Africa in world history, 1400 to 1800

RAY A. KEA

Multi-disciplinary perspectives, an expanding and more diversified corpus of source materials, and wide-ranging research projects have enlarged and deepened historical knowledge about early modern Africa (1400 to 1800): its multi-layered phases of material and social development, its roles in the Afro-Eurasian oikumene and its position in world history historiography.

For heuristic purposes, the chapter divides Africa into two geo-regions: the greater Sahara, north of the equator, and greater Zambezia, south of the equator. In contrast to conventional world history meta-narratives which construct the Sahara as an ahistorical wasteland and an impenetrable barrier, the following discussion sees the desert as a crossroads, a space of culture and cross-cultural ventures, and a resource base for salt, copper, dromedaries and semi-precious gemstones which supported different ways of rural and urban life in the bordering steppes and grasslands. Adjoining areas of the desert include the Nile valley, the Lake Chad basin, and the basins of the Middle Niger and Senegal Rivers.

Thanks to its geographical location, Africa was an area of intersection for three world spaces—the Mediterranean basin and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The area of intersection was a site of exchanges—biological, com­mercial and cultural. The ports (entrepots, emporia or gateway cities) of Mediterranean Africa, Indian Ocean Africa and Atlantic Africa were directly connected to the interaction spheres and networks of the greater Sahara interior. The interaction spheres and networks of the greater Zambezia interior were directly linked to Indian Ocean Africa and Atlantic Africa and indirectly to Mediterranean Africa. The commercial integration of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean basins dates from ancient times; the com­mercial integration of the Atlantic basin dates from the sixteenth century. While local structures and factors contributed to broad cultural and social developments, extensive trans-local contacts between groups and commu­nities were manifested in the regular exchange of ideas, artifacts, materials and techniques.

For example, a culture of travel was important to the Muslim Jakhanke clerical community of the Middle Niger basin. The Jakhanke ulama (scholars) proclaimed that there was blessing in travel. One travelled for many reasons that were not mutually exclusive. One performed the pil­grimage to Mecca and one also travelled in search of knowledge, to trade, to experience a sense of adventure and to satisfy one's curiosity about the wonders of the world.

In a thoughtful and informative essay, historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam offers an extended definition of early modernity within a comparative world history frame. He argues that concurrent developments and changes (or “synchronicities”) across the Afro-Eurasian oikumene between c.

For analytical and descriptive purposes, Africa's history in the 1400 to 1800 period can be viewed in terms of cultural-political paradigms with specific and very different social contents; each can be used as a prism that illumin­ates conjunctural changes and trajectories of development. With regard to greater Saharan history, three cultural-political paradigms are invoked: the city (as a central place in structural opposition to the rural); the zawiya (a Sufi educational-religious community); and the world port or entrepot (a site of global commerce and contact). In greater Zambezia history, four cultural-political paradigms are recognized: the dzimbabwe (pl.

Greater Sahara

The (fortified) city

The historical landscape of the greater Sahara in the early modern period was dominated by dense urban networks and city-oriented economies. Across the southern steppes and grasslands, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Lake Chad basin, a distance of over 3,000 kilometers, archaeological surveys have brought to light the ruins of 10,000 walled towns and cities and an unspeci­fied number of unwalled cities and towns. East of Lake Chad, archaeologists have located a broad zone of fortresses, caravanserai, craft workshops, strongholds of different kinds, and walled and unwalled settlements up to the banks of the Nile River, which from Egypt to Nubia was lined with cities, towns and fortresses.

Urban morphology varied. There were double towns, separated from each other by a few kilometers. One half functioned as a political-military center and the other half as a commercial, craft and (Islamic) clerical center. Triple towns had, in addition to spatially distinct political-military and commercial­craft components, a clerical space with mosques, schools and madrasas. A founding principle of these divisions was that the political-military group had a right to rule and the clerical-merchant group had a right to autono­mous jurisdiction over their own affairs.

The wider context for an understanding of urbanization and urbanism must include the operations of the Mediterranean gold and silver bullion market. The latter depended solely on West African gold production, one source estimating that, until the late sixteenth century, 20 to 30 tons of gold were exported annually to Mediterranean emporia. The gold trade was integral to long-established continental traffic and substantial inter-regional exchanges between producing areas and complementary zones of consump­tion. Urban networks set the logic and rules of discourse and patterns of mobility, sociality and settlement, and they functioned as seats for different kinds of political and surplus accumulation regimes, ranging from city-states and principalities to expansive imperial formations.

The urban-rural division of labor was fundamental in the history of the greater Sahara. The view of urban-based Oyo nobles regarding rural folk is instructive: “The rights of the talaka [‘peasant'; ‘commoner'] do not matter; they can be trampled upon”; “the poor man's mouth is a cutlass. We shall use it to clear the forest.” The upper classes of the Borno sultanate also had a contemptuous view of peasant life on the Borno plains: “The peasant is grass, fodder for the horses. To your fields peasant that we may eat!” The peasant was summarily excluded from the urban world of the Borno ruling classes. The historical identity and unity of Borno's upper classes were realized, in part, in their cities, which were described in the early nineteenth century as large and well-built with walls 12 to 14 meters high and 6 meters wide. Borno's cities, whose commercial and diplomatic links were trans­continental, were built and maintained by conscripted rural labor.

State power was strongest in the cities. In a treatise on rulership, Muhammad Bello (1775 to 1837), a prominent jihad leader, states that a ruler “must see to the construction of walled towns and bridges and the maintenance of markets and roads and the realization of the public welfare, so that the harmony of this world may be maintained.” Elsewhere, he valorizes the urban at the expense of the rural.

Critical Muslim clerics poured scorn on urban-dwelling political and merchant elites who were corrupt, despised the poor and lived in luxury. A Borno scholar named Muhammad ibn al-hajj ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Khatib ibn Bint al-hajj al-Barnawi (d. 1746), for example, wrote a lengthy and scathing criticism of the Borno political establishment. Rulers of Borno, he wrote, were tyrannical and corrupt, the rich withheld food at famine time in the hope of making a profit, usury was concealed in the renting of land, judges accepted bribes as did governors of provinces and gambling (for example, horse-racing) was common among the upper classes.^[212] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, clerics who shared al-Barnawi's sentiments tended to withdraw from the cities and retire to the countryside and teach in a peasant village or join a zawiya, a clerical town or a Sufi order, or establish a clerical community. A further option was to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. A last resort was to remain in the city and assume an administrative position and try to uphold religious standards by example.

The earliest known clerical town dates from the thirteenth century, but from the fifteenth century onwards clerical towns and communities appear in increasing numbers in different places in the southern Sahara, Senegambia, the Upper and Middle Niger basins and the Lake Chad basin. Self-governing and politically independent, the clerical town (bilad al-fuqaha'; morikunde) of scholars, teachers, students, mosques, schools and libraries was an instru­ment of Islamization in rural areas. It functioned too as a sanctuary and haven for escaped slaves, political exiles, social outcasts, debtors and the like. Even if a man had killed the son of a king, he could find safety and refuge in the inviolable space of a clerical town. A common social practice was for Muslim as well as non-Muslim rulers to grant holy men (s. shaykh or wali) or scholars (s. ‘alim, pl. ‘ulama), together with their students, disciples and followers, a landed estate, usually comprising a number of villages and/or groups of pastoralists, and privileges, such as immunity from taxes and military conscription. In return for the endowment, the holy men or scholars were expected to offer counsel and to place their skills, including knowledge of the shari‘a, literacy, divination and magic, at the disposal of ruling dynas­ties. The estate and privileges were guaranteed by a royal charter. Students not only studied the Islamic sciences, including the philological and religious sciences and jurisprudence, but they were also obliged to learn a craft, such as rope-making, weaving and sandal-making. Students were sent by their shaykhs into the countryside to non-Muslim villages, hamlets and encampments where they would preach, set up schools and mosques, teach, convert and practice their crafts. The clerical town bridged the material and social divide between city and village. It introduced elements of urban life such as schools and libraries into the countryside and created a new insti­tutional focus for rural identity. At the same time, rural areas became a social basis of the clerics' position vis-a-vis ruling political authorities. With regard to the politics of royal courts, the clerical towns generally remained aloof, but with regard to proselytization and education, they pursued a vigorous activist program.

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, another form of urbanism emerged in Senegambia and the Upper and Middle Niger basins. This was the large, fortified market center of merchants, with their armed retainers and entourages, and clerics, with their students and followers, and artisan castes. In the hinterland were plantations worked by enslaved labor and village farms cultivated by indebted peasants. The market center was the proprietor of the land and owner of the slaves' and peasants' conditions of production. It promoted the commodification of agricultural production and reduced indebted peasants to the status of tenants, thus furthering the process of de-peasantization which was a defining feature of the early modern period in the greater Sahara and greater Zambezia (see below). The commercial town, a place of trans-shipment, price-fixing mechanisms and partnerships, was a domain of commodity exchanges and credit. The logic of the clerical town included proselytizing in the countryside and the maintenance of a network of rural schools—developed in opposition to the market town.

The spread of clerical towns coincided with the decline of imperial Mali and the rise of the Songhay Empire (1460 to 1591). The market center with a dependent hinterland of enslaved labor and peasants in debt bondage was a consequence of the fall of Songhay following its conquest by Morocco in 1591. Cities were instrumental in these developments. When wealthy merchants decided to transfer their capital and commercial operations from Malian cities (such as Niani, Dia and Walata) to Middle Niger and southern Saharan cities (for example, Jenne, Timbuktu, Takedda and Agades), Mali declined. Merchants' support of Songhay ruling dynasties resulted in the establishment of a centralized bureaucratic hegemony in the Middle Niger basin. Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur (1578 to 1603), the Moroccan conqueror of Songhay, justified his invasion by contrasting the poverty of Morocco and the wealth of Songhay, with its “many cities, running rivers, forested fields, trade routes, numerous zawiyas, and salt and gold mines.” Songhay's cities, trade routes, zawiyas and mines were supported by specialized slave groups (blacksmiths, leather workers, boat-builders, boatmen, masons, herders, cultivators, horse trainers, messengers, armed retainers, hunters, fishermen and so on) who provided services in kind, taxes and labor designated for the needs of the royal court, the central administration and the army.

The material and moral foundations of Songhay rested on three elements, according to the ‘ulama’ of Timbuktu and Jenne: urbanism (‘amara), long­distance trade (mu‘amalat) and Islam (diyanat). Trade and Islam, in its dominant Sunni Maliki expression, flourished in cities like Jenne, Timbuktu, Diakha-Masina, Tadmakka, Takkeda, Kano, Katsina and Agadez. Sunni Malikism was a general conception of life for urban commoners, but for intellectuals it was a scholastic program or a set of principles. Islam was pluralistic and multi-faceted. Two figures, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim ibn Muhannad al-Maghili of Tlemcen (c. 1440 to 1504/05) and Jalal al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Suyuti of Cairo (d. 1504/ 05), introduced several ideas to Songhay clerics—the role of the sultan as guardian of Islam, the idea of asceticism (zuhd) and the millenarian doctrines of the mujaddid and the mahdi, the messiah. At the same time, Sufism, in the form of different orders (turuq; s. tariqa) became an important subject of study in places like Timbuktu, but with the fall of Songhay Sufism became an important current of belief and action for reformers and a political project for jihadists.

A geographical description of the world published by the cosmographer Giovanni d'Anania (1545 to 1607) in 1582 includes accounts of three premier cities in Africa: Cairo in Ottoman Egypt, Fez in the Saadi sultanate (Morocco) and Kano—capital of the Kano sultanate and a Songhay tributary. This urban triangle defined the geography of a vast interaction sphere in the interior of the greater Sahara in which Songhay was the dominant political and socio­economic power. Songhay’s collapse was followed by the rapid dispersion of zawiyas and Sufi orders within this urban triangle and the dissemination of clerical towns across the southern reaches of the greater Sahara, from the Atlantic to Darfur.

The fall of Songhay contributed to the continued economic, cultural and political development and territorial expansion of polities in the Lake Chad basin, particularly the Borno Empire, whose sway extended from the Hausa sultanates to Darfur and northwards to the Fazzan. The city of Katsina, capital of the Katsina sultanate and a Borno tributary, replaced its rival Kano, emerging as one of the principal commercial centers in the greater Sahara in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its growth and prosperity was due to expanded trade with the Ottoman Empire, the Volta River basin in the Gold Coast hinterland and the Lower Guinea Coast.

Borno rulers actively promoted trans-Saharan commerce, sending numer­ous commercial and diplomatic missions to Istanbul, Cairo and Tripoli. North African, Egyptian, Ottoman and Italian merchants traveled to the Borno capital importing large quantities of manufactured goods. The growth of the clerical class in Borno and Hausa cities was significant. They were guardians of learning, scholarship and education. They were surveyors and town builders. With the support of rich merchants and artisans, they laid out new towns or rebuilt old ones, all of which were oriented towards Mecca. The nouveau riche of merchants, artisans and clerics sent their sons and daughters to local and regional schools and centers of learning, to North Africa and Egypt and to Baghdad. They also encouraged them to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. The significant expansion of educational facilities for higher education and the production of learned and popular works led to the growing political influence of the scholarly classes in the cities and the countryside.

Itineraries and lines of communication stretched across considerable dis­tances. The travels of two men—a Katsina scholar and a Borno royal—were typical. Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Fullani al-Kashnawi (d. 1741/42), from the Katsina sultanate, a man learned in many branches of knowledge especially mathematics, numerology, magic squares and other esoteric sci­ences, traveled extensively in search of knowledge and wrote a now lost Rihla (“Travel”) describing his travel experiences. He performed the pilgrim­age to Mecca in 1730 and in 1733/34 settled in Cairo, where he died. In the 1760s or 1770s, an unnamed Borno prince from the walled city of Gazargamu, the capital of Borno, traveled to Italy with his family and servants and spent six months there touring the country. Travelers, not all of whom were merchants, journeyed from the emporia on the Mediterranean African coastline to ports on the Gold Coast seaboard.

The experience of a Franciscan friar named Peter Farde (1651 to 1691) illustrates an unexpected line of communication. Farde, an enslaved Francis­can friar in the southern Saharan city of Agadez, was guaranteed his freedom as soon as his owner, a rich merchant named Sura Bellin, received the ransom. From 1686 to 1688, Farde corresponded with his superiors in Amsterdam. Fardc's letters were carried by camel caravan across the Sahara to a North African port and from there to Amsterdam. The replies of his superiors went by Dutch ships to the Gold Coast port of Elmina, the commercial headquarters of the Dutch West Indies Company in Atlantic Africa, and from there, merchant caravans en route to interior markets conveyed the letters to Agadez, over 1,000 kilometers from Elmina. When the ransom was delivered, Farde was released from bondage. Epistolary intercourse across such distances sheds light on the integrity of lines of communication between cities in the greater Sahara and Europe.

The zawiya

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the zawiya was a leading educational, scholarly and religious institution throughout the central and western Sahara, Senegambia, the Upper and Middle Niger basins and the Lake Chad basin. It was seminal in the spread of Sufi orders, including the Qadiriyya, Shadhaliyya, Khalwatiyya, Mahmudiyya and Fadeliyya, the creation of Sufi networks that crossed the desert and the ruralization of Islam. The zawiya existed before the sixteenth century, but its instrumental role in the evolution of movements of reform and armed resistance can be attributed to a shift of institutional resources and merchant capital away from cities like Timbuktu, Tadmakka and Jenne to the southern Sahara, the Upper Niger basin and Senegambia. Those responsible for setting up zawiyas, known as marabouts or mubashshirun (“those who propagate the Faith”), sometimes served as royal advisors to Muslim and non-Muslim rulers. High scholarship flourished in zawiyas.

One of the most prominent figures in the history of West and North African Sufism was Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729 to 1811) of Azawad (north of Timbuktu). A prolific writer with more than 200 works to his credit, he founded a new Sufi order, al-Qadiriyya al-Mukhtariyya. A strong proponent of asceticism and austerity, he realized that God called upon him to enter the world and to engage in its pursuits. Over the years he amassed great wealth from the trans-Saharan trade and raising livestock, but “the world and its possessions and pleasures meant nothing to him.”^[213] His desire was to spend on the poor and needy, and on guests, refugees and neighbors.

Sidi al-Mukhtar believed he was the mujaddid of the thirteenth century of the Hijra (the eighteenth century in the Christian calendar), the person called by God at the beginning of every century to renovate Islam and to restore the umma to its glorious past throughout the entire Muslim world. To him, West Africa was at the heart of Islamic culture, a place where outstanding scholastic standards were reached. North Africa was under the rule of despotic princes, the East was falling under the influence of the Wahhabis, and pure Islam was to be found only within the precincts of the zawiya. His reputation came to extend from northern and central Sahara to Senegambia and the Lake Chad basin and southwards to the forest zones of present-day Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea: “all along this area one finds disciples and followers of Sidi al-Mukhtar who are among the notables and celebrities of their respective localities.”^[214] His eminence encompassed the largest area ever to come under the authority of an African Muslim without military conquest. The geographical sphere of his prestige and authority corres­ponded to the area of jurisdiction and alliances of imperial Songhay in the sixteenth century. He belongs to the Timbuktu tradition of scholarship and spirituality. In one of his works (“The Gift of the Followers of the Path of Muhammad”), he examines the history of Songhay and discusses important questions of Islamic law that arose in the empire, including the status and rights of women and children in a Muslim society.

The world of Sufis and Sufism spread in a time when in Upper Guinea there was a strengthening of military regimes and in Lower Guinea a militarization of political institutions and culture. Military regimes were strengthened in two ways. Dynastic states either depended on armies of mounted slave-warriors (cheddos) or they relied on free professional soldiers (nyanchos) and mercenaries as cavalry troops. In this environment, the construction of fortified cities, towns, castles and forts was vigorously carried out. The demands of the military, the costs of building fortifications and strongholds, and the expense of siege warfare required that dynastic regimes increase their revenues so that dynasties could acquire money, horses, weapons, armor, produce, livestock and siege equipment. Their needs were met by merchants and artisan castes and by the development of scale economies in metal-working and mining. New systems of taxation, including military conscription and corvee labor, were imposed on peasant and pastor­alist communities, and state industries were developed, including arsenals for weapons, boat-building, metal-working and mining. Slave-warriors put down peasant and pastoralist rebellions and the defeated were sold into Atlantic slavery or were settled in urban hinterlands as slave cultivators. In seven­teenth- and eighteenth-century Upper Guinea, the urban centers declared war on the countryside, a phenomenon that can be assigned to the long process of de-peasantization.

Four major movements emerged in the Senegambian region between the mid-seventeenth and the late eighteenth century. The movements' leadership, which consisted of scholars, teachers and shaykhs, responded to the crises in the countryside. They included the War of the Marabouts (1647 to 1677), the Futa Bundujihad (1680s to 1690s), the FutaJalonjihad (1725 to 1750) and the Futa Toro jihad (1776 to 1783). In each case, a new kind of Islamic state was created—the imamiyya or imamate—which in theory and practice was opposed to any form of hereditary rule.

The victors, the clerical class and its adherents, emerged politically with disposal over larger concentrations of power and wealth than the previous dynastic regimes, and sold the vanquished into the Atlantic slave trade.

The guiding principles of these movements constituted what one writer has called the radical tradition in the literature of Muslim West Africa.^[215] In summarizing these principles, he relates that the tradition: (ι) emphasized true rights of common people against the claims of their rulers; (2) took an egalitarian attitude to differences of status, rank, wealth, gender and ethnic origin, and any privileges based upon these; (3) was concerned with changing institutions as a precondition of changing human beings, and opening up new possibilities for their development; (4) attached importance to the widest possible diffusion of knowledge and education; (5) stressed the principle that men and women belong to an international community (dar al-islam; jamaa'at al-sudaniyya), whose claims surpassed those of a particular state, region, cultural or linguistic group; and (6) emphasized the urgency of social change and reform, regarding as justified the use of revolutionary (violent) methods to achieve it.

In the struggle against royalism and mercantilism, Malik ibn Nabir, a participant in the Futa Toro jihad, emphasized agency and the role of individuals/people making their own history. He wrote: “Verily God does not change the conditions of a people until they change themselves inwardly” and “every revolution creates new social values, and these are capable of transforming men and women.”^[216]

The world port

Along the Atlantic seaboard, from Senegambia to Kongo-Angola, was a succession of world ports or entrepots, many with fortified trading stations belonging to European chartered companies. In the seventeenth and eight­eenth centuries, the ports provided the economic, social, technical and organizational arrangements required for Atlantic maritime exchanges. Specifically, they accommodated the export of an estimated 12 million captive bodies (mainly males) to American plantations and mines and facilitated the annual import of tens of thousands of tons of merchandise. The bulk of imported trade goods, in the range of 60 to 90 per cent, was destined for consumption in inland cities. In addition, the ports were responsible for organizing the sale and exchange of provisions and other products necessary for the maintenance of the slaving ships as they crossed the Atlantic.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Upper and Lower Guinea ruling classes created a cultural landscape of palaces and royal courts, public gardens, multilingual literate cultures and libraries, marketplaces and com­mercial districts, as well as mosques and prayer grounds, Koranic schools and madrasas, shrines and temples, and, in some places, churches and schools for Christian converts. In this period, about two dozen West African languages began to be written in modified Arabic script, and eighteenth-century Gold Coast ports used Portuguese Creole as a lingua franca in their written communications. This landscape, with its normative structures, epitomized an upper class social imaginary of order, efficiency, predictability, prosperity and reason, and the achievement of personal capacity and spiritual agency. From the point of view of the countryside, this landscape was realized at great social cost.

Archaeological fieldwork has identified an early modern urban zone from 10 to 100 kilometers from the Lower Guinea coastline, from the Ivory Coast to the Lower Niger basin, consisting of walled and unwalled cities and towns and belonging to different kinds of political formations—city-states, feder­ations, kingdoms and empires. This included Fante and Asante in the Gold Coast region, and Allada, Savi, Benin, Dahomey, Oyo and Benin in the Slave Coast region (Figure 10.ι). At the eastern end of this zone, in the lands of Aja-, Edo- and Yoruba-speaking populations, there were urban assemblages of great extent and complexity. Massive earthwork structures, up to several thousand kilometers in total length, and monumental fortifications, some with walls up to 25 meters in height and over 100 kilometers in length, were major collective and public works projects.

Slave Coast polities like Ardra, Savi, Dahomey and Oyo were palace­centered in the sense that the palace reinforced the sacralizing persona of the ruler and his court and the palace functioned as the locus of the central apparatus of the state. For the urban-based upper classes of the Yoruba-Aja Commonwealth, the cultural climate of the region was charac­terized by a dialogic ethos and a constant effort to exchange ideas, experi­ence and material culture. One of the doctrines at work was Asuwada, a corpus of ideas concerning the making or creating of human society, emphasizing principles of association and sociality. Society brings into being various potentials and constructs: it creates, it destroys and it modi­fies. Created society consists of two contending modalities: the civil or political domain and the religious or spiritual domain and the possibility of political or religious emancipation. Society-making created the “free citizen” and the non-citizen, “a thing belonging in cords and deprived of liberty” in contexts of stormy and bloody conflicts, hierarchical order of authority and a quest for social and spatial mobility. Asuwada and other doctrines were codified in the meta-languages of Ifa and Vodun.

On the Gold Coast, a contingent condition of a life of luxury consumption and high culture was the cultural-historical “gap” between the ports

Figure 10.1 View of city of Benin with royal palace, Nigeria, engraving from Description of Africa, by Olfert Dapper (c. 1635-1689), 1686. (De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images).

inhabited by affluent traders and brokers and hinterland plantations worked by servile labor. The bonded laborers lived a secluded life, hardly ever visiting the ports; hence they were ignorant of the rules and manners of the more extended spheres of urban cultural and social life. They were not citizens of the ports. In contrast, the owners of the plantations who were also citizens—political officials, brokers and merchants—enjoyed a life of prosperity and wealth. Their culture of high consumption included a trad­ition of travel. Prominent port residents traveled abroad as teachers, stu­dents, tourists, apprentices, envoys and merchants to Europe and occasionally to the Americas. A 1787 report, for example, relates that fifty boys and girls, from wealthy West African households, were studying in schools in and around Liverpool. Gold Coast youths, in particular, studied in Denmark, the Netherlands, England, Ireland and France. The earliest known travel journals from the Gold Coast were written (in German) by a Gold Coast Christian named Christian J. Protten (1715 to 1769), who studied at the University of Copenhagen (1732 to 1735) and traveled to the Danish West Indies (1744 to 1745) and Europe (1750s and 1760s).

Upper class ideology codified and theorized distinctions of class, lifestyle and status as grounded in the nature of the universe (Fate), the nature of nature (disorder/order), the nature of human nature (rational/irrational) and the essence of society (independence/dependence). Key concepts included the idea of “crossroad,” a concept with multiple and antithetical significations (opportunity, achievement, prosperity and health; loss, sickness, disgrace, poverty), the culture-nature binary (or the opposition between rationality and irrationality) and the freedom-necessity binary (or the opposition between wealth and poverty). “Freedom” connoted self-actualization and the ability and right to participate in the public debates and politics of the town, as well as the town's holidays, festivities and celebrations. “Necessity” defined the world of commoners and slaves and a life devoted to acquiring the means of subsistence.

To lower the risk of social unrest among commoners, debtors and slaves and to alleviate their conditions of material need, the upper classes and European factors distributed, through the agency of the ports' local priests and priestesses, gold, produce, trade goods, small livestock and salt. This practice flourished in the seventeenth century. In addition, communities of priests and priestesses served as places of refuge and sanctuary for escaped slaves, social outcasts, outlaws, debtors, thieves, the poverty-stricken and exiles. These communities were inviolable. Whoever found refuge in them could not be apprehended by any political authority. For the excluded, the priesthood created a sense of belonging and social connectedness in a time from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries of intense urbanization and mercantile accumulation on a large scale.

Greater Zambezia

The dzimbabwe

The Indian Ocean commercial system extended from the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean to Eastern Africa and to the Straits of Malacca and the Indonesian Archipelago. From Mogadishu (Somalia) to Chibuene (Mozambique), a distance of more than 3,000 kilometers, the Swahili urban maritime culture and its Indian Ocean trade reached its peak between 1300 and 1500. The largest towns, like Kilwa, Pate, Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa, Mogadishu and Merca, maintained merchant fleets and conducted long­distance exchanges in a wide range of goods with the Arabian Peninsula, India, Southeast Asia and China, as well as with the coastal countryside, which supplied agricultural and other necessities and provided labor and markets for the cities (Figure 10.2). The Swahili economy was monetized: Kilwa and Mogadishu minted gold and silver coins. The cities established trading partnerships with interior states, particularly in southern Zambezia, where in the early sixteenth century there were an estimated 10,000 Swahili merchants settled in commercial and political centers. Swahili merchants had well-established trade routes along major navigable rivers. The gold trade was at its peak in the fifteenth century. Estimates of annual gold export from southern Zambezia range from ι ton in the fifteenth century to several thousand tons from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Whatever the actual volume, research has shown that Zambezian gold was the most important component of the financial basis of Indian Ocean trade until the arrival of Brazilian and West African gold in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

From the Horn of Africa, Christian and Muslim Ethiopians traded along the Swahili coast and sailed to India. Ethiopian churchmen, envoys and diplomatic missions traveled to the Holy Land, Rome and different European courts and cities, as well as in the Islamic world throughout the early modern

Figure 10.2 Husuni Kubwa, a palace and market built in the fourteenth century for the Sultan of Kilwa, on Kilwa Kisiwani, an island in present-day Nigeria. (Ulrich Doering / Alamy).

period. In 1488, Lucas Marcus, an Ethiopian priest, was sent from Rome to Lisbon and, together with an Ethiopian monk called Jacob, traveled to West Africa on board a Portuguese ship in search of the legendary Prester John. In the early sixteenth century, Ethiopian monks named Antonio and Thomas, having traveled to India, sailed from there to Portugal. The Ethiopian monk Abba Tesfa Sion, Abbot of St. Stefano and the leader of the Ethiopian scholars in Rome, published in 1549 the New Testament in Geez, an Ethiop­ian language. In the preface he wrote: “I am an Ethiopian pilgrim [traveling] from place to place, from province to province, from the land of the infidels [i.e., Muslims] to the land of the faithful [i.e., Christians], through sea and land. At Rome I found rest for my soul through the right faith.”^[217] Published itineraries indicate that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ethiopian church­men, envoys and merchants were well acquainted with the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean routes.

International commerce and external relations were the culmination of processes generated within local and regional economies and political structures that were able to exploit long-distance trade as a component of hierarchical functions already supervising regional resources on a large scale. Archaeological fieldwork in southern Zambezia provides details about settle­ment patterns, different aspects of material and cultural life, and local and long-distance interconnections. Comparable fieldwork has not been carried out in northern Zambezia. Hundreds of thousands of stone wall structures throughout southern Africa testify to the density of rural and urban habita­tion sites. Some places were major political centers, like Great Zimbabwe and Khami. A number of towns, built along lines of mineral deposits, were associated with scale economies in mining and metal-working operations. Such sites show extensive evidence of high temperature metallurgical technologies, extensive mining and metal extraction technologies, and the mass production of pottery. Still others were seats of “cattle barons,” who combined livestock breeding on a grand scale with copper mining and ivory production. Near the Limpopo River, the stratified community of Thulamela, dated between the thirteenth and late seventeenth centuries, had elites residing in a large dzimbabwe on the hilltop and the rest of the population of craftsmen, herders and peasants in the valley below. The town exported copper, gold, iron and tin into the Indian Ocean trading system and imported glass beads and other luxury goods, thus demonstrating commercial contact with North Africa and Egypt, western Asia, India and China. Mining and metallurgy were salient factors in urbanization, social structuring and state formation.

State structures evolved to protect populations involved in commerce, animal husbandry, crafts and mining. New social and cultural identities were created as producers were incorporated into expanding political structures and into circuits of mercantile accumulation. Foreign imports were socialized at the level of the state and its public structures, a development that ensured the circulation of luxury goods in ruling class circles. Archaeological evidence indicates that throughout southern Zambezia, there was a general homogen­eity of ruling class material culture through the importation of foreign luxury goods such as Chinese porcelain, Persian glassware, Indian textiles and Egyptian ceramics. Ruling classes shared legal prescriptions, festivals, terri­torial cults, healing associations, and ritual actions and formulae.

The period from the mid-thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries was a time of political aggregation. Large centralizing political hegemonies—the Zimbabwe imperium (1250 to 1450) and the Mwene Mutapa Empire (1450 to 1630) which emerged out of the Zimbabwe polity—and the centralization of surplus extraction in a context of expanding agro-pastoral and artisan-mining frontiers were dominant processes. In the Zimbabwe polity, 150 provincial towns functioned as administrative-political centers over the lowland lands between the eastern Kalahari desert and Indian Ocean and the high plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. They specialized in craft industries and trade in gold, ivory, textiles, glass beads, cattle and produce. An estimated 500 smaller madzimbabwe, in the hands of powerful descent groups, were responsible for agricultural production and the management of royal cattle herds and trade routes. At the base of the Zimbabwe settlement hierarchy were several thousand villages in which kinship systems were based on a collective ethic and collective ownership of land.

Great Zimbabwe, capital of the Zimbabwe state (1290 to 1450), was a metropolis with many quarters: palace and royal court, elite residences of state officials, merchants, and priests and priestesses, ritual centers, public ceremonial courts, public forums, markets, and houses for commoners and artisans. The principal buildings were constructed in dressed stone with regular coursing. Estimates of the city's population range between 11,000 and 50,000 for the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

The Zimbabwe ruling class was sustained by an economy based on mineral wealth, especially copper and gold, trade with the Indian Ocean commercial system and herds of cattle. Backed by a large army, the ruler appropriated surplus in the form of state taxes from village communities (rural social commons) in the form of labor services, agricultural produce, craft goods, livestock and raw materials. The gold trade was supported by vast herds of cattle that were used to pay the miners and to subsidize the subsistence of residents in the major urban centers. The upper classes of Great Zimbabwe were buried with gifts of gold jewelry, jeweled iron work, large copper ingots and Chinese porcelain. Peasants, on the other hand, were buried with few or no grave goods—after lives spent growing millet and sorghum.

The rulers of the Mwene Mutapa inherited the Zimbabwe administrative- political and economic systems with some modifications. They abandoned Great Zimbabwe as a political center and established their capital near the Zambezi River as well as more than sixty new towns, including centers of metal-working and new ports on the Zambezi River. The structure of the new towns was similar to that of Great Zimbabwe, which became a religious and pilgrimage center after 1450. The Mutapa rulers now exercised control over all branches of production, including agriculture, mining, craft indus­tries and livestock, and these sectors paid a tribute-rent in labor and kind. In the 1480s, ports on the Mozambique coast were re-built—Angoche, Nyashawa and Nyembani—so that the ruling dynasty would have direct access to the Indian Ocean commercial world. This project failed to materi­alize, however, as a result of civil wars following rebellions of provincial governors in the 1490s and through the sixteenth century. These struggles led to dismemberment of the Mwene Mutapa polity and widespread political fragmentation or disaggregation in southern Zambezia. Sub-imperial polities like the Khami kingdom under the Rozwi-Chagamire dynasties (1450 to 1800) emerged and expanded as they conquered and incorporated vassal territories. Warlords and principalities (“chiefdoms”) with mercenary and slave armies appeared on the political scene in the sixteenth century, together with stone forts. There were constant struggles over the control of gold and copper mines, markets like Ingombe Ilede on the Zambezi and trade routes. With shifts in the distribution of military and political power, the social commons of rural villages were appropriated by new political classes who established themselves as proprietors of the land.

An archaeological interpretation of the monumental architecture of Great Zimbabwe contends that the ruling class viewed it as an extension of the natural environment; that is, the architecture of royal constructions was to represent assimilation of and not the domination of nature. Monu­mental architecture of Khami's madzimbabwe, by contrast, represented royal domination of nature; that is, natural geographical features were enclosed in a built environment of monumentality in the form of terraces and massive platforms over 8 meters high and up to a kilometer or more in length. This was a time when the communal organization of peasant village communities was breaking up in particular areas of the high plateau and the Zambezi basin, a time of expanding and contracting commercial and political networks, and a time of contested hierarchies with the growing presence of enslaved labor, mercenary soldiers and displaced peasants.

The breakdown of imperial authority and the processes of de-peasantization and enslavement were concurrent with the arrival on the Eastern African coast of Portuguese ships. The dynamics of contact in southern Zambezia created an intersection of networks and hierarchies organized around three interact­ing entities: Zambezian polities with resources and labor, Swahili merchants with trading capital and Portuguese entrepreneurs (and their African allies) with firearms (see below).

In northern Zambezia, the situation was different. There, political aggre­gation or centralization prevailed in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The cultural-economic complexes of the Luba and Lunda forma­tions, which were based in the headwaters of the Congo River, gave rise to imperial political systems and associated satellite polities, such as Kazembe and the Marave confederation, in the 1600s and 1700s. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lunda Empire established a trans-continental network that linked southern Swahili ports and southern Angolan ports. The empire was a principle supplier of captive labor to the Americas, especially in the eighteenth century.

The stone fort and the palace

The stone fort and the palace became prominent landscape features in southern Zambezia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in the context of an expanding mercantile frontier, political de-centralization on a regional scale and militarism. The stone fort, signaling the spread of military architecture and firearms, attests to heightened armed conflicts among several different political actors: local warlords, the declining Mwene Mutapa state, Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese entrepreneurs, and military predatory states. For the first time, armies of slaves and mercenaries appeared on battlefields as decisive military combatants. The contending forces fought over trade routes and gold-mining areas, creating in the process armed commercial networks dotted with garrisoned soldiers in stone forts. Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese traders established markets along the Zambezi River and in the gold-producing districts. They promoted Christianization in their sphere of influence, unlike their Muslim Swahili competitors who did not attempt to convert Zambezian populations to Islam.

The royal palace, with its courtiers, sacralizing functions and practices of governance, belonged to an earlier era. The seventeenth-century palace had two primary functions: as a citadel with a garrison of armed retainers— usually mercenaries, but also armed slaves; or as a site of merchant activities. In a few instances, it combined the two functions. Throughout the northern high plateau, Mwene Mutapa rulers no longer had large madzimbabwe as their political capitals, but ruled through palaces as citadels and palaces as markets. Both functions were associated with the expansion of the mercantile frontier from Portuguese-dominated Indian Ocean emporia to Zambezi River-based entrepots and the gold fields of the central and northern high plateau. Portuguese missionaries were active evangelizing in and around Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese market centers, where they also built churches and chapels.

In the late seventeenth century, rulers of the Khami kingdom, which dominated the southern high plateau, destroyed the markets of the Portu­guese and Afro-Portuguese and drove the Portuguese and their African allies out of the middle Zambezi valley and the northern high plateau and closed the gold mines. Henceforth, southern Zambezia's exports to the wider Indian Ocean world were primarily ivory and copper. Khami rulers, who continued to receive luxury goods from Indian Ocean commerce, symbolized the shift from the primacy of gold to the primacy of ivory by lining the walls and steps of their palaces with ivory panels.

In the lower Zambezi valley, the Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese man­aged to consolidate their positions as estate-holders (prazeros) in their fortified landed estates (prazos) of peasants and slave cultivators with the help of their armies of slaves and mercenaries (Chikunda). Estate-holders militarized trade routes leading to the gold fields by setting up garrisoned forts along them; but their purpose, to gain access to gold-mining areas, was ultimately unsuccessful.

The territorial cult

Historical studies have shown that the Luba-Lunda heartland, situated in the headwaters of the Congo and Zambezi Rivers, was the source of a range of institutions, practices, beliefs and ideas that became over a period of centuries hegemonic throughout much of greater Zambezia. They included: (ι) political ideas and institutions; (2) medical-religious systems concerning the medico-empirical (common physical ailments) and the medico-religious (witchcraft); (3) religious shrines and territorial cults; (4) music and musical instruments; and (5) specialized vocabularies relating to political, religious and medical matters.

The territorial cult was associated with mental and physical health, medical knowledge and practices, and mercantile wealth. Its principal concern was the material and moral well-being of the population of a territory, both rulers and ruled. It could cut across major political, cultural and linguistic boundaries, embracing an area of several thousand square kilometers. As public institutions and definers of a public sphere and civil society, territorial cults stood for the mediation of social conflict and the socialization of individuals, groups and communities. They had multiple functions with regard to rituals, ceremonial protocols, symbolisms of different kinds, cosmology and medical-religious systems, and numerous organizational expressions—commercial, magical, spiritual, judicial, associ- ational and textual. They exercised control over norms of discourse and cultural representations.

Each cult center had its specialists (priests and priestesses), some of whom served more than one cult. Each cult had its congregation of worshippers and its shrine and oracles, with the latter serving as pilgrimage sites for individual supplicants from a very wide area. The territorial cult had its code of practice and rules, but at the same time it was open, dynamic and action- filled. In the eighteenth century, Christian prazeros assimilated elements of certain territorial cults, creating in the Lower Zambezi valley a hybrid Christian-territorial cult system of belief.

Archaeological research has revealed that a territorial cult could sustain trans-oceanic links. For example, certain mining and metal-working towns in southern Zambezia—“healing towns”—were also important ritual sites and places of healing. The metal tools and glass objects that were used in rituals associated with medical practices and healing ceremonies are similar in form to metal artifacts and glass jewelry found in south Indian “healing temple” iconography and ritualized medicinal practices. Indian technical specialists traveled to southern Zambezia and African technical specialists traveled to south India. Southern Zambezian “healing towns” maintained trans-oceanic ties with southern Indian “healing temples” from ancient times up until the seventeenth century and possibly later. Alongside long-distance trade routes crossing the Indian Ocean, there was also a long-distance cultural- informational route that linked local politics of medical knowledge and public health to distant sources of knowledge.

With a rise of ivory exports from greater Zambezia in the seventeenth century, the network of professional hunters' guilds expanded. The guilds were linked to one or another territorial cult and shrine, such as cults of the land. With intensification of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new territorial cult, the Lemba association, emerged in the Lower Congo basin. It was linked to the rise of merchant­warriors who were engaged in buying and selling slaves for the Atlantic trade and established themselves in market towns with their armed retainers of slaves and mercenaries. Most of the enslaved were captives from Lunda imperial expansion. To alleviate social and political conflicts in the areas and along the routes where the slave trade transactions occurred, militarized market towns were turned into centers of negotiation, adjudication and cooperation presided over by merchant-warriors who served as judges. The ideological and institutional basis for the merchant-warriors' authorita­tive role as judges was the Lemba association. This was a healing association and an organization engaged in long-distance commerce, which had ritual networks associated with medical healers and public health. Dominated by rich merchant-warriors, its membership also included skilled orators, reputable healers, priests, officials and their wives, and it maintained social alliances with key landed families. It kept the markets “calm,” and it “calmed” towns and villages by cementing alliances and “healing” controver­sies and violent conflicts. It represents another organizational side of the interplay between the expanding frontier of Atlantic mercantile transactions and the continuity and stability of rural and urban life in the Lower Congo basin.

Conclusion

Sanjay Subrahmanyam characterizes early modernity in terms of travel, global trade, urban-rural dynamics, political theology and historical anthro­pology. These features were salient across the Afro-Eurasian oikumene. The present study examines the historical specificity of early modernity in greater Sahara and greater Zambesia through particular prisms—the city, the zawiya, the world port, the dzimbabwe, the stone fort and palace, and the territorial cult. The prisms anchor socio-political and cultural phenomena, illuminate local and trans-local levels of activity, mediate social conditions in which Africans are the historical subjects, and register the contexts in which early modern features emerged within the transactional spaces of the greater Saharan and greater Zambezian interaction spheres. Furthermore, they indicate that particular African experiences and conditions were, in varied ways, congruent with developments in other parts of the Afro-Eurasian oikumene and, simultaneously, reveal that certain situations, events and relationships were specific to the internal dynamics of the two interaction spheres. As “texts” or fields of signification, the prisms enable local and global ways of reading Africa in the early modern era. The study shows how generations of early modern Africans imagined and organized societal order and societal relationships in local- and world-historical contexts of change, struggle, rupture and transformation.

FURTHBR RBADING

Ajaye, J. F. Ade and Michael Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa, 3rd edn. (Harlow: Longman Group Ltd., 1985).

Austen, Ralph A., Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Bassani, Ezio, “Additional Notes on the Afro-Portuguese Ivories,” African Arts 27(3) (1994), 34-45, 100-1.

Batran, ‘Abdu-‘Aziz ‘Abdullah, “The Qadiryya-Kukhtaryya Brotherhood in West Africa: The Concept of Tasawwuf in the Writings of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729-1811),” Transafrican Journal of History 4(1-2) (1974), 41-70.

Birmingham, David and Phyllis Martin (eds.), History of Central Africa (London and New York: Longman Group Ltd., 1983), vol. 1.

Boston, Thomas D., “On the Transition to Feudalism in Mozambique,” Journal of African Studies 8(4) (1981), 182-7.

Brett, Michael, Approaching African History (Woodbridge: James Curry, 2013).

Chami, Felix and Gilbert Pwiti (eds.), Southern Africa and the Swahili World (Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press Ltd., 2002).

Connah, Graham, African Civilizations. An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Crawford, O. G. S. (ed.), Ethiopians’ Itineraries circa 1400-1524 (Cambridge: The Hakluyt Society, 1958).

Debrunner, Hans, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe. A History of Africans in Europe before 1918 (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1979).

Ehret, Christopher, The Civilizations of Africa. A History to 1800 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2002).

Garlake, Peter S., Great Zimbabwe (New York: Stein and Day, 1973).

Gijanto, Liza and Rachel L. Horlings, “Connecting African Diaspora and West African Historical Archaeology,” Historical Archaeology 46(2) (2012), 134-56.

Gray, Richard and David Birmingham (eds.), Pre-Colonial Africa Trade: Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa before 1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Hall, Martin, Farmers, Kings, and Traders. The People of Southern Africa 200-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Haour, Anne, Rulers, Warriors, Traders, Clerics. The Central Sahel and the North Sea 800-1500 (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Hunwick, John, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire. Al-Sa’di’s Ta’rikh al-sudan down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

Inikori, Joseph E., “Africa and the Globalization Process: Western Africa, 1450-1850,” Journal of Global History 2 (2007), 63-86.

Kea, Ray A., A Cultural and Social History of Ghanafrom the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. The Gold Coast in the Age of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2012).

Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

Kusimba, Chapurukha M., The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1999).

LaViolette, Adria, “Swahili Cosmopolitanism in Africa and the Indian Ocean World, A.D. 600-1500,” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 4(1) (2008), 24-49.

Lawuyi, Olatunde Bayo, “Studies on Traditional Religion” in Toyin Falola (ed.),Yoruba Historiography (Madison, WI: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1991), pp. 43-9.

Lowe, Kate, “‘Representing' Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402-1608,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (2007), 101-28.

MacDonald, Kevin C., “‘The Least of Their Inhabited Villages are Fortified': The Walled Settlements of Segou,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 47(3) (2012), 343-64.

McDougall, James and Judith Scheele (eds.), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012).

Meillassoux, Claude (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (Oxford University Press, 1971).

Mitchell, Peter, African Connections. Archaeological Perspectives on Africa and the Wider World (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005).

Monroe, J. Cameron, “Power and Agency in Precolonial African States,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013), 17-35.

“Urbanism on West Africa's Slave Coast,” American Scientist 99 (2011), 400-9.

Monroe, J. Cameron and Akinwumi Ogundiran (eds.), Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa. Archaeological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Mouser, Bruce, “Rebellion. Marronage, and Jihad: Strategies of Resistance to Slavery on the Sierra Leone Coast, c. 1783-1796,” Journal of African History 48 (2007), 27-44.

Niani, D. T. (ed.), General History of Africa IV. Africafrom the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

Northrup, David, Africa’s Discovery of Europe 1450-1850, 3rd edn. (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Ogot, B. A. (ed.), General History of Africa V. Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

Pikirayi, Innocent, “Stone Architecture and the Development of Power in the Zimbabwe Tradition AD 1270-1830,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 48(2) (2013), 282-300.

The Zimbabwe Culture. Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2001).

Reese, Scott S. (ed.), The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Salvadore, Matteo, “The Ethiopian Age of Exploration: Prester John's Discovery of Europe, 1306-1458,” Journal of World History 21(4) (2011), 593-627.

Wise, Christopher (ed.), Ta'rikh alfattash. The Timbuktu Chronicles 1493-1599, Christopher Wise and Hala Abu Taleb (trans.) (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011).