Enterprises
The Kingdom of Aksum
In the sixth century, the kingdom of Aksum (Axum) was doing what many elsewhere had
been doing: pursuing trade and empire. Despite the disintegration of the Roman Empire in
the 400s and the decline in world trade, Aksum's trade increased during that century. Its
exports of ivory, glass crystal, brass and copper items, and perhaps slaves, among other
things, had brought prosperity to the kingdom. Some people had become wealthy and
cosmopolitan. Aksum's port city on the Red Sea, Adulis, bustled with activity. Its agriculture
and cattle breeding flourished, and Aksum extended its rule to Nubia, across the Red Sea to
Yemen, and it had extended its rule to the northern Ethiopian Highlands and along the coast
to Cape Guardafui.
From Aksum's beginnings in the third century, Christianity there had spread. But at the peak
of Christianity's success, Aksum began its decline. In the late 600s, Aksum's trade was
diminished by the clash between Constantinople and the Sassanid Empire. The Sassanid
Empire clashed with Constantinople over trade on the Red Sea and expanded into Yemen,
driving Aksum out of Arabia. Then Islam united Arabia and began expanding. In the 700s,
Muslim Arabs occupied the Dahlak Islands just off the coast of Adulis, which had been ruled
by Aksum. The Arabs moved into the port city of Adulis, and Aksum's trade by sea ended.
Aksum was now cut off from much of the world. Greek- the language of trade - declined there.
Minted coins became rare. Paganism revived and mixed with Christianity. And it has been
surmised that the productivity of soil in the area was being diminished by over-exploitation
and the cutting down of trees. Taking advantage of Aksum's weakness, the Bedja people, who
had been living just north of Aksum, moved in. The people of Aksum, in turn, migrated into
the Ethiopian Highlands, where they overran small farmers and settled at Amhara, among
other nearby places. And with this migration a new Ethiopian civilization began.
West Africa
In West Africa, trade was giving rise to towns. There, on the fringes of the Sahara, arose a
kingdom and empire that its rulers called Wagadu. The people of this kingdom were the
Soninke - black people who spoke the language of Mande. Their king was called Ghana, and
Ghana became the name by which this kingdom and empire became known - ancient Ghana
rather than the modern state also called Ghana.
The kings of ancient Ghana were authoritarian. They inherited rule through their mother's side
of the family - matrilineal rather than patrilineal as with kings in Europe at the time - and they
claimed descent from an original ancestor whom they believed had first settled the land.
Ghana's king was the leader of a religious cult that was served by devoted priests, and the
king's subjects were obliged to view him as divine and as too exalted to communicate directly
with them.
Ghana's kings had enhanced their power and enriched themselves by exploiting the trade
passing through their territory. From the perspective of merchants they were not unlike
highway bandits, forcing from tradesmen a tax on the gold they carried. But the tax was
shrewder than robbery. Continuing robbery at will would have ended the arrival of gold on their
territory.
As Ghana's kings grew richer they conquered, forcing obedience from the kings of other tribes,
from whom they exacted tribute. They extended their rule to the gold producing regions to
their south, and they imposed a tax on gold production.
Ghana's major competitor was the Berber dominated city of Awdaghost to the northwest - a
city with an ample supply of water, surrounded by herds of cattle and where millet, wheat,
grapes, dates and figs were grown. The Berbers who dominated that city had wanted to make
it the major point of passage for caravan trading across the western Sahara. But in 990 Ghana
conquered the city, putting Ghana at the peak of its power.
Muslim Incursions
During Ghana's days of glory, Muslim tradesmen were coming south in caravans from places
like Sijilmasa, Tunis and Tripoli. From Sijilmasa the caravans had been going through
Taghaza to Awdaghost. From Tunis and Tripoli they had been going to Hausaland and the
Lake Chad region. They had been bringing salt southward, and they also carried cloth, copper,
steel, cowry shells, glass beads, dates and figs. And they brought slaves for sale.
The Muslims were literate while the Soninke and their kings were not. The Soninke left no
record of the doings of their kings. It was through Muslim writers that modern historians would
gather what information they could about Ghana.
The Muslims were offended to find people worshiping their king as a divinity rather than
worshipping Allah. The Muslims complained of people believing their kings to be the source of
life, sickness, health and death. The Muslim writer al-Bakre described a Ghana king as
having an army of 200,000 men, 40,000 of whom were archers. And he described the
presence in Ghana of small horses.
Among the Soninke, the town of Kumbi had become a commercial center alongside a town of
round mud-brick huts. Muslim tradesmen living there built stone houses and a number of
mosques. Some Muslims there served as ministers at the king's palace, and the town of
Kumbi became an intellectual center for western Africa.
Muslim writers described one king of Ghana as renowned for his great wealth and the splendor
of his court. The king held audience wearing fine fabrics and gold ornaments and bedecked
his animals and retainers in gold. People in the north of Africa spoke of the king of Ghana as
the richest monarch in the world.
But the power of the kings of Ghana was destined to end. Muslims in western Africa united
behind the Almoravids - a Muslim dynasty that ruled in Morocco and Spain in the 11th and
12th centuries. A religious movement among the Muslims known as the Sanhaja inspired the
Almoravids and others to a jihad (holy war), and Muslim Berbers in the Sahara joined an effort
toward conversions and war against Ghana. The leader of the Sanhaja movement and army in
the Sahara area, Abu Bakr, captured Awdaghost in 1054. And in 1076, after many battles, he
captured the city of Kumbi.
Almoravid domination of Ghana lasted only a few years, but the Almoravids held onto control
of the desert trade that had been dominated by Ghana. Without control of the gold trade, the
power of Ghana's kings declined further. They had, meanwhile, converted to Islam - while
holding onto the religious rituals and myths that justified their rule to their subjects. Ghana's
kings allowed Berber herdsmen to move into Soninke homelands, and these herdsmen began
overgrazing Ghana's lands. Ghana's agricultural land became worn and less able to support as
many people as before. Subject kings and tribes broke away from Ghana's rule. The king of
the Sosso people, in neighboring Kaniaga, turned the tables on Ghana, and in 1203 the
Sosso overran Ghana's capital city, Kumbi.
The Mandingo Empire
After their victory over Ghana, the Sosso expanded against the Mandingo (or Mande) - a
people who spoke Mande and lived on fertile farmland around Wangara. The Sosso king,
Sumaguru Kante, put to death all of the sons of the Mandingo ruler but one, Sundjata, who
appeared to be an insignificant cripple. But Sundjata rallied the Mandingo. A guerrilla army
built by Sundjata overwhelmed the Sosso and in 1235 killed their king, Sumaguru Kante.
Sundjata annexed Ghana in 1240, and he took control of the gold trade routes. Merchants
moved out of Kumbi to another commercial city farther north: Walata. And in small groups the
Soninke people began emigrating from what had been their homeland.
The empire that the Sosso built, called Mali, gained control over the salt trade from Taghaza
and the copper trade of the Sahara. The gold trade was a source of wealth for Mali, and so too
was trade in food: sorghum, millet and rice. And regarding trade, Mali dominated the town of
Timbuktu, nine miles north of the Niger River, which had risen a century or two before as a
point of trade for desert caravans.
After Sundjata's death in 1255 more conquests were made by his successors - Mansa Uli and
then Sakura. Sakura had been a freed slave serving in the royal household and had seized
power after the ruling family had become weakened by quarreling among themselves. It is
surmised that Sakura was responsible for Mali's expansion to Tekrur in the west and to Gao in
the east.
By the 1300s, Mali's kings had converted to Islam, which gave them advantages of good will
in diplomacy and in commerce. But, again, the pagan rituals and artifacts that were a part of
the ideology and justification of rule were maintained. And the king's loyal subjects continued
their traditional prostrations and covering themselves with dust to display their humility.
By the 1300s, Muslim Mandingo merchants were trading as far east as the city-states in
Hausaland and beyond to Lake Chad. Islam was spreading with the trade of its merchants,
and it appears that in the 1300s or 1400s the kings of Hausaland converted to Islam. But
when a Mali king tried to pressure people in the gold mining region around Wangara to
convert, a disruption in the production of gold was threatened, and the pressure to convert
was withdrawn.
One well known Mali emperor who was Muslim was Mansa Musa, who ruled from 1312-1337.
On record is Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca, his entourage described as including 500
slaves with gold staffs and 100 camels each with 300 pounds of gold. Mansa Mura is described
as spending lavishly in the bazaars of Cairo and his spending is said to have increased the
supply of gold to an extent that its price depreciated on the Cairo exchange. And, as usual,
scholars were not immune from being influenced by wealth, Mansa Musa bringing a collection
of them back with him from Mecca. Mali was literate, but only insofar as it employed Muslim
scribes at the court of its kings. As in Europe, the common people of Mali were not yet
expected to read and write.
The Songhai Rebellion and Mali's Decline
Mali reached its peak in fame and fortune in the 1300s. Then weak and incompetent kings
inherited power. Late in the 1300s the old problem of dynastic succession brought quarrels
that weakened the Mali kingship and gave others opportunity.
The others in this instance were the Songhai people, who lived along the middle of the Niger
River and monopolized fishing and canoe transport there. Trade at Gao had brought Islam to
the Songhai. Some Songhai royalty had converted to Islam, as had an unknown percentage of
Songhai commoners. Mali control over the Songhai capital, Gao, had always been tentative,
and the spirit of independence had not died among Songhai kings. A Songhai king led his
people in rebellion. The rebellion disrupted Mali's trade on the Niger River. Mali's empire
suffered as the Songhai sacked and occupied Timbuktu in 1433-34. In 1464 a Songhai king,
Sonni 'Ali took power, and again Timbuktu was attacked, Sonni 'Ali capturing the city after a
great loss of life. Five years later, Sonni 'Ali conquered the town of Jenne which had been
thought impregnable. In his twenty-eight years of military campaigning, the victorious Songhai
king won the title of King of Kings. He dominated trade routes and the great grain producing
region of the Niger river delta. Sonni 'Ali's competitor, the Mali empire, was deteriorating, and
the Mali empire was to die in the 1600s.
Benin Exports Slaves
Benin was a city that dated back to the eleventh century - and no relation to the West African
nation of Benin of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Benin was a large city for its time -
a walled city several kilometers wide in a forested region inland from where the Niger River
emptied into the Atlantic. In the mid-1400s the ruler of Benin, Ewuare, built up his military
and began expanding. Captives taken in battle he traded to the Portuguese. Benin's empire
reached about 190 miles (300 kilometers) in width by the early 1500s. Then it stopped
expanding, and with this it had no more captives to sell as slaves, while selling slaves to the
Portuguese was being taken up by others.
South Central Africa
Some scholars theorize that Bantu speaking people had moved south from around the Benue
River in western Africa into south-central Africa. By the 900s, the pastoral and Hamitic
speaking Tutsi were migrating southward, into east-central Africa, to Rwanda, near Ukerewe, in
centuries to come to be known as Lake Victoria. There, it is said, the Tutsi introduced cattle
raising, iron-working, new crops, kingship and caste divisions. The people whom the Tutsi
overran were Bantu speakers - the Hutu - and the Tutsi made vassals of some of the Hutu,
giving them cattle in exchange for services and loyalty.
Before the 1100s agriculture was practiced in much of south-central Africa, except in the
interior of southern Angola, close to the Kalahari Desert. In south-central Africa, bananas were
grown. This was tropical woodland and savana, where yams and sugar cane were grown.
Beans, groundnuts, sorghum and other millets were cultivated in areas of savanna. And
people augmented their food production by hunting, fishing, gathering grubs and by raising
chickens, pigs and, in a few places, cattle. There was also pottery making, wickerwork and salt
production. At Munza were iron mines. People in this region of Africa preferred using salt and
metal, including copper, as currency for trading. By the 1300s, communities in Katanga were
uniting into a kingdom of farmers, fishermen and crafts people, and they were trading in dry
fish and products made of metal.
In some of the more remote parts of south-central Africa were villages that were still
egalitarian, but in the more densely populated areas monarchs had arisen. These monarchs
associated their rule with spirits, and their rule was supported by rituals and priests not totally
removed from sorcery, divination, healing and fertility rites. And those supporting monarchical
rule believed in the sacredness of lineage and royal blood of their monarchs. A monarch had
underlings who advised him and went with him in his visits to the villages where he claimed
rule. He had the keepers of emblems, a military chief and warriors to support his rule. He had
slaves. And from his subjects the monarch received taxes with which to maintain his operation
and to buy what he needed to maintain what he considered an appropriate lifestyle.
By the 1400s small empires thrived in south-central Africa. One was centered at Luba. Another
was centered at Lunda - where, it appears, people learned metal working from Luba. A third
empire was centered in the kingdom of the Kongo, which dominated areas such as Loango,
Kakong, Ngoi and Kisama.
Eastern Africa
Those who remained in Nubia after conquests by the Soba and by the Aksumites lived for long
periods in peace and cooperation with Egypt, including returning to Egypt runaway slaves.
They traded with Egypt, and some genetic diffusion with the Egyptians occurred. Between the
ninth and twelfth centuries, Nubia became more Arabic and more Muslim. And blacks from
Nubia filled the ranks of Egypt's military.
Egypt went through rule by the Fatimids, followed by the turmoil of the Christian crusades and
rule by Saladin and his Ayubbid dynasty. In 1172 Christian Nubia joined Europe's Crusaders by
attacking the Ayubbids, and an Ayubbid army successfully counterattacked. In 1250 the
Mamelukes replaced the Ayubbids, and the more aggressive Mamelukes warred frequently,
their armies diminishing Nubian populations and taking many slaves from Nubia. Nubia split
into two kingdoms, Makouria and Alwa. In the 1300s Makouria collapsed. Then in the 1400s,
pastoralists from Egypt overran Alwa, and this was followed by civil war there. The Muslim
invasions were accompanied by anti-Christian violence, and by 1500 little Christianity was left
in what had been Nubia.
Christianity and Islam in Ethiopia
Since the 900s, people in and around the Ethiopian highlands had been benefiting from trade
with port cities such as Adulis on the Red Sea, Zeila and Berbera on the Gulf of Aden, and
Mogadishu, Merca and Brava on the shore of the Indian Ocean. These were towns populated
by Muslims, and inland were Muslim and Christian communities, often neighboring each other.
The Muslims had a strong sense of community and generally participated more in trade than
the Christians - trade being largely in Muslim hands. The Christians were under various
chiefdoms, many were farmers, and a few of them were prosperous and had slaves.
In the area was also a Jewish community, the Falashas, who spoke Ge'ez and knew no
Hebrew. They were unfamiliar with the Talmuds that had been produced in West Asia, but they
claimed to be descended from the ten tribes banished from Israel.
Around the year 1270, at Amhara, in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, a new Christian
dynasty, the Solomonids, was founded by Yikunno-Amlak, a conqueror who was described as
a king of kings. His dynasty was believed to be a continuation of the Christian kingdom that
had been in Aksum centuries before. Yikunno-Amlak was to be described as descended from
Solomon's son, Manelik and the Queen of Sheba. His Christian subjects believed that they
were God's chosen people, that they were maintaining purity in Christian belief, and that they
were members of a second Israel.
The Solomonids addressed the problem of monarchical succession by putting
Yikunno-Amlak's male descendants in a mountain retreat guarded by several hundred
warriors. There Yikunno-Amlak's descendants remained in isolation, studied their faith, wrote
poetry and composed sacred music as they awaited selection as heir to the throne.
It was under Yikunno-Amlak's grandson, Amda Seyon (1314-44), that the Solomonids gained
military dominance in Ethiopia - Solomonid rule stretching from Adulis in the north to Bali in
the south. The success of Christians against Muslims in Ethiopia did not sit well with the
Muslims of Egypt. In Ethiopia, Amda-Seyon became concerned about retributions against his
fellow Christians in Egypt. He demanded freedom of worship and other civil rights for
Christians in Egypt, and he was prepared to fight Egypt and to ally himself with Christian
Europe to end Muslim supremacy in West Asia, but no such war took place. The Mamelukes of
Egypt remained interested primarily in events in the eastern Mediterranean. Christians in
Egypt were becoming more outnumbered by Muslims, and this would continue into the 1400s,
with the Muslim majority increasingly blaming Christians and other minorities for their troubles.
In the 1400s the power of the Solomonids in Ethiopia declined as various Muslim communities
rebelled against it. Under the king Beide-Maryan (1468-78), the Solomonids suffered their
first serious military defeat. And after 1478 the Solomonids were weakened by a conflict over
succession - their attempt to solve the problem of succession apparently having failed. War
between two Solomonid princes continued for several years. Muslims took advantage of
Solomonid weakness, declared a holy war, and the Solomonid Empire collapsed. But a
Solomonid king remained, a local king rather than a king of kings, the Solomonids would rise
again, the last of them to be Haile Selassie in the 20th century.
Farther South
In the 700s and 800s, Arab traders looking for opportunity were moving southward into
coastal towns such as Mogadishu, Merca and Brava. They participated in the trade that
traversed the Indian Ocean. As in Nubia, intermarriages with local blacks occurred. Arab
tradesmen made themselves dominant in the region, and a few Arabs migrated farther south
along the coast, the island of Pemba, for example, becoming part Muslim by the 900s.
Along the coast below Mogadishu, Merca and Brava, Africa remained predominately black.
There were hunters, fishermen, growers of sorghum, millet, rice, cucumbers, coconuts, sugar
and bananas, and some were raising cattle. Some hunter-gatherers integrated with the cattle
herders and agriculturists around them - societies ruled by kings who believed that they were
divine but vulnerable to assassination if they were oppressive.
Inland, about 180 miles from the eastern coast, on a plateau sparse in trees, was Zimbabwe,
where Bantu speakers were living sometime between the 5th and 10th centuries - the Bantu
speaking people having replaced the Sa (Bushmen) whom they had driven into the desert.
The Bantu speakers had come in two waves, the last wave being a pastoral and agricultural
people who built the stone structures that were to be known in the 20th century as the ruins of
Zimbabwe, of an architecture unknown to any people elsewhere in the world - the oldest of
which dated from the 700s.
Gold that was mined near Zimbabwe was taken to trading towns along the coast. So too were
leopard skins, rhinoceros horn, ambergris, slaves and ivory - the ivory of the African elephant
more in demand than the harder ivory of the Indian elephant. Joining this trade was iron
taken from deposits around the towns of Mombasa and Malindi. Traders on the eastern coast
of Africa, many of them blacks, profited from a rise in trade with Asia, and from India the
Africans imported silks, cottons and glassware.
From the 1100s, Arabs began arriving in greater number in this coastal area. In the 1200s
Mombasa became staunchly Muslim, and a Muslim dynasty was established at Kilwa. By the
mid-1200s, Kilwa controlled the trade from Sofala to its south, Sofala being a point of
departure for gold from inland.
Meanwhile, economic activity in Zimbabwe was predominantly cattle raising, while the wealth
of its king grew from trade in gold. With his wealth the king was able to maintain a powerful
army and to extend his authority across a variety of principalities - a hundred miles to the
west and to the Indian Ocean in the east. During the 1300s and into the 1400s Zimbabwe was
the richest state on Africa's eastern coast, but it was also declining: Zimbabwe was losing its
timber. Its lands were overgrazed and farmlands were eroding. Zimbabwe declined as a
power, and it was abandoned around 1450. Successor states arose: Torwa to its west,
Changamire just to its north, and Mutapa on the Zambezi River. Mutapa's economy was also
based on cattle and wealth from the gold trade, and Mutapa expanded locally by military
conquest.
Toward the end of the 1400s, Kilwa's preeminence on the east coast was fading as dynastic
struggles sapped its strength. Kilwa was losing the trade in gold from Sofala to Mutaba. And
Mutaba's gold trading attracted the Portuguese, who had begun sailing along Africa's eastern
coast. Trade between Africans and the Europeans was on the rise, in slaves as well as gold.
Of Great Note:
After the Muslim lived among the Black African, Married Black African Women, Had Children in
Africa by Black African Women, Ate The Black Africans Food in Africa, And Acted and Behaved
Themselves as though They Were the True Friend of Black Africans in Africa. They Realize a
Profit Could Be Made From African Human Cargo From the Teaching of Mohomed. Therefore,
These Muslim which were formerly the Sadducees in Israel which were kicked out of Isreal by
Queen Salome Alexander moved to Arabi and became the Sepharic Arab Muslims, and in
Spain they Became the Sepharics who later became the Sephardic Jews. These Beastly
Muslim People in conjunction with the Jewish People Raped Black African Children, Raped
Black African Men, Raped Black African Women,and Feasted on The Black African Slaves by
Eating the Black African Slaves. These inhumane muslims and jew began the Cruel Horrible
Dishonorable Devasting Detestable Human Cargo Slave Trade of Africa. These Muslims used
their mulato sons to hunt the Africans down in Africa and captured them and then sent them
off in Jewish Slaves Ships to all Parts of the World to be sold as Human Slave Cargo, and for
Food for their Diet. The Largest of these Slave Merchant Ship Companies wast the East
Atlantic Trade Company, which was and is Headquartered in Amsterdam (Europe). This Slave
Trading and Slave Shipping Company is Now Known as Phillips Electronics, The electronic
maker of Very Well Known electric appliances in the United State, England, France, Spain,
Russia and throughout the world.
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