Precolonial Black Africa

Cheikh Anta Diop, Harold Salemson

• Editore: Lawrence Hill Books
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781613747452
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: African History

This comparison of the political and social systems of Europe and black Africa from antiquity to the formation of modern states demonstrates the black contribution to the development of Western civilization.

Chapter Five

POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

POWER OF THE AFRICAN EMPIRES

Before undertaking a detailed analysis of the political organization of precolonial Africa, we must show the actual power and the extent of the African empires. These factors are often minimized, or left vague. Insofar as there exists a certain persistent tendency to allude to more or less mythical White conquerors to explain African civilizations, it is worthwhile to reestablish the truth strictly based on facts and documents, with regard to the relationship between White and Black cultures toward the close of the First Millennium—when Africa’s history was beginning just about everywhere.¹

Delafosse, quoting Ibn Khaldun, relates that, as early as the eighth century, after the conquest of North Africa by the Umayyads, Arab traders crossed the Sahara as far as the Sudan.

STRENGTH AND EXTENT OF THE EMPIRES

Ghana

Henceforth new connections, never again interrupted, were being forged with the outside, particularly the Arab Orient and the Mediterranean world. These first traders discovered that the Sudan was governed by a Black emperor whose capital was Ghana. The empire at its highest point extended from Djaka on the west of the Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean and, north to south, from the Sahara to the edge of Mali. The gold-rich region of Upper Senegal, centered around Gadiaru, Garentel, and Iresni, belonged to the Empire. In Bakri’s day the outlying village of Aluken was an Eastern border territory governed by the son of the late Emperor Bessi, uncle of the reigning Tunka Min.

The white populations then inhabiting the land were under the strict authority of the Blacks. In 990 the Berber center of the Lemtunas, Aoudaghast, was governed by a Black farba who levied taxes, tariff duties, etc., in the name of the Emperor on the goods and merchandise of the city’s population, made up almost exclusively of Berbers and Arabs; these two groups moreover hated each other at the time.

Immediately following the occupation of North Africa, the first Umayyads sent an army to attempt the conquest of the Empire of Ghana. It was defeated, but its survivors were not executed: they were allowed to settle on the land and live there in the same conditions as others. They were known as the El Honneihîn, a portion of whom broke away and settled in the village of Silla, on the Senegal River, where the ruler was already Islamized. In 1067, during Bakri’s time, the El Honneihîn minority had practically been assimilated into the Black society whose religion it shared. Those who had settled along the river were called El Faman.² Can there possibly be an etymological link between that name and Laman, Lam-Toro; heir of the Toro? Is that, perhaps, the White origin often claimed by the Tuculors and, in particular, the ruling dynasty of the Lam-Toros? However that may be, it was through peaceful intermarriage that this white minority must have fused with the Black element.

Not until the decline of Ghana did it cease to rule Aoudaghast, after the attacks of the Almoravides in 1076. While the Berbers remained vassals of the Black emperor of Ghana for centuries, the Almoravide revenge on Ghana lasted only ten years; it ended in 1087 with the death of Abubeker-Ben-Omar, killed by the arrow of a Black warrior inside the borders of present-day Mauritania. The Almoravides displayed extreme cruelty at the time of the taking of Ghana: goods were looted, the inhabitants slaughtered. After this ten-year interruption, Ghana was once again to be attacked by the Sosso vassals but succeeded in holding its own until the siege of the capital by Sundiata Keita in 1240.

The Empire of Ghana, according to Bakri, was defended by two hundred thousand warriors, forty thousand of them archers. Its power and reputation, renowned as far as Baghdad in the East, were no mere legend: it was actually a phenomenon attested to by the fact that for 1250 years a succession of Black emperors occupied the throne of a country as vast as all of Europe, with no enemy from without nor any internal tensions able to dismember it.

The capital was already a cosmopolitan and international city; it had its own Arab quarter where Islam existed alongside the traditional cult, before the conversion of the royal dynasty and the people: in Bakri’s time the city already boasted a dozen mosques located in the Arab sector, with their imam, muezzins, and salaried “lectors.”³ It had a large number of jurists and scholars. Ten thousand meals, cooked over a thousand bundles of wood, were served daily. The Emperor himself attended these feasts to which he treated the populace outside his palace.

The Empire first opened itself to the world-at-large through commerce; it already enjoyed international repute, which would be inherited and extended by the future empires of Mali and Songhai. But domestic slavery at this time was rife in African society: one could sell his fellow man to another citizen or a foreigner. Which explains why Berber and Arab merchants, grown rich since settling at Aoudaghast, though still vassals of the Black soveriegn, could acquire Black slaves on the open market. Some individuals in the city owned as many as a thousand slaves.

This shows the peaceful means by which the white world could possess Black slaves.⁴ It was not through conquest, as has often been asserted. These empires, defended when necessary by hundreds of thousands of warriors, and having their centralized political and administrative organization, were much too powerful for a single traveler, thousands of miles from home, to try any sort of violence against them. The reality of the matter was much simpler, as evidenced by the preceding; for reasons to be explained later on, slavery would cease to exist in the white world, especially Europe, while still subsisting in the Black. One sees here the complex facts that it has often been very tempting to use so as to obscure certain points of history. All the white minorities living in Africa might own Black slaves, but slaves and white masters alike were all subjects of a Black Emperor: they were all under the same African political power. No historian worth his salt can permit the obscuring of this politico-social context, so that only the one fact of Black slavery emerges from it.

Mali

The boundaries of the Empire of Mali stretched from Kaoga (Gao) all the way to the Atlantic and from the Sahara to the tropical forest. According to Ibn Khaldun, the Emperor of Mali reigned over the entire Sahara: “… Mansa Mussa was a powerful sovereign whose authority extended as far as the desert near Uargla.”⁵

In Bakri’s view, Ifrikya (North Africa) was bounded by a line parallel to the Equator, passing through Sijjilmessa,⁶ and had the same universalist tendency, the same cosmopolitan character as Ghana. The capital city, Mali, also had its own Arab quarter, its mosques and jurists, its Muslim cemetery, etc. The Emperor, Mansa Kankan Mussa, made a celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca (1324–1325). He exchanged embassies with Morocco, maintaining commercial and diplomatic ties with Egypt, Portugal, and Bornu.

There were African interpreters in Egypt. Ibn Khaldun, speaking of the frontiers of Mali which extended as far as the Atlantic Ocean, mentions the name of El Hajj Yunos, a Tekrurian interpreter in Cairo.⁷

Africans were already in the habit of traveling to North Africa, and sometimes settling there to study. Mali’s international activity thus increased. Delafosse was quite right to be impressed by the might of this nation.

Meanwhile, Gao had recovered its independence between the death of Gongo (Kankan) Mussa and the accession of Suleiman Mansa, and approximately one century later, the Mandingo Empire began to decline under the attacks of Songhai, while preserving enough power and prestige so that its sovereign could meet on an equal footing with the King of Portugal, then at the height of his glory.⁸

The might of the Empire was such that the Arabs at times called on it for military aid. Such was the case, according to Khaldun, of El Mamer, who fought the Arabo-Berber tribes from the region of Uargla, in the North Sahara. He appealed to Kankan Mussa, on the latter’s return from Mecca, to come to his aid militarily. Khaldun also tells of the size of the Moroccan embassy in Mali and the interest the Sultan of Morocco displayed in it.

The Maghreban sultan even had prepared a selection of the finest products of his realm and entrusted to Ali Ibn-Ghanem, Emir of the Mâkil, the task of transporting this truly royal gift to the sultan of the Blacks. A deputation made up of the highest-ranking individuals in the empire accompanied Ibn-Ghanem.⁹

Contrary to the notions prevailing today, the relationship then existing between Whites and Blacks could not have been those of masters to slaves. A passage from Ibn Battuta, who visited that very Empire of Mali, clearly reveals the state of mind and the pride of Africans of this period (1352). The border regions of the Empire, such as Ualata, at the edge of the Sahara, were governed by Black farbas who levied customs duties and other taxes on caravans bringing merchandise into the country. Upon arrival, the merchants had to clear administrative formalities with them, before being allowed to carry on their trade. It was in such circumstances that Ibn Battuta, accompanying one of these caravans, met the farba of Ualata, Hussein.

Our merchants stood up in his presence and, even though they were close to him, he spoke to them through a third person. This was a mark of the little consideration he had for them and I was so unhappy at this that I regretted bitterly having come to a country whose inhabitants display such bad manners and give evidence of such contempt for white men.¹⁰

Ibn Battuta was an eyewitness; it is difficult to contradict him regarding the feelings and attitudes he attributes to the speaker. But, if the pride and dignity of the farba are beyond question, the contemptuous intentions attributed to him by Battuta seem to derive from the latter’s ignorance of the proper ceremonials governing receptions and audiences of any African chieftain. As we have already seen in chapter IV, the latter addresses a crowd only through a herald; this was how the farba must have acted at his own court in Ualata.

The white minorities who lived in the Empire at the time of Ghana were now, in even greater numbers, under the rule of Mali: the Ullimidden, located on the bend of the Niger, the Medeza, near Ras-el-Mâ, and all the Berber tribes living in Mauritania, as evidenced by this passage from Mohammed Hamidullah, in an article entitled “Africa Discovered America before Christopher Columbus,” based on a contemporary text:¹¹

Iban Fadallâh al-Umarîy (d.1348) has left us an account of an attempt to reach America from West Africa. Of his voluminous encyclopedia, Masâlik al-absãd, only a minute fragment has so far been published. What follows is an excerpt from the fourth volume of this work (MS. Asasafia, Istanbul, fol. 18b, 19a, 19b, 23b):

Chapter Ten, concerning Mâli and its dependencies … “In these regions there is no one deserving the name of king, unless it be the sovereign of Ghânah, who is a kind of viceroy of the Emperor of Mâli, although in his own domain he is like a veritable king. To the north of Mali, there are white Berbers who live as his subjects. These are the Yantasar, Yantafrâs, Maddûsah, and Lamtûnah tribes. They have their own cheikhs, who rule them, except for the Yantasar who have their own kings, vassals of the Emperor of Mali.”

In actuality, when far from their homeland, the Arabs were often led by their isolation to adapt to the Black African milieu. Some of them thus traditionally took on the role of jesters at royal African courts. Though never before emphasized, this aspect of the relations between the two cultures was no less ancient or general. Khaldun thus relates the story of two Arab courtiers, Abu-Ishac el Toneijen-El-Mâmer, who were part of Mansa Mussa’s entourage on his return from Mecca.

We were pa...