ABSTRACT
Introduction Our perception of history is influenced by the nature of the evidence.
Because the writings of Arab geographers and historians are our earlier sources, the history of the Western Sudan is unfolding from north to south, from the Maghrib, across the Sahara, to the Sahel and the Savannah. The view from the north emphasized the dominant role of the nomads of the desert in the confrontation with the sedentaries of the Sahel. Such a view, which also considered the conquest of Ghana by the Almoravids as the climax of that confrontation, was criticized by Paulo Farias in his review of my Ancient Ghana and Mali and by Humphrey Fisher in his review of the Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, edited by the late J.F.P. Hopkins and myself.tAn article in two parts by David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher argues in great detail that neither the external nor the internal sources explicitly say that Ghana was conquered by the Almoravids.2 While I remain unconvinced by the detailed arguments of Conrad and Fisher concerning the Arabic texts, I do not intend to undertake now a similar textual exhausting exercise. Instead, I suggest reconsidering statements about the conquest of Ghana by the Almoravids, including my own, in the light of recent studies that emphasize the interdependence and the complementary roles of pastoralists and cultivators at the desert edge.3 The cultivators of the Sudan depended on the salt of the desert, whereas the nomads had to supplement their diet with grains imported from the Sahel. Also, the successful operation of the trans-Saharan trade needed the cooperation of the Berbers and the Sudanese. As a result, peoples at the interface of these two different ecological zones often found themselves within the same political entity. Political hegemony, however, oscillated between the nomads of the desert and the kingdoms of the Sudan. Over a period of a thousand years, from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries, the pendulum swung to and fro seven limes.
