Crest (Ejagham).

Nigeria or Cameroon. Wood,

antelope skin, basketry, iron,

bones, pigment, 72 x 54 cm.

Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

 

 

West Africa from the 15th Century to Today

 

 

More Abundant Documentation

 

It was in the 14th century that European navigators began to land at a few places along the coast of tropical Africa, but it was hardly until the following century and especially in the 16th that relations were established between the Negroes and the whites and that somewhat rounded details reached Europe touching the newly discovered countries and their inhabitants.

 

However, compared to the preceding period, we have other and more abundant sources of information on the condition of Negro Africa subsequent to the Middle Ages. There are, to begin with, the recitals of the first navigators, such as Cadamosto; then there are those of the Arab traveller, Leo the African, whose work, less documented than the books of the previous Muslim geographers but better known because of its Italian and French editions, constituted, at least in what concerns Berbery, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan, the basis of numerous descriptions of Africa published in the 16th and 17th centuries, from Marmol to Dapper. Then there are the accounts or diaries of the numerous travellers, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch, Italian, etc., who wandered all over Africa, pushing farther and farther towards the interior and finally informing us about the equatorial and southern countries that the Arab authors did not know. It should be added that oral traditions and local chronicles are the richer in detail as the events they recount become more recent.

 

Profiting by all this documentation, accumulated during five centuries, I will try to sketch a summary picture of the history of the principal Negro peoples of Africa after the 15th century. The immensity of the domain where this history unrolled will prevent me from employing in a rigid fashion the chronological method and will force me to turn back again each time that I must pass from one region to another. Going from west to east and from north to south, I will begin with West Africa, continuing by central and eastern Sudan and terminating with sub-equatorial Africa.

 

 

The Mandinka and Songhoy Empires

 

In western Sudan, two great empires divided the supremacy at the beginning of the 15th century: one, that of Manding, was terminating the period of its apogee, while the other, that of the Songhoy, was on the eve of attaining it. The first still exercised, sometimes its direct authority, sometimes only its influence, over all the countries comprised between the Sahara to the north and the great forest to the south, the Atlantic on the west and the 5 west longitude on the east. The second extended its power, with the same alternatives, from this meridian in the west to the 2 east longitude in the east and from the Sahara in the north as far south as a line going approximately from Hombori to Karimama on the lower Niger. Beyond this line, and as far as the proximity of the coastal zone, was the domain of the two Mossi empires of Yatenga and Wagadugu and, farther to the east, the kingdoms of the Gurma (or Gurmanche) and of the Bergo or Borgu (or Berba. or Bariba), which were founded at nearly the same epoch as that of the Mossi States and possessed a similar organisation, but with a more modest, though not negligible, destiny.

 

Without doubt, the first Sonni prince of the Songhoy, Ali-Kolen (or Ali-Kolon or Ali-Golom) had, in 1335, shaken off, in part, the tutelage of Manding. However, the army of the Mandinka emperor Mussa II, who in 1374 had succeeded Mari-Diata II, dead of the sleeping sickness, went to wage war as far as the east of Gao and was even audacious enough to attack Omar ben Idris, sultan of Bornu, all of which indicates that the Mandinka Empire still enjoyed a certain strength. Ibn Khaldoun, who finished writing his History of the Berbers around 1395, said that in his time the Tekrur was vassal to the Mali prince Magan-Mamadu and that the “veiled Zenaga of the desert” paid tribute to him and furnished him with military contingents. Some fifty years later, the Wolofs declared to the Portuguese, Diego Gomez, that all the country that they knew belonged to the mansa of Manding. Cadamosto, in 1455, confirms the fact that in the middle of the 15th century the power of the latter extended as far as the lower Gambia.

 

However, in 1435, the Tuareg chief Akil captured Arawan, Timbuktu, and Walata. A little later the emperor of Gao, Ali the Great, after having taken Timbuktu from the Tuareg in 1468, entered Djenné as conqueror towards 1473 and took away from the authority of the mansa a good part of the Massina, where the Fulani coming from Termes, obeying a chief of the Diallo family, had settled about the beginning of the 15th century, with the authorisation of the Mandinka governor of Bagana.

 

Soon after, by the intermediary of the Portuguese officers Rio de Cantor (Gambia) and Elmina (Gold Coast), there took place an exchange of presents, messages, and embassies between the emperor of Manding, who was then called Mamoud or Mamudu, according to Joao de Barros, and the king of Portugal, John II, who mounted the throne in 1481, remaining there until 1495.