Effects of Trade on West African Society

The steady growth of trans-Saharan trade (Table 10.1) had three important effects on West African society. First, trade stimulated gold mining. Parts of modern-day Senegal, Nigeria, and Ghana contained rich veins of gold. Both sexes shared in mining it. Men hacked out gold-bearing rocks and crushed them, separating gold from soil. Women washed the gold in gourds. Alluvial gold (mixed with soil, sand, or gravel) was separated from the soil by panning. Scholars estimate that by the eleventh century nine tons of gold were exported to the Mediterranean coast and Europe annually — a prodigious amount for the time, since even with modern machinery and sophisticated techniques, total gold exports from the same region in 1937 amounted to only twenty-one tons. Some of this metal went to Egypt. From there it was transported down the Red Sea and eventually to India (see Map 9.2) to pay for the spices and silks demanded by Mediterranean commerce. In this way, African gold linked the entire world, exclusive of the Western Hemisphere.

Second, trade in gold and other goods created a desire for slaves. Slaves were West Africa’s second-most valuable export (after gold). Slaves worked the gold and salt mines, and in Muslim North Africa, southern Europe, and southwestern Asia there was a high demand for household slaves among the elite. African slaves, like their early European and Asian counterparts, seem to have been peoples captured in war. Recent research suggests, moreover, that large numbers of black slaves were also recruited for Muslim military service through the trans-Saharan trade. Manumission (the freeing of individual slaves), high death rates from disease, and the assimilation of some blacks into Muslim society meant that the demand for slaves remained high for centuries. Table 10.1 shows the scope of the trans-Saharan slave trade. The total number of blacks enslaved over an 850-year period may be tentatively estimated at more than 4 million.3

YEARS ANNUAL AVERAGE OF SLAVES TRADED TOTAL
650–800 1,000 150,000
800–900 3,000 300,000
900–1100 8,700 1,740,000
1100–1400 5,500 1,650,000
1400–1500 4,300 430,000

Source: R. A. Austen, “The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979). Used with permission.

Table 10.1: TABLE 10.1 Estimated Magnitude of Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 650–1500

Slavery in Muslim societies, as in European and Asian countries before the fifteenth century, was not based on skin color. Muslims also enslaved Caucasians who had been purchased, seized in war, or kidnapped from Europe. Wealthy Muslim households in Córdoba, Alexandria, and Tunis often included slaves of a number of races, all of whom had been completely cut off from their cultural roots. Likewise, West African kings who sold blacks to northern traders also bought a few white slaves — Slavic, British, and Turkish — for their own domestic needs. Race had little to do with the phenomenon of slavery.

The third important effect of trans-Saharan trade on West African society was its role in stimulating the development of urban centers. Scholars date the growth of African cities from around the early ninth century. Families that had profited from trade tended to congregate in the border zones between the savanna and the Sahara. They acted as middlemen between the miners to the south and the Muslim merchants from the north. By the early thirteenth century these families had become powerful merchant dynasties. Muslim traders from the Mediterranean settled permanently in the trading depots, from which they organized the trans-Saharan caravans. The concentration of people stimulated agriculture and the craft industries. Gradually cities of sizable population emerged. Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu, which enjoyed commanding positions on the Niger River bend, became centers of the export-import trade. Sijilmasa grew into a thriving market center. Koumbi Saleh, with between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants, was probably the largest city in the western Sudan in the twelfth century. (By European standards, Koumbi Saleh was a metropolis; London and Paris achieved this size only in the late thirteenth century.) Between 1100 and 1400 these cities played a dynamic role in West Africa’s commercial life and became centers of intellectual creativity.