbabwe was a fortress built of five meter high stone walls which meandered up the side of a mountain, and in the city at its feet lived an estimated

18,000 inhabitants. Great Zimbabwe was a strongly hierarchical society with a rigid separation between ordinary people and the ruling elite. Its wealth came from the trade in ivory and gold. Shards of Chinese ceramics, coins from Arabia and glass beads from

India have been discovered here by archaeologists.

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 15 Further north, in the mountains of what today is Uganda — in the region, that is, of

Lake Victoria and Lake Albert — we find Bunyoro and Buganda, two states which were rivals from the thirteenth-century CE well into the nineteenth. Initially Bunyoro was the largest of the two but it was eventually overtaken by Buganda. The traditional economy here revolved around big game hunting of elephants, lions, leopards and crocodiles, but they were making money from trade too. Just as in West Africa, salt was a key commodity. Salt was produced at Kibiro, on the banks of Lake Albert, and from here it was exported to the coast of the Indian Ocean. Archaeological digs at Kibiro, taking us back some 800 years, have unearthed vast deposits of ceramic shards which clearly were not produced locally. As for the people of Buganda, they were mainly farmers, but they were merchants too, specializing in the ivory trade. The blacksmiths of Buganda were famous for producing high-quality tools and lethal weapons and the king of Buganda had a powerful army famous for its war canoes. Buganda eclipsed Bunyoro in the eighteenth- century when it gained control of the salt trade. Nineteenth-century visitors to Buganda were amazed at the wealth of the country and the elaborate ceremonies conducted at its court where foreign ambassadors and the king's own official mingled in large assembly halls. [Box: Stanley's letters from Buganda] Buganda went on to constitute the largest province in today's Uganda. To this day both Bunyoro and Buganda have royal families which still take court ceremony very seriously indeed and which still are revered by the general public.

Even further north is Ethiopia. Today Ethiopia is a landlocked country which has suffered badly both from droughts and political instability, but two thousand years ago there was a powerful kingdom here, with Aksum as its capital. The Aksumite kingdom,

100-940 CE, had close connections with Yemen in the Arabian peninsula, across the Red

Sea. Yemen at the time was dominated by Jewish culture and Jewish culture spread to

Ethiopia too. Indeed, Ethiopians insist that the Queen of Sheba came from here.

According to the Hebrew Bible, she visited King Solomon in Jerusalem, and according to

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 16 the Ethiopian legends, she had a child by him. In fact, Ethiopians maintain that the Ark of the Covenant, in which the Jews kept the ten commandments given to them by god, still is housed in a small church in Aksum. [Box: The Jews of Ethiopia] What is more certain is that the Aksumite kingdom was heavily involved in trade both with the Arabian peninsula and with the world beyond. They were for example famous exporters of frankincense and myrrh, which together with gold were the presents said to have been given to Jesus after his birth. The Aksumites were trading across the Indian Ocean too, and they are referred to as ivory merchants in Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a guidebook and merchant's manual dating from the first century CE. [Box: Periplus of the

Erythraean Sea] Located at the intersection of these shipping lanes, the Aksumite kingdom became a major player in the trade which connected India and the Roman empire. The Aksumite kings minted their own coins in order to facilitate trade, and they built enormous steles, which still are standing, in order to commemorate their achievements.

The Aksumite king converted to Christianity in 325 CE — after the king of Armenia but about a hundred years before the emperor in Rome — and from this time onward the symbol of the cross appears on their coins. Today at least half of the population of

Ethiopia are Christians. The Ethiopian church follows the Coptic liturgy, first developed in

Alexandria in Egypt in the first century CE. Links to the Arabian peninsula have remained strong. In the sixteenth-century, Ethiopia exported coffee to Yemen from where it was sent on to the fashionable coffee shops which were springing up all over the Ottoman

Empire. [Read more: “Coffee and croissants”] Ethiopia was never colonized by any

European power and when the country was invaded by Italy in the 1930s, the emperor,

Haile Selassie, made a personal appearance at the League of Nations in Geneva,

Switzerland, appealing for help. This established his reputation world-wide and many black people in the Americas were amazed to hear about this African emperor who claimed to be the descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 17 Rastafarian religion of Jamaica, Haile Selassie was regarded as the messiah who would lead the African diaspora to freedom. He was finally and unceremoniously deposed in a

Communist coup in 1974. His grandson and heir to the throne, Zera Yacob Amha

Selassie, is currently living in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, but there seems to be little popular interest in a return to the monarchy.

An African international system?

The question is whether it is possible to talk about a distinct African international system and, if so, what its characteristics might be. Like elsewhere in the world, most people in

Africa spent most of their lives in their local communities, with only limited contacts with the outside world. In addition, we said, in the case of Africa geography and the climate put up obstacles to the formation of the kinds of political structures which we associate with a state. In the rainforest, the vegetation was too dense to clear and no large communities could be formed, and further inland, on the savanna, people were often pastoralists and difficult to organize politically. Yet one's ecological niche is not one's fate, and Africa has been full of mighty empires, elaborate political structures and unimaginably wealthy kings, and even the most remote locations have been connected to international networks.

Two separate waves of expansions have more than anything served to bring the dispersed communities together — the Arab invasion of North Africa and the Bantu migration throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The Arab invasion connected North Africa to the caliphates in the Middle East and thereby to prosperous centers of civilization, and

Islam united people behind one god and one set of beliefs. Likewise, the Bantu migration spread kindred languages throughout the continent together with cultural practices and assorted technical know-how. [Box: Mancala] Yet it was trade which more than anything brought the continent together while at the same time connecting it to the outside world.

The trade in gold, salt and slaves was particularly brisk and it was the profits derived

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 18 from these key commodities that convinced Berber merchants to cross the Sahara, that took Arab dhows down the Swahili coast, and brought European explorers to the Bight of

Benin. It was also trade which more than anything allowed people to escape their ecological niches. Trade made cities spring up in the desert and gave the people of the jungles the resources they needed to fell even the tallest of trees. In both West and

Central Africa, communities of traders would establish themselves at just the right distance from each other — perhaps a 15 days' journey apart — in order to maintain all the links in the trading networks. And it was by taxing this trade that city-states grew rich and expanded into kingdoms and empires.

This is not to say that Africa did not have its fair share of wars. The bands of people living in the rainforest often conducted raids on their enemies, and the powerful states on the savanna relied on powerful armies which could subjugate and enslave their enemies.

[Box: War in the state of nature] Yet wars in Africa were different from many wars elsewhere. Since land was an abundant resource, it was not worth fighting over, and while a salt or a gold mine would constitute a precious catch, there was no point in territorial expansion as such. The only proper exception to this rule are the Yoruba city- states in the Niger Delta which were very concerned about territorial boundaries. For the most part, however, political leaders were content to raze the capital of their enemies, humiliate them, and then to include them as a subordinate partner in an alliance. That is, diplomacy would soon come to replace overt acts of warfare. By means of diplomacy the subordinate state would become a tribute bearer who visited the suzerain state bearing lavish gift. This arrangement had the additional advantage that the subordinate state could maintain a measure of independence. This, in the end, is how empires were constituted.

Often these political relations were expressed in the language of kinship. The powerful state was the “father,” while the subordinate states were “children” or other, more distant relatives. By tracing their genealogy back to a common ancestor, the unity

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 19 of the alliance could be assured. This was also how empires would expand. If a group of people established a community at a new location, they would link their ancestry back to the original state. Thus, while the original state was broken up, the result was an expanding alliance of related states. This is how the Bantu speaking people migrated across the continent. Alternatively, states which shared no political genealogy might make one up in order to cement their bonds. Similar ties of genealogy and friendship helped protect the trade routes. In Central Africa long-distance traders often declared each other ndeko, “blood brothers,” and insisted on the right of safe passage and on political protection. States that traded with each other could be declared friends and relatives too and thereby exempt from acts of war. In fact, in many cases, trade continued even between enemies and even during times of war. Trade was simply more important than whatever benefits a war might bring.

This does not, to be sure, amount to one, all-encompassing, "African international system." The continent is too vast and relations between its various parts not strong enough to be described as an integrated system. Although trade connected west and east with north and south, no political relations were equally extensive. Besides the trade routes did not only link various African locations with each other, but Africa with the rest of the world. Perhaps, for that reason, we could talk about at least three separate international systems on the continent — a North African, a West Africa and an East

African international system, and in each case commercial relations would be more important than political and military relations. This leaves out central and southern

Africa to be sure, but given the role which the trade across the Indian Ocean played also for them, we could perhaps include them in the East African international system.

Erik Ringmar, irhistory.info — no copyright, help yourself — 20