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In the open marketplaces found in cities and villages throughout Africa, women traders usually predominate. This gives women considerable weight as economic actors, because these marketplace systems are the primary distributive networks in most parts of Africa. A large proportion of Africa’s consumer goods and foodstuffs move through their intricate chains of intermediaries, which can include market retailers, neighborhood shops, street vendors, wholesalers, and travelers who collect goods from farms, factories, and ports. Although the vast majority of women traders live at or below the poverty line, some have risen to powerful positions that earn them the sobriquet of queen. Different regions of Africa show distinctive patterns of trading practices and of men and women’s participation in specific trading roles, reflecting specific gendered histories of precolonial trade, colonial interventions, and waves of national policy. These variations arise not from some primordial isolation, but from traders’ varied positioning within longstanding trade relations that have linked Africans since ancient times between regions, across the Sahara Desert and over adjoining oceans. Women’s trading roles are more highly developed in western Africa than in eastern, northern, and southern Africa, where precolonial trading patterns were more radically disrupted by conquest, land appropriation, and apartheid. Ideologies and arenas of practice such as Islam, Christianity, modernization, socialism, structural adjustment, and globalization likewise shape the constraints and opportunities facing women traders in any given situation. Because these influences operate around the globe, though not uniformly, they to some extent create parallel or convergent trends in widely separated nations. Deepening economic pressures today push even more women and men into trading to support their families and sustain the hope of prosperity. Market women struggle individually and collectively to keep their communities going under difficult circumstances that make formal economic channels function poorly. Their determined efforts give African economies more resilience as they respond to the challenges of war, political instability, and climate change.

Established using a conventional Islamic model of government, the new Muslim state in Sokoto, known as the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), possessed eventually very large numbers of men, women, and children, taken captive (usually when children) in jihad from mainly non-Muslim communities, to serve as slaves. These slaves worked on farms or within households, they might be concubines and bear children for their owners; or they might be sold as children for export to North Africa in payment for the luxury imports the new elite wanted. Slaves were, under Islamic law, deemed “minors” or “half-persons,” and so had rights that differed from those of the free Muslim. By the end of the 19th century there were more slaves on the local markets than could be sold; exports of captives to North Africa had already dropped. For some captives enslaved as children, however, the career as a slave led eventually to high political positions, even to owning many slaves of their own. But slaves’ property, even their children, ultimately belonged to the slave’s owner. Revolts by male slaves were very rare, but escape was commonplace. Concubines, if they ever became pregnant by their owner, could not be sold again. The abolition of slavery c.1903 was slow to become a reality for many individual slaves, whether men or women.

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.