African States: Songhai, Kongo, Benin, Ethiopia and the Swahili Coast

A city of books in the Sahara

Around 1510, a young traveller from Granada and Fez, known in Europe as Leo Africanus, visited Timbuktu on the Niger River. In his Description of Africa (published in Italian in 1550) he described a city with many judges, teachers and scholars, where books from North Africa sold for more than any other merchandise. Today hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from Timbuktu and the surrounding region (estimates vary), on law, astronomy, medicine, mathematics and religion, survive in family libraries and archives.

For a long time, some European writers claimed Africa had "no history" before Europeans arrived. The evidence shows the opposite. This lesson visits five African societies between 1450 and 1650.

1. Songhai: West Africa's largest empire

• Gao, on the Niger River, was the capital. Songhai broke away from the declining Mali Empire.
• Sunni Ali (ruled 1464 to 1492) was a brilliant military leader. He used cavalry and a river fleet to take Timbuktu (1468) and Djenné.
• Askia Muhammad (ruled 1493 to 1528) seized power after Sunni Ali's death. He made the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, promoted Islam and Islamic learning, appointed governors over provinces and organized a professional army.
• Economy: Songhai controlled the southern end of the trans-Saharan trade. Gold from West African fields went north; salt from Saharan mines such as Taghaza came south. Copper, cloth, horses and books came across the desert too. Enslaved people were also traded north across the Sahara, a trade that was much older than the Atlantic trade.
• Society: a ruling elite and Muslim scholars in the cities; most people were farmers, fishers and herders, many following local religious traditions alongside or instead of Islam; there were also people of servile status and hereditary occupational groups.
• The end: in 1591 an army sent by Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco crossed the Sahara and, using firearms, defeated the Songhai at Tondibi. The empire broke apart. The Moroccans exiled leading Timbuktu scholars, among them Ahmad Baba, to Marrakesh.

2. The Kingdom of Kongo: a Christian African kingdom

• Portuguese ships reached the mouth of the Congo River in 1483. Kongo's king was baptized in 1491.
• Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga, ruled 1509 to about 1542) made Christianity central to his rule, built churches in the capital Mbanza Kongo, and sent young nobles to study in Portugal. His son Henrique was made a bishop by the Pope, one of the first Black African bishops.
• Afonso wanted Portuguese teachers, priests and goods. But Portuguese traders increasingly wanted captives. In letters to King João III of Portugal in 1526, Afonso complained (paraphrased) that Portuguese merchants were seizing free people, even relatives of nobles, and that the trade was emptying his land. He tried to control the trade, with limited success.
• Afonso himself did not oppose all slavery: slavery existed in Kongo, and he sold war captives. His complaint was about who was enslaved and about losing control. This complexity is important: African rulers were actors with their own goals, not simply victims or villains.

3. Benin: a forest kingdom of artists

The Kingdom of Benin (in what is now southern Nigeria, not the modern country called Benin) was ruled by the Oba. In the mid-1400s Oba Ewuare rebuilt Benin City with great walls and moats. Guilds of artists cast brass and bronze sculptures and plaques for the royal palace, recording kings, ceremonies and, after the 1480s, Portuguese soldiers and traders. Benin traded pepper, ivory and cloth with the Portuguese and controlled that trade strictly. Many of these artworks were taken by British troops in 1897 (see the sibling unit The World, 1789–1900); since 2021, some museums have begun returning them to Nigeria.

4. Ethiopia: a Christian kingdom under threat

The highland Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, whose Solomonic kings traced their line to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, had been Christian since the 300s. From 1529, the neighbouring Adal Sultanate, led by Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, invaded and conquered much of the kingdom, with Ottoman-supplied firearms. Ethiopia asked Portugal for help. A small Portuguese force led by Cristóvão da Gama (Vasco's son) landed in 1541; da Gama was killed, but in 1543 Ethiopian and Portuguese troops defeated and killed Imam Ahmad. Afterward, Jesuit missionaries tried to convert Ethiopia to Catholicism, leading to conflict; in the 1630s the Ethiopian emperor expelled them and restored the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

5. The Swahili coast and the Indian Ocean

Along the East African coast, Muslim Swahili city-states such as Kilwa, Mombasa and Malindi traded gold (from the Zimbabwe plateau, where the Mutapa state now dominated after the decline of Great Zimbabwe), ivory and other goods with Arabia, India and beyond, using the monsoon winds. Swahili is a Bantu language with many Arabic loanwords: itself evidence of centuries of exchange.

When Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498, Malindi's ruler helped him find a pilot to cross to India. Then the Portuguese used force to control the ocean trade: in 1505 they attacked Kilwa and Mombasa, demanded tribute, and later built Fort Jesus at Mombasa (1593). They disrupted but never fully controlled the old Indian Ocean networks.