East African City-states

East African City-states

The Bantu migration from the central Sahara, perhaps the defining event in the history of Africa south of the Sahara, brought people to the region of East Africa as the nucleus of the emerging city-states. From the 10th century, Arab traders noticed the importance of such settlements to their trade.

From the onset the city-states were fiercely independent, and no East African empires emerged in the way that Ghana, Mali, and Songhai did in the west. As Richard Hooker wrote in Civilizations in Africa: The Swahili Kingdoms: “The major Swahili city-states were Mogadishu, Barawa, Mombasa (Kenya), Gedi, Pate, Malindi, Zanzibar, Kilwa, and Sofala in the far south.

These city-states were Muslim and cosmopolitan and they were all politically independent of one another; nothing like a Swahili empire or hegemony was formed around any of these city-states. In fact they were more like competitive companies or corporations each vying for the lion’s share of African trade.”


However while the Arabs provided much of the impetus for economic and cultural development, the original settlements were definitely rooted among Africans. Joseph E. Harris writes in Africans and Their History that “the most important pre-Islamic commercial town on the coast seems to have been Rhapta, about which little is known except that it was the center for the export of ivory that Arab merchants controlled. Rhapta was probably located on the northern coast of Tanganyika [now Tanzania].”

The culture of the region became increasingly diverse, as Persians and Indians would join the Bantu Africans and the Arabs in the city-states. When Idi Amin Dada drove the Indians from what is now Uganda during his rule (1971–79), he was ending an Indian presence in his country that had its roots in the first traders from India hundreds of years before.

While ivory, sandalwood, and gold were important exports, tragically the largest part of the economy was the slave trade. Zanzibar and Mombasa became the eastern terminus points for slaves the Arabs took out of Africa for shipment to Arabia and Yemen.

Kilwa ruins located in Tanzania

Kilwa emerged by the 12th century as perhaps the most powerful of the city-states, containing a mosque made from coral. The great Arab traveler Ibn Batuta stopped in Kilwa in 1331. It was ruled, as Harris notes, by the Shirazis, who had originally left the Persian city of Shiraz and intermarried with the Bantu population. Kilwa spread its influence south into the region of Zimbabwe and became a decisive factor in the trade in southern Africa as well.

Symbolic of the wide-ranging trade was the voyage from Malindi to China in 1414. On that trip, the ruler of the city-state of Malindi sent a live giraffe to the Ming emperor of China, Emperor Yongle (Yunglo). It was the early 15th century that saw the great Ming dynasty exploring fleets sailing from China, perhaps even as far as the Americas, under Admiral Zheng He.

Admiral Zheng would ultimately make seven historic expeditions from 1405 to 1433. The Chinese fleets made several stops on the East African coasts, making the Swahili city states part of a vast panoceanic trading economy. Trade was determined by the prevailing winds of the monsoon seasons. From November to March, Arabs, Indians, and Persians would sail south toward the Swahili coast and make their return voyages north between July and September.

The Indian Ocean trade would be monopolized by Arabs until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498. It would mark the beginning of the end of the prosperous East African city-states. Mocambique, spelled also as Mozambique, would not be free from Portugal’s imperial rule until 1975.

Hausa City-states

Hausa City-states

The early origin of the Hausa people is shrouded in mystery. Some scholars believe they originally came from the Sahara, as did the Bantu, while others feel that they migrated from the region of Lake Chad. Still another school believes they were the region’s original inhabitants.

The rise of the Hausa city-states dates from approximately 500 to 700 c.e. In a unique arrangement, the city-states were centered on their place in the general Hausa society and did not owe their prominence to specific political power as in the Bantu (Bantu) Mutapa kingdom.

Cotton grew readily in the great plains of these states, and they became the primary producers of cloth, weaving and dying it before sending it off in caravans to other states within Hausaland and to extensive regions beyond. Biram was the original seat of government, while Zaria supplied labor.


The region was largely united between Lake Chad and the Niger River to the west, opening up to Hausa traders a vast part of Africa. Daura is the first known truly unified kingdom. It was around the 12th century that the Hausas became the dominant nation in this region, although they were threatened by Kanem Bornu, which had replaced the earlier realms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.

Dominant in Kanem, the Kanuri people embraced Islam and began a series of jihads, or Islamic holy wars, to widen their kingdom. Among the Hausas, Islam appeared at the same time but was spread peacefully by traders and missionaries, unlike the jihads of the Kanem empire. At the same time, native Hausa beliefs continued to be held by the majority of the population.

Because of their wide trading influence, Hausa became the common language of West Africa as Swahili did on the east coast. Hausa trade caravans would stop at places called zongos, which eventually developed into centers of Hausa habitation throughout West Africa. Zongos also became the Islamic centers of each town, associated with mosques, madrassas (schools), and waqfs (charities).

However strong an influence culturally, the Hausas in modern Nigeria came under increasing pressure from the Fulanis, a militarized Islamic society determined to conquer by jihad. The Fulanis appeared in the region by the fifth century, apparently also after a long migration from the Sahara, as it became a desert.

They reached Mauretania by the beginning of the first century, and from the fifth to the 11th centuries in what was then the Senegambia region. The Fulanis, also known as the Fulbes, were one of the first African cultures to convert to Islam, formed their own class of Muslim imams or and clerics, the Torodbe. This occurred between the eighth and 14th centuries in the Takrur region.

The Fulanis set their imperial goals on conquering the Hausas. By the early 1800s, the Hausas had become absorbed politically—but not culturally or socially—into the Fulani Kingdom in Nigeria. The Fulanis went on to found the Islamic caliphate of Sokoto. Under the rule of Usman Dan Fodio, Sokoto would become perhaps the most powerful Islamic state in the region.

Omani Empire in East Africa

Ruin of Omani Empire Palace

The Omani empire in East Africa was based on the Swahili coast, which extended from present-day central Somalia to Cape Delgado in southern Mozambique. It included a number of islands and archipelagos in the Indian Ocean.

There were more than 400 urban settlements of varying sizes. The trading networks within the interior extended from 20 to 200 miles. The trade provided a valuable intermediary between the African interior and the vast Indian Ocean trade.

This lucrative trade had been disrupted by the arrival of the Portuguese after 1498. The non-Muslim Portuguese had interfered with the Muslim Swahili trading connections without offering security. Consequently they were attacked by the Turks by the coast and the Jagga and Zimba from the interior.


Treasure hunts for gold and silver and slave-hunting expeditions disrupted the interior trade just as Portuguese opposition to Islam disrupted the Indian Ocean aspect of the trade. In the early 17th century, the cities sought liberation from Portugal and called in the Omanis from southeastern Arabia.

The Omanis were a good fit as they had been trading partners with the Swahili city-states for centuries, were fellow Muslims, and used the Arabic alphabet, as did the Swahili.

They had also been threatened by the Portuguese, who sought to control their strategic position of the Straits of Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf. Thus they were glad to arrive in the 1640s to attack the Portuguese.

Between 1640 and 1730, they conquered all of the Swahili cities from Somalia to the border between Tanganyika and Mozambique. By 1730, Zanzibar had emerged as the most important Swahili city and the Omanis and an Omani governor were established there.

But though the Omanis came as allies and liberators, they remained as conquerors through appointing representatives in each city. Over the next half-century, the Swahili cities grew tired of Omani taxes and there were periodic revolts.

There were temporary overthrows of Omani representatives, but these would be put down. The only city to regain authority was Mombassa under the Mazrui family. They were partially protected in their harbor by Fort St. Jesus, the fortress built by the Portuguese for their military headquarters.

During the 18th century, old trade patterns reemerged under Omani rule due to increased demand for slaves, the availability of capital from places such as India to finance trade, and the willingness of Africans in the interior to take slaves and ivory to the coast.

There were effects of the new emphasis on slaves, which replaced the earlier trade in gold (with Zimbabwe) and copper (from Katanga). The international trade for slaves made Omani sultans rich; it also turned communities against each other. Former African trading partners of the Swahili raided each other (encouraged by Omanis to take persons to sell as slaves).

Some of the smaller Swahili settlements disappeared as they were not defensible against voracious slave traders. Overall, the Swahili city-states did not regain the wealth that they had experienced during the golden era of 1300–1500.

Internally the people began to identify with Omani conquerors. Inside Swahili cities Omani soldiers of fortune expropriated large tracts of land although many were actually ethnic Baluchis. Many upper-class Swahili found it advantageous to intermarry with Omanis and even claim Arab ancestry.

These internal changes plus the participation of wealthy coastal people in the interior slave trade and the owning of slaves from the interior created a chasm between the coast and the interior that persists to this day.

By 1800, the Omani empire in East Africa faced new challenges as the English and French established themselves off East Africa in the Comoros and Madagascar (French), as well as Mauritius and Seychelles (English).

Rhodesia/Zimbabwe Independence Movements

Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia, as it was known until 1980, is a landlocked nation of 13 million people occupying the plateau between the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers, bordered by Zambia to the north, Botswana to the west, Mozambique to the east, and South Africa to the south.

While the rest of Britain’s African colonies, including two of Rhodesia’s neighbors—Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi)—gained independence as part of a wave of decolonization, Rhodesia remained a bastion of minority white rule because of its influential European population. Even after the country gained majority rule in 1980, white control of land continued to be a crucial issue in Zimbabwe.

At midcentury, mostly because of the country’s substantial mineral wealth and fertile soil for tobacco cultivation, Rhodesia’s white population enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world.


The country’s black residents, however, who made up over 95 percent of the population, possessed little political power and received just 5 percent of the nation’s income. Having gained control by force roughly a half-century earlier, whites made up one-twentieth of the population but held one-third of the land.

At the end of World War II the political winds began to change. Britain moved to grant independence to many of its colonies in Asia and Africa. Rhodesia, which had been a British-chartered corporate colony at the turn of the century and a self-governing British colony since 1923, took on a new political form in 1953 with the establishment of the Central African Federation. Southern Rhodesia dominated this confederation; it exploited the copper of Northern Rhodesia and the labor of Nyasaland.

The arrival of independent rule in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1964 brought considerable anxiety to the white population of Southern Rhodesia, who believed that Britain favored majority rule.

In response, in November of 1965, Ian Douglas Smith, an unabashed champion of white rule, announced the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, which cut the country’s ties with Britain and established the independent nation of Rhodesia. In a referendum, overwhelming numbers of the white population supported Smith. Britain responded by imposing diplomatic and economic sanctions.

The cold war struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence around the world, including in the nations of Africa, complicated these developments. U.S. relations with Ian Smith’s white-ruled Rhodesia at the time shows the ambivalent position of the United States.

On the one hand the United States valued the support of Rhodesia, which contained vast reserves of strategic minerals, especially chromium, and adopted a strongly anticommunist stance. Yet, at the same time, the United States worried that support for Smith’s white supremacist government would cost it needed friends in rapidly decolonizing Africa.

In 1965 U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson condemned Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence and, following Britain’s lead, imposed economic sanctions. Although these sanctions could have been even stronger, U.S. trade there declined from $29 million in 1965 to $3.7 million in 1968, a real blow to the Rhodesian economy. At the same time, though, Rhodesia received substantial support from some within the United States.

The Byrd Amendment of 1971, which was enacted with the support of the Richard Nixon administration, punched a significant hole in the sanctions against Rhodesia. According to this law, the United States could not ban the importation from a non-communist nation any material needed for national defense if that same material would otherwise be purchased from a communist nation.

Since chromium, a key resource for many modern weapon systems, was also imported from the Soviet Union, the United States was forced to allow trade with Rhodesia. Imports of chromium grew from $500,000 in 1965, to $13 million in 1972, to $45 million in 1975.

Organized black resistance to white rule in Rhodesia took shape in the late 1950s, and the two main oppositional parties, parties that would dominate Zimbabwean politics well beyond independence, were established in the early 1960s.

In 1957 the African National Congress, based in Bulawayo, and the African National Youth League, based in Salisbury (present-day Harare), combined to form the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress under Joshua Nkomo. Banned in 1959, this group was succeeded by the National Democratic Party, which was itself banned in December 1961.

Shortly thereafter, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) was established. A major split occurred in 1963, resulting in the formation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). ZAPU was mostly Ndebele and Chinese-leaning; ZANU was mostly Shona and Soviet-leaning.

ZAPU and ZANU adopted different strategies at different times. During the 1960s, as white Rhodesians like Ian Smith grew more extreme, African nationalist methods became more militant and confrontational.

Both ZANU and ZAPU began attacking white farms in 1964, but they quickly realized they were outmatched by the Rhodesian military. A more moderate group, the African National Council—organized by Bishop Abel Muzorewa—sprang up during the early 1970s. None of these groups had much success.

The situation began to shift during the late 1970s. In 1975, after long wars, two Portuguese colonies in southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola, gained their independence. Black-ruled Mozambique became a safe haven for many of the guerrilla groups opposing the white regime in Rhodesia. In 1975 the two most important of these groups—ZANU, under Robert Mugabe, and ZAPU, under Joshua Nkomo—joined forces to become the Patriotic Front.

Jimmy Carter’s victory in the U.S. presidential election of 1976 also played a role in shifting the context of Rhodesian politics. Concerned about the U.S. reputation in other parts of black Africa, the Carter administration began to push for a settlement to the conflict. In general, the United States supported majority rule with protection of white interests.

The British called the Lancaster House Conference in an attempt to broker a lasting solution. The resulting settlement guaranteed majority rule for Zimbabwe, a transitional period for whites, and a multiparty system.

At the center of the settlement was a new constitution, which gave the vote to all Africans 18 years and older, reserved 28 seats in the parliament for whites for 10 years, and guaranteed private property rights. In the election of February 1980, voting mostly followed ethnic lines. ZANU–Popular Front won a clear majority, making its leader, Robert Mugabe, the prime minister.

ZAPU–Popular Front, which had recently split from ZANU-PF, joined the white members of parliament in opposition. Taking its name from the 14th- and 15th-century stone city of Great Zimbabwe, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980. The war for majority rule, which had cost over 25,000 lives, most of them black, was over.

Under Robert Mugabe’s rule, Zimbabwe in the 1980s pursued socialist-leaning policies not unlike those of many other countries in Africa. It expanded social programs that had been denied under white rule. And, although it claimed to want to redistribute land, in reality it moved slowly to break up successful white farms.

This cost the regime politically but it enabled Zimbabwe to continue to feed itself. Overall, during the early 1980s many Zimbabweans saw real improvements in the quality of their lives.

As the 1980s unfolded, Mugabe began to show authoritarian tendencies. Even early on he rounded up opponents, censored the press, and gave broad authority to security forces. At first he was able to get away with this because of his wide support, especially in rural areas.

Mugabe won the March 1996 election with 92.7 percent of the vote, but only a very small number of Zimbabweans bothered to vote. The decrease in voter participation revealed the growing discontent of Zimbabweans with Mugabe. On top of this, in the early 1980s a civil war that would last until 1987 broke out in Matabeleland, a stronghold of the ZAPU-PF.

In the late 1990s Mugabe initiated two very controversial programs. In 1997, he began seizing white-owned land without compensation and quietly encouraging landless blacks to move onto white farms. These farms had previously fed the nation and provided work for large numbers of people, mostly black.

In 2002 Mugabe appropriated the remaining white land and ordered white farmers to offer payments to former workers. Because many of the blacks who moved onto the white land had few farming skills, the nation soon faced a food crisis.

Critics, moreover, claimed that Mugabe handed out the best land to his family, friends, and close supporters. In another controversial move, in 1998 Mugabe deployed the military in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help its government fend off an armed rebellion.

The situation in Zimbabwe seems precarious. During the 2002 elections Mugabe rigged the voting and jailed opponents, especially the supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai. Neighboring nations supported Mugabe but other African nations, such as Kenya and Ghana, condemned his move.

Famine conditions persist in Zimbabwe, and the people struggle with skyrocketing prices and extremely high unemployment. That no system is in place to determine a successor to the aging Mugabe portends a divisive struggle to come.

Akan States of West Africa

Akan States of West Africa

The Akan people of West Africa are descandants of the residents of the early Akan states and continue to live in the area east of the Mende people that makes up present-day Ghana and the Ivory Coast. It is believed that the Akan people have been present in West Africa since the first century.

However, it was not until the 15th century that the world outside Africa became aware of the Akan states. Most of the early information on the Akan came from the Portuguese who developed the West African gold trade.

When the Portuguese first appeared in West Africa, the area controlled by the Akan states stretched from the equatorial forest southward to the Ofin and Pra Rivers. This area roughly compares to what later became the states of Ashanti and Adansi.


While locals called the early Akan settlements Akyerekyere, Europeans identified the people as belonging to two separate groups, the Akany and Twifu (or Twifo). While a number of scholars suggest that members of Akan states were of Dyula ancestry, others disagree. It is true that a number of Dyula settlements existed in Akan states, but the most prevalent view is that Akan states grew in strength to rival Dyula rather than evolving from it.

Further arguments that support the belief that the Akan states were separate from Dyula center on cultural differences. Two customs that were distinctly Akan in nature and that had no counterpart in Dyulan culture were the annual yam festivals and the tradition of matrilineal inheritance.

Subsequent studies of the Akan people have led scholars to believe that the southern branch of the Akan, the Fante, traveled in earlier times from the Volta Gap to the coastlands of Accura, where they intermarried with existing inhabitants.

As the area expanded, several powerful Akan states emerged. The oldest of these is thought to be Bono, which was also called Brong. Asante, which later came to be known as Ashanti, proved to be the most powerful Akan state. Others included Akwamu, Denkyira, Akyem, and Fante.

Europe and the Akan States

When the Portuguese established their presence in West Africa in 1471, they discovered that the Akan people were not living in towns, as was typical in Africa during this period. Instead, the Akan were occupying small kingdoms ruled by kings and queens in the savanna north of the existing gold belt.

Within each kingdom, families that were descended from seven or eight particular clans, identified by matrilineal lineage, lived in villages where they were ruled by their own chieftains. In addition to the chieftains, each family and clan had its own leader. All of the families, clans, and villages worshipped gods that they had individually deified. The various lineages also had their own symbols, which were used to identify matrilineal ancestry.

Once it became clear that the gold trade would develop into a significant economic undertaking, the Akan states realized that it was in their best interest to control the route to and from the Gold Coast.

As a result, the Akan states took on a prominent role in developing West Africa. Early on, the Akan depended on three significant areas to establish their presence in the gold trade. The first of these was Bona, which was located close to the Lobi gold mine.

The others were Banda, which controlled passage to the main gold trading route through the Volta Gap, and Bono, where Bono-Mansa, the capital of the early Akan states, was located. Over the following decades, the gold trade with Portugal exploded, reaching its peak in 1560 with West African gold providing one-fourth of all revenue for Portugal.

From the earliest days, the Akan had been heavily involved in agriculture, developing a farming belt along the outer environs of the equatorial forest where they grew yams and oil-producing palms.

Other agricultural activities included the production of plantain, bananas, and rice, as well as collecting kola nuts, raising livestock, hunting, fishing, and making salt. The density of the soil in and around the forest limited the type of produce that could be grown, and increasing populations soon exhausted the soil.

As a result, the Akan people entered the equatorial forests, where they cleared enough land to support the needs of the people. In the 17th century, agricultural production and the growth of the trade along the Gold Coast led to permanent settlements in the equatorial forest.

Rates of urbanization and increasing sophistication among the Akan states subsequently led to the emergence of more complex political and social structures. Strong leadership among the people of the Akan states allowed them to retain their own cultures in the midst of the expanding European presence, while winning the respect of the Europeans in the process.

Slavery in The Akan States

In the past, attempts by some Akan leaders to dominate the entire region had resulted in tribal wars. As a result, victorious tribes had begun selling members of conquered tribes at local European slave markets.

The more vulnerable tribes, such as the Ewe who lived in the lower Volta area, were continually subjected to being enslaved. Additionally, certain Africans were born into lineage slavery and were forced from their earliest years to serve the dominant African groups. The Akan states also bought slaves from the Portuguese.

Most of these came from Benin, where the government regularly sold off its captives. After 1516, when the government of Benin reduced its military activity, most of the slaves that the Akan states purchased from Portugal came from the Niger Delta and the Igbo region.

The Akan states retained some slaves for local use, while others were placed on slave ships bound for markets along the Atlantic slave-trading route. Domestically, the Akan states used slaves in royal households and in transporting goods to market. Additionally, large numbers of slaves were put to work in construction, in mines, and on farms.

A smaller number of slaves were employed as artisans in various crafts. The Akan states also designated some slaves to be trained to use flintlock muskets as part of citizen armies employed in the Akan quest to crush neighboring states and expand the existing Akan empire.

Along with slaves, the Akan states also commandeered the services of immigrants and migrants to be employed in various tasks. In general, both slaves and forced labor were allowed limited freedom because their numbers prevented total control over the population.

Rivalry Among Akan States

As individual states became more powerful, competition arose among the Akan states, with Denkyira and Akwamu emerging as the most powerful. By the middle of the 17th century, Denkyira had won the right to control most of the western gold-bearing area and had begun forging an empire leading northward to the established European trading routes that led to Banda and Bono.

During the 1670s, Denkyira seized control of the entire area around the western Gold Coast and beyond. On the eastern coast, Akwamu had begun to do the same. From 1677 to 1781, Akwamu worked on its campaign to win control of Accara, which had been under Denkyira control since 1629. Ultimately, Akwamu annexed Accara, in addition to the surrounding areas of the eastern territory.

This expansion provided them with direct control of the trading forts operated by the English, Dutch, and Danish along the eastern Gold Coast. Thus, by 1702, Akwamu had also gained control of the east coast slave-exporting businesses. Despite their enormous strength, greed ultimately destroyed both Denkyira and Akwamu.

Asante, which had originally been a dependency of Denkyira’s, emerged as a major contender in the ongoing power struggle of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, giving birth to the powerful Ashanti state. Ashanti was formed from the various Akan states that had gathered together in the north-central section of the equatorial forest.

The combined strength of these states enabled them to dominate the trading route from western and central Sudan. Within the state of Ashanti, the various kings agreed to accept the supremacy of one king to be based in the capital city of Kumasi. The first Ashanti king was Osei Tutu (c. 1680–1717).

In 1698, Osei Tutu declared war on Denkyira, using arms from Akwamu. In 1701, Ashanti finally succeeded in overwhelming Denkyira, thereby gaining essential territory for its southward expansion.

Three decades later, Akyem, an important Ashanti ally, defeated Akwamu. After the downfall of Denkyira and Akwamu, Ashanti became the most powerful influence in the area now known as Ghana, continuing to rule until the end of the 19th century when the British conquered the area.

Ashanti Development and Expansion

Over the course of the 18th century, Ashanti strengthened its hold on the central forest region and began reaching outward to expand its territory. Each captive area was forced to pay tribute to Ashanti. Areas such as Dagoomba in the northeastern area of the equatorial forest paid their tribute in slaves, which had in turn been taken captive from more remote areas of Africa.

Ashanti then traded those slaves for firearms, smelted iron, and copper. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, some 4 million slaves had been taken for this purpose from south of the equator in an area that extended from Cameroon to Kunene.

Until the pope banned the sale and trade of European firearms to Ashanti out of fear that radical Muslims would lay hold of the guns and use them against Christian traders, the Portuguese regularly traded weapons to Ashanti in exchange for slaves.

By 1820, the Ashanti Empire controlled some 250,000 square kilometers that had been organized into three distinct regions. The first was composed of the six metropolitan chiefdoms that had furnished the military power for King Osei Tutu.

The bulk of the people of Akan descent lived in the second region. The third was composed of dependencies, such as Gonja and Dagomba, which were required to pay tribute of 1,000 slaves each year.

Since the strength of the Ashanti state was always dependent on the force of its military rather than on a sense of nationalism, it became impossible to maintain a hold on those tributary states that made up two-thirds of the Ashanti Empire. This weakness made Ashanti more vulnerable when the British declared war on the state in the 19th century.

Today, the remaining Akan people belong to either eastern or western Akan groups. The five groups of eastern Akan, which all speak Twi, include Asanta, Auapem, Akyem, Denkyria, and Gomua. Sehwi-speaking Western Akan is made up of Anya, Ahanta, Baule, Sanwi (Afema), Nzima, and Aowin.

Despite the fact that each subgroup has its own dialect, groups are able to communicate with one another. While the Akan people continue to practice the tradition of matrilineal descent, some changes have been instituted to make inheritance laws more equitable.

Portuguese in Africa

Portuguese in Africa

The Portuguese were the first to make significant inroads into Africa during the age of discovery, yet they were the last to decolonize their African possessions. This was to a large extent true of Portuguese socioeconomic and political activities in the various communities of Africa in which they operated. The Portuguese empire in Africa was the earliest and longest lived of the colonial empires, lasting from 1415 until 1974, with serious activity beginning in 1450.

The first attempt made by the Portuguese to establish a presence in Africa was when some Portuguese soldiers captured Ceuta on the North African coast in 1415. Three years later, a group of Moors attempted to retake it. A better armed Portuguese army defeated the Moors, although this did not result in effective political control.

In 1419, two captains in the employ of Prince Henry (Henrique) the Navigator, João Gonzalez Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were driven by a storm to Madeira. A Portuguese expedition to Tangier in 1436, which was undertaken by King Edward (Duarte) for establishing Portuguese political control over the area, followed.

However Edward’s army was defeated, and Prince Ferdinand, the king’s youngest brother, was surrendered as a hostage. Tangier was later captured by the Portuguese in 1471.


The coast of West Africa also attracted the attention of the Portuguese. The Senegal was reached in 1445, and Cape Verde was passed in the same year. In 1446, Álvaro Fernandes was close to Sierra Leone. By 1450, the Portuguese had made tremendous progress in the exploration of the Gulf of Guinea.

Specifically under João II, exploration had reached the fortress of São Jorge da Mina (Elmina), which was established for the protection of the trade of the Guinea. The Portuguese reached the ancient kingdom of Benin and the coastal part of present-day Niger Delta region of Nigeria before 1480. Oba (King) Esigie, who reigned in the last quarter of the 15th century, is said to have interacted and traded with the Portuguese.

The famous Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão sighted the Congo in 1482 and reached Cape Cross in 1486. The Portuguese thus found themselves in contact with one of the largest states in Africa.

The leading kingdom in the area was the Kongo Kingdom built by the Bakongo, a Bantu people whose king, the Mani-Kongo, had his capital at Mbanza-Kongo, modern San Salvador in northern Angola. Other leading states in the area included Ngoyo and Loango on the Atlantic coast.

When the Portuguese arrived on the east coast of Africa at the end of the 15th century, the region was already witnessing some remarkable prosperity occasioned by a combined effort of Africans and Arab traders who established urbanized Islamic communities in the area.

These included the coast of Mozambique, Kilwa, Brava, and Mombassa. From East Africa the Portuguese explorer Pêro da Covilhã reached Ethiopia in 1490. The big island of Madagascar was discovered in 1500 by a Portuguese fleet under the command of Diogo Dias.

The island was called Iiha de São Lourenço by the Portuguese. Other Portuguese might have visited previously, as was evidenced in the stone tower, containing symbols of Portuguese coats of arms and a Holy Cross. Mauritius was discovered in 1507.

By 1550, Portuguese dominance in both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans had been confirmed. Their position was further strengthened by the Treaty of Tordesillas of July 7, 1494, with Spain, leading to the emergence of a large empire. Some African communities were part of this sprawling Portuguese empire.

Commercial Aims

The needs to establish Christianity and Portuguese civilization were not strong motivators; the aims of the Portuguese were essentially commercial. In the East African region, the Portuguese wanted to supplant the preexisting network of Arab seaborne trade.

Consequently, Portuguese bases at Sofala, Kilwa, and other areas such as the offshore islands of Mozambique, Zanzibar, Pemba, Mombassa, and the island of Lamu were established. In this direction, Vasco da Gama took the first step on his second voyage to India in 1502. He called at Kilwa and forced the sultan to pay a yearly tribute to the king of Portugal.

This was typical of Portugal’s dealings with the coast, and unless tribute was paid, the town was destroyed. If it was paid, the local ruler was usually left in peace, provided he carried out the wishes of the Portuguese.

Map of Portugese in Africa

After Kilwa, Zanzibar was the next place to suffer from the Portuguese. In 1503, a Portuguese commander, Ruy Lourenço Ravasco showed the power of guns by killing about 4,000 men aboard canoes. The men were carrying commodities that were of interest to Ravasco. Available evidence shows that the local men in no way provoked the Portuguese official.

Sofala was another center of attraction to the Portuguese. The town was important because it gave the Portuguese control of the gold supply of the interior of East Africa. The town offered minor resistance to Portuguese incursion. Consequently, a fort was built there to protect the Portuguese colony that now replaced the old Arab settlement in the area.

Kilwa shared the fate that befell Sofala. As in the case of Sofala, the Portuguese met little resistance there. A Portuguese fleet commanded by D’Almeidas captured the town. From there the Portuguese official then sailed away to Mombassa, where they met strong resistance.

Indeed the city was like a thorn in the flesh of the Portuguese. The island was consequently named “the island of war.” However the resistance of the people of Mombassa collapsed and the city was set on fire.

Outside the coast the Portuguese were interested in the gold region of the Zambezi. The Portuguese embarked upon such a massive exploitation of the mineral that within a few years of their activities and occupation, the region had withered to an unattractive settlement.

This development sometimes created a crisis and revolt from the local people. The first serious revolt to succeed was in 1631 when Mombassa rebelled.

It should be noted that it was in an effort to contain uprising from the local people that the Portuguese in 1593 established and garrisoned the great and famous Fort Jesus at Mombassa. Still, the safety and security of the Portuguese merchants were never guaranteed relative to Arab threats.

Already a part of the Indian Ocean community was slipping out of the grip of the Portuguese. In 1622, they were ejected from the Persian Gulf and by mid-17th century, the seafarers of the maritime state of Oman were regularly making incursions and conducting raids as far south as Zanzibar.

By the middle of the 18th century, the maritime trade of the East African coast was more or less out of the control of the Portuguese and the region had gradually resumed its pre-Portuguese commercial activities that made the area an attraction for many traders. The appearance of the British and the Dutch East India Companies was another threat to Portuguese commercial interests in East Africa.

Elsewhere in Africa the Portuguese experimented with the plantation system in São Tomé from where they introduced it to Brazil. Following this development a new periode of Portuguese exploitation of Africa started. This was in the area of the slave trade, which lasted for more than two centuries.

During the 16th century, the Portuguese concentrated their slave trading attention on the Kongo Kingdom. During the reign (1507–43) of the Christian king Afonso (Nzinga Mbemba), the Portuguese had already started to export young Kongolese across the atlantic in large numbers.

Although King Afonso disliked the slave trade, he paid in slaves for European goods and services, which he regarded as essential to his kingdom. Such services included those provided by missionaries, masons, carpenters, and other artisans. King Afonso died frustrated with his desires to see the Portuguese technologically transform his kingdom unfulfilled. Instead the slave trade continued unabated.

A turning point in Portuguese exploitation of West Central Africa came in 1575 when Paulo Dia de Novais was sent as a conquistador to Africa. From his base at Loanda, south of the Kongo frontier, several wars were waged against the so-called recalcitrant king of Ndongo, the Ngola. Sometimes the Portuguese made an alliance with the predatory Jaga group encouraging them to wage wars against Ndongo and some parts of Kongo Kingdom.

The situation was so chaotic that early 17th century Mani-Kongos had to send petitions to the Holy See through the missionaries urging them to intervene in the matter, but nothing substantial came out of it. Not even the Portuguese Crown could help the situation.

This was the development when in 1660 the Bakongo turned to war with the Portuguese. The Portuguese defeated them. Further raids weakened the kingdom. In fact many of the provinces began to break away. By 1750 the once powerful Kongo state had become a shadow of its former self.

The high demand of slaves in the Portuguese colony of Brazil put pressure on Ndongo, known as Angola by the Portuguese. The state was the largest supplier of slaves to the colony of Brazil in the whole of Africa south of the equator. The demand was so great that the Portuguese often incited the local communities to wage war on one another in the interest of obtaining slave labor for Brazil.

The Portuguese also tried their hands in commodities other than slaves, such as pepper from the Benin kingdom (in present-day Nigeria) and gold from the Gold Coast. However by 1642, the Dutch had permanently ousted the Portuguese from the Gold Coast.

This development encouraged both the English and French to join in the competition against the Portuguese. By the 18th century, it was the traders of these countries who became very active in the trade of the Gulf of Guinea, while the Portuguese continued with their slave-trading activities.

Meanwhile, before the other European powers joined in international trade, the Portuguese experimented with all sorts of goods. In the 1470s, for example, the Portuguese were able to procure cotton cloth, beads, and other items from the Benin kingdom, which they exchanged for gold on the Gold Coast. The Portuguese also participated in the trade in cowries in the Kongo and its offshore islands. They were also very active in the trade in salt along the Angolan coast.

The Portuguese dominated trade in this periode because they were better organized compared to the Africans and they were technologically superior. This showed in the way the Portuguese dislodged the Arab traders along the East African coast who had been established in the area long before the advent of the Portuguese in Africa.

Latin States of the Crusades

The history of the first crusading kingdom of Jerusalem commences with the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christian army, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, on July 15, 1099. The crusading host stormed the city and, having slaughtered the native population, captured the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Although the religious mission was accomplished, the political goals of the crusading leaders were yet to be achieved. Following Jerusalem, other towns fell to the crusaders: Haifa in 1100, Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101, Acre in 1104, Sidon in 1110, Tyre in 1124, and finally, Ascalon in 1153. At the same time the crusading leaders established their control over some trans-Jordan areas, as well as by the northern coast of the Red Sea.

Godfrey of Bouillon never assumed the title of the king, addressing himself merely as a “defender of the Holy Sepulcher.” He died childless on July 18, 1100, and on Christmas Day of the same year, his brother Baldwin of Boulogne was crowned as Baldwin I.


It was under him that the crusading army captured most of the aforementioned towns. He died on April 2, 1118, and the kingship passed to the hands of his cousin, Baldwin of Bourcq, crowned as Baldwin II (1118–31). Upon his death, his son-in-law, Fulk, count of Anjou, succeeded the crown.

His reign (1131–43) is characterized by political and social unrest in the kingdom, which was divided between the “king’s party” supporting Fulk and the “queen’s party” following his wife, Melisende. With Fulk dead, Melisende attempted to rule on her own, provoking anger of her young son, Baldwin III (1143–63), and his supporters. The latter forced the queen to give up her intention. Among Baldwin III’s achievements were the conquest of Ascalon (1153) and rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (completed in 1149).

His younger brother Amalric (1163–74) initiated three Egyptian campaigns against Nur al-Din, capturing Bilbais on November 1168. Amalric’s son Baldwin IV the “Leper” (1174–85) was surrounded by court intrigues and conspiracies. At the center of these intrigues stood Baldwin’s sister Sibylle with her second husband, Guy of Lusignan, and Raymond III, count of Tripoli.

Baldwin died in May 1185, leaving the Crown to Sibylle’s son Baldwin V, still a boy. The latter died on September 13, 1186, and Sibylle was crowned with Guy, who was captured by the Muslim leader Saladin (Salah ad din, Yusuf), in the Battle of Hattin (July 4, 1187).

Despite their political control over vast territories, the crusading kings could never achieve continual peace and their rule was permanently threatened by the Muslim enemies, as well as their Christian rivals—Frankish nobility.

The Islamic threat became evident with the conquest of Edessa in 1144 by a Muslim warlord Zangi, while the crusaders’ weakness was proved by inability of the Christian forces to cope with the Muslim army, which eventually captured Damascus on April 25, 1154. The failure in the north was followed by a similar failure in the south: a new Muslim leader, Salah ad Din, also known as Saladin, (1138–93), repelled the crusading forces in 1169 in Damietta, and 1174 in Alexandria.

Having subdued his Muslim rivals between 1174 and 1186, Saladin moved on the attack against the Christians. On July 4, 1187, he defeated the crusading army led by King Guy in the Battle of Hattin, leaving the rest of the Christian towns exposed to his threat. Acre was captured on July 10, 1187, while Jerusalem capitulated on October 2 of the same year. The first crusading kingdom came to its end.

The Second Crusading Kingdom of Acre (1189–1291)

The disaster of Hittin and fall of Jerusalem provoked a strong reaction in western Europe, whose leaders rose to a new crusade. Led by Richard I the Lionheart of England, Philip II Augustus of France, and Frederick I Barbarossa, the German emperor who died on his way to the Holy Land, the crusading host had arrived before the walls of Acre in the summer of 1189. After two years of siege the city was recaptured on July 12, 1191.

The Christian unity did not last long; Philip Augustus decided to return to France, while Richard remained in Palestine. He failed to capture Jerusalem and on September 2, 1192, the Christian and Muslim armies came to a settlement. The coastline stretching between Jaffa and Tyre came into the hands of the crusaders, while Jerusalem remained under Muslim control, with holy sites accessible to pilgrims.

Acre effectively became not only a political capital of the new crusading kingdom, but also its cultural and economic center. The city was strongly multicultural in character, being home to Italian, French, English, German, Greek, Muslim, Jewish, and Eastern Christian communities.

The struggle with the Muslims resumed in 1219, when John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, and his army penetrated into Egypt, capturing Damietta. From there they moved to Cairo, which they failed to reach, having suffered a defeat at the hands of the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil (1218–38) on August 30, 1221, near al-Mansura. The crusaders’ lives were spared in exchange for Damietta.

The next crusading initiative came from the German emperor Frederick II (1212–50), who came to Palestine in September 1228 with a large army. Fearing Frederick’s military advantage, al-Kamil offered a treaty, which granted the crusaders Jerusalem, Galilee, and part of Sidon and Toron.

Jerusalem remained in Christian hands until 1239, when the Ayyubids briefly captured it, only to be restored to the Christians in 1240. The Christian rule of Jerusalem came to its end four years later, with the conquest by the Khorezmian Turks in the summer of 1244.

The crusade of Louis IX of France (1229–70) did not aim at the reconquest of the Holy City. On June 6, 1249, his forces seized Damietta and moved on to Cairo, only to suffer the fate of their predecessors of 1221. On April 6, 1250, his army was badly beaten at al-Mansura and as the result the king and his men were taken captive.

The Latin population of Acre did not always live in peace. The tensions were especially apparent between the Venetian and Genoese communities, who struggled over commercial supremacy in the region. The War of St. Sabas broke out in 1256 and lasted until the Genoese defeat in 1258. Following the defeat the Genoese were forced to leave the city and their territory was overrun by the Venetians.

In the meantime a new threat had emerged from the Mamluks, who in 1250 overthrew the Ayyubid Sultanate in Egypt and established their own military rule. Faced with the crusading presence and the Mongol threat, under Sultan Baybars (1260–77) and his heirs, the Mamluks conquered the remaining towns, villages, and forts of the crusading kingdom, forcing its inhabitants into exile.

The European population of the Outremer sharply fell, resulting in the inability of the crusaders to stop the Mamluks, and led to the simpulan fall of the kingdom. On May 18, 1291, the inhabitants of Acre, the capital town of the kingdom, surrendered and those not slain by the conquerors returned to Europe, mainly France and Italy. The town was laid to waste and remained so until it was rebuilt in the 18th century. The history of the Latin kingdom in the Holy Land came to an end.

Minor Crusading States

The conquest of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, may signify the establishment of the first crusading kingdom, but not the first crusading state. As early as March 1098, Baldwin of Boulogne, the future king Baldwin I of Jerusalem (1100–18), forced the Armenian principality of Edessa to accept him as its new master. Baldwin assumed the title of count of Edessa, establishing the first Latin principality in the Near East.

Two years later upon the death of his brother Godfrey of Bouillon (July 18, 1100), the first ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin changed his title to king of Jerusalem. Baldwin of Bourcq was also crowned as Baldwin II of Jerusalem (1118–31). While Baldwin II exercised full control over both the kingdom of Jerusalem and the county of Edessa, his successor handed the lordship of Edessa to the hands of the family of Courtenay.

The first count of the Courtenay dynasty was Joscelin I (1119–31), who was succeeded by Joscelin II (1131–49). It was under the latter that the Muslim leader Zangi captured the principal town Edessa in 1144 and forced the Christian ruler and his family to desert it. Zangi killed the male Christian population of the city, reduced the women and children into slavery, and decimated the city in 1146.

Joscelin moved to Turbessel, where he had established his power, only to be captured by the Turkish sultan of Konya, Masud, in 1149. The latter handed Joscelin over to Nur al-Din, who took him captive to Aleppo, where the count died in prison in 1159. His wife, Beatrice, granted the remains of the county to the Byzantine emperor. The son of Joscelin and Beatrice, Joscelin III, retained the title, without ever ruling the county.

The history of the county of Tripoli goes back to 1102, when Raymond of Saint-Gilles, a crusading leader, named himself as count of Tripoli. He did not live to capture the town itself, which surrendered in July 1109. A struggle between Raymond’s cousin William Jordan of Cerdagne and his eldest son, Bertrand, followed the conquest of the town.

The rivalry ended thanks to the intervention of Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who installed Bertrand as his vassal. The latter died in 1112 and soon after, the county passed to his young son, Pons, who attempted to set himself free from the authority of Baldwin II, his suzerain.

Pons’s rebellion was crushed in 1122, although he retained his county. He ruled until 1137 when the townsfolk of Damascus killed him. His successor, Raymond II, faced a political challenge from Bertrand, the illegitimate son of Alfonso Jordan, son of Raymond of Saint-Gilles. He eventually overcame his challenge with the aid of Nur al-Din.

After his murder by the Assassins in 1152, the rule passed to his son, Raymond III (1152–89). In 1164 he was captured and imprisoned by Nur al-Din, while on a campaign to relieve the siege of Harim, along with Bohemond III of Antioch and Joscelin III of Edessa. During their imprisonment, Amalric of Jerusalem was regent of the county. Raymond III was released in 1172 and two years later rose to the position of regent of Jerusalem.

He died in Tyre in 1187, having installed his godson, Bohemond IV, prince of Antioch, as his successor. The two baronies were united, with a brief exception of the years 1216–19, until the fall of Antioch in 1268. After the death of Count Bohemond VII in 1287, the county sank into political and social chaos, which was exploited by the Mamluk sultan Qalawun. The city fell into his hands in 1289, after a siege.

The origins of the principality of Antioch go back to the conquest of the city in 1098 by Bohemond of Taranto, the first prince of Antioch. The latter died in 1103 leaving the principality to his young son, Bohemond II, while Tancred of Hauteville and Roger of Salerno acted, respectively, as his regent until 1119.

In October 1126 Bohemond was married to Alice, daughter of Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem (1118–31). The union of two crusading families did not last long: His Muslim enemies killed Bohemond in February 1130. Bohemond left a young daughter, Constance, whose regent was Raymond of Poitiers.

In 1136 Raymond had officially assumed the title of the prince of Antioch and remained in power until his death in the battlefield on June 29, 1149. During his rule, the Byzantine emperor John Komnenus invaded Antioch in 1137 and captured towns that threatened the principality. The campaign was repeated in 1142 and the integration of the principality into the empire was hindered only by John’s death in 1143.

In 1153 Constance married Renaud of Châtillon- sur-Loing, a man of well-established knightly family, who was taken captive by his Frankish enemies in 1161. As a result, the magnates of Antioch forced Constance to hand the title of the prince to her son, Bohemond III.

The latter joined Raymond III, count of Tripoli, in a military campaign against Nur al-Din. The result of this campaign was a complete defeat of the Christian army in 1164. According to the Muslim sources, Nur al-Din was advised to capture Antioch, which he did not do. Raymond was ransomed by the emperor and restored to the principality.

However, the real ruler of Antioch was King Amalric of Jerusalem. In the course of Saladin’s campaigns of 1280–90, the territory of the principality had been reduced to the surroundings of the town of Antioch. The Armenian prince Leo exploited the weakness of Bohemond III, attempting to capture the city. The local population in 1194, however, drove out his army.

Upon Bohemond’s death in April 1201, his older son Bohemond IV succeeded him, also reigning as count of Tripoli, being adopted by Raymond III of Tripoli. The two Latin baronies were united under one prince. Unlike the kingdom of Jerusalem, Antioch survived the assault of Saladin, with the assistance of the Italian city-states, but afterward did not play any important role in the subsequent Crusades.

After Bohemond IV’s death in 1201, the principality was torn by a power struggle between the two rivals, Bohemond of Tripoli, the future Bohemond V (1207–23), and Raymond-Ruben of Armenia, Bohemond III’s grandson. The struggle between Antioch and Armenia ended with the marriage of Bohemond VI and an Armenian princess, Sybille. The city and the entire principality fell to the Mamluks in 1268. The title prince of Antioch passed to the king of Cyprus, after the fall of Acre in 1291.

Although not European countries, the Latin states of the Near East played an important role in the political, social, economic, and cultural life of Europe in the High Middle Ages. The very idea of the crusading knight became the ideal of the European nobility.

The encounter with the Orient and its culture, different from that of the West, had enriched the horizons of the Europeans. The Outremer states, at times through the mediation of Italian city-states, maintained vital mercantile connections with Europe, acting as the supplier of African gold and spices.

Sunni Ali - Founder of West African Songhai Dynasty

Sunni Ali

Sunni Ali was an African ruler who founded the Songhai Empire in the 15th century. He was the hereditary ruler of the kingdom of Songhai, which existed from the 11th century and was centered in the city of Gao on the Niger River in the southeastern part of the present-day Republic of Mali.

In 1335, Gao, as the kingdom was also called, fell under the influence of Mali, the predominant Atlantic Ocean on the west to the Red Sea on the east.) Mali had been the dominant regional power since the mid-13th century.

After Sunni Ali ascended the hereditary throne of Gao in 1464, he transformed the kingdom of Gao into the empire of Songhai, even though the Songhai people were a numerical minority in the new empire he created. At its height in the mid-16th century, Songhai was the greatest empire in Sudanic history, with an area of more than 1 million square miles.


It stretched from the Niger bend in the east (on the borders of the contemporary states of Niger and Nigeria) to the Senegal headwaters in the west and from Timbuktu and the Sahara in the north to Jenne and the forest belt in the south. In creating this empire, Sunni Ali completed by 1470 the destruction of Mali, which had been declining for about 100 years.

As in the case of the predecessor empires of Ghana and Mali, the economic basis for the empire of Songhai under Sunni Ali was the trans-Saharan trade route. This so-called Silent Trade of goods was based on a trade route that ran north-south from North Africa to West Africa.

Goods from Europe and the Muslim world, such as cloth and salt, would be exchanged for gold derived from West African mines at Wangara and Bouke (in the present-day Ivory Coast). The traders from the north would leave their goods on a riverbank.

If the gold miners from West Africa approved of the amount, they would leave gold and take the goods. The gold would be deposited the next day on the riverbank for the traders from the north. Usually no words would be exchanged in these transactions. Songhai benefited from the tariffs imposed on these goods, which passed through its territory.

In establishing his empire, Sunni Ali made use of his well-armed cavalry, which was very efficient. His army also had an infantry. In addition, Sunni Ali developed a powerful navy, a fleet of ships manned by Sorko fishermen (the people who had cofounded Ghana).

In 1468, he ousted the nomadic Tuareg from Timbuktu, the major Sudanic city between the Sahara and the Sudanic belt. In the process, he pillaged the city, an oasis of Muslim learning as the headquarters of the famous Islamic university of Sankore, and killed many priests and scholars during these attacks, thereby earning the enmity of the Islamic establishment.

In contrast, his conquest of Jenne, although prolonged, was less violent. Utilizing the navy and siege engines, he took seven months and seven days to complete the blockade of the city. Jenne was the southern counterpart of Timbuktu as it was the connecting link between the Sudanic belt and the forest belt.

After 1480, Sunni Ali had established his empire and stepped up military campaigns against nomadic peoples who threatened the economic basis of the empire. The Tuaregs who menaced Timbuktu were harassed. The Mossi who sacked the gold town of Wangara were similarly harassed and driven back into their Upper Volta homeland between 1483 and 1486. (Until gold and silver began to arrive in large amounts in the mid-1500s from Mexico and Peru, West African gold was the major source of coinage for Europe and the Middle East.)

The Fulani were also pushed back to their home territory in northern Niger, Guinea, and Senegal. In fact, Sunni Ali drowned in 1492 after an expedition against the Fulani.

The empire that Sunni Ali founded lasted in part because of the administration he developed. The conquered territories were made into provinces whereby their hereditary rulers became governors of the newly created vassal states of the empire of Songhai.

Therefore, the empire that Sunni Ali created was a centralized state with some degree of local autonomy for outlying areas. In addition, places like Timbuktu and the Muslim provinces received special government.

It was Sunni Ali’s lukewarm practice of Islam that incurred the wrath of the ulema, the Muslim scholars. He was only nominally Muslim and did not neglect traditional Songhai religious practices, which his own people continued to observe.

He also did not make Islam the state religion. These actions, in combination with the sack of Timbuktu, earned him enduring hostility from Arab/Muslim historians. This enmity was a cause for the overthrow of Sunni Ali’s dynasty the year after his death.

Almoravid Empire

Almoravid Empire

North Africa’s Berber tribes began converting to Islam with the commencement of the Arab conquests during the second half of the seventh century under the al-Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates. Although Berber Muslims were active participants in the expansion of the Islamic state north from Morocco into Iberia, they remained subservient to Arab commanders appointed by the reigning caliph in the Middle East.

Around 1050 from the Sahara in Mauritania, the first major political-military movement dominated by Berbers, the Almoravids, began to emerge. This revolutionary movement was founded and led by Abdullah ibn Yasin al-Gazuli, a fundamentalist Sunni preacher of the Maliki legal school who had been trained at Dar al-Murabitun, a desert religious school in the Sahara.

Abdullah had begun his career as a preacher by teaching the Berber Lamatunah tribes in the Sahara, who had converted to Islam but remained ignorant of its intricacies, orthodox Sunni Islam. The origins of the Almoravid movement lay in the foundation by Abdullah of a small, militant sect that abided by a strict interpretation of Maliki Islamic law. To join Abdullah’s movement, new members were flogged for past sins, and infractions of Islamic law were severely punished.


The community was guided by the religious legal opinions of Abdullah and later by the legal rulings of Maliki jurists, who were paid for their services. In 1056 the Almoravids, who had developed into a strong and fanatical military movement, began to advance northward into Morocco, where they subjugated other Berber tribes and preached a strict version of Sunni Islam. Three years later, during a fierce war against the Barghawata Berber tribe, Abdullah was killed.

After the death of Abdullah, leadership of the Almoravid movement passed to two cousins, Yusuf ibn Tashfin and his cousin, Abu Bakr. In 1062 the city of Marrakesh was founded in southern Morocco, where it would serve as the Almoravid capital, followed in 1069 by the establishment of Fez.

Almoravid flame thrower

Under Yusuf and Abu Bakr, the Almoravid Empire expanded eastward into Algeria by the early 1080s. The conquest of Morocco was completed by 1084, and by 1075 Almoravid forces had expanded into the West African kingdom of Ghana.

While the Almoravids continued to expand their realm in North Africa, Christian states in Iberia began to chip away at the Iberian Muslim states. Under the leadership of Alfonso VI, the duke of Castile, Spanish Christian forces forced the Islamic city-states in the south, including Seville and Granada, to pay him tribute.

In the late 1070s Iberian Muslims sent messengers to the Almoravids, requesting support against the Christians. However, it was not until 1086 that Yusuf crossed the Mediterranean into Iberia, where he defeated Alfonso VI’s army at Sagrajas.

Almoravid warrior

Between 1090 and 1092 Yusuf established Almoravid authority over the Muslim states in southern Iberia, forming a strong line of defense against further Christian expansion. Although the Almoravid leadership did not favor the secular arts, such as nonreligious poetry and music, other forms of art and architecture continued to receive government support. Christian and Jewish communities residing in the south were persecuted, and the cooperation and intellectual collaboration that had once existed between Iberia’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews ended.

In 1106 Yusuf died of old age and was succeeded as Almoravid caliph by Ali ibn Yusuf. At the time of Yusuf’s death, the Almoravid Empire was at the height of its power, stretching across Morocco south to Ghana, north into Iberia, and east into Algeria. 

During his reign and that of his successor Ali, Maliki jurists served as paid participants in the government, and the influence of a strict version of Sunni Islam was increased. Although the Almoravids officially recognized the authority of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, Iraq, they ruled independently and without interference from Iraq. They also maintained generally cordial relations with the neighboring Fatimid Caliphate centered in Egypt.

Opposition to the Almoravid Empire had already taken root in North Africa by the time of Yusuf’s death. The Almoravid caliph Ali’s use of Christian mercenaries and foreign Turkish slave-soldiers raised the ire of a militant fundamentalist Berber movement, the Almohads, led by Muhammad ibn Tumart, a member of the Hargha tribe of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The Almohads opposed the influence of the Almoravids’ Maliki jurists, who Ibn Tumart argued had corrupted Sunni Islamic orthodoxy.

Almoravid ghazi

In 1100 Ibn Tumart returned to his native mountain village after spending years in Iberia and then further east studying Islamic theology, legal thought, and philosophy. He founded a mosque and school where he began to preach his interpretation of Sunni Islam.

Ibn Tumart ordered that the call to prayer and the sermons during Friday congregational prayers be delivered in Berber instead of Arabic, and it is reported that he wrote several religious treatises in Berber as well. The growing influence of the Almohads would continue and would come to threaten the authority and existence of the Almoravid Empire, which was further weakened in 1144 with the death of Caliph Ali.

It was during the reign of Ali that Almoravid power began to disintegrate, but it was under his successors that the empire would finally collapse. Faced with growing opposition in Iberia, the Almoravids were defeated in battle by Spanish, French, and Portuguese armies between 1138 and 1147, losing control of the cities of Zaragoza and Lisbon.

In Morocco, the Almoravid heartland, the increasing influence of the Almohads continued to loom, even after the death of Ibn Tumart in 1133. The successor to the Almohad throne, Abd al-Mu’min, supervised the tamat destruction of the Almoravid Empire, which finally collapsed in 1147 after the fall of its capital city of Marrakesh.