Kerma was a Bronze Age culture (c. 2500–1500 bce) located in what is today Sudan and southern Egypt. It is one of the earliest complex societies in Africa and, at its height, rivaled Ancient Egypt. The ancient Kerma culture spans the Pre-Kerma, examining the settlements and cemeteries of this ancient culture during the Pre-Kerma (3500–2500 bce, included here as a precursor to the Kerma civilization), Early Kerma, Middle Kerma, Classic Kerma, and Recent Kerma periods. Much of what is known comes from the capital city and type site, Kerma. However, other urban centers such as Sai, as well as hinterland communities, are also discussed. An archaeological approach is crucial to the examination of Kerma’s past because an indigenous writing system had not yet been developed. Interaction with Egypt is discussed, but only as it relates to Kerma’s historical context. Chronological changes to craft production, religious practices, domestic spaces, and funerary rituals are framed by larger sociopolitical and socioeconomic issues, including inequality, political authority, and economic development.
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Archaeology of the Kerma Culture
Sarah Schrader and Stuart Tyson Smith
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The Empire of Ghana
Nikolas Gestrich
The Empire of Ghana is one of the earliest known political formations in West Africa. Within the context of a growing trans-Saharan trade, Arabic sources begin to mention “Ghāna,” the name of a ruler as well as of the city or country he ruled, in the 9th century. Repeatedly named in connection with fabulous riches in gold, Ghāna had acquired a preeminent role in the western Sahel and was a leader among a large group of smaller polities. Ghāna’s influence waned, and by the mid-14th century its ruler had become subordinate to the Empire of Mali. Over the course of a complex history of research, the Empire of Ghana became equated with the Soninké people’s legend of Wagadu and the archaeological site of Kumbi Saleh in southern Mauritania was identified as its capital. Yet between historical sources, oral traditions, and archaeological finds, little is known with certainty about the Empire of Ghana. Most questions on this early West African empire remain unanswered, including its location, development, the nature and extent of its rule, and the circumstances of its demise.
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The Empire of Mali
Sirio Canós-Donnay
The Mali Empire is one of the largest and most widely known precolonial African states. It has featured in films, video games, works of fiction, and its memory is still a profound force in the articulation of social and political identities across Mande West Africa. Founded in the 13th century in the south of modern Mali, it quickly grew from a small kingdom to a vast empire stretching from the Senegambia in the west to Ivory Coast in the south. Before its disintegration in the late 16th century, its connections to distant trade networks stretched from Europe to China and its rulers became famous across the Old World for their wealth. In the absence of indigenous written histories, knowledge of the Mali Empire has been based on a complex combination of oral traditions, medieval Arabic chronicles, European accounts, oral histories, and archaeology. Through a critical analysis of these sources, it has been possible to learn much about Mali’s history, including aspects its social organization, political structure, belief systems, and historical evolution. However, there is much we still do not know, including the location and nature of its capital(s).
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The First Intermediate Period in Egypt
Wojciech Ejsmond
The First Intermediate Period (FIP; c. 2118–1980 bce) covers almost a century and a half during which the first major crisis of the Egyptian state occurred. Many aspects of the civilization went through a significant restructuring during that time.
After nearly a millennium of the elite ruling from Memphis, a new capital was established at Heracleopolis Magna. Provincial administrative personages rose to prominence and some exercised political initiative, such as the rulers of Edfu, Hefat, and Thebes. The latter took control of southern Upper Egypt and challenged the kings ruling from Heracleopolis. Thus, the period is characterized by this division to northern and southern kingdoms.
On the one hand, traditional historiography views the epoch as a time of crisis, featuring wars and famines, yet it seems that such opinions may be exaggerated. On the other hand, this period witnessed the growth of provincial towns like Edfu and Dendera and the flourishing of literature. Provincial culture was enriched by traditions previously developed in the capital and disseminated across the country, although the artistic quality was often compromised.
The culture of the following periods inherited innovations of the FIP, such as scarab seals, mummy masks, saff-tombs, and the idea that royal power comes from the gods. A new power center emerged in the south, Thebes, which dominated the political, religious, and cultural life of Egypt for the next two millennia.
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Saharan Peoples and Societies
E. Ann McDougall
The Sahara: bridge or barrier? Today, most would answer that the desert was more a historical facilitator than hindrance in moving commodities, ideas, and people between North and sub-Saharan Africa. A recent publication even coined a new name for the region: “trans-Saharan Africa.”
However, the Sahara is also a place where people live. Complex societies, sophisticated polities, extensive economies—all flourished at various times, waxing and waning in response to much the same factors as societies elsewhere. It is just that in the Sahara the vagaries of climate and the availability of water always established the parameters of development. A long-term drying era led to the dispersal of the Late Stone Age Dhar-Tichitt agro-pastoral settlements in eastern Mauritania, but in the east, Lake “Mega-Chad” shrank, leaving rich, sandy soils that attracted new cultivators. The Garamantes people of the Libyan Fezzan overcame their lack of water by developing a sophisticated underground irrigation system that supported an urbanized, cosmopolitan civilization that outlasted the Roman Empire.
The introduction of the camel in the 4th century and the gradual growth of Islam from at least the 9th century added new possibilities for economic, cultural, and religious life. The Sahara benefited from the sequence of medieval empires emerging across its southern desert edge. Camel pastoralism, salt mining, oasis agriculture, and expansive trade networks shaped the region’s economy; those same networks facilitated cultural and scholarly exchanges. As Islam took root, growing its own understandings of North African and Middle Eastern schools of thought, a prodigious body of Saharan scholarship was created. It underpinned much of the jihad-led political upheaval and state-building in the 18th and 19th Sahel.
Saharan clerics also directed their religious fervor against the invasion of French imperialists; “pacification” took the colonialists decades to achieve. But the impact of this violence exacerbated traditional clan conflict and disrupted economic life. So too did policies aimed at sedentarizing pastoralists and reshaping their social relations in the interests of the colonial economy. Much talked-about but largely ineffective efforts to abolish slavery had far less real impact than taxation policies; these both suppressed traditional exactions such as those levied by “warriors” and introduced new ones, including those to be paid in forced labor. Life in the Sahara became increasingly untenable. The arrival of Independence did nothing to address colonial legacies; the years of drought that devastated herds and crops in the desert and along its edge less than a decade later further fueled both political instability and economic crisis. That today the region nurtures radicalized Islamic movements promising to return “true meaning” (not to mention material benefits) to that life is not surprising.
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The Archaeology of Political Complexity in West Africa Through 1450 CE
Stephen Dueppen
Political complexity in archaeological research has traditionally been defined as socio-political differentiation (roles, statuses, offices) integrated through centralized systems of power and authority. In recent decades the assumption that complex organizational forms tend to be hierarchical in structure has been called into question, based upon both archaeological research and ethnological observations worldwide, including in classic archaeological case studies of centralization. Moreover, there has been an increasing interest in exploring variability in political legitimizations and articulations of power and authority globally. Until these theoretical shifts, West African complex societies, both archaeological and from ethnographic analyses, were largely ignored in discussions of political complexity since many (but not all) conformed poorly to the expectations of highly centralized power and administration. West African ethnohistoric and archaeological examples are now playing important roles in current discussions of heterarchical organizational structures, checks on exclusionary power, cooperation, urbanism, ethnicity, and the nature of administration in states.
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Warfare among Yoruba in the Nineteenth Century
Aribidesi Usman
One cannot discuss the 19th-century Yoruba warfare without emphasizing some of the pre-19th-century events that led to the wars. Military aggression among Yoruba in the 19th century was an escalation of the political and economic turmoil in Yorubaland during the previous century. Critical questions are: What caused warfare in Yorubaland in the 19th century or earlier? Did the wars lead to socio-political changes in Yorubaland? Yoruba wars can be identified with three, though not widely distinct, periods: 1750 to 1837, 1837 to 1878, and 1878 to 1893. In the first period, Nupe intensified their raids in northern Yoruba as the constitutional crisis in Old Oyo began to distract the administration and reduced Old Oyo’s control in the north. In the south, Yoruba were gripped by the Owu-Ife war and, later, the Ijebu-Ife-Old Oyo military coalition against Owu. The second period began with the collapse of Old Oyo and the struggle for leadership among the successor states of Ibadan, Ijaye, and Ilorin. The third and last period of warfare saw a military alliance against Ibadan. The oppressive regime of Ibadan led to a revolt among the subjugated towns that formed the Ekitiparapo confederacy.
Warfare and military threat in Yorubaland have led to aggregated communities, the manufacturing of weapons of war, the construction of fortifications, and the abandonment and settlement relocation. Warfare in Yorubaland gave rise to both conqueror states and small, fragmented, conquered polities. Constant military pressure from north and south transformed Old Oyo into a militant state. The collapse of Old Oyo in the 19th century ushered in a long period of Yoruba internecine warfare. The unrest destroyed many royal households, which gave able warriors opportunities to gain wealth and power.
