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H. Lhote, to whom one must render hommage, observed that:

1. the bellows made of pottery is original and exclusive to the Sudan

2. that the Berbers in the Sahara are not metallurgists: they mistrusted iron-working (the 'Enaden' are mostly repairmen)

3. no traces of blast furnaces have been found in the Sahara even though iron is present but the nearby peoples do not on their own know how to work iron;

4. there are numerous traces of blast furnaces in the Sudanese zone up to the 16th northern parallel [4]

5. the northern limits to finding these blast furnaces are found up to approximately the southern reaches of the BRZL linguistic family that uses a word of semitic origin for iron

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“The masterpieces of the Monbutto [Mangbettu] smiths are the fine chains worn as ornaments, and which in perfection of form and fineness compare well with our best steel chains.” Shubotz in 1911 called the Mangbettu “a highly cultivated people” in architecture and handicraft. Barth found copper exported from Central Africa in competition with European copper at Kano.

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Black Africa was for a long time an exporter of iron, and even in the twelfth century exports to India and Java are recorded by Idrisi.

The Negro is a born trader. Lenz says, “our sharpest European merchants, even Jews and Armenians, can learn much of the cunning
and trade of the Negroes.” We know that the trade between Central Africa and Egypt was in the hands of Negroes for thousands of years, and in early days the cities of the Sudan and North Africa grew rich through Negro trade.

Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, said, “It is a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is daily brought
hither and how costly and sumptuous all things be.... Here are many shops of artificers and merchants and especially of such as weave linnen and cloth.”

Long before cotton weaving was a British industry, West Africa and the Sudan were supplying a large part of the world with cotton cloth. Even to-day cities like Kuka on the west shore of Lake Chad and Sokota are manufacturing centers where cotton is spun and woven, skins tanned, implements and iron ornaments made.

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The Zanj have no ships in which they can voyage, but boats land in their country from Oman, as do others that are going to Zabaj (or Djawaga) (Endonezya). These foreigners sell their goods there, and buy the produce of the country. The inhabitants of Zabaj (or Djawaga) call at Zanj in both large and small ships (zawariq wa marakib kubar) and trade their merchandise with them, as they understand each other's language. The Zendj have at the bottom of their hearts a great respect for the Arabs. For this reason, when they see an Arab, whether a traveler or merchants they prostrate themselves before him. They say in their language: Welcome son of Yemen. The visitors to this country steal their children, enticing them away by means of giving them fruit. They carry the children from place to place and finally take possession of them and carry them off to their own country. Because the people of Zangibar or numerous and are short on food. The ruler from the island of Qais (or Keish) in the sea of Oman (opposite Muscat, the port that became important after the decline of Siraf) had 505 ships with which he used to raid the Zanj coast for slaves and he makes many captives....

....This section embraces the description of the remainder of the country of Sofala
You first find two towns or better two big villages, in-between there are villages and camps that resemble those of the Arabs. Those big villages are called Djantama and Dandama (Chindi and Quilimane?) They are situated at the sea shore and rather small. The inhabitants are poor, miserable, and without resources to support them except iron, of this metal there are numerous mines in the mountains of Sofala. People of the Zabag (or Zanedj or Raneh) come hither for iron, which they carry to the continent and islands of India where they sell it for good money, because it is an object of big trade and it has a huge market in India. For although there is good quality iron in the islands and in the mines of that country, it does not equal the iron of Sofala for its quality and its malleability. The Indians are masters in the arts of working it. They prepare and mix the substances so that through fusion one gets the soft steel normally called: India steel. They have factories that make the best swords in the world. This is how in iron Sind, Serenbid and Yemen rival among each other in quality through local circumstances, as well as the art of manufacturing, the pouring of the steel, the smelting, and the beauty of the polished surface. But nothing cuts better then this iron from India. Everybody knows that and nobody can deny it.

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A thousand years ago, after Islam had spread into the Sahel, the trans-Sahara camel caravan trade was flowering. It has been known for a long time that mainly gold and later slaves were the most desired West African products for the Arabs at the Mediterranean coast. So far, historians have argued that salt was the main trade product brought southwards, but new research adds copper to the favourite products of West Africans in the 11th to 16th century....

One of the questions Mr Fenn wants to answer concerns the sources of copper and other raw materials that became manufactured goods that were traded throughout the region. Specifically, why were metal workers in a sophisticated metallurgical industry in sub-Saharan Africa importing copper ingots when there were perfectly good copper ore deposits nearby?

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


For the most part they formed endogamous castes
outside of whatever ethny they were attached to.
They were never in control of the society of their
ethnic affiliation.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
Why don't we try dealing in facts instead of theories.

Show me in the histories of Europe or Asia where
craftsmen and "people with the knowledge" "have
an edge" over the people of the government and
their militants thus forcing them into reliance.

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Again, Great Britain was developing in industry more rapidly than was the continent of Europe, and hence was not only a better market for exported foods but was also able better to supply America with the manufactures which the people of the United States required. When the British monopoly of American trade was terminated by the Revolution and the staple articles of export from America were no longer "enumerated," but were free to go to any market in the world, there proved to be little demand for the articles outside of Great Britain, where they had previously been sold…..

…..One other reason that may be noted as in part accounting for the control of American trade by Great Britain after the Revolution was that many, if not most, of the staple articles of manufactures desired by American buyers were made better in Great Britain and sold more cheaply there than in continental Europe. As an illustration of this, Lord Sheffield cites the fact that "when France granted a sum of money to Congress for clothing the American troops, Mr. Laurens, Jr., was employed to provide it; but instead of laying out the money in France he went to Holland and bought English cloths and sent them to America."

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Originally posted by Doug M:


Likewise, imperialism is primarily defined by force of arms not by force of craftsmen. Name one empire that was not built on and maintained by military conquest and political domination.

There are none.

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The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations....

....Acquisition by a government of other governments or territories, or of economic or cultural power over other nations or territories, often by force. Colonialism is a form of imperialism.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


In a thread I posted years ago it was shown that
iron metallurgy was an independent invention of
inner Africans.

Northern coastal Africans had no iron metallurgy of their own.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


I tire of all you who have just begun studying
Africana and come up with these wild ox ideas.
I tire of those who've studied Africana for
decades yet haven't advanced beyond 19th and
early 20th century Africanists' notions.

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These measures have allowed the U.S. to dump its farm surplus on world markets. For example, the U.S. exports corn at prices 20 percent below the cost of actual production, and wheat at 46 percent below cost. This has resulted in Mexican corn farmers being put out of business. The dramatic increase in U.S. agricultural subsidies will further jeopardize the livelihoods of those in developing countries. Poor regions, like Africa, depend on agriculture for about a quarter of their total output, most of it coming from low-income families.

Exporters in Africa will also suffer. According to the World Bank, West African cotton exporters already lose about $250 million a year as a direct result of U.S. subsidies; this figure will rise sharply. In West African countries like Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad, where cotton accounts for more than one-third of export earnings, the losses already represent around three times the savings provided through debt relief.

This is a classic example of trade policy undermining aid. In the cotton-growing basin of Sikasso, in southeast Mali, where 80 percent live in poverty, the consequences will be devastating. The Texas cotton barons will be cashing in at the bank while desperately poor Africans suffer more.

Staple food producers in developing countries face particularly bleak prospects as IMF imposed import liberalization exposes them to intensified competition with subsidized imports. For instance, since Mexico's import barriers started tumbling under the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. maize imports have tripled. Mexican smallholders have been forced out of local markets, undermining rural economies and fuelling migration. The U.S. department of agriculture is now targeting countries such as Brazil and the Philippines.

Import liberalization in markets distorted by subsidies can have devastating implications for efforts to combat rural poverty and improve self-reliance. When the IMF bulldozed Haiti into liberalizing its rice markets in the mid-1990s, the country was flooded with cheap U.S. imports. Local production collapsed, along with tens of thousands of rural livelihoods. Self-sufficient a decade ago, Haiti today spends half of its export earnings importing U.S. rice.

The wider danger is that the U.S. farm bill will undermine local agriculture and foster dependence on imports. This will be particularly damaging in sub-Saharan Africa, where staple food production lags behind population growth and imports have risen 40 percent over the past decade.

Even the World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, acknowledges "these subsidies are crippling Africa's chance to export its way out of poverty." The developing world faces trade barriers costing them $200 billion per annum - twice as much as they receive in aid. Industrialized nations currently spend about $350 billion a year assisting their farmers, more than the economic output for all of Africa.

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“With cheap food imports, Haiti can't feed itself” The Washington post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/20/AR2010032001329.html



Captain: Maria Carmelle Jean, center, sells rice and dry products at a downtown street market in Port-au-Prince, Saturday, March 20, 2010. Decades of cheap imports, especially rice from the U.S., punctuated with abundant aid in various crises, have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz) (Jorge Saenz - AP)

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Decades of inexpensive imports - especially rice from the U.S. - punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They're led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton - now U.N. special envoy to Haiti - who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti's rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else." ….

"A combination of food aid, but also cheap imports have ... resulted in a lack of investment in Haitian farming, and that has to be reversed," U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes told The Associated Press. "That's a global phenomenon, but Haiti's a prime example. I think this is where we should start."

Haiti's government is asking for $722 million for agriculture, part of an overall request of $11.5 billion.


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"National rice isn't the same, it's better quality. It tastes better. But it's too expensive for people to buy," said Leonne Fedelone, a 50-year-old vendor

Riceland defends its market share in Haiti, now the fifth-biggest export market in the world for American rice.

But for Haitians, near-total dependence on imported food has been a disaster.
Cheap foreign products drove farmers off their land and into overcrowded cities. Rice, a grain with limited nutrition once reserved for special occasions in the Haitian diet, is now a staple.…

Three decades ago things were different. Haiti imported only 19 percent of its food and produced enough rice to export, thanks in part to protective tariffs of 50 percent set by the father-son dictators, Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier….

…Impoverished farmers unable to compete with the billions of dollars in subsidies paid by the U.S. to its growers abandoned their farms. Others turned to more environmentally destructive crops, such as beans, that are harvested quickly but hasten soil erosion and deadly floods.

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Originally posted by markellion:


The article seems to suggest that the "Sudan" had a knowledge of iron smelting technology that people in the north didn't have. Is the article wrong? If it is then fine but still the high level of knowledge and technology of many "Sudanese" industries would still allow for an advantage, I would think

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…..One other reason that may be noted as in part accounting for the control of American trade by Great Britain after the Revolution was that many, if not most, of the staple articles of manufactures desired by American buyers were made better in Great Britain and sold more cheaply there than in continental Europe. As an illustration of this, Lord Sheffield cites the fact that "when France granted a sum of money to Congress for clothing the American troops, Mr. Laurens, Jr., was employed to provide it; but instead of laying out the money in France he went to Holland and bought English cloths and sent them to America."

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Originally posted by markellion:

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


In a thread I posted years ago it was shown that
iron metallurgy was an independent invention of
inner Africans.

Northern coastal Africans had no iron metallurgy of their own.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


I tire of all you who have just begun studying
Africana and come up with these wild ox ideas.
I tire of those who've studied Africana for
decades yet haven't advanced beyond 19th and
early 20th century Africanists' notions.

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So don't you think that a logical conclusion would be that the "Sudanese", who as you said had metallurgy, would have an advantage over those who did not have metallurgy? Even if these blacksmiths were of a low caste? (edit: it depends on the society) And wouldn't one regard that a person who doesn't come to this conclusion is simply following 19th century racial theories because they don't see it when a people have a clear advantage?

Note that you used the terms "of inner Africans" and "Northern coastal Africans". The word "Sudan" is a much older word and a concept that has gone back millennia

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Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


In a thread I posted years ago it was shown that
iron metallurgy was an independent invention of
inner Africans.

Northern coastal Africans had no iron metallurgy of their own.

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758, when the new Abbasid governor of Egypt wrote to the Makurian monarch: “[Here] no obstacle is placed between your merchants and what they want – [they are] safe and contented wherever they go in our land. You, however… behave otherwise… nore are our merchants safe with you.”

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In the early 13th century, the governor of Sijilmasa, which was the most important terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan routes in southern Morocco, sent a following letter to the king of Ghana who was by then the most powerful ruler in Western Africa:

"We are neighbours in benevolence even if we differ in religion; we agree on right conduct and are one in leniency towards our subjects. It goes without saying that justice is an essential quality of kings in conducting sound policy; tyranny is the preoccupation of ignorant and evil minds. We have heard about the imprisonment of poor traders and their being prevented from going freely about their business. The coming to and fro of merchants to a country is of benefit to its inhabitants and a help to keeping it populous. If we wished we would imprison the people of that region who happen to be in our territory but we do not think it right to do that. We ought not to "forbid immorality while practising it ourselves". Peace be upon you."

Considering the contents of this letter, there is no doubt who had the actual control over the trade in the south.

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page 5 of article

Portuguese administrators came to depend on Swahili-speakers. In the sixteenth century, several Portuguese factors even employed Swahili elites as political and economic advisors.[9] This dependence was not only born out of an ignorance of East Africa, but also as a result of the ease with which many Portuguese could interpret the Swahili world conceptually, materially, and religiously. The Portuguese found a familiar Islamic civilization on the East African coast and, able to effectively communicate within it through dialog and/or coercion, attempted to manipulate it for narrow economic proposes. Yet Swahili-speakers, lacking military supremacy, used their paradoxically privileged position to impede Portuguese commercial relations with non-Swahili and, in some cases, even to further their own aspirations. Thus, despite fierce rivalries in Iberia and abroad, Portuguese familiarity with Islam and what they perceived as general Muslim material and social worlds precipitated close relations with the Swahili such that over the course of the sixteenth century Portuguese perceptions, language, relations, and investments in East Africa were filtered through the lens of Swahili society......[10]

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The situation was perhaps similar to that in the early 19th century, when European explorers, who had penetrated the African interior in order to unveil her secrets, were amazed at how well the West Africans knew what was going on in the outside world. When Mungo Park arrived in Segu on the Niger in July 1796, being the first European in this city, he was told that the British and French were fighting in the Mediterranean. The news probably concerned the battles that took place after the treaty of Basle which was made in April 1795, when Park was in his way to Gambia. In 1824, Hugh Clapperton visited Kano, being again the first European in this city, and he was surprised by Muhammad Bello, the ruler of Sokoto caliphate, who asked him detailed questions concerning the British policy in India and the religious situation in Europe. In early 1871, Gustav Nachtigal, the famous German traveller who had left Tripoli in 1869 in order to explore Central Africa, was told in Bornu that a war had broke out between franse and nimse, meaning Frenchmen and Germans. Considering that the Franco-Prussian war began in July 1870, the news had reached Bornu very quickly.

Perhaps news of the great events in the medieval Mediterranean, like the fall of Acre in 1291 or the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, were heard in the capital of Mali as quickly. However, there are only few mentions in the contemporary Arabic sources concerning the transmission of news across the Sahara. We know, for example, that Mansa Musa of Mali sent a delagation to congratulate the Marinid Sultan Abu 'l-Hasan for the conquest of Tlemcen. Since Tlemcen had fallen to Marinids in April 1337, the news most probably arrived in Mali with the traders who had left Morocco in autumn, which was the usual season of departure for the caravans to the south. The Malian delegation was sent to Fez probably in the following summer, when the caravans returned to the north. Similarly, another Malian delegation was sent to congratulate Sultan Abu 'l-Hasan for the conquest of Constantine in 1349. The prompt action on part of the Malian rulers proves that they knew well the political geography of Northern Africa, being fully aware of the consequenses of the Marinid expansion to central Maghrib....

Similarly, it was another channel for West Africans to the outside world: in 1594 a Portuguese navigator reported that he had in Senegal met many blacks who were not only capable of speaking French but have even visited France. In was only during the age of imperialism that the encounter of West Africans with other civilisations turned definitely from controlled relationship to collision.

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But there was a much earlier ‘discovery’ of the continent and a similar ‘invention’ of it by Arabs—or at least those using the Arabic language to express their thoughts—a thousand and more years earlier and the picture that such writers drew of sub-Saharan Africa, at least in regard to its physical geography, certainly influenced Europeans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as they set out, mentally and physically to explore the interior of the continent. In 1788 when the Association
for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa was founded in London, it noted in its ‘Plan’ that the map of inner Africa was ‘still but a wide extended blank on which the geographer, on the authority of Leo Africanus, and of Xeriff Edrissi, the Nubian author, has traced with a hesitating hand, a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations’.1 The situation had scarcely improved over the half century which had passed since Jonathan Swift had written with biting satire:

Geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.2

Thus, while the little that was known of the African continent away from the coast where European merchants had been trading was known principally from Arabic sources, it had to be admitted that that ‘little’ was itself only imperfectly known.

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There is no injustice done to the Arabs in thus ascribing altogether to theory a positive statement made by many of their best authors. It is in the highest degree improbable, that with little or no knowledge of the various Black nations inhabiting the eastern coast of Africa, they should have had any accurate acquaintance with the remote interior: and besides, the acquiescence in system here imputed to them, is no greater than must have inevitably arisen from the imperfect state of their knowledge. Little more than a century ago, European geographers represented Abyssinia as occupying nearly a fourth of the African continent; on its eastern borders they placed a great lake, from which issued the Egyptian ' Nile, and all the great rivers of Southern Africa.21 The maps of Africa of that date exhibit less vacant space than they do at the present day. The improvement of geography, with respect to that quarter of the globe, has consisted chiefly in reducing what is known within its proper limits. Distant nations were of course as easily brought together and united as distant countries. The different African tribes which, in the course of the sixteenth century, devastated the widelyseparate coasts of Sierra Leone, of Angola, and of Melinda, were, by a sweeping generalization, all supposed to be one and the same people, and were furthermore identified with the Agows and Gallas of Abyssinia.222 Vestiges of these ideas still remain in our treatises of geography, and in some of the latest maps, nor is the system of thinking from which they emanated yet quite obsolete.23 But the close resemblance of European theories respecting the mysterious interior of Africa to those of the Arabs, is strikingly manifest in the following words of the Portuguese historian, Da Couto:—" About the year 1570, a horde of barbarians, like locusts, issued from the heart of Ethiopia, from the great lake whence flows the Cuama, the Zaire, the Rhapta, and the Nile."24—Here then we have the exact counterpart of Lake Kura and the Demdem or Demadem. The subsequent history of the horde referred to by Da Couto is taken up by other learned writers, who affect to describe its march southwards from Mombasa to the Cape of Good Hope; thence to Angola, whence it spread to Sierra Leone and elsewhere: so that not even the Demadem were ever carried by conjecture so far from their native homes.26 Thus it appears that the theories ascribed above to the Arabs, much excelled in sobriety, while they were exactly parallel in design with the geographical speculations of a later age.

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That the wars which have always existed in Africa, have no connexion with the slave trade, is evident from the universality of the practice of it between communities in a savage state. The oldest writers, as Leo, and others, have represented the Africans as living in a continual state of war, and rapine, long before the commerce with Europeans was introduced among them

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Page 34-35
Walter Rodney suggested that Akan gold production began to decline in the early eighteenth century, and links this to the rise in profits that could be made by concentrating on slave production rather than gold mining. If this is so it is an irony that the Europeans by promoting the slave trade were ultimately forced, much against their own wishes, to carry gold to the Gold Coast. A more likely explanation of the phenomenon lies in the increasing monetarization of the Asante economy, described by Joseph LaTorre, and in the consequent hoarding of gold in Asante itself. This in turn provoked a partial monetarization of the Fante economy and undoubtedly increased the value of gold whiter it was regarded as a currency or a commodity

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


Saharans were not dependent on "Sudanese"
for iron implements because they had their
own local castes of iron workers.

Even if there were no local iron workers why
would Saharans be dependent on "Sudanese"
for iron implements? Such could be procured
from littoral North Africa, and elsewhere,
just as other items were.

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Again, Great Britain was developing in industry more rapidly than was the continent of Europe, and hence was not only a better market for exported foods but was also able better to supply America with the manufactures which the people of the United States required. When the British monopoly of American trade was terminated by the Revolution and the staple articles of export from America were no longer "enumerated," but were free to go to any market in the world, there proved to be little demand for the articles outside of Great Britain, where they had previously been sold…..

…..One other reason that may be noted as in part accounting for the control of American trade by Great Britain after the Revolution was that many, if not most, of the staple articles of manufactures desired by American buyers were made better in Great Britain and sold more cheaply there than in continental Europe. As an illustration of this, Lord Sheffield cites the fact that "when France granted a sum of money to Congress for clothing the American troops, Mr. Laurens, Jr., was employed to provide it; but instead of laying out the money in France he went to Holland and bought English cloths and sent them to America."

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
So I ask you just what advantage was had and which ethnies or polities were at what kind of disadvantage?

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
Do we all understand the difference between
imperialism and scattered non-conquest, even
if organized, presence of individuals?

I'd want a thread on Imperial Africans to have
posts on Africans of a governing, centralized,
multi-ethnic polity called empire.

I suppose one could make a point for trading
empires though. If so that would include the
mercantile Zanj of Iraq as well as the Wangara
of West Africa's savanna.

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quote:

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


In a thread I posted years ago it was shown that
iron metallurgy was an independent invention of
inner Africans.

Northern coastal Africans had no iron metallurgy of their own.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
So I ask you just what advantage was had and which ethnies or polities were at what kind of disadvantage?

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The southern economy was totally dependant on outside markets for the sale of its two major export commodities, raw, unfinished cotton and to a lesser degree rice; it was similarly totally dependant on outside markets for the bulk of its foodstuffs, almost all consumer goods, and virtually all capital goods. Almost no other of the extensive mineral and natural resources in these southern states were developed or harnessed….

….Along with the development of an industrial economy, agriculture in the northern states had become significantly more productive. The reasons can be seen in the fact that investments in both agricultural and manufacturing were vastly greater in the northern free states than in the slave labor economy of the south; both the value of farm machinery and implements per acre and per farm laborer in the south were approximately one half that in the north. A more telling figure is the percentage of capital invested in manufacturing; in 1860 over 84% of the U.S. total was invested in the north, with a mere 16% in the south; the per capita dollar figure in the north was four times that in the south despite the North's greater population…

…….Such a labor system would not only degrade labor, but would bestialize those who owned, or controlled such labor. Despite the southern propaganda praising the benefits of such a system, and southern assertions of the power of King Cotton, southern planters were themselves chained to such a primitive system, through indebtedness to outside finance, total dependence on the British and British allied New England textile manufacturers, who turned their raw cotton into finished products, and outside suppliers for almost all consumer and capital goods.

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Economy

- Dahomey had a monetary system: cowry shells were the basic currency, but trade goods were used also—guns, bolts of cloth etc.

- Europeans tried to take advantage of this currency; they brought so many cowry shells that the shells lost value (inflation). As a result, European trade goods became the basic currency used in the purchase of slaves.

- farming was very important; agriculture was mostly carried out by men, usually in communal gangs of young men; this was different from most of the rest of Africa where women did most of the agricultural work. However, there were many artisans also who made products in addition to farming.

- the market economy mostly involved producers selling to consumers,but some women acted as middlemen. The latter would travel from market to market buying and selling goods.


- all trade with Europeans was a royal monopoly and guarded jealously by successive kings; kings never allowed Europeans to bypass and trade directly with people in the kingdom. As a military, predatory state, the costs of government and the military were high; thus,the king needed all the revenue from taxes and the profits of trade that he could get.

- Europeans and their influence were confined to one port on the coast—Whydah.

- permission to go inland, especially to the capital, was given only infrequently and as a special favour; because so few Europeans were allowed in, there were only a limited number of eyewitness accounts in spite of the long history of trade and contacts; no missionaries were allowed in.

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Meanwhile some Nubian subjects themselves, especially from the northern zone of special status, had also become private merchants and had begun to conduct their own commercial ventures northward into Egypt. The Nubian king attempted to maintain his hold over subjects living abroad, and to profit from their private commerce, by negotiating an arrangement according to when a royal Makurian agent was authorized to reside and to travel within the Islamic caliphate in order to collect taxes from the Nubians living abroad.

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No figures whatsoever exist concerning the magnitude of this trade at any period; yet without such data, no remotely plausible assessment of total slave exports is possible. Even in the absence of absolute numbers, however, it is possible to challenge the assertion by Cliometricians that most slaves exported from the Northeast Africa to the Islamic Orient were female, for the claim is difficult to reconcile with a source literature from medieval Egypt in which corps of black male military slaves are conspicuous while Africa females are not. The actual primary evidence on the question is perhaps instructive; the one known baqt shipment in the form of slaves by an independent Makurian monarch comprised one male and one female.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:

Northern coastal Africans had no iron metallurgy
of their own.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:


Even if there were no local iron workers why
would Saharans be dependent on "Sudanese"
for iron implements? Such could be procured
from littoral North Africa, and elsewhere,
just as other items were.

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Originally posted by dana marniche:

The Almoravids were mainly Aulamidden (Lamtuna) Tuareg now centered in Niger. Lower caste Tuareg smiths to whom much of the craftmanship of the Moors was probably due are of Nilo-Saharan origin related to Teda Tibbu-Krit or Ikaradan groups.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
Do we all understand the difference between
imperialism and scattered non-conquest, even
if organized, presence of individuals?

I'd want a thread on Imperial Africans to have
posts on Africans of a governing, centralized,
multi-ethnic polity called empire.

I suppose one could make a point for trading
empires though. If so that would include the
mercantile Zanj of Iraq as well as the Wangara
of West Africa's savanna.

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Originally posted by markellion:
The article in the first post says that "Saharan" folk didn't know metallurgy, and you said "Northern coastal Africans had no iron metallurgy of their own"

So I'm kind of confused here. Did they have metallurgy?

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Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by markellion:
Yes but the level of technology and skill of iron industries throughout "Sudan" was very high, amongst the most sophisticated in the world. Dana had suggested that Tuareg had members of other societies as blacksmiths which would be people like the Zaghawa, even saying most of the crafts of the "Moors" would be dependent on these people

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Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
See, that's what I mean. All over space and time.
I leave you to your own devices and whoever will
discuss this with you. Your methodology is too
frazzled for me. Sorry, I can't keep up with you.

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