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After people hear of Africa's true past the question, "what
happened?" usually follows. Why did the kingdoms of the once great
continent fall? The answer could be written into a thousand-page book.
An oversimplified answer can be broken into two categories--slavery and guns.
The terror,
demoralization, political instability, and wealth disparity that Africa
experienced during the slave trade destroyed many societies in West Africa.
The guns had perhaps a
greater effect. Guns, invented by Arabs and massed produced by
Europeans, allowed North African kingdoms to inflict enough harm on
Songhay and other West African kingdoms to lead to their destruction.
Guns also gave the
Portuguese an effortless conquest of East African trading cities and
the West coast of India,
consequently destroying the prosperous trade between those two regions
and Central Africa. With the
prosperous trade suddenly destroyed--therefore an economic livelihood
suddenly destroyed--wars broke out among the desperate people. Soon
kings, chiefs, and princes in central Africa
were making deals with the Portuguese to remain in or to gain power.
The structure of African governments and their economies were
destroyed.
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West
Africa:
Songhay, in a sense, was the continuation of the intellectual,
economic, and military powerhouse that was Mali,
which was a continuation of the great, powerful, and organized kingdom of Ghana. The destruction of
Songhay was therefore the death of over 1000 yrs of West African
evolution of enhanced prosperity, technology, wealth, and power.
Several factors led to the great kingdom's decline. In the 1580's
droughts and epidemics caused food shortages within the region. Prior
to the droughts the Portuguese were giving trade advantages to some of
Songhay's tenuous vassal states in order to fragment the kingdom, which
would lead to greater trading competition, and therefore lower prices
for Europeans. Songhay's central government lost a lot of tax revenue
and military power when their vassal states seceded. Some of these new
independent states made several of the primary trade routes too
dangerous to travel. The combination of food shortages and the decline
in revenue intensified rivalries, which
resulted in a civil war. The civil war ended when Ishak II defeated
Balama al-Sadduk--who resided in Timbuktu--in
the 1580's; this left little time, though, to reunite the country
before the Moroccan army, now wielding muskets, stormed into Songhay.
Previously the West African nations of Ghana,
Mali
and Songhay had enjoyed military superiority over the North African
nations, but they soon fell victim to the new dimension of warfare that
had just begun to shape our world…guns.1
In 1585 the Moroccan sultan, Mulay Ahmed el-Mansure, took the vital
Taghaza salt deposits from Songhay. Then in 1591, under the Spanish
renegade Judar, the Moroccan army overwhelmed Songhay, seizing Timbuktu and Gao.2
One chronicle of the time cried, "From that moment everything
changed. Danger took the place of security, poverty of wealth. Peace
gave way to distress, disasters, and violence."3
Finally, in 1618, after 25
years of fighting and 23,000 Moroccan deaths, the Sultan Mulay Zidan
abandoned the Songhay campaign for good.4
Basil Davidson wrote that the Moroccan invasion, "cost Songhay its
place in history…It demolished the unity and administrative
organization of the state, and while it left Timbuktu and Gao and Jenne
as considerable cities, it robbed this civilization of its vitality,
for it temporarily ruined the trans-Saharan trade as well as much of
the internal trade of the Sudan."5
External warfare continued
with the Dendi in the south, who had recognized Songhay's newfound
vulnerability and wished to capitalize on it. Soon the Songhay nation
was completely vanquished. Wars continued, and in 1884 the French began
their attacks on the Niger.
They conquered Timbuktu
in 1894, Gao in 1898, and the much-desired Tuareg salt mines in 1900.6
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Slavery and West Africa
Songhay wasn't the only great state in West Africa.
West Africa was home to the powerful and advanced kingdoms of Benin,
Kongo, and Borno, to name a few. The death of these kingdoms can be
directly attributed to the slave trade.
When Portugal first arrived in West Africa the slave trade was an afterthought.
Only a few criminals and prisoners of war were traded here and there.
It was nothing more than had been done for hundreds of years in the
region. With the breakdown of the Lord/serf system many Europeans
needed cheap labor fast. White people were too difficult to maintain as
slaves because they could easily run away to the newly developed
coastal cities and become lost among a sea of white people; that is one
of the reasons the feudal system broke down in the first place. The
landowners needed people who were easily distinguishable and Black
African's were their answer. At first the Africans gladly rid
themselves of their POW's and criminals. A few powerful men and
government officials gained a monopoly over the slave trade and their
wealth and power grew. When the pool of available slaves dried they
needed other means to hold onto their wealth and power. Greedy African
slave merchants and government officials weren't about to let go of
their wealth making machine and consequently hired men to raid weaker
villages to obtain more slaves. Davidson wrote, "The chiefs and
some of the tribes of the coasts were easily corrupted into wholesale
slave trading is obvious enough; the step from domestic slavery, which
they had always practiced, to the sale of slaves was all too easily
made…the hunt for a few slaves changing into the hunt for many; and,
with that, the gradual ruin of every sentiment of decency and
restraint."7
Between 1486-1641 one million three hundred eighty-nine thousand slaves
were taken from the coast of Angola alone. This is about
9,000 a year from an area not too densely populated.8
Soon the Americans faced
the same problems the Europeans had. They needed cheap labor but didn't
have any usable people: Indians knew the land too well and could easily
escape and mix with other Indian people. They also couldn't raid the
Indian villages for slaves because the Indians had organized clans,
federations, and confederations that could strike back.9
Furthermore, the Indians were too vulnerable to diseases. At first
white slaves from Europe were used,
who went through the same brutal middle passage blacks later would. In
the 17th and 18th centuries thousands of Europeans, because of either
false promises made by slave traders, kidnappings, or merely in
desperation to leave their harsh life in Europe, become commodities for
merchants, traders, ship captains and finally their masters in the Americas.
On the voyage to America
the famous historian Howard Zinn wrote, "the servants were
packed into ships with the same fanatic concern for profits that marked
the slave ships."11
It was recorded that one ship in 1741 had 46 out of 106 white
passengers die on its way to Boston--six
of them were eaten. On another ship thirty-two children died from
starvation, disease or being thrown into the ocean.12
A German, Gottlieb Mittelberher, described the horrific experience in
1750:
"During the journey the ship is full of pitiful sign of
distress-smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kings of sea
sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils,
scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused
by the age and the high salted state of the food, especially of the
meat, as well as by the very bad and filthy water…Add to all that
shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery,
vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles…On board our ship,
on a day on which we had a great storm, a woman about to give birth
and unable to deliver under the circumstances, was pushed through one
of the portholes into the sea…"13
When Europeans arrived in America
they were auctioned off like black slaves. "Beatings and whippings
were common," Zinn wrote. "Servant women were raped."14
Luckily for Europe the white servants were not part of the
wanted society. They were the underclass, which the European nations
desperately wanted to get rid of. That is why crimes like stealing a loaf
of bread were enough to ship a starving child to Australia. In America
the vast majority of people had no idea about the cruelties of the
middle passage and indentured servitude. Soon, because of the growing
white population in America,
whites could no longer be used as servants because they could easily
escape and mix into society. The solution was more black slaves.
Americans soon forgot about using white slaves and justified the use of
black slaves by the Bible. Excluding the slave traders who were aware
of the great civilizations in Africa
whites felt that they were lifting up a less civilized and savage Pagan
people. They actually believed they were doing good. They used the
erroneous, "Curse of Cannan," as justification; this
justification was a distortion of the Old Testament.
Whites were able to
contrast themselves with the savage blacks: we are the people who
always strive to be civilized, they believed, whereas the blacks were
brutish savages; that mindset gave whites an extreme psychological advantage
over the African societies. The psychological cushioning allowed whites
to separate themselves from the reality of the situation. The whites
had justification on moral grounds, while the only justification for
Africans were profit.
As the slave trade grew
African civilizations fell. Slavery fused mercantilism and the
monarchy: either monarchs or government officials selling slaves,
or slave merchants acquiring too much power--sometimes more than the
king. The former traditional monarchy that had developed out of
hundreds of years of careful pragmatism was destroyed. The result was
the rule of immoral merchants looking to enrich themselves at the
expense of the people.15
It devastated Africa's economy.
"One of the slave trade's most destructive effects," wrote
Iliffe of Cambridge University, "was to retard African commodity
production."16
During the Atlantic slave trade, "Western
Africa traded with the Atlantic world for over 300 years
without experiencing any significant economic development."17
Rarely did large African textile or metal industries find new
international markets. It became slavery and more slavery.18
As Europe's industry grew they were
able to produce commodities at cheaper prices than the Africans.
Consequently, cheap European cloth and metal nearly destroyed West Africa's textile and metal-smelting
industries.19
This could have, of course, been avoided if Africa's industry and
technology wouldn't have been retarded by the slave trade, and if the
former governments of Africa's
pre-Atlantic-slavery days would have remained.
"By 1600,"
Davidson sadly wrote, "the great days of the western Sudan
were over."20
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East
Coast
The Swahili East Coast of Africa, just like the West Coast of India,
was clearly destroyed by Portuguese intervention. When the rough and
war conditioned Portuguese, with their guns and cannons, came upon the,
"soft and civilized," merchant cities, they took advantage of
the easy prey. Davidson wrote, "The first care of the Portuguese
had been to sack and subdue the wealthier of the coastal cities, and
thanks to their guns, this had proved relatively easy….for here was
once again the old familiar tale of nomad strength and settled
weakness."21
One European of the time
gave a horrifying account of what the Portuguese did to the defenseless
people; "Cruelties were not confined to the baser sort, but were
deliberately adopted as a line of terrorizing policy by Vasco da Gama,
Almeida, and Albuquerque, to take no mean examples. Da Gama, tortured
helpless fishermen; Almeida tore out the eyes of Nair who had come in
with a promise of his life, because he suspected a design on his life;
Albuquerque cut off the noses of women and the hands of men."22
The ruler of Mombasa wrote a
letter explaining that his city was left with, "no living thing
in it, neither man nor woman, young nor old, nor child however little.
All who had failed to escape had been killed and burned."
Barbosa recorded that the city of Brava,
"was destroyed by the Portuguese, who slew many of its peoples and
carried them into captivity, and took great spoil of gold and silver
and goods."23
In 1502 da Gama threatened
to burn the prosperous and advanced trading city of Kilwa
if its ruler did not acknowledge the king of Portugal
as his overlord and pay him yearly tribute--Ravosio did the same to the
cities of Zanzibar
and Brava. The annual payment imposed upon the black trading city was
too much; consequently Kilwa suffered greatly. In 1505, because Kilwa
could not afford the Portuguese's illogical demands, Dom Francesco de
Ameida, who would later become the viceroy of India, attacked, burned and
destroyed the city. He did the same to Mombasa; Saldanha did the same to
Cerbera; Soares destroyed Zeila; and D'Acunha destroyed Brava.24
In 1512 the Portuguese finally realized the tribute forced upon the
Kilwa people had destroyed the economy, and thus abandoned the city.
Perhaps the most
devastating result of Portuguese intervention was that it destroyed
the rich Indian, Eastern African, and Central African trade. After
conquering the coastal cities of India
and Africa the Portuguese attempted to
continue the African-Indian trade, but failed miserably, according to
Davidson, "by their ignorance and greed." They then made an
even greater blunder. "The mistake…had been to try and seize not
only the maritime monopoly but also the overland monopoly. The African
coastal cities had learned better than to try to dominate their inland
neighbors…. Their (the Portuguese) captains and commercial agents would
do the same in India
with the same destructive consequences."25
Davidson gave the
following of Africa and India's
experience:
"They sacked and conquered the coastal cities and cut the trading
links which had long bound the east coast--and its inland customers and
suppliers--with the Persian Gulf and India
and the Far East. They pushed into the
interior and used their firearms on this side or on that of dynastic
wars and rivalries, so as to weaken the whole and deliver the power of
government into their ultimate control. Being too weak to hold this
power, they left chaos in their wake."26
Examples of the Portuguese
giving smaller chiefs aid to usurp kings so that the Portuguese could
gain trading advantages are common. In 1667 Manuel Barreto wrote,
"While I was there Antonio Ruiz was at the head of this unjust
rebellion, and of other great disorders in that conquest."27
A 1607 document recorded
by Antionio Bocarro, written by an African king to the King of
Portugal, describes the sad and common fate of the kings and chiefs of
Africa:
"I, the emperor Monomotapa think fit and am pleased to give to His
Majesty (King of Portugal) all the mines of gold, copper, iron, lead,
and pewter which may be in my empire, so long as the king of Portugal,
to whom I give the said mines, shall maintain me in my position, that I
may have power to order and dispose therein in the same manner as my
predecessors…and shall give me forces which to go and take possession
of my court and destroy a rebellious robber named Matuzuanha, who has
pillaged some of the lands in which there is gold, and prevents
merchants trading with their goods."28
In 1629 that same chief
wrote that his kingdom had to, "within a year expel all the Moors
from his kingdom (who were the Portuguese rivals in trade) and those
who shall be found there afterwards shall be killed by the
Portuguese."29
The new wars in the
interior and the Portuguese's cupidity and bad trading policies, "damned
the flow of gold," as well as all other forms of trade.
Barreto gave a couple
examples why the gold trade halted:
"The Kaffirs would not dig for it through fear of the Portuguese.
It is true that the chiefs do not wish gold to be dug in their lands,
because upon the report of gold being found the Portuguese buy the land
from the king as has frequently happened, and they, the chiefs, being
great lords…are despoiled of their lands, and become poor capreros,
which signifies laborers….the bad conduct of the Portuguese, from whose
violence the Kaffirs flee from our lands to others."30
His second example tells
of the gold mining region of Morando.
"For in Morando, if they should respond to our demand for it,
there comes immediately some powerful man, or in his default some
mocoque with his people and slaves, and commits such thefts and
violence against the poor diggers that they think it better to hide the
gold than to extract any more as a further incentive to our greed and
their own misfortune."31
The new reality caused
African merchants to smuggle goods in and out of the country. Many
Africans, the Sofala for instance, began to illegally weave their own
cloth because they could no longer buy it from India, unless they went
through the Portuguese. Soon it all became too much. The wealth the
Portuguese once dreamed of turned into poverty and chaos.
In 1719 the Portuguese
king wrote this letter to his viceroy in India:
This once, "vast empire" of central Africa "is in such
decay at the present day that no one has dominion over it, because
everyone has power there; and although there is a ruling prince, a descendant
of the ancient line of Monomotapa, this right and pre-eminence that he
hath avail him little, because Changamire and an infinite number of
other petty rulers nearly always put these kings to death as soon as
they take up the sceptre."32
The Portuguese couldn't
take anymore. Having ruined the royal order, stability, and economy of
Coastal, Central, and Southern Africa, along with the west coast of India--subsequently
destroying the long established and successful network of trade between
these regions--the Portuguese, as many of their letters show, could not
restore it, so left.
Davidson wrote,
"Having destroyed this great system of exchange and found its restoration
beyond their powers, they went off desperately in search of gold; and
when gold eluded them they looked for silver; and when silver failed
they went for anything they could get, and were finally content with
slaves…. The domestic slavery of Africa
slides easily and grimly into a wholesale traffic in human flesh for
sale and export."33
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