ABSTRACT
By ad 1600, at the end of the sixteenth century, West Africans had solved the great problems of everyday life. West Africa’s many-sided political development throughout the sixteenth century, with colonial invasions still far in the future, was entirely the work of West Africans, but it was influenced, sometimes with deep effect, by new pressures from outside. For century after century, the gold and other export products of West Africa were carried across the Sahara by ‘ships of the desert’, the slow but persevering camel caravans which brought back, in exchange, salt and other things of value in West African markets. Coastal Africans now found that they could buy metal goods and other useful things from European traders who came right to their beaches. West African states were too strong to be attacked with much hope of success by soldiers from the sea. This being so, the raiding and looting soon gave way to peaceful trade and then to friendship.
