Ancient African History: The Ancient Kingdom of Ghana (West Africa Part 1)

Some Background to this Post:

 Hello all, this post and others to follow have gotten sidetracked due to other life commitments, but here it is for any that are interested. The previous post dealt with Ancient Southeast Africa, the Land of the Zanj approximately where Tanzania lies today. Now I am coming with the history of Western Africa, these are the states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. This information came from a book I read on Ancient African history, and newer sources that I found online.

I think we can learn a few telling things from this history and others like it, namely:

Much of the economy of the Western African states, especially as far as trade with other states relied on Gold, and slavery. Gold, and slaves were sent to the Northern Berber, and Arab states, whereas they would obtain such things as salt, cloth, dried fruits, etc., towards the South.

These people had no written language and history of their own, most of the information comes from Arab historians.

These people were able to make simple dwellings and have a simple form of government with kings. They were capable of agriculture, as well as amassing large armies armed with swords, daggers, and bows and arrows, which they used to fight with, or subjugate their neighbours and grow in size and power. 

Quarrels with neighbours were continual, either with Berber people to the North, or other Negro kingdoms vying for power.

This seems to be reflective of much of sub-Saharan Ancient African history. The following is the basic history:

Chinguetti, a town that was part of the Ghana Empire (Image Source from Wikipedia)

Note due to a lack of time I am mostly offering the account found in the old book I was reading about African history I was reading. Looking into more modern evidence is beyond the scope of what I’m able to offer here.

History:

The Ancient State of Ghana, properly known as Wagadou (Ghana was the title of its ruler) was about 1000 miles north of the modern one, located in the area of present-day southeastern Mauritania and western Mali, and it had nothing to do with the modern state. The modern state took its name from this empire due to its renown. Ghana was the first of the three Western African states, to rise to power. The others being Mali, and Songhai. The people there had no written language and the history was passed down orally from generation to generation. Aside from that much of the knowledge comes from Arab travelers, who had either been there or merely heard of what it was like there.

A writer called El Zuhri wrote that the people of Ghana attacked neighbours ‘who knew not iron and fight with bars of ebony’. The Ghanaians defeat them ‘because they fight with swords and lances.’ The first definite thing we heard about Ghana comes in the eighth century when the Arab writer El-Fazari tells us that the Arabs in Morocco sent an expedition to raid Ghana which he calls ‘the land of Gold.’ This was in about 734 AD.

To the north of the land controlled by Ghana was a town where middlemen acted between Arab and Ghanaian traders. An important commodity for the Ghanaians was salt which could not be acquired from the lands South. Prior to the discovery of the Americas, Africa was the main source of gold for the Europeans. Gold was mined by a Negro people, from an area called ‘Wangara’ to the Southwest of the land controlled by Ghana. It was these people that really wanted the salt, and sometimes it is said they would trade salt for an equal weight of gold. It is said that that trade was done by merchants leaving goods at the border, then leaving and waiting for the miners to arrive with gold. The merchants would come back and if they were happy, they would take it, if not they leave it and would want more gold. Apparently, there this is how the trade worked, without verbal communication. 

The king of Ghana, apparently, was intelligent enough to realize that he must control the supply of gold for it to be valuable. He would be careful about trading too much so that its value and demand would decrease. The empire also charged taxes on all trades coming in, and it was based on this that the kingdom’s wealth grew.

El Bekri gives the most detailed information from his book in 1067 AD. Although he did not travel to Ghana himself, he must have had good information from traveling merchants there. Apparently, from his book, we know that the king of Ghana could put 200,000 warriors on the field, with more than 40,000 of them armed with bow and arrow. Those not armed with bow and arrow would probably have had iron weapons, swords, and daggers for hand-to-hand fighting.

The capital city was two towns a few kilometers apart. One called El Ghaba, meaning the forest, where the king lived and held court. The king had a residence consisting of a fortress with several huts with domed roofs; the whole being enclosed by a wall. The ordinary citizens, however, lived in huts made of acacia wood.

The other city was built partly of stone houses and partly of straw thatched mud houses. This is where the Muslim population lived, the merchants, lawyers, religious teachers and others who had come to live in Ghana. The site of this city is at Kumbi Saleh 1000 miles north of modern Ghana.  It is there that Mosques and houses have been excavated from desert sand, built of blocks of stone cemented with mud. Some of the houses were grand, two storeys high and with many rooms. The town was large, about 1 square mile. The style and size of the buildings, and their contents gives an impression of great prosperity.

Glass weights for weighing gold, pottery, verses from the Koran painted on stone tablets, a fine pair of scissors, all of which must have come from the north, together with farming tools and weapons of war which must’ve been made locally. The site of el Ghaba has not been discovered.

Very little is mentioned of the people of Ghana, we have learned that they grew crops, millet is mentioned, also they caught fish. They were required by their king to fight troublesome neighbours or to make raids for slaves. Trade in slaves was a secondary source of income to Ghana.

Culturally, from such things as descriptions of how the kings would be buried, it is evident that the people there stuck to their own traditions in spite of the Muslims trying to convert them.

Ghana and its people, the Soninke, had to fight continual quarrels with their neighbours, the Lemtuna and Jedala, who lived to the north. The Lemtuna, for example, captured an important trading town called Audoghast, where gold and slaves were sent northward to North Africa, and salt, and dried fruit were sent southward. The Lemtuna were a Tuareg, Berber people, and not Negros like the Soninke.

The Ghana Empire at its greatest extent

The Decline of the Ghana Empire:

To the North were a group of Muslims who did not think they were strict enough adherents of Islam, now known as the Almoravids, so they became fanatical and thought everyone else should believe as they do. In 1042 AD they set out on a holy war (jihad). In 1054 they reached Audoghast and captured it, and offered two choices to the Lemtuna, conversion or death. The Lemtuna mostly opted for the former. The Almoravids eventually grew in strength and attacked Ghana. The Soninke were powerful enough to keep them out for a while, but Kumbi Saleh fell in 1076-1077.

The Almoravids were not, however, strong enough to keep the people they conquered, partly due to their splitting of forces and sending their armies to Morocco and Spain. In 1087, their leader Abu Bakr died fighting in the Sudan, and they regained their independence. The years under the Almoravids, had weakened their links with people it controlled. And the authority over them was lost. Some people split off and separated from Ghana and the empire shrank and never recovered.

 Ibn Khaldun, an Arab historian writing in the 14^th century, when the Ghana empire had already decayed, wrote that the Arabs had ‘spread their dominion over the Negros, devastated their territory and plundered their property. Having submitted them to a poll tax, they imposed on them a tribute, and compelled a great many of them to become Muslims. The authority of the kings of Ghana being destroyed, their neighbours, the Sosso, took their country and reduced the inhabitants to slavery’. The final downfall occurred in 1203, when Sumanguru, the greatest Sosso ruler captured Ghana and enslaved the people. But in 1235 AD, when attempting to subdue another growing power, the Mandingo, he was defeated and killed.

Ghana became the territory of Sundiata, the Mandingo ruler, and part of the empire of Mali.

Controversy Over the Original Rulers of the Empire:

It is interesting that there have been quite a few historians who ascribe to the hypothesis that the original ruling people of the Ghana empire were actually Tuareg, Berber people. Several others dispute this, and there are records of them being  Negro people, but unfortunately I don’t have time to look into this controversy in detail.