A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context
Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this period of the region's history in a generation, tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, including Arabic manuscripts, oral histories, and recent archaeological findings, Michael Gomez unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history more generally. Scholars have long held that such distinctions arose during the colonial period, but Gomez shows they developed much earlier.
Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, Gomez traces the exchange of ideas and influences with North Africa and the Central Islamic Lands by way of merchants, scholars, and pilgrims. Islam's growth in West Africa, in tandem with intensifying commerce that included slaves, resulted in a series of political experiments unique to the region, culminating in the rise of empire. A major preoccupation was the question of who could be legally enslaved, which together with other factors led to the construction of new ideas about ethnicity, race, gender, and caste—long before colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.
Telling a radically new story about early Africa in global history, African Dominion is set to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come.
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The Middle Niger in Pre-Antiquity and Global Context
WORLD HISTORY PLAYS A CRITICAL ROLE within the larger discipline, providing a unitary lens, a panoptic, through which the drama that constitutes the human experience can be observed at once. The artistic achievements, the scientific breakthroughs, the political innovations, and the revelatory imagination are all on display, with an emphasis on the spectacular, the monumental. Creativity, urbanity, social and commercial intercourse, productive capacities, and the dynamics by which relations of power change or remain unaltered often form the threads by which the narrative coheres, the indices held to be common to cultures upon whom fortune smiled. By inference it follows that areas of the world consistently overlooked by scholars play no significant role in the unfolding of world history. That segments of the human family have, at no time in their existence, ever been worthy of mention, let alone included in sustained study and investigation, is a claim made indirectly, faintly whispered, with implications for the past and present.
It is therefore sobering that world history scholarship (in English) has remained fairly consistent, even formulaic, over many years. Though there is certainly organizational variation, it is often the approach to begin with ancient civilizations and to proceed in linear and diachronic fashion. Sumer, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia are initially discussed, followed by Pharaonic Egypt. The focus then swings to the dawn of Harappan culture in the Indus valley and Vedic civilization in India in the third and second millennia BCE, after which follows a succession of Chinese dynasties from the second millennium BCE Shang all the way to the Tang of the eighth through tenth centuries CE. Graeco-Roman civilization is a staple, to which are added the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, the Mayans of Central America from the fourth to the tenth century, and the Incas of the eleventh through the sixteenth century. The collective story then commonly features the transformation of Europe from its medieval preoccupations to a triumphalist world expansion.1
A developing cognate of world history is the study of empire, chiefly distinguished from the former in its preoccupation with more recent history (though with some attention to antecedent periods) that involves sweeping vistas and expansive, transregional landscapes. A “history of empire” approach can go to considerable lengths demonstrating how those under threat of subjugation resist, influence, or otherwise redirect certain consequences, and in ways that subvert if not transform the imperial project, so that imposition is an open-ended process of contestation and negotiation. As such, imperial histories are in instances quite sophisticated in their analyses, but even so, they share world history’s apparent disdain for empire as envisioned and engendered by Africans themselves, as none of the texts go beyond a cursory mention of such formations as Mali or Songhay—if they are mentioned at all.2
What therefore unites world and imperial histories, at least for the purposes of this study, is their consistent omission, their collective silence on early and medieval Africa, of saying anything of substance about it, with the exception of Egypt, Nubia, and North Africa. West Africa is certainly left out of the narrative of early human endeavor, and only tends to be mentioned, with brevity, in conjunction with European imperialism. This sort of treatment can be observed in a leading tome of more than 550 pages, out of which the discussion of sub-Saharan Africa, in a chapter entitled “Changes in the Barbarian World, 1700–500 BC,” is exemplary:
Sub-Saharan Africa also remained apart from the rest of the world. In all probability, cultivation of edible roots and all other crops made considerable progress in West Africa, while the east coast of the continent was visited at least occasionally by seafarers from civilized ports.3
Later in the same volume, slightly less than four pages are devoted to a discussion of sub-Saharan Africa that includes Ghana, Mali, and the spread of Islam. The chapter is called “The Fringes of the Civilized World to 1500” and, according to the author, “rests on nothing more solid than shrewd guesswork.”4 As such, we are not at a significant remove from Hegel.5 To be sure, world history as well as the imperial annal requires substantial preparation and endeavor, often an impressive, invaluable feat of erudition. It is therefore all the more disappointing that Africa continues to receive such short shrift.
A more promising development may be the rise of big history, resembling world history but extending it by light years, literally, connecting the immediacy of the planet’s past with the universe’s origins some 13.7 billion years ago. Continental shifts and drifts hundreds of millions of years old, combined with ice ages and other ecological transformations taking place 90,000 to 11,000 years ago, set the stage for the emergence of humans. In particular, big history provides a solar context for the Sahara’s unfolding, central to the region’s history. But once the discussion reaches Sumer, we are back to a very familiar narrative, and though Africa’s consideration is at times informed by more current scholarship, the continent remains a bit player in a much larger drama, its leading roles assigned to others.6
Whether world or imperial or big history, none is invested in ongoing research in Africa, where developments have been considerable. Substantial archaeological work has been underway in West Africa for decades, particularly in the middle Niger valley, and should scholars of world and big histories take note, they would need to seriously revise their accounts. For it was during the period of the Shang, Chou, Shin, Han, and Tang dynasties of China, the Vedic period in India, and the Mayans in central America, that another urban-based civilization flourished in West Africa, in the Middle Niger region. From the late first millennium BCE into the beginning of the second millennium CE, a series of communities were nurtured by a floodplain that at its apex covered more than 170,000 square kilometres, comparing favorably with Mesopotamia’s maximum range of cultivable land of 51,000 square kilometres, and ancient Egypt’s 34,000 square kilometers. Spanning the Iron Age (from the first millennium BCE well into the first millennium CE), the region was dotted with literally hundreds of urban sites characterized by a variety of crafts and productive capacities, constituting a collective center of human organization and activity, deserving its rightful place among world civilizations customarily acclaimed. Indeed, a number of the region’s six basins have yet to be adequately excavated, and even more urban settlements await discovery. Given its location, the early Middle Niger is critical to any serious investigation into the region’s subsequent history—precisely the present study’s major preoccupation. A consideration of what has been uncovered there is consequently both appropriate and necessary, bearing directly upon key issues reverberating well into the medieval period.7
To an appreciable extent, the history of civilization in the Middle Niger is a study of the multiple ways in which communities continually adjust to and engage with one of the more “variable and unpredictable” environments in the world.8 Indeed, the story of the Middle Niger connects directly with the celestial preoccupations of big history in that much of its climatic variability is explained by slight alterations in solar radiation, produced in turn by the intricacies of the sun’s cyclical patterns. The sun’s behavior, in concert with shifting distributions of the earth’s mass, resulted in such drastic changes that tenth millennium BCE conditions supporting teeming aquatic life together with lush flora and fauna, extending from the Middle Niger to what is now the Sahara Desert, had by 5,500 BCE undergone extensive desiccation, only to be followed by a massive dry period around 2,200 BCE, and yet another between 1,800 and 1,000 BCE. A firmament in the land had effectively taken shape, dividing Sahara and Savannah.
Though humans had entered the Middle Niger as early as 7,000 BCE, their first “serious” settlement in the region was not until 3,000 BCE.9 Still, it was only some 2,700 years later, between 300 BCE and 300 CE, that the Middle Niger experienced a “massive influx” of human populations, corresponding to a time of dramatic decline in precipitation in West Africa as a whole, the so-called Big Dry. Rainfall patterns in the Middle Niger would stabilize from 300 CE to 700 CE, leading to an important theme that would characterize not only the narrative of the Middle Niger, but West Africa and the continent as a whole: namely, repetitive, numerically significant patterns of human migratory activity. In the case of the Middle Niger, perhaps what is most arresting is the transfer of substantial populations from the Sahara into both the southern Sahel (sāḥil or “shore”) and the floodplain, a movement from very poor soils to those marginally less so.10 This points to one of the signature features of the region—the perpetual transgression of differentiated landscapes by diverse communities and cultures that is only one of many reasons for conjunctively reconsidering the histories of Sahara, Savannah, and Sahel.
Map 2: The Middle Niger Valley in Pre-Antiquity
In response to the stresses of meteorological transformations, far beyond the capacity of anyone on earth to comprehend, populations throughout West Africa packed their belongings and sought better conditions. For the Middle Niger, the result was the gradual rise of urban culture and society, a period during which the necessary elements of urban ...
