The Sande and Poro societies were uniquely positioned to provide a framework for community in plantation slave quarters because they had been modified by social disruptions caused by Europe’s direct contact with sub-Saharan Africa.
For centuries the relationship between the two economies had been gold. When the African continent was forming, the Mann Shield grew by absorbing volcanos that had erupted on its perimeter. Gold formed in greenstone belts on the terranes and then was laid on the surface between 2.100 and 2.200 billion years ago. [1]
The Futa Jallon, the deep rose on the Man Shield, laid to the west. The sandstone block rose "sharply from the coastal plain in a series of abrupt faults." The plateaus were broken by deep valleys and the remnants of "ancient volcanism." [2] The rivers that flowed from the futa exposed the gold beneath. The Bambuk field was near the headwaters of the Sénégal river, the Boire along the upper Niger, and the Lobi along the Black Volta.
Timothy Garrard thought the transport of gold north from the Bambuk field had begun by 296 when Carthage opened a mint [3] in what today is Libya. By then, camels capable of crossing the Sahara had been introduced. He believed one reason the Umayyad Muslims moved west from Egypt toward the Byzantine provinces was to control that mint, which they did in 695. [4] They wanted only one currency in their territories. [5]
The Abbasids toppled the Umayyad caliphate in 750, [6] and, in 800, appointed an Arab leader of the Aghlabid as hereditary emir of north Africa. [7] The Kutama Berbers revolted in 909, and established an independent Fatimid caliphate. They moved their capital to Cairo in 969. [8]
Jean Devisse believed the Fatimids were responsible for the development of the trans-Saharan gold trade because they minted coins independently [9] of those issued by the Abbasids in Baghdad, [10] while the Umayyads, who had retreated to Spain, were issuing their own currency there. [11] The rival mints created a demand large enough for men to cross the desert.
Sijilmassa became the northern center of trade that brought gold across the Sahara from the Mandé-speaking [12] Ghana Empire [13] centered in Koumbi Saleh. Salt was taken south by camel from Taghaza in the Taoudeni Basin. [14] Caravans were run by Berber nomads living in the Sahara, the Tuaregs. [15]
Lamtuna Berbers rebelled against the chaos that came with the struggles between the Umayyads and Fatimids for control of what is now Morocco in western North Africa. [16] They also were suffering from the transfer of the salt monopoly from Awlil in their territory to Taghaza. [17]
The Almoravids merged the need for religious reform with the one for social order. They moved their capital to the boundary between the Berbers and Negroes at the Sénégal river around 1030 where Bambuk gold, Awlil salt, and Sahel grain were traded. [18] They converted the sedimentary population in the Takrur Empire, [19] then imposed Sharia law in 1035. [20]
From Takrur, the Almoravids moved east to take Awdâghust, an important caravan stop of the Ghana Empire in 1055, [21] where again they imposed Sharia Law in 1076. [22] The neighboring Sosso invaded Ghana and took over the caravan trade by 1100. [23] By then, Jan Bart Gewald said those West African goldfields were the principle currency supply for Europe and the Arab caliphate. [24]
Another Mandé-speaking group, the Mandinka, defeated the Sosso in 1235 to establish what became the Islamic Mali Empire. [25] One of the clans that supported its leader was the iron smithing Kamara. [26] Sundiata located his capital on a Niger tributary in Kamara territory upriver [27] from the newly opened Boure gold fields. [28]
The Sosso were iron workers who rejected Islam. [29] The Moslem leaders of Mali were more discriminating than the Almoravids. They did not proselytize gold workers because "prospecting and production of the metal traditionally depended on a number of beliefs and magical practices that were alien to Islam." [30] Similarly, Diango Cissé said the Kamara were known for their magic. They acted "as intermediaries between humans and protector spirits." [31]
Iron production required heat. The Kamara, no doubt, moved the Empire’s frontier with the nearby forest south as it converted trees into fuel. [32] To the north, Timbuktu became Mali’s most important city when it was annexed in 1324. [33] It had been founded by Moslem scholars fleeing the Almoravid conquest of Oualata in 1100. [34]
One consequence of the Almoravid rout of the Umayyads in Iberia was renewed efforts at reconquest. Portugal became independent in 1249. In 1415, João I landed on the Moroccan coast at Ceuta with his sons, Duarte, Pedro, and Henrique. [35] From there, Henrique directed navigators to locate the African goldfields. One of his agents spent a year near the Gulf of Arguin learning the intricacies of internal African trade. [36]
By then Mali was in decline. The Tuareg had retaken control of the caravan routes in 1433, [37] and the Songhai Empire to the north and east conquered Timbukto in 1468. [38] Taghaza fell to Songhai in 1493. [39]
The dynamics of African trade changed again in 1545 when Spain began mining at Potosí in modern-day Bolivia. [40] Silver flooded markets, especially in Italy, and gold was hoarded, especially by the Ottoman Turks who had taken over Egypt in 1517. [41]
Soon after the disruption of currency markets, Mandé-speakers began moving southwest. The first group, the Vai, went south and east toward salt supplies. The next group, the Mane, were assumed to have been a Kamara group that developed alliances as it moved. Their motives can only be deduced from the direction of their movements, south and east then northwest along the coast toward the Portuguese slave-trade centers. [42]
The first group the Mane met on the today’s coast of Liberia were the Cubales. Yves Person believed they were Gola, [43] and that the Mane introduced Poro male initiation rituals [44] to the group. The Gola already had the female Sande society.
Graphics
1. Aymatth2. "West Africa Showing the West African Craton." Wikimedia Commons. 26 December 2010.
2. Aa77zz. "Trade Routes of the Western Sahara c. 1000-1500." Wikimedia Commons. 5 August 2011.
3. T. L. Miles. "Map of Medieval Saharan Trade Routes circa 1400 CE, Centered on Niger." Wikimedia Commons. 18 January 2008.
End Notes
1. Thomas Schlüter. Geological Atlas of Africa. Berlin: Springer-Verlad, 2008. 16, 50, 192.
2. Thomas E. O’Toole. "Guinea." Encyclopædia Britannica. Last updated, 30 December 2015.
3. Timothy F. Garrard. "Myth and Metrology: The Early Trans-Saharan Gold Trade." The Journal of African History 23:443–461:1982. 447.
4. Garrard. 449.
5. J. Devisse. "Trade and Trade Routes in West Africa." 367–435 in M. El Fasi. Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 391.
6. Wikipedia. "Abbasid Caliphate."
7. Wikipedia. "Aghlabids."
8. Wikipedia. "Kutama."
9. Devisse. 392.
10. Wikipedia. "Abbasid Caliphate."
11. Devisse. 399–400.
12. Mandé is a linguistic classification, much like Romance and Germanic are categories for languages spoken by diverse ethnic groups.
13. Wikipedia. "Sijilmassa."
14. Wikipedia. "Taghaza."
15. Wikipedia. "Tuareg People."
16. I. Hrbek and J. Devisse. "The Almoravids." 336–366 in El Fasi. 337.
17. Hrbek. 340–1.
18. Wikipedia. "Takrur."
19. C J. D. Fage. "Upper and Lower Guinea." In The Cambridge History of Africa. Edited by Roland Oliver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 3:484.
20. Wikipedia, Takrur.
21. Wikipedia. "Almoravid dynasty."
22. Fage. 484.
23. Wikipedia. "Sosso Empire."
24. Jan Bart Gewald. "Gold the True Motor of West African History: An Overview of the Importance of Gold in West Africa and Its Relations with the Wider World." In Worlds of Debt: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gold Mining in West Africa. Edited by Cristiana Panella. Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2010.
25. Wikipedia, Sosso.
26. D. T. Niane. "Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion." 117–171 in Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. Edited by D. T. Niane. Paris: UNESCO, 1984. On allegiance to Sundiata, 131–132.
Bakary Camara. Evolution des Systemes Fonciers au Mali. Dakar: Consel pour de développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique, 2015. On clan as black smiths, 54. Kamara also was spelled Cámara.
27. Niane. 136. Niani was located on the Sankarani.
28. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. "The Trans-Saharan Gold Trade (7th–14th Century)." Museum website. October 2000.
29. N. Levtzion. Ancient Ghana and Mali. London: Methuen, 1973. Cited by Niane. 125.
30. Metropolitan Museum.
31. Diango Cissé. Structures des Malinké de Kita: Contribution à une Anthropologie Social et Politique du Mali. Bamako: Editions Populaires, 1970. 211, 249. Quoted by Christopher L. Miller. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 141.
32. Niane’s map showed Kamaro was south of Niani with an arrow pointing to the forest. (page 128)
33. Wikipedia. "History of Timbuktu."
34. Wikipedia, Timbuktu.
35. Wikipedia. "History of Portugal.
36. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 58. João Fernandes stayed on the Bay of Arguin in 1455.
37. M . Ly-Tall. "The decline of the Mali Empire. 172–186 in Niane. 174.
38. Wikipedia, Timbuktu.
39. Wikipedia. "Mali Empire."
40. Wikpedia. "Potosí."
41. Ferdinand Braudel. La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Epoque. 1966. Translated by Siân Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper and Row, 1975 paperback edition. On Italian banks 496–497; gold hoarding, 499.
42. Yves Person. "Ethnic Movements and Acculturation in Upper Guinea since the Fifteenth Century." African Historical Studies 4:669–689:1971. "The Vai eruption must have been aimed at the kola and sea salt trade. The Mane, one century later, were probably motivated at least in part by the desire to trade with white men." (page 676)
43. Person. 681.
44. Person. 678.
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