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Africa: A.D. 1401 to 1500
∗
Jack E. Maxeld
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†
Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0
1 AFRICA
Back to Africa: A.D. 1301 to 1400
1.1 NORTHEAST AFRICA
This part of the world experienced no great change from the previous century. The Solomonid Dynasty in
Ethiopia was at the height of its power and Amhara colonists continued to invade southern Shoa, Gojam
and the base of the Semien Mountains. The Moslems controlled all the Red Sea coast, however, and conned
the Christians to the Ethiopian highlands. Even Nubia became Moslem. The Caucasoid Azanians in the
northeastern interior felt the impact of migrating Bantu speakers and the arrival of Nilo Hamites with their
Cushitic languages, such as Galla, inuenced the region. These Nilo-Hamites appear to have been a mixture
from three origins, - Nilotic Negroids of the upper Nile, Cushitic Sidama of Ethiopia and a third of origin
unknown. (Ref. 83)
The Mamluk Dynasty continued in Egypt, but with declining power and inuence.
It must be recalled that this ruling group were originally warriors from the Caucasus region and this
communication with Black Sea ports allowed recurrent epidemic disasters in Egypt. Disease, helped probably
by oppression and bad government, resulted in depopulation and impoverishment. The last great Mamluk
sultan was Qaitbay (1468-96), an avid builder, who restored some of the greatness of the old Bahri period
of the 13th century, but the decline of the empire was only temporarily halted. (Ref. 140, 5)
1.2 NORTH CENTRAL AND NORTHWEST AFRICA
The coast still had a high cultural level and now acted as a refuge for the Moors eeing from the persecutions
in Spain. With the decline of the Moroccan Marinids and after the Portuguese seized Ceuta, opposite from
Gibralter in 1415, the Hafsids gained at least titular supremacy over all of western North Africa for while. By
1478 the Wattasid Sultanate developed in the far west and the Ziyanid Emir existed between the Wattasid
and the slipping Hafsids. (Ref. 137, 83) By the end of the century, the Arabs had established sugar cane in
the Moroccan Sousse and from there it soon spread on into the Atlantic to Madeira, the Canaries and the
Azores.
1.3 SUBSAHARAN AFRICA
Just southwest of the Sahara it was the heyday of the Songhai, who had great mosques at Timbuktu and
Jenne and were famous for their piety and scholarship. Relationships of this particular empire with Morocco
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were not cordial because of competition for the trans-Saharan trade and the valuable salt mine of Taghaxa
in the northern desert. This Songhai Empire came into its zenith about 1464, when a warrior king, the Sonni
Ali, came to the throne of Gao in the middle Niger and by his death had extended his rule over the whole
western Sudan. He had cavalry, levies of foot soldiers and otillas of war canoes, which patrolled the 1,000
miles of the navigable Niger. It was he who ended the Mali Empire of Ghana. (Ref. 83)
In the forest area of west Africa were the Edo, who developed great bronze sculpture in the Kingdom
of Benin, near the coast of Nigeria. Benin was a walled city, 25 miles around, with wide, straight streets
and spacious houses of wood. In Ife, in southwest Nigeria, one of these bronze heads was denitely made
by the lost wax technique. Seven Hausa city-states, including Kano, Zaria, Gobir and Katsina had become
ourishing commercial centers in the Sudan. Agriculture was the basis of society, with trade routes through
the Sahara. Guinea, existing out on the southwest corner of the bulge of west Africa, would, at rst glance,
appear to be a site early exploited by Europeans, but actually it remained isolated for a long time because
European ships could not return from there directly up the west African coast. Because of the Atlantic
currents and wind, they had to go straight out to the middle Atlantic before they could turn and go north
again. The people of Guinea were modest farmers and shermen, with some local trade involving salt and
dried sh. Deeper inland, they had some contact with the Sudan. This small country has a rain forest, but
it is not deep and is traversed by the magnicent waterway, the Niger. Near the end of the century the
Portugese did arrive to establish a trading post. A little to the east, the foundations had been laid for the
famous forest states of Oyo and Akan, as well as Benin, which we have described above. (Ref. 206, 17, 83,
8) The Sudan had gold mines, ruled by village chiefs and the workers approached the condition of slavery.
(Ref. 292)
In central Africa gold was plentiful and the king of the Congo maintained such opulence in his capital
that visiting Portuguese were amazed and made haste to make an alliance, not a conquest. About 1441 they
brought Christianity to western, central Africa, going even 200 miles up the Congo to convert the Congo
king. Incidentally, they brought back gold. (Ref. 175) Living in the great bend of the Congo, in the plateau
north of Stanley Pool, were the Teke people in a number of chiefdoms collectively known as Mongo. (Ref.
83)
Farther east in the lake country between Tanzania and Zaire there appeared in this 15th century the
Batutsi, a tall, warrior people, perhaps originally from Ethiopia. They invaded and subjugated the native
Bahutu in Burundi. In Kenya, the nomadic Masai entered from the north, joining the Kikuyu already there
and then some Luo entered from the west. The Kikuyu were Bantu-speakers and related groups established
themselves in parts of the Transvaal and Natal as well as the lower Congo and Zambezi by about A.D. 1500.
Kitari was an Hamitic kingdom north of Lake Victoria. (Ref. 175, 83)
In the meantime Muslim Swahili1 city-states had been established all down the eastern coast of Africa
and there was special interest in the gold of the Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) region. The Bantu-speakers had
migrated southward along the spine of east Africa with a new war-like ethos and a pastoral life, dominating
other tribes and reaching the Zambesi River by the end of the century. Arab trade inland actually declined,
because these Bantu were less amenable to exploitation than their predecessors, chiey Bushmen. By 1440
King Mutota of the Rozur clan in the Katanga nation assembled an army which completely dominated the
Rhodesian plateau within 10 years. This period has been described by Charles Colt, Jr. (Ref. 35) as a
splitting of the Shona state into two rival kingdoms. At any rate, as ruler of an empire, Mutota than took
2
the title of
. The Portuguese wrote this as
, which soon became the name of
the empire, itself. The stone birds, which have been found in the ruins of old Zimbabwe, were probably
important in the religious ritual of that theocratic empire. The realm was soon subject to revolution and
succession wars and this resulted in many "ups and downs" in its history and in its buildings. From the
beginning in 1440 on for 400 years, however, there was a progressive evolution of artistic and technical skills
in that society. The Monomatapa ruler was considered divine and his subjects would hear him but not
look at him and had to approach him on their stomachs. He lived amid great pomp, but when he became
seriously ill or very old he was obliged to take poison. At the end of the 15th century the entire nation moved
Mwene Mutapa
Monomotapa
1 "Swahili" implies "Arab and Negro". (Ref. 83)
2 In the Shona language, "Mwene Mutapa" means "Master Pillager". (Ref. 176)
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hundreds of miles north, apparently because the local salt supplies of Great Zimbabwe had been exhausted.
Their extensive stone buildings, which still exist, were abandoned at that time. (Ref. 8, 83, 35, 176, 211, 45)
Explorer Diogo Cao claimed Angola for Portugal in 1483 and the slave trade was opened up in earnest. In
the next four centuries, some 3,000,000 slaves were sent to Brazil by the Portuguese. At the very tip of South
Africa the people seen when the Europeans rst explored the area were the Bushmen, who were hunters and
gatherers, and the Hottentots (Khoikhoi), who herded sheep and cattle along the coastal regions. As noted
previously, these were not Bantu-speaking people. (Ref. 175)
Forward to Africa: A.D. 1501 to 1600
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