The western portion of the African continent engaged in the Atlantic trade.
West Africa is a region south of the Sahara Desert and west of a line drawn southward from Lake Chad, the Cameroon Highlands inclusive. Its main geographical and historical subdivisions include western Sudan and the Guinea Coast. The former is derived from the Arabic name “Bilad-es-Sudan,” that is, “land of the blacks,” which was used for the entire stretch of the open savanna between the Red Sea and the western Atlantic coast. It also includes the arid strip of the Sahel. Historically, the term “Guinea Coast,” or simply “Guinea,” has been used for the coastal area and the forest belt in the region’s hinterland from the Senegal River to the southern border of present-day Angola, often divided into Upper and Lower Guinea. Beyond the Senegambia and Sierra Leone, its West African sections were earlier referred to as the “Pepper Coast,” “Ivory Coast,” “Gold Coast,” and “Slave Coast” to denote principal European interests in the region’s trade, while the eastern gulf was referred to as the Bight of Benin, named after the ancient inland empire around Benin City that attracted the attention of early Portuguese explorers.
At present, Benin, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire), Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo, and the Cape Verde Islands are regarded as West African countries, with a total land area of 4.9 million square miles and an estimated combined population of 240 million.
While the region’s historical great states and commercial networks date back to earlier periods, their first comprehensive accounts emerge only from ninth-century Arabic sources. These testify that trans-Saharan caravan routes connected West Africa to other trading systems and performed an integrative function regarding social and political frameworks, provided avenues for a world religion (Islam), and conveyed sub-Saharan influences to the Mediterranean at the same time.
On the basis of dominating local resources or controlling vital routes, the earliest large-scale state formations occurred in the savanna belt, specifically in the Senegal basin, around the fertile inland delta of the Niger bend, and the shores of Lake Chad. The partially overlapping states of Ghana (eighth to twelfth century), Mali (twelfth to fifteenth century), and Songhay (fifteenth to sixteenth century) are among the most outstanding medieval empires and are associated with Mandé-speaking peoples and an Islamized court culture. These states were initially based on extensive agricultural production and the spread of ironworking, while later on they were able to take advantage of the proximity of the Bambuk and Bure goldfields and the trade these attracted.
Following the Moroccan conquest of Songhay in 1591, however, the continued presence of marauding armies contributed to the area’s instability into the eighteenth century, even as Timbuktu, Kong, Begho, and Djenne remained important centers of long-distance trade and Islamic scholarship. The relatively small-scale Bambara and other kingdoms later fell to Tuaregs invading from the north, partly in response to climatic changes. On the eastern fringes around Lake Chad, the Kanem and Borno empires rose to prominence, profiting from trade and a steady flow of pilgrims on a Nile valley–bound route to the Middle East. During the precolonial century, the western Sudan’s widely dispersed pastoralist Fulbe took the lead in indigenous Islamic reform and revolutions. They overran the predominantly Muslim kingdoms of Futa Jalo and the Senegambia in the west, as well as Hausaland in the east, where the core of the Sokoto caliphate was established by the jihad of Usaman dan Fodio and his disciples in 1808. Many of the new emirates reached their peak of influence immediately before the onset of European colonization.
In the more scarcely populated forest belt, Akan obirempon (great men) commanded the necessary resources for organizing land clearance and a rotating cultivation of forest plots, also vital for the supply of mining camps or other commercial enterprises. For the most part, their early polities tended to be lineage based, and success could be measured in terms of increasing the number of followers, often by the importation of slaves from the savanna belt. The most powerful of the Akan states was clearly the Ashanti empire. Originally a defensive coalition of seven city-states, it maintained a particularly effective and well-controlled communications network in the Gold Coast hinterland from the early eighteenth century. The royal great roads converged on the capital, Kumasi, and had a triple ring of checkpoints on regional boundaries corresponding to political distance and cultural divisions. Such a management of resources encouraged specialization and contained recurrent local resistance at the same time. The forest belt conditions do not appear to have hindered the development of extensive empires, as also exemplified by Oyo of Yorubaland or Benin of the Edo, while village-level organization could also form a viable basis of large cultural blocks like that of the Ibo east of the Niger.
Both the volume and value of long-distance trade within the African continent stayed above that of Euro-American exchanges until the colonial period. The appearance of new coastal outlets and the rise of a South Atlantic plantation system beginning in the late fifteenth century still had a profound effect on both state formation and dominant cultural patterns on the Guinea Coast. The first coastal forts and trading posts were established there by the Portuguese to short-circuit the trans-Saharan trade in traditional items such as hides, ivory, spices, and gold. Through the same channels, new staple food was also introduced from Asia and America, such as maize, cassava, as well as varieties of yams and bananas that could sustain greater populations.
Eventually, a rising demand for slaves in the Americas contributed to a significant net decrease of West Africa’s population. Different areas and states profited or suffered in varying degrees, though: the kingdom of Dahomey (now called Benin) to the east of the Volta was apparently strengthened by revenues from regular slave-raiding wars, other communities prospered from being middlemen in a north-south trade, and many Yoruba of the disintegrating old Oyo fell victim to raids in a civil war.
Moderate estimates put the total Atlantic slave trade at 12 million people sold overseas in the course of four centuries, with about half of them originating from West Africa, a region contributing an additional number to the trans-Saharan route’s 10 million slaves exported over eleven centuries. This greatest forced migration in history not only created large overseas African diasporas and caused human suffering, but also had a major impact on the homelands. Immense resources were spent on investment of a military nature, for either offense or defense, the lucrative trade could increase political instability or change demographic indicators with an effect on gender relations, while new patterns of conflict could shape ethnic or national identities as well.
The North Atlantic’s undisputed gains from the slave trade specifically and the triangular trade in general were not solely of a financial nature, but may also be translated to individuals’ or corporate entities’ political power and influence on their states’ overseas commitments. Dynastic trading partnerships also provided access to new strategic resources, such as palm or peanut oil lubricants, which increased the efficiency of industrial machinery. Abolishing the external slave trade at the end of the Napoleonic Wars also remains ambiguous.
While the value of external trade recovered by the 1820s, the main items and the profiting regions have changed considerably. Even as the Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Gabon colonies were founded to resettle freed African captives from 1787, surplus slave populations and an increasing number of migrant laborers were put to work on plantations producing cash crops for the “legitimate commerce” promoted as a civilizing incentive. Alternative networks to the state often developed these resources and their trade. A Creole elite could enjoy prosperity and political influence until the rise of monopoly companies in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The brief period of direct colonization by Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal eventually brought programs of European-managed modernization and infrastructure investments as well, yet these were essentially exploitative, mobilizing imperial resources in the context of the world wars and for overcoming the effects of economic depression at home.
After independent states had been established between 1957 and 1985, most built up large for eign debts to finance ambitious modernization programs, inefficient state management of the economy, trade balance deficits arising from depressed prices of monoculture export articles, or the costs of military conflict. Civil wars have frequently ravaged countries, arising partly from tensions within or across the artificial colonial boundaries inherited, as illustrated by the Biafran war in Nigeria or Nigeria’s dispute with Cameroon over coastal border areas.
The region is currently undergoing a moderately successful economic integration experiment in the framework of the Economic Community of West African States. Its member states can boast important resources: Nigeria is among the leading oil-producing countries, Ivory Coast and Ghana account for over 90 percent of the world’s cocoa production, and the east Atlantic states have vast mineral deposits, while Ashanti goldfields remain one of the few African-controlled companies noted on the New York Stock Exchange. At the same time, the region is plagued by underdeveloped infrastructure, notably the colonial heritage of north-south rail and road networks without extensive east-west connections between the countries, and in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, air travel has also declined due to security concerns. To date, internal trade within the bloc remains at a low rate, while the black market is estimated to account for an equally large turnover. Economic and environmental problems persist in the Sahel, and the civil wars of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and more recent upheavals in Ivory Coast have brought about ambiguous records in local crisis management and coordinated foreign policy.
Gábor Berczeli
See also: Atlantic Trade; Gold; Royal Niger Company; Slavery; Saharan and Trans-Saharan Trade; Wars for Empire.
Curtin, Philip D., Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina. African History from Earliest Times to Independence. New York: Longman, 1996.
Hopkins, Anthony G. An Economic History of West Africa. New York: Longman, 1973.
Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.