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Guinea-Bissau  

Philip J. Havik

Guinea-Bissau’s current frontiers were drawn in 1886, while the territory was occupied militarily by Portugal in 1915. Its complex sociocultural mosaic derives from the long-standing presence of farming communities in the coastal wetlands and the transitional forested zone. Its rich precolonial and proto-colonial history is associated with the Kaabú federation, which resulted from the westward expansion of the Mali Empire under Sundjata Keita. Following the first Euro-African encounters in the 1440s, small Afro-Atlantic settlements began to dot the landscape along the region’s many rivers. Forming a dispersed network of trading posts, they served as hubs for the export of slaves to the Cabo Verde archipelago, Europe, and the Americas. Cross-cultural exchange created conditions for the formation of creolized strata and trade lineages in riverine ports, as well as for the emergence of a new lingua franca, Guinean Creole. The transformation of these settlements into Portuguese garrison towns in the 1600s set in motion the transition toward the proto-colonial period and Euro-African tensions. The advent of “legitimate” trade and export crop cultivation culminated in the occupation of the region by Portuguese—and French—troops, creating conditions for the establishment of an extractive colonial state. The indigenato system, based on racial discrimination imposed by the Portuguese colonial administration, was soon challenged by nationalist movements in the 1950s, resulting in a protracted guerrilla war and the unilateral declaration of independence in 1973. Portugal’s refusal to decolonize set in motion an international momentum while mobilizing the largely rural population in favor of self-determination. High expectations were soon dashed as successive governments failed to develop and modernize the country. Chronic political instability has dominated Guinea-Bissau’s troubled postcolonial trajectory. Despite the transition toward multiparty elections in 1994, the presidential regime has contributed to characterized as a failed or “narco” state, boasting a doubtful record of military coups and political violence. It has largely remained dependent on international development aid and multilateral peacekeeping missions.

Article

The Sahel in West African History  

Barbara Cooper

The Sahel or Sahil is in a sense the “coast” of the Sahara and its cities major “ports” in trade circuits linking long-standing regional exchange in the products of different ecozones to the markets of the Mediterranean through the trans-Saharan trade. Despite botanical diversity and the capacity to support high concentrations of humans and livestock, the productivity of this region depends upon a single unpredictable annual rainy season. Long- and short-term fluctuations in aridity have required populations specializing in hunting, farming, fishing, pastoralism, gold mining, and trade to be mobile and to depend upon one another for their survival. While that interdependence has often been peaceful and increasingly facilitated through the shared idiom of Islam, it has also taken more coercive forms, particularly with the introduction of horses, guns, and a dynamic market in slaves. Although as an ecozone the region stretches all the way to the Red Sea, the political Sahel today comprises Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad—all former French colonies. France’s empire was superimposed upon the existing dynamics in the agropastoral meeting ground of the desert edge. Colonial requirements and transportation routes weakened the links between the ecozones so crucial to the success of states and markets in the region. Despite the abolition of slavery in 1905, France tacitly condoned the persistence of servile relations to secure requisitions of labor, food, and livestock. Abolition set off a very gradual shift from slavery to other kinds of labor patterns which nonetheless drew upon preexisting social hierarchies based upon religion, caste, race, and ethnicity. At the same time, gender and age gained in significance in struggles to secure labor and status. “Black Islam” (Islam noir), both invented and cultivated under French rule, was further reinforced by the bureaucratic logic of the French empire segregating “white” North Africa and “black” sub-Saharan Africa from one another. Periodic drought and famine in the region has prompted a perception of the Sahel as a vulnerable ecological zone undergoing desertification and requiring intervention from outside experts. Developmentalist discourse from the late colonial period on has facilitated the devolution of responsibilities and prerogatives that typically belong to the state to nongovernmental bodies. At the same time, competition over political authority in the fragmented postcolonial states of the Sahel has often reinscribed and amplified status and ethnic differences, pitting Saharan populations against the governments of desert edge states. External and internal radical Islamic movements entangled with black market opportunists muddy the clarity of the ideological and political stakes in ways that even currently (2018) further destabilize the region.

Article

Trans-Saharan Trade  

Judith Scheele

Trade in the Sahara is as old as its current human occupation. The many different and often highly specialized ways in which Saharans have pursued their livelihoods since the region developed its current hyper-aridity roughly three thousand years ago, from settled agriculture to pastoral nomadism via intermediate forms, all fundamentally rely on mobility and exchange over short, medium, and long distances. Oases were established to facilitate trade, but they could not survive without sustained exchange with pastoral and trading economies. Pastoral nomads relied on sedentary outlets in their economic and migratory cycles. This simple observation has several implications for trans-Saharan trade: One, although historical periods can be identified when trans-Saharan trade visibly increased, in particular areas and for historically specific reasons, it is difficult and probably counterproductive to search for the origins of trans-Saharan trade as such. Two, the kind of trade that is most familiar from Arabic and European sources—namely, the trade in trans-Saharan luxuries—was only the tip of the iceberg of more stable patterns of exchange, much of which concerned rather mundane staples such as cereals, salt, and dates. The decline of visible, trans-Saharan trade at any particular moment and in any particular place hence does not imply the decline of all forms of Saharan trade. Three, thinking needs to extend beyond north–south axes, so that patterns of connectivity—which might just as easily stretch east or west—can be analyzed in their own terms. Four, all trade should not be assumed as necessarily trans-Saharan, that is to say, carrying goods produced beyond the Sahara across it to the other side, but Saharan production and consumption, also with regards to the enslaved, need to be taken into account. In turn, this means that Saharan trade should not be conceived of as in any way external to Saharan societies but as part and parcel of broader political, social, and economic logics, where calculations of material profits were not always the main driving force. Kin ties and marital alliances, and hence women, played major parts in this. Much of this is still true today, allowing transregional practice of exchange to continue in new forms, despite profound technological changes—from camel caravans to trucks—and the contemporary economic and political weight of postcolonial nation-states and their borders throughout the region. The current criminalization of all trans-Saharan activities, mostly through foreign military or diplomatic intervention, therefore cannot but have disastrous consequences for the region as a whole.