The World and a Very Small Place in Africa

A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia

Donald R. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429996405
• Edition: 4
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The World and a Very Small Place in Africa is a fascinating look at how contacts with the wider world have affected how people have lived in Niumi, a small and little-known region at the mouth of West Africa's Gambia River, for over a thousand years.

Drawing on archives, oral traditions and published works, Donald R. Wright connects world history with real people on a local level through an exploration of how global events have affected life in Niumi. Thoroughly revised and updated throughout, this new edition rests on recent thinking in globalization theory, reflects the latest historiography and has been extended to the present day through discussion of the final years of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh's regime, the role of global forces in the events of the 2016 presidential elections and the changes that resulted from these elections. The book is supported throughout by photographs, maps and Perspectives boxes that present detailed information on such topics as Alex Haley's Roots (part set in Niumi), why Gambians take the risky "back way" to reach Europe, or "Wiri-Wiri, " the Senegalese soap that has Gambians' attention.

Written in a clear and personal style and taking a critical yet sensitive approach, it remains an essential resource for students and scholars of African history, particularly those interested in the impact of globalization on the lives of real people.

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PART I

Archaic globalization

Before 1600 CE

Archaic globalization was a dominant process across large segments of the Eurasian landmass and parts of Africa for centuries. One could argue endlessly over when and where the earliest human activity considered as globalization occurred, but historians are approaching agreement that the archaic form continued until a gradual transition began toward capital accumulation, industrialization, and rise of the nation-state. A rough date of 1600 CE for the start of this transition toward new forms of globalization holds up well.

The impetus behind archaic globalization was the movement of people over long distances. According to Anthony Hopkins (summarizing C.A. Bayly), it involved:

[g]reat kings and warriors searching for wealth and honor in fabulous lands . . . religious wanderers and pilgrims seeking traces of God in distant realms . . . merchant princes and venturers pursuing profit and risk across borders and continents [and] . . . at a more mundane level, consumers [seeking] prized exotic medical herbs and precious goods and tokens that they hoped would bring them health and fortune.¹

On swathes of the Eurasian landmass over early centuries, civilizations appeared, empires rose and fell, long-distance trade flourished, and religions spread beyond the reach of local spirits and deities. By the start of the Common Era, a grid of caravan routes known as the Silk Road connected China in the east with the Mediterranean in the west, enabling communication and exchange across the vast area. Globalization by then “was a fact of life,” writes Peter Frankopan, “one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.”²

Ancient Rome was part of this massive web until its fifth-century CE decline cut away western regions, but eastward from the Mediterranean the strands of the web thickened. After the mid-seventh century, enhanced contacts in central and western Eurasia were tied to expansion of the Muslim world. Islam is a monotheistic religion, influenced heavily by Judaism, that evolved in the Middle East for several centuries before the time of Muhammad.³ Over the century following Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim Arabs poured out of their homelands and conquered most of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. Early in the eighth century, Muslim armies followed across the trade routes of central Asia and swept into northern India, where they fought to establish themselves as purveyors of the fineries of the East. By the ninth century, Arab and Persian sailors were coming into direct contact with East Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China. The result was dramatic. The Muslim world, stretching from northwest Africa to India, was tied into a vast commercial complex that included the Pacific Rim. East Asian goods flowed westward; East African goods moved north and eastward. A Persian geographer, al-Muqadassi, listed items one could obtain just prior to 1000 CE in Oman at the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula: drugs, perfumes, saffron, teakwood, ivory, pearls, onyx, rubies, ebony, sugar, aloes, iron, lead, canes, earthenware, sandalwood, glass, and pepper. Nearly every one of these came to Arabia through the Indian Ocean-East Asian-East African trade.⁴

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MAP 2 Eurasia and Africa before 1450 ce

To finance this commercial expansion and efforts at collateral political consolidation, Muslims needed bullion. They found it south of the Sahara Desert, in the gold deposits of Africa’s western savannas. In gaining access to this gold in the eighth and ninth centuries, Muslim merchants established firmly the previously tenuous links that tied West Africa into the growing network.⁵ A trickle of trans-Sahara trade, with indirect commercial connections between the populated savannas of West Africa and the plains of North Africa, probably predated the Roman Empire, but such trade grew in the fourth century CE with the introduction of camels among North Africa’s Berber population. Camels quickly replaced horses and pack oxen to become veritable ships of the desert, voyaging from oasis to oasis under the guidance of Berber masters, carrying slabs of salt from mines on the desert’s north side to the salt-starved inhabitants of the savannas, along with dates, figs, woven cloth, and copper articles. They returned northward with gold, which West Africa had in greater supply than anywhere else in reach of the Eurasian world, and also kola nuts, a stimulant from the Guinea forests, and ivory. Slaves accompanied the northward treks for sale in North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean. West Africa thus supplied a good part of the bullion that oiled pre-Islamic commercial mechanisms between the Mediterranean and China. The Islamic stimulus to the trade of Eurasia increased the importance of the West Africa link and led to cultural transferrals back and forth across the desert. This connection to the expanding Islamic world had political, economic, and cultural effects for the West Africans involved.

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In world-systems terms, several Asian areas had characteristics of cores. One was the Middle East-India corridor, where prior to 1000 CE Muslims controlled the international exchange that took place. Another was China, having growing land and sea connections to its west and south after the end of the first millennium, in company with Southeast Asia’s involvement in the carrying trade of the East Indies. A restructuring seemingly was under way by the eleventh century; eastern regions were more central to the system thereafter.⁶

One thing seems certain, however: before 1000 CE Europe was neither a central focus of any web of communication nor a core in any system of economic exchange. When thinking of the vast Asian network of the time, the isolated reaches of northern and western Europe were barely peripheral. Through the several centuries when residents of these regions were tied to a narrow existence on the feudal manor, a network of interaction existed from the southern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean, across the Sahara, down the East African coast, and over the expanse of central and eastern Asia that brought a material and cultural fullness to urban dwellers and the occasional lord of a manor. Northern and western Europeans were removed from the commercial and cultural hubs of this vast and thriving system. If part of an intercommunicating web, the strands of connection were wispy indeed.

Over the next several centuries, this situation would change. The network that was thriving continued to strengthen after 1000 CE; across central Eurasia and extending to West and East Africa, production of agricultural and manufactured goods increased, short-distance trade continued, and long-distance trade grew. Growing in importance with the central Asian land trade was that of the Indian Ocean, which connected East Africa, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, India, Malaysia, and China into a network of production, exchange, personal interaction, and communication. The steady monsoon winds that reversed direction semiannually facilitated travel by sail across the Indian Ocean. Well known are the voyages of Chinese mariner Zheng He that reached East Africa early in the fourteenth century. But Arab, Persian, Indian, and Indonesian vessels operated across the network as well, and a peaceful coexistence enabled waterborne trade to pass back and forth in this grand operation.⁷

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Abu-Lughod believes this commercial system, with China, India, and the Muslim Middle East as core areas, reached its peak around 1300 and then began to restructure. “Indeed,” she writes:

[t]he century between 1250 and 1350 clearly seemed to constitute a crucial turning point in world history, a moment when the balance between East and West could have tipped in either direction. In terms of space, the Middle East heartland that linked the eastern Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean constituted a geographic fulcrum on which East and West were then roughly balanced.⁸

As we know, beginning symbolically with early Portuguese excursions down Africa’s Atlantic coast, the balance eventually would tip toward the West, but maybe not as quickly as Abu-Lughod asserts. Globalization was still in its archaic form through the 1500s, according to Hopkins, and Kenneth Pomerantz argues that “the great divergence,” which saw England and then the rest of western Europe advance economically and politically in relation to the rest of Eurasia, did not occur until the end of the eighteenth century.⁹ Still, changes were occurring, webs were strengthening, world-systems restructuring. By the mid-fifteenth century, strong forces were stirring the pot.

People in Niumi had been involved in trade along western Africa’s Atlantic coast long before the Portuguese arrived. They controlled part of the regional exchange of salt, dried seafood, and kola nuts with canoes and boatmen, and they were on the edge of the desert-side trade that connected them, across the Sahara, to the economic system of central parts of Eurasia. The appearance of Portuguese sailors in the Gambia River in the 1440s marked Niumi’s entrance into an Atlantic-oriented commerce that would begin slowly but would grow to trans-Atlantic proportions before archaic globalization had run its course. In numerous ways, participation in the Atlantic economy altered politics and society in Niumi. Changes wrought over the last century of archaic globalization brought to Niumi, by 1600, a different sort of state, containing different sorts of people, doing different sorts of things.

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1

THE GLOBAL SETTING FOR NIUMI’S HISTORY

Early archaic globalization

In the late summer of 1446, nearly half a century before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Portuguese knight and adventurer named Nuno Tristão sailed an armed caravel down Africa’s west coast and into the mouth of the Gambia River.¹⁰ He had reason to expect a hostile reception. For several years prior to this, sailors such as Tristão had been capturing Africans along the Atlantic coast north of the Gambia River and spiriting them back to Portugal. According to Gomes Eanes de Azurara, a contemporary Portuguese court chronicler, “the disposition and conversion of these prisoners occupied a good portion of [Prince Henry’s] time.”

Just inside the river’s mouth, Tristão launched two boats, with twelve armed men (including Tristão) in one and ten in the other, and began riding the tide upriver, intent on locating more “prisoners.” Soon, however, they altered their route and, writes Azurara, “made for some habitations that they espied on the right hand.” Their concentration on these habitations must have been intense, for they did not immediately notice the approach of twelve boats launched from the north bank, “in the which,” Azurara records, “there would be as many as seventy or eighty Guineas, all Negroes, with bows in their hands.” The men in one of the boats beached their craft, got out, and began to rain arrows on the Portuguese. The others came near and “discharged that accursed ammunition of theirs all full of poison upon the bodies of our countrymen.” They chased the two Portuguese boats back to the caravel, where the seamen tied up to the larger vessel, the crew cut their anchor cables amid the ...