The River That Fed a Civilization

Before there were kings, before there were trade routes, before the first Islamic scholar heard of the Niger bend, there was a river. And before that river became the lifeline of empires, it fed the quiet communities that lived on its banks, caught fish, planted millet and built their canoes from African mahogany.

To understand how the great Islamic civilizations of West Africa came into being, one must begin not with Mansa Musa on his throne, but with the river that kept his fields fertile and carried his traders: the Niger.

The Sahel, the Coast of an Ocean

The Arabic word sahil means coast.

The region we today call the Sahel is the southern coastline of the Sahara, the border where the desert ends and life begins. Just as a port city stands at the edge of a sea, the great empires of West Africa lay at the edge of the Sahara, which served as an ocean for the caravans.

The Sahel is not a sharp line, but a gradual transition from dry sandy plains in the north to savanna and grassland in the south, a zone of unpredictability with too little rain for lush agriculture, but enough for millet, sorghum and livestock. Precisely this made it strategically valuable, for whoever controlled the Sahel controlled the passage between two worlds. And in the heart of the Sahel flows the Niger.

More than a River

The Niger is the principal river of West Africa and extends over more than four thousand kilometres: it rises in the highlands of Guinea, makes a wide arc through southwestern Mali and Niger, and finally empties into the Gulf of Guinea, through the delta in Nigeria.

An exceptional feature of the river is the Inland Niger Delta, a region of branching streams, marshes and great lakes, where the seasonal floods make the delta extraordinarily productive for fishing and agriculture. Just as the Nile floods its banks every year and leaves fertile silt behind, the Niger does the same, and yet there is a difference, for where the Nile flows through a narrow green strip enclosed by desert, the Niger flows through a web of inland deltas, marshes and branching waterways that feed an enormous area. Where the Nile was one line of life, the Niger was a web.

On the banks the early inhabitants grew rice, millet, sorghum, vegetables and fruit, kept cattle, sheep and goats, and fished with nets weighted with terracotta sinkers. As early as prehistory the Niger fed communities engaged in agriculture, fishing, ironworking and pottery.

Three Peoples, Three Masteries

What distinguished the Niger valley from other early civilizations was not one dominant tribe or one central power, but precisely the diversity that formed its strength, for different peoples settled along the river, each with a specialty of its own, and together they laid the foundation for what would later become the great city-states of the Sahel.

In antiquity, somewhere between the ninth and third centuries before the common era, several groups together formed what would later be called the Songhay identity, centred around the developing Kukiya.

Three of these peoples stand central in the tradition:

1. The Sorko, the masters of the river, were the fisher-hunters and canoemen who carved their boats from African mahogany, plied the river day and night and hunted hippopotamus from their narrow vessels.

2. The Gabibi, the masters of the soil, worked the rich grounds along the banks, where they planted millet, sorghum and rice and harvested in the season when the silt had settled on the fields.

3. The Gow were the hunters. They hunted the animals of the wilderness, including the dangerous crocodiles that shared the river with the Sorko, and supplied the communities with meat while they protected them from the predators that could otherwise approach unhindered.

The different purposes for which these peoples used the river and its resources brought about a balance between themselves and their environment that ultimately became an organic system of cooperation: the farmer produced food, the fisherman supplied protein and transport, and the hunter provided meat and protection, so that each complemented the other. Precisely that layered cooperation made it possible to form larger communities than any single people could ever have sustained on its own.

A Civilization Without a Pharaoh

What arose on the Niger was something exceptional in world history: not a civilization around one ruler, one throne and one citadel, but a network of communities that complemented one another. The best evidence lies beneath the sand at Djenné-Djenno, old Djenné, which is considered one of the oldest urbanized centres and the best-known archaeological site in West Africa, and which was inhabited from 250 before to about 1400 of the common era.

Between the sixth and ninth centuries the city had a population of about twenty thousand and covered some three hundred thousand square metres, while around it lay perhaps fifteen smaller settlements, some only a few hundred metres from each other. Unlike the strongly hierarchical cities of the same period in other parts of the world, Djenné-Djenno was not organized on the basis of hierarchy or concentrated economic power, for the inhabitants lived in clusters of quarters, with each quarter identifying itself with a specific ethnicity and work specialization.

In Western historiography lives a stubborn misconception that sub-Saharan Africa before the coming of Islam, and later before the coming of the Europeans, was an empty continent, with scattered tribes without cities, without planning, without civilization. Djenné-Djenno refutes that misconception with hard archaeological facts, for after extensive excavations in the seventies and eighties, many previously held assumptions about the absence of a social, economic or urban history in Africa before the common era have proven demonstrably false.

West Africa had cities when large parts of Europe still consisted of scattered villages.

What the Chronicles of Timbuktu Tell Us

The two great historical works of West Africa are known as the Chronicles of Timbuktu.

The Tarikh as-Sudan was written around 1655 by al-Sa’di, chronicler and scholar of Timbuktu, and forms the most important primary source for the history of the Songhay, while the Tarikh al-Fattash gives an account that reaches from the reign of Sunni Ali to 1599. Both works were written by Muslim scholars, centuries after the events took place, and for the earliest history they rest largely on oral tradition.

Too great a dependence on these chronicles is problematic, for the authors had political, ideological and religious motives of their own, and for much of the early history they relied on what the griots had told them. That does not make the chronicles worthless, but it calls for a critical reading.

What al-Sa’di ﵀ tells about the earliest period is telling, for according to the Tarikh as-Sudan there were, after the first ruler Zuwa Alyaman, fourteen Zuwa rulers of Gao before Islam arose in the second half of the eleventh century. This testifies to an established political order that existed long before the first Muslim set foot ashore in Gao.

The Tarikh al-Fattash, in its treatment of the early history, emphasizes the connections between specialized occupational groups, tributary relations and trade networks, and thereby reveals something of the wider world with which Songhay was inseparably bound. The chronicles show that what later became Islamic sultanates was built on a foundation that was already centuries old.

Gao, the First City-State

At the bend of the Niger, on the border of the Sahara and the savanna, arose Gao. The book African Dominion argued that Gao was the first city-state of West Africa, an important model for the Ghana empire and afterwards for the Mali and Songhay, and that the Middle Niger region was economically and politically connected to the Sahel, the savanna and the Middle East in ways that made it an essential part of the world system.

Gao-Saney was founded in the seventh century as the southern terminus of a trans-Saharan trade route, while the area was also an important centre for local fishing communities, and between the eighth and the tenth centuries Gao grew into a regional power that surpassed even Wagadou.

Archaeological excavations have established that Gao Ancien was the political centre and contains the oldest royal palace discovered in the region. The earliest mention of Gao in Arabic sources dates from the ninth century, but the city existed long before that, as a product of the cooperation between the peoples of the river, long before any outsider had cast his eye upon it.

A Foundation for What Was to Come

This is the world Islam encountered when it reached West Africa: no empty plain and scattered tribes without history, but a civilization with roots that go back to far before the common era, built on the Niger as its lifeline and shaped by centuries of migration, cooperation and craftsmanship.

The Sorko mastered the water, the Gabibi the soil and the Gow the wilderness, and together they built the first cities of West Africa, long before a written word was devoted to them. The Sahel was the coast, the Niger was the harbour, and Gao was the first city that grew at that harbour. When Islam later made its entry into this world, it did so not as a foreign force that filled a void, but as a message that descended upon a people that already knew how to build, to trade and to govern.

That makes the Islamic history of West Africa all the richer to understand.

Sources

• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh as-Sudan, chapter 1 on the Zuwa dynasty: the arrival of Zuwa Alayaman from Yemen at ancient Kukiya, the fourteen kings who died before Islam and the conversion of Zuwa Kusoy in the year 400 AH, in Hunwick’s translation, pp. 3, 5–6.
• Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀ and Ibn al-Mukhtar ﵀, Tarikh al-Fattash, the second chronicle of Timbuktu, begun around 1593 and completed in the seventeenth century, with the dating of the conversion of the people of Gao between 471/1079 and 475/1082, as discussed in Gomez, p. 25, and in Hunwick’s introduction.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 5, 13–18, 20–25, 374, 378.
  • p. 14: the Arabic sahil as the shore or coast of the Sahara, and the transfer of whole populations from the desert into the southern Sahel and the floodplain.
  • pp. 13, 15–18: the urban civilization of the Middle Niger in the age of Shang and Han; Jenne-jeno founded about 250 BCE, with rice as the major staple beside sorghum and millet, ironworking and pottery; by 800 CE a heterogeneous agglomeration of craftsmen, herders, farmers and fisherfolk with ten to twenty-six thousand inhabitants; the emptying only after 1200 and the end around 1400.
  • pp. 5, 20–21: Gao as the first city-state and a model of statecraft in the early Middle Niger; al-Yaʿqubi ﵀ who in 872–873 calls Kawkaw the greatest and most powerful realm of the Sudan, above Kanem and Ghana; the chronicles that prefer to connect Songhay with Ghana and Mali.
  • pp. 21–22: the Sorko as fisherfolk and the Gow as riverine hunters who moved upstream from Kukiya to Gao in the late seventh century; the Do as the original masters of the river and the Sorko as masters of the water, one of the strands from which the Songhay emerged.
  • pp. 23–24: the three settlements Gadei, Gao Ancien and Gao-Saney; Gao Ancien as the royal residence with stone structures of the tenth century; Gao-Saney as the locus of manufacturing and defence serving the trade with Ifriqiya, Tripoli and Egypt; Gao settled as early as 2000 BCE and a political and commercial hub by the ninth century.
  • pp. 24–25: the Zuwa list and al-Ayaman, the stranger from Yemen; Kusoy as fifteenth in the succession and first Muslim ruler in 400/1009–1010; Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀ on the adoption of Islam by the people of Gao between 471/1079 and 475/1082; the ruler-lists as subsidiary to the inscriptions and the external sources.
  • pp. 374, 378: the excavations of McIntosh, with the formula cities without citadels; the Sahara as a body of water with two shores; Takezawa and Cissé on the residence in Gao Ancien as the earliest medieval royal palace of West Africa.
• 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. xxii–xxv, xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, lxii–lxiii, 3, 5–6.
  • pp. xxii–xxiv: the Niger Bend as the great arc of the Middle Niger, navigable for close to a thousand miles; the source of the river in the highlands of Guinea; the cailcédrat (Khaya senegalensis) as timber for boats; the Inland Delta of three hundred miles with creeks and lakes, breadbasket of Timbuktu, rich in hippopotami and fish.
  • pp. xxiv–xxv: the earliest evidence of urbanisation around 250 BCE; the excavations of the 1970s and 1980s at Jenne-jeno, captured around 1200 by nearby Jenne; the three occupational categories of pastoralists, farmer-hunters and fisherfolk by ecological niche; the Zuwa dynasty that emerged at Kukiya in the first millennium CE.
  • pp. xxx, xxxii: the Sorko as Songhay-speaking masters of the water, monopolising river transportation, hippopotamus hunting and spear fishing, counted among the earliest inhabitants of the Middle Niger; the Gabibi (Gaabibi) as Songhay-speaking agricultural populations.
  • p. xxxiv: the Songhay chiefs of Kukiya who moved north to Gao; the North African traders who settled at Sane in the early ninth century; Gao by the tenth century a small kingdom at a crossroads of trade routes.
  • pp. lxii–lxiii: the chronicles put together only in the seventeenth century from orally and textually transmitted accounts; Mahmud Kaʿti ﵀ around 1593; al-Saʿdi ﵀ born in 1594, his Tarikh al-Sudan in thirty-eight chapters down to 1655.
  • pp. 3, 5–6 (TS ch. 1): the fourteen Zuwa kings, Zuwa Alayaman included, who died before the coming of Islam; Zuwa Kusoy as the first Muslim in the year 400 AH; the name Alayaman as he came from Yemen; Kukiya as a town from the days of Pharaoh and the fish idol on the river.