12 Medieval Sub-Saharan Africa
For nearly seven hundred years, medieval empires and kingdoms dominated the economies and politics of West Africa and southern Africa. The wealth of these states and thus their power came from their control of trade in commodities such as gold, ivory, salt, silk, horses, and enslaved people. In West Africa, the kingdoms of Ghana and Mali moved these goods along a sprawling network of trade that stretched across North Africa, eastward into Ethiopia, and southward as far as the grassland savanna, connecting West Africa to the Mediterranean world, Europe, the Near East, southwest Asia, and beyond. In southern Africa, Mapungubwe and then Great Zimbabwe consolidated their control over local and regional trade and connected their economies with the coastal civilization of the Swahili peoples through a network of waterways that included the Limpopo and Zambezi Rivers. In so doing, they linked the southern African interior with the distant and overlapping nodes of oceanic commerce that connected East Africa with Asia and Arabia.
The Ghana Kingdom
The Ghana Kingdom, which flourished from the 6th to the 13th centuries, was a powerful and influential kingdom that dominated the region between western Mali and southeastern Mauritania. Its rise to power began in the 5th century when a group of chiefdoms in the Sahel grassland south of the Sahara formed a loosely knit kingdom under the leadership of the Soninke people, led by Diabe Cisse (c. 420-460 CE), who unified the Soninke in a loose federation to combat nomadic raiders and expand the kingdom.
Ghana’s growth was slow, with the kingdom expanding through the conquest of independent chiefdoms and kingdoms, which were then absorbed into the kingdom. At its peak in the early 11th century CE, Ghana had a powerful military with 200,000 soldiers and controlled a vast territory under the rule of its king, Basi (r. 1062-1082 CE). The kingdom’s wealth came from its strategic position in the trans-Saharan trade, where it exchanged gold, salt, and other commodities, with merchants such as those from the Islamic town of Awdaghost, which Ghana later conquered. However, Ghana’s control over the Bambuk goldfields, located far to the south, was tenuous. The chief of the nearest village had local authority over the mining area, and while Ghanaian rulers, such as King Tunka Manin (r. 1062-1082 CE), enforced a strict monopoly on gold nuggets above an ounce in weight, the difficulties of extracting and transporting the gold made their dominance precarious.
In the medieval Ghanaian kingdom, life was shaped by a dynamic blend of traditional African customs and Islamic influences, with distinct but complementary roles for men and women. Men largely controlled the trans-Saharan trade networks, facilitating the exchange of gold, salt, and other valuable commodities with Berber and Arab traders. Women, meanwhile, played an essential role in local commerce, managing markets and trading goods such as clot