Encyclopedia of African History

(Note: Sample material is taken from uncorrected proofs. Changes may be made prior to publication.)

Tuareg: Takedda and trans-Saharan trade

Trans-Saharan trade between North Africa and the West African Sudan pre-dated Carthaginian and Roman settlement in North Africa. It was the introduction of the camel to the Sahara in the first centuries that made regular and extensive trade possible. Expansion of the trans-Saharan caravan trade, with the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, was a major stimulus to the creation of political organization south of the Sahara. The main commodities were gold, slaves, spices, leather, and later ostrich feathers going north and weapons, horses, textiles, and paper going south. From the eighth century on, North African Arabic writers make increasingly precise references to kingdoms in the Western Sudan straddling the Sahel-Saharan fringes: Takrur in the far west on the Senegal, Ghana further east in the open Sahel, and Gao, the nucleus of the later Songhay empire, on the Niger bend. Further south, on the upper Niger and tributaries, an incipient kingdom of the Malinke people, the likely forerunner of the Mali empire, was mentioned in the eleventh century. These polities were to form the matrix of the western Sudanese politico-commercial empires until the 1590's (Curtin et. al. 1984). Also significant were permanent settlements in the Saharan pastoral nomadic areas such as Aoudaghost in Mauritania, Tadamakkat-Es-Suk in Mali, and Takadda-Azelik in Niger, which were vital centers of commerce, religious scholarship, and the arts. Timbuktu, Jenne, Takedda, and Gazargamu were among the centers of Islamic learning from where Islamic scholars emerged during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries as influential leaders serving as ministers, scribes, envoys, and peace-makers. The scholars and mystics in the Mali Adrar and the Air Massif established cells and hermitages there. Of diverse Shaharan origins, many came from Arab and Berber clans who had been settled in these districts for many centuries. They included the Massufa Sahhaja, who were reputedly ancestors of the Inessufa Icherifan. These latter, centered today around the town of In Gall in Niger, around Takadda (Azelik), and also in Agadez itself, formed the ruling class in the medieval copper and salt complex of Takadda. They were also citizens of the "town of scholars," Anu Samman, the ruins of which lie west of Agadez. Before the rise of Agadez to prominence, Takadda held status as a town of commerce and Islamic scholarship (Norris 1990).

These settled centers and their infrastructures, as well as the organization of caravan trade, encouraged-indeed enabled-commerce to occur between political parties that were sometimes in armed conflict. The point of contact with the trans-Saharan trade was the desert's edge. A sedentary state near the desert would seek to control the desert ports and to control as long a section of the desert-savanna frontier as possible. With an exchange like that of gold for salt, bargaining was open, without a multiplicity of buyers and sellers to establish a market price. Salt could be monopolized because the Saharan deposits were few and easily controlled. Gold could also be monopolized in the same way, but no state south of the Sahara ever came to control the three principal gold-fields in West Africa. The Saharan populations benefited from this trade by providing marketplaces in the oases, or by collecting toll and protection money from foreign traders. These revenues could be transformed into political capital, because the group that controlled the trade route could also control its neighbors. The revenues could also be invested in agricultural production in the desert-side regions.

The most important commodity in local and regional trade has been salt, which has been exchanged for millet or other foodstuffs in the south. Notable deposits are found n the deserts of Mauritania and Mali, the Saharan Tenere of eastern Niger, near Fachi and Bilma in the Kawar region. The earliest-known rock salt mine was in Idjil (present-day Mauritania), where laborers exploited the deposits from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. Taghaza (in present-day Mali) was also in full production in the fifteenth century. After the destruction of Taghaza in the sixteenth century, Taodeni (Taghaza al Ghizlan) took its place and in the mid-twentieth century was still producing several thousand tons of salt a year.

In prosperous times, profits from salt and date sales enabled the Tuareg (who were active in the salt trade) to purchase many savanna products: indigo cloth, spices, household utensils and tools. The large annual caravans of several thousand camels each carried salt and dates to urban commercial centers in the Sahelian periphery. Unlike other trans-Saharan business, however, Tuareg merchants reaped most of the profits from the salt trade. Originally, there were three trans-Saharan caravan routes for this trade; later, only two routes persisted in importance: the route east to Bilma and Fachi for salt and dates. Men from the Air region take leave in October or November, trade millet for salt and dates there, and then return briefly to the Air before proceeding on south to trade in millet, salt, and dates in Kano. Caravanners usually remain in the Hausa Southlands for five to seven months of the year, and bring back millet, utensils, tools, pottery, cloth, and spices. Before departure, camels were grazed in pastures to the west. One camel transported three sacks of millet from Hausaland; when trucks began crossing the Sahara, they did not replace camel caravans, but diminished their importance. For one truck can take a load comparable to twenty camels' loads. Some camel caravanners go in person, and some send relatives or former servile persons still attached commercially to the caravanner's family. The caravanner who takes one camel is entitled to keep one-half a sack of millet; if for example, he takes six camels, he keeps three sacks, and the owner who sent him received fifteen sacks, and so on. Formerly, nobles brought back one sack of millet for the smith/artisan client families. In the past, slaves accompanied the caravans to cook and watch over animals. Although traditionally Tuareg noble women have not gone on caravan trading expeditions (only slave women went, in the past, to cook and gather firewood), women may participate in the caravan trade indirectly, through sending camels with male relatives (Rasmussen 1998).

The Tuareg participated in the trans-Saharan trade primarily as transporters, guides, and hired security forces, and they also controlled a sizable proportion of desert-edge production destined for trans-Saharan export. Exports of ostrich feathers from the Sudan increased rapidly in the 1870's, declined again in the 1880's, and by the 1890s accounted for about half the total value of exports. The finance of the feather trade was largely in the hands of North African expatriates, most of whom from Ghadames. Few nomads possessed the capital needed to invest directly in the trans-Saharan trading; instead, camel owners received a payment for each load they carried and left organization to North Africans who had more specialized knowledge of market conditions and more financial connections. Trade was the driving force of the Mali and Songhay kingdoms. Once new regions of commerce were discovered, particularly in the Americas, the volume and importance of trade declined. Gold, for example, could be obtained from the trans-Atlantic trade, and by the middle of the fifteenth century, the adoption of the lateen sail and the stern-post rudder allowed ships to sail to the West African coast and return to Europe. There was no need to cross the desert anymore to trade with West African entities. As a result, the focus of long-distance trade shifted to the coasts of Africa and away from the Sahelian areas.

Susan Rasmussen