ABSTRACT

For the last few thousand years the Sahara Desert has made contact difficult between Mediterranean North Africa and West Africa. Difficult but not impossible. The existence of important resources south of the desert, particularly gold, stimulated extensive trade across the desert, using camel transport, from a little more than 1000 years ago. The development of this trade was only possible because there were already communities in West Africa who were able to handle the procurement, transport and exchange of commodities from the West African interior and the distribution of merchandise from the Sahara and the Mediterranean world that was offered in exchange. Some of the most important of these communities were those situated where the savanna and the desert meet. This is because they were in the front line of contact with traders from the north, whose activities they could to some extent control and benefit from. This was particularly the case along the Middle Niger, where that river swings north in a great bend that brings it to the very edge of the desert but provides an environment capable of supporting a substantial human population, although one that has varied as climatic conditions have fluctuated. Many towns and cities were to grow up along this part of the Niger during the last 1000 years or so, some of them becoming famous such as Timbuktu and Gao. During a similar period a succession of states were also to rise and fall: Ghana, Mali and Songhai being the principal ones. As is now realized, however, the origins of these developments were over 1000 years earlier. Some of the most important evidence for this comes from the site of Jenné-jeno, near the present city of Jenné.