The Intensification of the Trans-Saharan Trade Routes

What for centuries had been a footpath now became a highway. And along this highway traveled not only gold and salt, but also ideas, letters, and prayers.

The Desert as Ocean

People often compare the Sahara to a barrier, a wall between North and South, but that image does not fit, since the Sahara is an ocean rather than a wall, and like every ocean it has harbors, has winds, has ships, and above all has connection.

Whoever looks at the medieval world map of the Muslims, like that of al-Idrisi a few centuries later, sees that the cartographer does not draw the Sahara as an emptiness but as a sea with islands. Awdaghust, Sijilmasa, Ghadames, Zawila, Tadmekka, Timbuktu: these are not oases in a dead region but harbor towns in a dust ocean, and between those harbors the camels move like galleons between Venice and Alexandria.

In the eighth century, as an earlier article showed, this network is still modest; caravans travel, goods are exchanged, Islam seeps in. But in the ninth century something happens that lifts the entire system to another scale.

Why Now

The intensification of the trans-Saharan trade in the ninth century has no single cause but is a confluence, and its causes must be seen together to understand why the scale suddenly grows.

First, the Abbasids. Since 750 CE a new dynasty has ruled the Islamic world from Baghdad, and the Abbasids build an economy that requires money, so that as silver becomes scarce, gold gains in strategic importance. And in the world the Abbasids know there is one region where gold seems to be in abundance: the southern edge of the Sahara, the land the Arabs call bilad al-sudan, the “land of the blacks,” a geographic designation rather than a pejorative, and the place where the gold comes from.

Second, the introduction of the camel as a fully developed trade animal is by this time fully consolidated. The single-humped dromedary, which at the beginning of our era was only present in limited numbers in North Africa, is now dominant, and this is decisive, since a camel can go seven to ten days without water, carries up to 200 kilos, and survives temperatures that kill a mule. Without the camel, trans-Saharan trade on this scale is physically impossible; with the camel, it becomes profitable.

Third, stabilization at both ends. In the north, dynasties settle that provide security, the Aghlabids in Ifriqiya, the Rustamids in Tahert, the Idrisids in the western Maghreb, while in the south Wagadou, the Ghana Empire of the Soninke, grows into an organized state with royal control over the gold trade. Both ends now begin to function as reliable partners, not as chaotic frontier zones.

The Ships of the Desert

A caravan of this period was something other than one camel or ten camels: a serious caravan numbers hundreds of animals, sometimes more than a thousand. They set out from Sijilmasa or Tahert when the season allows, usually in autumn or winter, when the sun is less murderous, and they travel in convoy, with guide, with guard, with quartermaster, with a water supply that must be replenished at specific well-points.

A crossing from Sijilmasa to Awdaghust takes, according to a later observation by al-Bakri ﵀, some 60 to 70 days: two months in the desert, two months in which every glass of water is calculated, every day a fraction closer to the southern edge. The camel-drivers are almost always Sanhaja Imazighen, the tribe that controls this northwestern Saharan route, and they know the wells, they know the stars, and they know when a sandstorm is coming.

The saddlebags heading south carry salt, first of all, great slabs of salt from the mines of Taghaza and later Tadmekka, cut in blocks the size of a door, lashed to the flanks of the camels. Beyond that they carry copper, dried dates, textiles from North Africa and sometimes from still further afield, books and manuscripts, and above all money: dinars and dirhams, which circulate in the Sahel to buy gold.

The saddlebags heading north carry gold, above all, gold dust in small bags, gold nuggets for the better-off, gold bars for those with the privilege. But they also carry slaves, painfully and in mass transported, as well as ivory, ostrich feathers, leather and medicinal plants, and sometimes people with knowledge: a Soninke who wants to learn Arabic, a young Sahel Muslim on his way to Kairouan to study.

The Economy That Follows

This intensification turns the Sahel into something it had never been before: an essential link in a world economy. Around 815, a growing percentage of the gold minted in Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba moves out of this region, and modern estimates suggest that at the peak, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, up to two-thirds of all gold circulating in the Mediterranean came from West Africa. In 815 this process is still in its infancy, but it is already beginning to be noticed.

The economic consequences for West Africa itself are complex. On the one hand, the intensification brings prosperity, urbanization, monetization; the Soninke king, the Ghana, as his title runs, becomes rich enough to maintain an immense court, and rich enough to act as broker between the gold-producing Wangara in the south and the traders from the north, so that Kumbi grows, Awdaghust flourishes, and Gao on the Niger becomes a center in its own right.

On the other hand, there is the price that never appears in any Arabic chronicle in full. The slave trade grows along with the rest, and people are made commodities among the commodities. That is an ordinary reality of the medieval world, which holds for Christian Byzantium, the Muslim world, and Europe long after, but it has specific consequences for the Sahel: whole populations are deported, families torn apart, entire villages depopulated. The ethical restrictions Islam imposes on slavery, no sale of freeborn Muslims, protection of family ties, encouragement of manumission, are far from always observed.

The Culture That Travels Along

Trade transports not only goods but ideas, and every caravan is also a small means of transport for culture: with the salt slabs travel stories, with the dates travel recipes, with the dinars travels an idea of contract, and with the people travel always language, customs, religion.

The Tarikh al-Sudan tells us several times that the earliest mosques in the Sahel towns arose not as foundations of a king but as places of worship of traders, and that is an important distinction, since a royal mosque is a state institution while a merchant mosque is a service to a community. The first mosques in Awdaghust, Tadmekka, later in Gao and Kumbi, are of that second type, built to give the visiting caravan a place to perform its salah and to gather on Friday.

Al-Umari ﵀, the Egyptian scholar of the fourteenth century, looks back on this development in his Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar and describes how administrative ministries in West African empires in his time function in Arabic. That Arabization does not begin with the generation of al-Umari ﵀; it begins here, in the ninth century, in the trade ledgers of Sanhaja merchants.

Tadmekka and the Rise of a New Node

One development in this period deserves particular attention: the rise of Tadmekka, a town in present-day northeastern Mali, not far from the border with Algeria. Tadmekka, whose name literally means “the one that resembles Mecca,” grows in the ninth century into one of the principal way-stations of the central trans-Saharan route.

That the town names itself after Mecca is telling, since this is the self-identification of a place that understands itself as Muslim from the start rather than a pagan name later Islamized. Archaeological research in recent decades has made finds there, mosque foundations, Arabic gravestones, remains of houses built in a style that mirrors the Maghrebi, that confirm this identity.

Tadmekka, Awdaghust, Sijilmasa: these are the nodes where trade is materially condensed, where caravans halt, are repaired, unloaded and loaded again, and at each of these nodes a Muslim community remains behind that no longer leaves.

A Class of Intermediaries

What this ninth-century intensification also produces is a new social class: the intermediary, the trader who stands between two worlds, northern and southern, Muslim and non-Muslim, Arabic and Soninke or Songhai. He is multilingual, devout, pragmatic; he maintains a family in both worlds, sometimes literally, and he organizes credit across distances that are almost incomprehensible.

This class will get a name that only comes into broad use in later centuries: the Wangara. Wangara stands not for a people in the ethnic sense but for an occupational community of Muslim merchants who control the trade routes between the goldfields and the Sahel, and their origin lies with the Soninke, but they are multilingual, mobile, transreligious in their dealings yet steadfast in their own faith.

The ninth century is the period in which this class is still young, still thin, but it is forming, and it will, in the centuries to follow, do far more than transport gold: it will carry Islam south to Djenné, to the forests, ultimately to the present-day coasts of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

The Shadow of the Atlantic Sequel

Here a painful matter must be faced. The trans-Saharan trade, intensifying in this period, is not the same as the Atlantic slave trade, since it is centuries earlier and smaller in scale, and it transports above all gold and goods, with slavery a part but not the core. The Atlantic trade, from the fifteenth century onward under Portuguese and later Dutch, British, and French, has a radically different character: industrial, racial in category, genocidal in intensity.

But the two are not entirely disconnected. The trans-Saharan routes laid down commercial structures that later, when European trade arose, could be used as connection points, and networks that brought gold from the Wangara region north could be tapped by Portuguese to lead slaves to the coast. That is a bitter and painful continuity.

A West African of the ninth century may have known a fellow countryman who was carried off across the Sahara, and centuries later that line was continued by another system, one that ultimately ended in a ship to Suriname, Trinidad, or Curaçao. History is one cloth; the threads shift in color, but they run on.

To name this is no indictment of the ninth-century Muslims but an honest look at a complicated legacy. The Islam that came along these routes was greater than the practice of its bearers, and that remains our task: to separate Islam from what people did with it.

A Network That Stands

Around 815 CE, then, a network stands, imperfect, incompletely Islamic and carrying its shadow, but standing all the same, as infrastructure. The camels move, the gold flows on, the dinars circulate, the scholars begin to travel. Within a few generations Soninke kings at their courts will have Arabic letters read to them by Muslim secretaries; a few generations after that, a Soninke prince will himself be a Muslim; and one generation further on, the first fully Islamic West African state, Takrur, will appear on the map.

But all of that depends on this network, since without the network there is no next step, and that network is set in this period.

The Monetary Foundation of a World

Something often forgotten deserves a moment here: the money itself. In the ninth century the gold dinar is the principal currency of the Abbasid world, a dinar weighs about 4.25 grams of pure gold, and the Abbasid mints in Damascus, Basra, and later Samarra strike them in great quantities each year. And a growing percentage of the gold melted into these dinars comes from the Sahel.

This is known through metallurgical analysis of preserved dinars from this period. Spectrographic analyses of Abbasid and Fatimid coins show characteristic trace elements, small percentages of silver, copper, platinum, that match the “fingerprint” of Bambuk gold, not that of Egyptian or Siberian or Andalusian gold. Such studies, conducted by present-day researchers like Thomas Vogelpohl and the École Française de Rome, confirm what the medieval Arab geographers had already sensed: the West African goldfields were not a far-flung peripheral feature; they were a structural feeding source of the entire Muslim economy.

This point is worthy of contemplation. When West Africans in the ninth century mined gold in Bambuk, without precisely knowing where it was going, they contributed to financing palaces in Cairo, libraries in Baghdad, mosques in Córdoba, so that the historical footprint of West Africa is greater than is usually thought. The Muslim civilization often portrayed in history books as “Arab” was, in its material foundation, partly Black African.

The Aghlabid Factor

One dynasty deserves specific mention in this connection: the Aghlabids. From Kairouan they ruled Ifriqiya (present-day Tunisia) in the ninth century as vassals of the Abbasids but with effective autonomy, and their prosperity rested largely on two sources: the Mediterranean trade with Christian Europe, and the trans-Saharan trade with the Sahel.

The Aghlabids invested in infrastructure on the northern starting points of the southern routes. They built ribats, fortified frontier posts, that functioned not only militarily but also as way-stations for trade missions; they invested in Kairouan itself, which became one of the great cities of the Muslim world and a center of Maliki scholarship; and from Kairouan, scholars and pilgrims went along with caravans heading south, or received Muslim visitors from the Sahel.

An important fact: in this period the Maliki madhhab in Kairouan begins to take shape under scholars such as Sahnun ﵀, author of the Mudawwana. This legal school, with its emphasis on the practice of Medina and its relatively practical approach to commercial law, was particularly suited to the trading context of the trans-Saharan routes, and it is no coincidence that the Islam that ultimately Islamized West Africa was predominantly Maliki. That choice was made in this period, in these caravans, on practical grounds, before Ibadi was displaced.

The Pilgrim as Pioneer

There is one type of traveler we have not yet named, and he is important: the pilgrim. From the ninth century onward, the first West African Muslims begin to undertake the hajj, not as a group or a royal delegation, but as individuals. They travel along with trade caravans heading north, traverse the Sahara, walk through Kairouan and Cairo on to the holy cities, and, if they survive the return journey, turn back to their villages.

Such pilgrims change their surroundings beyond recognition, since they have seen Mecca, they have seen Masjid al-Nabawi, and they have made tawaf around the Ka’bah. And they bring back not only memories, but also knowledge: new surahs they have learned on the spot, legal opinions they have gathered from scholars, hadiths of the Prophet ﷺ they have heard in the halaqah in Medina. A returned hajji is in his village a living representation of the ummah.

The scale of these early hajj journeys is small, perhaps a few dozen travelers a year from all of West Africa, but their impact is disproportionate: they build the first great mosque of their village, they become the imam, they give their sons Arabic names and send them to distant madrasas. The wave that will culminate in the fourteenth century in Mansa Musa’s legendary hajj begins here, in the ninth century, with anonymous individuals who walked two and a half thousand kilometers to see a building they knew only from the descriptions of their teachers.

Toward the Court of Ghana

The ninth century of intensification carries on into the tenth and eleventh, and by the end of these centuries we encounter situations that in 815 were still unthinkable: Muslim officials at the court of Ghana, Arabic as the administrative language in Kumbi, an entire Islamic quarter stretched out next to the royal residence. The road leads toward 1048, toward the time of al-Bakri ﵀, toward a moment at which the connection between Sahara and Sahel is so fully grown that the Mediterranean world for the first time really recognizes West Africa as one of its partners.

But before that comes, the traders must simply keep riding, season after season and caravan after caravan, patiently, without knowing what they are building.

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Sources

• Abu Ubayd al-Bakri ﵀, Kitab al-masalik wa-l-mamalik (460/1068), on the two-month crossing between Sijilmasa and Awdaghust, the mosques of Awdaghust and the Muslim town of Ghana, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 33–35, 383.
• Shihab ad-Din al-Umari ﵀, Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar, the chapter on Mali as a retrospect on the Arabization of the West African realms, named as a source in Hunwick, p. 9.
• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, pp. 3–7, 9–10, 14–17.
  • pp. 3–4: the Rustamids of Tahert, founded in 144/761, the opening of routes to bilad as-sudan and the mission of Imam Aflah to a Sudanic ruler; al-Khwarizmi ﵀, active in Baghdad between 813 and 842, who already knows Kawkaw; the gold fields of Bambuk, between the Faleme and the Bafing, and Bure on the Upper Niger.
  • pp. 5–7: salt as currency in the Sahel, hard slabs of rock salt broken into ever smaller pieces, and the salt of Tadmakka brought to Gao; Ibrahim I (800–812) as the first Aghlabid ruler of Ifriqiya; the name Tadmakka as this is Mecca; the merchants guided by nomads from the south who bought dates and cloth in the northern oases; the winter caravan season and Gao as the crossroads of the northern route and the west-east route from Ghana.
  • pp. 9–10: the possible passage from Ibadism to Sunni Malikism under Almoravid influence; al-Muhallabi ﵀ on the communal place of prayer between the merchant quarter of Sane and the king’s town of Gao, led by an imam from the North African community.
  • pp. 14–17: the route from Sijilmasa down the Mauritanian Adrar to Awdaghust and from Warghla through Tadmakka; the Masufa Sanhaja, famed for their knowledge of the routes across the Empty Quarter; Taghaza, the Tatantal of al-Bakri ﵀, twenty days’ travel south of Sijilmasa; the Dyula merchants who opened the route from Jenne to the edge of the Akan forests.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 17, 23–26, 28–29, 31–36, 43, 284, 304, 383.
  • p. 17: the introduction of the camel into the Maghreb between 100 BCE and 100 CE, which made regular trade between North and West Africa viable.
  • pp. 23–24: Gao as a hub of political and commercial activity in the 9th century; the export of ivory, with a cache of fifty hippopotamus tusks; al-Muhallabi ﵀ on the king’s treasure-houses, filled principally with salt; Ibn Hawqal ﵀ (988) on the route from Egypt to Ghana.
  • pp. 25–26: Arabic inscriptions on stelae and tombstones as the earliest writings of the region, with dates from the 11th century; Tadmekka (Es-Souk), the appearance of Mecca, 390 kilometres northeast of Gao, as an entrepot for salt and semi-precious stones, with an epigraphic tradition pointing to Qayrawan and Tripoli.
  • pp. 28–29, 43: Zawila as the assembly point of the slave export from bilad as-sudan in al-Ya’qubi ﵀ and al-Istakhri ﵀; al-Bakri ﵀ on slaves bought for short pieces of red cloth; the slave trade well established by the 9th century and intensifying with the reform Islam of the 11th.
  • pp. 31–33: the exchange of salt for gold developing in the 9th century and Ghana identified with gold from the earliest sources, with al-Hamdani ﵀ on the richest gold mine on earth; the Wangara as Mande-speaking trading communities; Awdaghust and Ghana as interdependent partners; al-Bakri ﵀ on the cathedral mosque and the many smaller mosques of Awdaghust; Sijilmasa with residents from Basra, Kufa and Baghdad.
  • pp. 34–36: the Muslim town of Ghana with twelve mosques, salaried imams and muezzins, jurists and scholars, six miles from the king’s town; the king’s interpreters, his treasurer and most of his ministers as Muslims; the taxation of salt on import and transshipment.
  • pp. 284, 304: the Maliki madhhab of West and North Africa with the Mudawwana of Sahnun ﵀ (d. 240/854–855) as a core work; Makhluf al-Balbali ﵀ on the enslavement of free Muslims as a calamity spread far and wide.
  • p. 383 (note): al-Bakri ﵀ on the two-month journey between Sijilmasa and Awdaghust and the fifteen days from Awdaghust to Ghana.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. 9, 18–19, 29–30, 53, 273.
  • p. 9 (TS ch. 3): the hajj of Mansa Musa in 724/1324 as the culmination of the West African pilgrimage tradition; the mithqal, the gold weight of the dinar, at approximately 4.25 grams.
  • pp. 18–19 (TS ch. 5): Bitu (Begho) as the southern terminus of the route from Jenne, to which the gold of the forest regions was brought; the mosque of Jenne, founded by Sultan Kunburu, who had his palace pulled down.
  • pp. 29–30 (TS ch. 7): Timbuktu, begun as a seasonal camp of Sanhaja nomads, as a depot and crossroads of caravans; the early inhabitants who themselves built the Great Mosque and the Sankore Mosque to the best of their ability.
  • p. 53 (TS ch. 10, note): Sahnun ﵀ (d. 240/854), qadi of Qayrawan, who compiled the Mudawwana on the basis of questions put to Ibn al-Qasim ﵀, the pupil of Malik ﵀.
  • p. 273 (Leo Africanus, note): al-Bakri ﵀ who wrote his Kitab al-masalik wa-l-mamalik in 460/1068.