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The Songhai lived around Gao, on the Niger River, and they had built an empire that included Timbuktu and trade routes in the Sahara region. But after the mid-1500s they had weakened themselves in a common manner: dynastic succession disputes and, in the 1580s, by civil war. Also, Songhai's agricultural economy had suffered from draught and disease. The Songhai lost control over their long distance trading networks. The center for trading across the Saharan desert moved eastward to the kingdoms in and around Hausaland, between the Niger River and Lake Chad.
In 1590, the sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, sent troops with muzzle loading rifles, to seize control of the trans-Saharan trade in gold. They took the Songhai by surprise, and Moroccan guns threw the Songhai army into confusion. The Moroccans defeated the Songhai near Gao and went on to capture Timbuktu and Jenne. The Songhai empire broke into several independent states. Some Moroccans settled around the northern portion of the Niger River, and they began marrying local women. A sense of independence from Morocco developed among their descendants, the sultans of Morocco having their names dropped from Friday prayers in the mosque at Timbuktu. And gold was being diverted for trade with Europeans on the coast.
In the 1580s - after Spain's king expanded his rule to Portugal - exclusive right to trade along the Gambia River was sold to English merchants, confirmed by letters of patent from Queen Elizabeth. The Dutch were at war with Spain's king, and in 1593, soon after they had declared independence from Spanish rule, they launched attacks against the Spanish king's Portuguese shipping. The world's most successful merchant mariners, the Dutch from 1593 to 1607 sent about 200 ships to trade along Africa's Atlantic coast, and in each of the years 1610 and 1611 they sent twenty ships. The Dutch were able to ship more goods and lower prices, giving them an edge in trading in their competition with the English, French and Portuguese.
The Europeans competed for forts along Africa's Atlantic coast. The English drove the French from the mouth of the Senegal River. In 1631, the English built a fort on what was called the Gold Coast - a stretch of coastline that included Portuguese positions at Elmina and Axim. The Dutch established a fortified position at the mouth of the Zaire (Congo) River and at points on the shore along the coast, including the capture of Portugal positions at Elmina and Axim.
The Dutch had taken Brazil from the Portuguese - who were again independent of Spanish rule. And the Dutch wanted slaves for their new colony. The Dutch also took from the Portuguese the island of São Tomé. In August 1641, an armada of 21 Dutch ships appeared off the coast of Angola. The Dutch captured Luanda and Benguela, and the Portuguese retreated inland where they held off assaults by the Dutch and by Jaga tribesmen.
The French in 1645 established a hold at the mouth of the Senegal River, where they traded for gum and slaves. The French increased their trading on the Ivory Coast, and Swedes, Danes, and Germans from Brandenburg came and built forts on the coast. And it was standard among them to pay rent for the forts to local kings.
Portugal held onto the island of Pincipe (a little to the northwest of São Tomé) and a spot of land (roughly 200 by 200 kilometers) called Portuguese Guinea. In 1623, the Portuguese signed a peace treaty with Ndongo - east of Luanda and populated primarily by Mbundu. In 1624, a warrior queen, Nzinga, succeeded to the throne in Ndongo. She objected to Portuguese violations of the treaty. She welcomed slaves that had runaway from the Portuguese colony. She called on Africans under Portuguese rule to rebel and she acquired African soldiers who had been trained by the Portuguese. The Portuguese drove her from Ndongo and replaced her with a puppet ruler. Nzinga and her army fled north and conquered the kingdom of Matamba, from which she continued to war against the Portuguese. Nzinga formed an alliance with the Dutch, and at her request the Dutch sent her a militia of soldiers, the officer commanding the militia describing her as valiant, cunning and a "prudent virago" in command of both her slaves and her soldiers.
Queen Nzinga envisioned command of a great empire. Thousands of slave soldiers deserted to her. She attempted to bring various kings and heads of families to her fight against the Portuguese. In 1645 and 1646 she suffered military setbacks at the hands of the Portuguese, and she wondered whether the god of the Portuguese was stronger than her own god, Tem-Bon-Dumba. She had heard the Jesuits say that the Christian god was just and an enemy of all who suffered. She could not resolve this and the fact that the Portuguese were invading her country, but she decided to worship of the god of the Portuguese to test its power.
Queen Nzinga's alliance with the Dutch came to nothing as the Portuguese drove the Dutch from Luanda in 1648. The Dutch had lost their hold on Brazil and places on the Atlantic coast of Africa as well as their colonies in North America and their ability to trade on the Atlantic.
Queen Nzinga was facing the superior weaponry of the Portuguese. By the time she was at least seventy-five years old she had lost many of her faithful assistants. Some of those close to her had grown tired of fighting the Portuguese. Nzinga signed a treaty giving the Portuguese alone access to Matamba's markets - the Portuguese concerned about competition from the Dutch, English and French.
From the 1640s, four inland states near the Gulf of Guinea were growing in wealth and power from the slave trade. The kingdom of Oyo, around 300 kilometers (190 miles) inland, was the most successful of these kingdoms. It benefited from terrain sufficiently unforested and free of the tsetse fly and other disease carrying insects to allow for the breeding of horses. The Oyo kingdom used cavalry effectively in expanding southward where savanna split coastal forest. Oyo forced the coastal kingdom of Allada to pay it tribute, and it gained direct access to trade with Europeans. Oyo was a slave state, and its king used slave labor on his vast farmlands. In wars, Oyo took more slaves than it needed for the royal farms, and it traded them to the Europeans for guns, cloth, metal goods and cowry shells. It traded also with Africans to its north, for horses and for more captives for the slave trade. And the kingdom acquired wealth by taxing trade that crossed its territory to and from Hausaland.
Another power in the region was the kingdom of Abomey, which was founded in the early 1600s by the brother of the king of Allada, a coastal kingdom that had grown wealthy from the slave trade. The brother, Do-Aklin, cut off village chiefs from having any say in selecting his successor. Rule in Abomey passed to his grandson, Wegbaja, who consolidated his power - while both and Allada and Abomey were paying tribute to the more powerful kingdom of Oyo. In Abomey human sacrifices were used to honor the king's ancestors – the sacrifices usually captives from warfare.
West of Abomey were the Ashanti (Asanti), who were dominated by the Denkera to their southwest, to whom the Ashanti paid tribute. The primary political unit among the Ashanti had been the village, governed by clan elders. In the 1660s, an Ashanti warrior named Osei Tutu grouped clan chiefs around him and formed an alliance with the leading Ashanti religious figure, Anokye. They created a golden stool, representing power and spiritual unity, on which the ruler of the Ashanti was to sit, and they sanctified the golden stool with sacrifices.
Osei Tutu and Anokye extended their power across Ashanti chiefdoms, unifying the Ashanti. And with the power that accrued from this unity, the Ashanti defeated the Denkera and absorbed some of their subject states. These victories gave the Ashanti contact with the Europeans, to whom they sold slaves. And the Ashanti began an expansion inland for more slaves and for gold.
Meanwhile, Oyo cavalry invaded the Abomey four times, but Abomey retained enough power to expand against Allada on the coast. The king of Abomey, Agaja, was interested in buying arms from the Europeans. Conquering Allada in the 1720s gave him access to European trading. The enlarged rule of Agaja became known as Dahomey, and it began to prosper from the sale of slaves to the Europeans.
In 1662 the British established headquarters on the Gold Coast a few miles east of Elmina, giving competition to the Dutch in that region. In 1677 the French built a fort on Gorée, an island a little more than a hundred miles to the south of the mouth of the Senegal River, and soon they were established at a point on the north bank of the Gambia River, across the river from a fort held by the English. In 1693, during conflict between England and France in Europe, the English destroyed the French position on the Senegal River, and the following year the French blew up the English fort on the Gambia.
By 1700, the Swedes and Germans had dropped out of the trading wars, and the Danes were limiting their trading to the coastline east of Elmina. And with the treaty that ended the war between the French and the British - the Treaty of Utrecht - the French and English recognized each other's positions and slave trading in Africa, the French holding onto their position around the Senegal River and inland, where their inland trading was being handled by African middlemen.
As for the Kongo, the cultural disintegration and the political disarray that the Portuguese left was accompanied by the development of a blend of Christianity and paganism. A young woman named Kimpa Vita, also to be known as Dona Beatrice, believed herself to be possessed by the spirit of St. Anthony of Padua, a popular Catholic saint and miracle worker. She began preaching in São Salvador, and her call to unity drew strong support among the peasants, who flocked to the city, which she identified as the biblical Bethlehem. She told her followers that Jesus, Mary and other Christian saints were really Kongolese. She conspired with one of the contenders for the throne. She acquired political enemies as well as the hostility of Christian missionaries. And, in 1706, these hostilities led to both her and her child - claimed to have been conceived by her guardian angel - being burned at the stake for heresy.
In Luanda, power was measured by the number of slaves one owned. A businessman might own fifty slaves while the owner of a great spread of land might own more than a thousand. With slave labor, Luanda's first streets were constructed, and in 1779 the two halves of the city were linked by paved roads.
Luanda had become Africa's leading point of export for slaves, and Benguela grew as a major point of departure for slaves. Slave trading dominated the economy of these areas, and attempts by the Portuguese to develop the area's agriculture were slowed by the demand and higher price that people were now willing to pay for slaves. Traders roamed the interior buying slaves from local chiefs, returning the slaves to Luanda or Benguela in groups sometimes of several hundred. The slaves were held in enclosures and open corrals, restored to health for their journey abroad. The trip to Brazil took from five to eight weeks, the slaves packed closely together and in places under decks that did not allow them to stand. And some of the slaves did not survive the journey.
Slavery had long been brutal, as with the Roman invasion of Sardinia and the chained gangs of plantation workers in Italy. And slavery had at times been soft, as with the bringing of servants, scribes and such into one's homes or business, treating them as friends or members of one's family and allowing them property of their own and some freedoms. The taking of slaves by Muslims was extensive but would not be as obvious to people in the twenty-first century because fewer known descendants of slaves were around to remind people of it - the Muslims were castrating their slaves.[note] The slavery developing with trade between Christian Europeans and Africans was no less brutal, and that trade was intensifying in the 1600s and 1700s. The number of slaves exported from Africa to Christian societies between 1450 and 1600 has been estimated at 367,000, between 1601 and 1700 at 1,868,000, and between 1701 and 1800 at 6,133,000.[note]
In the 1700s, an average of around 60,000 slaves were exported per year. It has been estimated that each year six persons were taken for every thousand population - whereas 50 persons are said to have died from disease for every thousand. [note] The slave taking, for export or domestic use, was enough to create a widespread sense of insecurity. Communities along the Atlantic coast were on constant watch against intruding slave traders sneaking into their village and fleeing with their children and young adults.
By now the Portuguese were losing more to Dutch, French and English traders, who could provide better goods to the Africans for less. And, unlike the Portuguese, they were also willing to sell guns. The Africans preferred trading with them over the Portuguese, and Portuguese attempts to enforce trading monopolies were largely ineffective.
By the 1770s along the Gold Coast, trade between the Europeans and Africans had changed. Rather than trading to obtain gold, the Europeans had begun paying for slaves with gold. The flow of gold from the interior to the Gold Coast had ended. The kingdom of Asante, which controlled the gold mines, was using its gold and was uninterested in selling it. With the demand for slaves having raised the amount that Americans were willing to pay for slaves, the traders were willing to pay in gold for the slaves, a prime male slave costing a European trader from 9 to 10 ounces of gold. And, heavy labor being the main interest in slavery, a female slave cost only two ounces of gold.
In 1652 the Dutch began anchoring their ships in a bay near the southern tip of Africa, halfway on their voyages to India, to replenish their supply of drinking water and meat. There they found brown-skinned hunter-gatherers called Bushmen and another brown skinned people they called Hottentots, who called themselves the real people - Khoikhoi. The Khoikhoi were horse riding pastoralists. They welcomed the new opportunity to trade and sold to the Dutch their old and sick animals in exchange for iron, copper, tobacco and beads.
The Dutch sometimes wanted more animals than the Khoikhoi were willing to part with, and the Dutch stole Khoikhoi animals and sailed off, little worried whether angry Khoikhoi would retaliate against the next ship that anchored in the bay.
Dutch with India and beyond was in the hands of the Dutch East India Company, and the company decided to improve its position and provisioning at the bay. It built a fort, and it induced a few people to settle there - mainly soldiers released from their contracts who were promised land on which to farm. The new settlement began growing fruit and vegetables, and it built a small hospital.
In 1658 the settlers were given slaves, and the company established regulations for the care and maintenance of the slaves. Every slave transported to the settlement in company ships was to have his own ration of barley, beans and bacon, with pot herbs to flavor the food, fresh fruit, vinegar to make the water more palatable, and they were to be given occasional periods of fresh air on deck. And at the settlement a school was opened to teach the slaves the Dutch language and Christianity.
The settlement - to be known as Cape Town - grew to 6000 acres. There, Dutch ships were picking up a twelve to fourteen-day supply of carrots, beets and other vegetables and a few live sheep. By 1659 Dutch livestock was occupying some native summer grazing land, and Khoikhoi and Bushmen united against the Dutch. They learned the limits of the muzzle loading guns of the Dutch and drove the Dutch back to their fortress.
Several attempts to break into the fortress failed. Unity between the Khoikhoi and Bushmen broke apart. The Dutch and Africans negotiated, the Khoikhoi arguing that there was not enough grazing land for both Dutch cattle and their cattle, that it was right that the invader give way and that the land the Dutch were expanding upon belonged to the Khoikhoi forever. For the Dutch East India Company the issue was merely power, and reinforcements arrived to bolster that power.
The Dutch and Africans began fighting again in 1673. Some Khoikhoi clans were more hostile to the Dutch than others, and some were more impoverished than others. The Dutch exploited these differences and old clan rivalries. They persuaded impoverished clans to attack the more hostile and prosperous clans. The war ended in 1677 with the more powerful Khoikhoi clan - the Cochoqua - weakened and the Dutch East India Company having larger herds of cattle and sheep.
In the 1680s and 1690s more settlers arrived at Cape Town, including around 200 Huguenots who had been driven from France. Also arriving was a group of orphan girls from Amsterdam - orphanages and poor houses being a source of settlers for the Dutch. And Germans also arrived, looking forward to acquiring farmland.
By the 1700s, local Khoikhoi were decimated. Survivors were attracted by European goods, especially tobacco and brandy. They had begun to sell themselves to the colony as laborers and as servants.
But the Bushmen were less interested in acquiring European goods. Traditionally they were more communal and more interested in sharing rather than acquiring wealth. They continued to resist Dutch expansion, killing settlers and driving Dutch cattle from their hunting grounds and watering holes.
The Dutch colony at Cape Town continued to expand. Settlers were leaving Cape Town in ox drawn wagons and moving into nearby fertile valleys. They were called Boers (Dutch for farmer), or Afrikaners. The Dutch East India Company allowed them to claim farms of 2500 hectares (about 1000 acres) or more.
The Boers were Calvinists, and those who could read had only one book: the Bible. They saw themselves as the chosen people of the Old Testament, and drawing from the Old Testament they concluded that slaves and other blacks were damned by God. Some Boers migrated northward along the coast and others toward the east. Then the northward migration shifted eastward, the two groups meeting half way to the Orange River.
Cape Town was growing in population and in the number of its slaves. Boers who had settled into farming were reluctant to journey there, afraid of leaving the farm unguarded during a trip that might take a couple of weeks. And selling their goods at Cape Town was risky because when they arrived they were taxed at the town's gate for the goods they brought with them, and when they left no tax returns were given for goods not sold. But the Boers had to go to Cape Town for marriage licenses and for wills.
By the late 1760s, Boers were confronting the Bantu-speaking people around Xhosa. The Bantu were also recent migrants to the area, and like the Boers they were eager to acquire land. Despite the view of Africans by Boers in general, some single Boer men married Bantu women, some in the Bantu custom of polygamy.
Boers and Bantu traded and lived side by side in peace, but by the 1770s a series of "frontier wars" - also called the Kaffir wars - began between the Boers and the Bantu, with African servants of the Boers fleeing to the Bantu.
The Boers were also fighting Bushmen, who were raiding Boer cattle and attacking Boer families. Boer raiding parties attacked the Bushmen, a raid against the Bushmen in 1774, aided by Khoikhoi trackers, killing around 500 Bushmen and taking nearly 300 prisoners. The Boers were driving the Bushmen toward the Kalahari desert and making servants of children orphaned during their raids.
During the 1500s and 1600s the Portuguese were trading in south-eastern Africa, where a variety of city states were populated by people of mixed African, Arab, Persian and Indian ancestry. There, the Portuguese established a base on the coastal island of Mozambique and at Sofala, which were ports of call for their ships traveling to India. And in pursuing trade, the Portuguese moved through the Zambezi River basin.
The area south of the Zambezi River was dominated by the Mutapa Empire, a century or so old, but politically fragmented, with various chiefs ruling over and drawing tribute from lesser chiefs. Taking advantage of wars within the empire, Portuguese trader-adventurers, to be called Prazeros, sided with one chief or another, winning favor and grants of land from their new allies. Some of them took African wives, and they maintained their own small armies.
The Portuguese fought for and won control over coastal trading points, and they established a presence at the trading center at Sena, on the south bank of the Zambezi River. There were about 50 Portuguese and around 750 Indians in addition to racially mixed Africans. The Portuguese operated trade fairs, exchanging beads and cloth for African gold and ivory. But Portugal's presence south of the Zambezi, inland and along the coast, diminished, ravaged by malaria and the hostility of local peoples. And in 1592 the area, including Sena, was overrun by tribal warriors, who eventually withdrew. The Prazeros and their mixed heritage offspring remained - outside the control of agents of Portugal's crown.
Portugal shifted the center of its east coast operations to a three-mile-wide coastal island that was eventually to be called Mombasa, and there, in 1593 they began building a fort - Fort Jesus - from which they hoped to administer influence over Kilwa, Zanzibar, Pemba and other coastal trading centers north of Cape Delgado. They intended to have all trade pass through customs at Fort Jesus, with import duties to be at six percent of value of the goods in question.
The coastal city-states above Cape Delgado were politically divided and in conflict with one another, which helped the Portuguese extend their domination. In the first decades of the 1600s they won some tribute paid to the king of Portugal. And amid this success, Augustinian friars came to Fort Jesus - the first Portuguese missionaries to arrive on Africa's east coast.
The success was short lived. In the 1630s Portugal's influence north of Cape Delgado began to decline. A local leader, who had been converted to Christianity, relapsed and rebelled. He attacked Fort Jesus, killing the captain in charge of the fort and most of its garrison. The Portuguese were able to regain the fort after a little more than a year, but by now the Dutch had weakened Portuguese naval power along the coast and on the Indian Ocean, and along the coast a number of cities were opposing the Portuguese. These Africans invited a naval force from the Arabian principality of Oman to the area to drive the Portuguese away. Oman's navy came, in 1652, 1660, 1667 and 1679, and they harassed the Portuguese rather than drive them away.
In 1623 an invasion by the Mariva from north of the Zambezi River into the Mutapa Empire south of the Zambezi, added to the chaos. The Mariva withdrew but there followed a war of succession among the Mutapa, in which the Portuguese intervened in favor of the side that offered to removed trading restrictions on them.
After that fighting ended - favorably for the Portuguese - trouble for the Portuguese arose from a new Mutapa chief. The Portuguese gathered private armies together and drove away the offending chief. A new Mutapa chief, Filipe, at least pretended to be Christian. He pledged vassalage to the king of Portugal and promised Christian missionaries and Portuguese traders everything they wanted.
In the second half of the 1600s the Portuguese became involved in more warring within the Mutapa Empire. Some areas were depopulated. More peasants became hostile toward the Portuguese. And gold mining - which had been declining because mineshafts had reached the water table - declined further.
With the insecurity of war, common people sought protection from those who were rich and had their own armies: men who owned large herds of cattle. Young men offered to join the army of such men in exchange for enough cattle to pay for a bride. And the wealthy, with their enlarged armies were able to resist the Portuguese, to protect their herds and grazing lands and to make raids against their neighbors.
One cattle owner emerged supreme. This was Changamire Dombo. On the ashes of the Mutapa empire he built an empire of his own. In 1684 he began expelling the Portuguese from his empire. The new empire - to be known as the Rozvi Empire - came to include what had been Zimbabwe. The Rozvi emperors controlled gold production and guarded as secrets the location of new mines, the disclosure of which was punishable by death, while much of the available gold was crafted by local goldsmiths into jewelry for the Rozvi court.
By now the sea off the coast of eastern Africa was dominated by pirates. In the 1690s another naval expedition from Oman arrived near Fort Jesus, and in 1698, after a thirty-three-month siege, a naval expedition overran the fort, killing around 1,000 Portuguese. Portugal lost its hold on Fort Jesus and the coast north of Cape Delgado. Arab power along this coast was accepted as supreme, and the island with Fort Jesus was renamed Mombasa, after a place in Oman.
South of Cape Delgado, across the Mozambique Channel, France had taken possession of Madagascar, King Louis XIV having officially annexed the island in 1686. In the coming decades the French built a plantation economy on Madagascar, increasing the demand for slaves.
In 1710 along the Zambezi River, the Rozvi Emperor allowed the Portuguese to maintain a trading post at Zumbo. The Rozvi emperors wished to avoid becoming over-dependent on foreign trade, but they wished to maintain trade with the Europeans, to acquire for themselves chinaware, beads, umbrellas, brass bells, brandy and other goods. Cattle raising remained a large part of the wealth of the Rozvi kings, while common folks remained engaged in subsistence farming. Some of the crops that were grown had originated in Europe and Asia:rice, yams, sweet potatoes, melons, cucumbers and pineapples and lemons.
The Portuguese still held the little island of Mozambique, consisting of several thousand Christians - white, black and brown. And at Sena and Tete the Portuguese still operated trading fairs. By now in this area, Dominicans and Jesuits owned vast tracts of land and were supporting themselves by collecting taxes and dealing in slaves. The Prazeros were still powerful as small-scale warlords with slave armies. And racially they were becoming only distantly European.
The authority of the Prazeros had been ill-defined, and in the second half of the 1700s, after having demanded taxes, having pushed people around and having committed bloody atrocities trying to enforce their power, they faced revolts. Some of the people the Prazeros had tried to subjugate moved away. The power of the Prazeros declined, and their opulent lifestyles disappeared.
Recommended Books
A History of the African People, by Robert W July
Africa: A Biography of the Continent: a Biography of the Continent, by John Reader
Portugal in Africa, by James Duffy, Penguin African Library, 1963
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