Independent West Africa Iron Metallurgy

[Tukuler al~Takruri]

Iron working is an independent invention of West Africans from ~5000 BP.

Egaro Niger so far
holds the earliest iron age record at 2900 BCE (all dates follow
L. M. Maes Diop's reckoning) possibly predating Gizeh and Abydos.

Neighboring Termit's last iron days were contemporary with the
Amarna age but started 700 years earlier. Oliga Cameroun is
another West African site contemporary with the Amarna age.

In Nigeria Nok (950 BCE) and Taruga (880 BCE) foundations
predate Piye and are roughly contemporary with the settling
of the Phoenicians at Carthage.

Tigidit Niger comes later (8th cent BCE) but still like all the above
it's earlier than Meroe, the premier iron foundry of the Nile Valley.


Although it was once considered a fact in the 1940's that iron
was an Inner African discovery it's generally taught that iron in
Africa was a late adaptation and of an extra-African origin. The
African process of making iron however, considerably differs from
Anatolian metallurgy. Both regions' discoveries are independent
of one another. Africans use direct reduction to form iron crystals
instead of sintering solid particles. This is akin to semi-conductor
technology as much as it is traditional smelting.

Fig. 1 - African "Male" kiln

The leap from stone age directly to iron challenges the accepted
understanding of a gradation in metals use from copper and
various intermediary metals to iron. Yet the African process produces
iron and steel from the same kilning. Steel production remained an
unknown outside of Africa and India until somewhere between the
14th and 19th centuries.

Unlike other continents, or in Meroe itself, iron was shrouded by
mystic underpinnings thought integral to its making yet served
to disable it from further advancements in production, use, and
distribution of a kind that led to the industrial age (the Bassari
were on their way to overcoming the non- technical limitations).
Still, African iron remained the superior product. This iron, or rather
carbon steel, was manufactured in furnaces attaining temperatures
sometimes exceeding 1800°C (3275°F). It was exported to India
where it was used in the synthesis of the famous ukku (wootz)
steel for weapons manufacture.

Fig. 2 - African "Female" kiln

Of the films below I've seen Tree of Iron where, following the instructions
of a 2000 year old oral manual, moderns construct and produce carbon
steel from a type of kiln and a technology not used for centuries due to
its environmental effects (depletion of forrestry). Tree of Iron can be
compared and contrasted to Inagina for the relatedness of ancient
African ferrous metallurgy from regions as far apart as the Great
Lakes (TaNzania) and the Niger Bend (Mali).

Eeeeeeeeee blacksmiths are numerous,
Aaaaaaah but those who can melt iron from stone have grown rare.
Beekillers are many.
Lionhunters are few.
-West African Song

FILM LINKS:
THE TREE OF IRON
INAGINA: THE LAST HOUSE OF IRON
THE BLOOMS OF BANJELI
OVAMBO IRON SMELTING
BLACK HEPHAISTOS
DOKWAZA: last of the African iron masters


MAP 1.
Comparative sites and dates for iron in Africa before 500BCE (after L. M. Diop-Maes)

[Tukuler al~Takruri]

:

STANLEY B. ALPERN
DID THEY OR DIDN’T THEY INVENT IT?
IRON IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
History in Africa, Volume 32, 2005, pp. 41-94


Judging from a number of recent publications, the long-running
debate over the origins of iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa
has been resolved… in favor of those advocating independent
invention.

For Gérard Quéchon, the French archeologist to whom we owe very
early dates for iron metallurgy from the Termit Massif in Niger,
“indisputably, in the present state of knowledge, the hypothesis
of an autochthonous invention is convincing.” ¹

According to Eric Huysecom, a Belgian-born archeologist, “[o]ur
present knowledge allows us . . . to envisage one or several
independent centres of metal innovation in sub-Saharan Africa.” ²

Hamady Bocoum, a Senegalese archeologist, asserts that “more and more
numerous datings are pushing back the beginning of iron production in
Africa to at least the middle of the second millennium BC, which would
make it one of the world’s oldest metallurgies.” He thinks that “in the
present state of knowledge, the debate [over diffusion vs. independent
invention] is closed for want of conclusive proof accrediting any of
the proposedtransmission channels [from the north].” ³

The American archeologist Peter R. Schmidt tells us “the hypothesis
for independent invention is currently the most viable among the
multitude of diffusionist hypotheses.” ⁴

Africanists other than archeologists are in agreement. For
Basil Davidson, the foremost popularizer of African history,
“African metallurgical skills [were] locally invented and
locally developed.” ⁵

The American linguist Christopher Ehret says

Africa south of the
Sahara, it now seems, was home to a separate and independent
invention of iron metallurgy . . . To sum up the available
evidence, iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa
has an African origin dating to before 1000 BCE. ⁶

The eminent British historian Roland Oliver thinks that the
discovery of iron smelting “could have occurred many times
over” in the world and that African ironworking probably
originated in the northern one-third of the continent. ⁷

The equally eminent Belgian-American historian Jan Vansina
took the rather extreme position that “ron smelting began
in several places at about the same time,” naming the
- western Great Lakes area,
- Gabon,
- Termit Massif,
- Taruga site in central Nigeria and the
- Igbo region in southeastern Nigeria.
He maintained that “ simple dispersal even from Taruga to
the Igbo sites not far away is excluded because different types
of furnaces were used.” ⁸


In the concluding chapter of UNESCO’s recent book on the subject,
the Senegalese-born scholar Louise-Marie Maes-Diop surveys the
beginnings of iron metallurgy worldwide and finds “the earliest
vestiges of reduced ore” in eastern Niger, followed by Egypt. ⁹

• 1 Gérard Quéchon,
  “Les datations de la métallurgie du fer à Termit (Niger):
  leur fiabilité, leur signification”
  in
  Hamady Bocoum, ed.,
  Aux origines de la métallurgie du fer en Afrique: une ancienneté méconnue
  (Paris, 2002), 114.
  The same statement is found in an almost identical chapter with
  the same title by Quéchon in Mediterranean Archaeology 14 (2001)
  (hereafter Meditarch), 253. That issue is titled
  “The Origins of Iron Metallurgy:
  Proceedings of the First International Colloquium
  on the Archaeology of Africa and the Mediterranean Basin
  Held at the Museum of Natural History in Geneva, 4-7 June, 1999.” )
  .
  
• 2 Eric Huysecom,
  “The Beginning of Iron Metallurgy:
  From Sporadic Inventions to Irreversible Generalizations,”
  Meditarch, 3.
  .
  
• 3 Hamady Bocoum,
  “La métallurgie du fer en Afrique:
  un patrimoine et une ressource au service du développement”
  in
  Bocoum, Origines, 94, 97.
  UNESCO published an English translation of Bocoum’s book in 2004
  under the title The Origins of Iron Metallurgy in Africa: New
  Light on Its Antiquity—West and Central Africa.
  .
  
• 4 Peter R. Schmidt,
  “Cultural Representations of African Iron Production”
  in
  Schmidt, ed.,
  The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production
  (Gainesville, 1996), 8.
  ..
  See also:
  Pierre de Maret,
  “L’Afrique centrale: Le `savoir-fer’”
  in
  Bocoum, Origines, 125;
  .
  François Paris, Alain Person, Gérard Quéchon, and Jean-François Saliège,
  “Les débuts de la métallurgie au Niger septentrional:
  Aïr, Azawagh, Ighazer, Termit,”
  Journal des Africanistes 72(1992), 58;
  .
  Schmidt and D.H. Avery,
  “More Evidence for an Advanced Prehistoric Iron Technology in Africa,”
  Journal of Field Archaeology 10(1983), 428, 432-34;
  .
  Candice L. Goucher,
  “Iron Is Iron ’Til It Is Rust:
  Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting,”
  JAH 22(1981), 180;
  .
  John A. Rustad,
  “The Emergence of Iron Technology in West Africa,
  with Special Emphasis on the Nok Culture of Nigeria”
  in
  B.K. Swartz and R. Dumett, eds.,
  West African Culture Dynamics:
  Archaeological and Historical Perspectives
  (The Hague, 1980), 237.
  .
  
• 5 Basil Davidson,
  West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850
  (London, 1998), 8.
  .
  
• 6 Christopher Ehret,
  The Civilizations of Africa: a History to 1800
  (Charlottesville, 2002), 161.
  Curiously, he suggests African iron metallurgy was developed in
  two places, northern Nigeria/Cameroon and the Great Lakes region,
  while ignoring Niger, source of the earliest available dates.
  .
  
• 7 Roland Oliver,
  The African Experience
  (New York, 1991), 65.
  .
  
• 8 Jan Vansina,
  “Historians, Are Archeologists Your Siblings?”
  HA 22(1995), 395.
  ..
  See also:
  John Thornton,
  Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800
  (2d ed.: Cambridge, 1998), 46;
  .
  P.T. Craddock and J. Picton,
  “Medieval Copper Alloy Production and West African Bronze Analyses–Part II,”
  Archaeometry 28 (1986), 6;
  .
  Ralph A. Austen and Daniel Headrick,
  “The Role of Technology in the African Past,”
  African Studies Review 26 (1983), 165-68.
  .
  
• 9 Louise-Marie Maes-Diop,
  “Bilan des datations des vestiges anciens de la sidérurgie en Afrique:
  l’enseignement qui s’en dégage”
  in
  Bocoum, Origines, 189.
  Thirty-four years earlier Maes-Diop had written that “in all probability,
  iron metallurgy on the African continent is autochthonous and was not
  introduced through external influences,” but hers was a lonely voice then.
  L.-M. Diop,
  “Métallurgie traditionnelle et âge du fer en Afrique,”
  BIFAN 30B (1968), 36.
  

[egyptianplanet]

My question to you is were some forms of African metallurgy superior to others?

[homeylu]

May 10, 2010 19:02:23 GMT -5 egyptianplanet said:

My question to you is were some forms of African metallurgy superior to others?

It is postulated that the Bantu produced the most 'superior' form of iron which allowed them to advance and spread their civilization throughout Africa. This resulted from superior weaponry produced from iron, as well as the most advanced agricultural tools which in turn led to their popularity as an advanced agricultural society. They were amongst the first to use metal to clear forests to pave the way for more arable land. They actually pushed the Khoisan out areas of the forests due to the Khoisan's "weaker stone weaponry", which were no match to the advance metal weaponry of the Bantu. Over a thousand years they managed to colonize most of the Eastern portion of South Africa and still remain to this day.

[djoser-xyyman]

The mods may want to move this to the appropriate sections? It can remain here or a similar thread on the same topic. I searched and did not find one.

-----

Philip de BARROS, Palomar College/Cotsen
Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, USA


Aspects of Industrial Iron Production in Africa

A number of areas of sub--Saharan Africa produced iron bloom at industrial levels: the Meroe region of the Sudan, the Mema and Dogon Plateau regions of Mali, the Bassar region of Togo, the Babungo Chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields, the Middle Senegal Valley of Senegal and Mauritania, several of the Swahili coastal towns, and the plateau region of Zimbabwe. The production levels of several of these sites reach or surpass 80,000 m3 Of slag (Bassar and Meroe), with an astonishing 250,000 m3 for the Fiko Tradition n the Dogon Plateau. Where estimated, actual iron production during the 19th century reached 80--‐120 tons/year at Babungo and 60--‐135 tons at Bassar with a peak production (based on German archival records) of 150--‐200 tons/year from 1904--‐1911. The export of iron to adjacent regions was important in many of the above regions, and in the case of the Swahili towns, iron bloom was exported to India from the 9--‐12th centuries A.D. as noted by Arab visitors to the coast, and Bassar carbon steel out competed European iron imports until ca. 1915. African industrial--‐level production also led to New technological innovations such as the induced (natural)draft furnace at least 1000 years ago. The use of wood fuel in these traditional furnaces also led to the production of low carbon steel in a one--‐step process, as has been documented at Dekpassanware as early as 400--‐200 B.C. Crucible steel appears to have been developed. At Galuon the Kenyan Coast. Large scale production also led to economies of scale which undoubtedly spurred intra--‐industry specialization at the clan, village and/or regional level (mining, smelting, furnace and tuyere making, smithing, charcoal making, and the like). It also led to large--‐scale smelting and smithing production areas associate With production units beyond the family level to that of the clan and/or village

[Tukuler al~Takruri]

Naija was producing iron while others only crafted iron from meteorites.

Iron and its influence on the prehistoric site of Lejja
Pamela Eze–Uzomaka

ABSTRACT: Archaeological investigations at the prehistoric iron smelting site of Lejja, Nigeria, made possible the study
of some large scale iron smelting debris – evidence of a once thriving iron smelting community. The main village square
in Lejja, contains over 800 slag blocks weighing between 34 and 57 kg. Furnaces, tuyères and slag are visible on the surface
in many places. The site has been radiocarbon dated to approximately 2000 BC. Iron smelting is currently extinct in Lejja,
and there are no active iron smiths in the entire community.

For a community to experience such a profuse production of iron, the people must have interacted with situations and
circumstances which impacted their life and modified their social existence. This raises some important questions: Why
did smelting become extinct in the area? Are there traces of the past in the present life of the inhabitants of Lejja? What
influenced them to embark on such an extensive iron production in prehistory?

www.academia.edu/4103707/Iron_and_its_influence_on_the_prehistoric_site_of_Lejja?email_work_card=view-paper

::: CalPal Online Result·.°.·°.·The CalPal Online Radiocarbon Calibration.

___________ 14C-age BP: 4005 ± 40
_____ Calendric Age calBP: 4481 ± 40
_______ 68% range calBP: 4440 - 4521
Calendric Age calBC: 2531 ± 40

See www.timemaps.com/history/africa-2500bc/ to compare with other regions
too lazy to compose a relative timeline myself. Dear reader, make one for me, please.

[mansamusa]

I do not understand why this remains a controversy. White academia either ignores the evidence or comes up with 1001 alternative explanations for it. I am beginning to think that anti-Black racism has made it impossible for these people to be reasonable or logical in regard to Africa and Africans. 

[anansi]

May 1, 2020 0:21:25 GMT -5 mansamusa said:

I do not understand why this remains a controversy. White academia either ignores the evidence or comes up with 1001 alternative explanations for it. I am beginning to think that anti-Black racism has made it impossible for these people to be reasonable or logical in regard to Africa and Africans. 

It's called the politics of low expectations, any other continent in the world would have been a Ureka!!! celebrity moment, but it's Africa , intra-Africa discovery at that, so buyer beware, let's not get ahead of ourselves here ok??.

[ycoamigofull]

May 1, 2020 0:21:25 GMT -5 mansamusa said:

I do not understand why this remains a controversy. White academia either ignores the evidence or comes up with 1001 alternative explanations for it. I am beginning to think that anti-Black racism has made it impossible for these people to be reasonable or logical in regard to Africa and Africans. 

One thing I don't understand. If the African iron was so good how come West Africans imported so much European iron and sold fellow Africans for iron bars from Europe?

[anansi]

[ One thing I don't understand. If the African iron was so good how come West Africans imported so much European iron and sold fellow Africans for iron bars from Europe?]

It didn't started out as such Africans were using manilla bars as currency well before the Atlantic trade took off, and the Africans produced superior quality, however the Europeans could produce more.
This was not unlike the cowrie shells, once Europeans could sourced their own supplies ,they would flood the market eventually.

Suggest the book A fist Full Of Shells.

[ycoamigofull]

May 3, 2020 3:54:48 GMT -5 anansi said:

[ One thing I don't understand. If the African iron was so good how come West Africans imported so much European iron and sold fellow Africans for iron bars from Europe?]

It didn't started out as such Africans were using manilla bars as currency well before the Atlantic trade took off, and the Africans produced superior quality, however the Europeans could produce more.
This was not unlike the cowrie shells, once Europeans could sourced their own supplies ,they would flood the market eventually.

Suggest the book A fist Full Of Shells.

This seems weitrd. If the African product was inferior quality, why would they need to buy or get an inferior iron from the white man? let alone sell off other Africans for the  inferior product? And far as I remember these manilas en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manilla_(money)  were mostly of copper or brass and most though not all was supplied by the white man, in trade for black slaves. Seems like in Nigeria Calabar a black slave could be bought for a little as 5 manilas, which is about 9 oz of cheap brass per manilla. Black life was reckoned pretty cheap. What does your book say on all these cheap impirts from Europe? 

[ycoamigofull]

Jan 5, 2015 15:42:48 GMT -5 djoser-xyyman said:

-----


Aspects of Industrial Iron Production in Africa

A number of areas of sub--Saharan Africa produced iron bloom at industrial levels: the Meroe region of the Sudan, the Mema and Dogon Plateau regions of Mali, the Bassar region of Togo, the Babungo Chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields, the Middle Senegal Valley of Senegal and Mauritania, several of the Swahili coastal towns, and the plateau region of Zimbabwe. The production levels of several of these sites reach or surpass 80,000 m3 Of slag (Bassar and Meroe), with an astonishing 250,000 m3 for the Fiko Tradition n the Dogon Plateau. Where estimated, actual iron production during the 19th century reached 80--‐120 tons/year at Babungo and 60--‐135 tons at Bassar with a peak production (based on German archival records) of 150--‐200 tons/year from 1904--‐1911. The export of iron to adjacent regions was important in many of the above regions, and in the case of the Swahili towns, iron bloom was exported to India from the 9--‐12th centuries A.D. as noted by Arab visitors to the coast, and Bassar carbon steel out competed European iron imports until ca. 1915. African industrial--‐level production also led to New technological innovations such as the induced (natural)draft furnace at least 1000 years ago. The use of wood fuel in these traditional furnaces also led to the production of low carbon steel in a one--‐step process, as has been documented at Dekpassanware as early as 400--‐200 B.C. Crucible steel appears to have been developed. At Galuon the Kenyan Coast. Large scale production also led to economies of scale which undoubtedly spurred intra--‐industry specialization at the clan, village and/or regional level (mining, smelting, furnace and tuyere making, smithing, charcoal making, and the like). It also led to large--‐scale smelting and smithing production areas associate With production units beyond the family level to that of the clan and/or village

This too seems weird in that you did not give any real reference to a book or article with it. I never heard of these industrial levels. Is this an opinion piece? Who is saying this and when? It also seems weird because of they were producing on such a large industrial scale, why did they need to import so much iron from the white man?

[anansi]

May 3, 2020 15:25:46 GMT -5 ycoamigofull said:

Jan 5, 2015 15:42:48 GMT -5 djoser-xyyman said:

This too seems weird in that you did not give any real reference to a book or article with it. I never heard of these industrial levels. Is this an opinion piece? Who is saying this and when? It also seems weird because of they were producing on such a large industrial scale, why did they need to import so much iron from the white man?

The following is gonna be long because a quick cut N paste won't do in this instance, so buckle up, and no! to any direct link , you'll just have to get the book mentioned above.

As trade expanded in the sixteenth century, so, too, did the currency base in the region. By the seventeenth century, iron-bar imports constituted roughly half the value of all European imports into Senegambia.

This was not thus the stereotyped trade of baubles and drink for slaves and ivory, but a monetized trade that was adding to exchanges and commercial complexity.

The standard bar was 10 feet long, 2 inches wide and 1/3 of an inch thick, weighing around 29 pounds; and these bars were often notched so that they could be sub-divided into smaller pieces. Once there, local

The abilities of the smiths were vividly described by the Dutch trader Pieter de Marees, around 1600: ‘They make very fine ironwork, and large quantities of Iron can be sold there, especially fine long bars on which they are keener than anyone else in the world.



They use them to make Tools for fishing and Agriculture, and also weapons such as Bows, Arrows, Harpoons, and Assegais.
The growth of iron bars as the standard money in Greater Senegambia is easily seen in the sources.

Arriving at the port of Portudal in 1606, Pieter van den Broecke noted that the factor of the port placed a domestic help with him ‘to serve me for two iron bars per month.

We paid our tolls and customs together to the factor, so that we were allowed to trade here, besides other traders, which amounted to fifty-seven iron bars.’

The money was also widely accepted to the south in the Guinea-Bissau region, so that, by 1617, Manuel Bautista Pérez recounted sending iron bars to Geba for trade, and 250 to the Bijagós Islands.

Further north, by 1640, according to Claude Jannequin, by far the most valuable items of trade on the Senegal River were iron bars and cloth imported from Rouen.


By 1730, Francis Moore paid a tax of 120 bars at the mouth of the Gambia River for licence to trade – hence the name of the port located on the north bank of the Gambia today, Barra.42 The growth of the iron-bar economy was set by the mutual interests of Senegambian and European traders.

There was ready access to iron in Europe, with many of the iron bars imported from Sweden.

And, although there had been a long history of smithing and smelting in West Africa, the Atlantic iron trade without doubt increased the volumes available.

More iron bars meant increased trade and currency, facilitating market exchanges.

The terms were set by West African kings and their factors, so much so that Richard Jobson described how, in 1620, English traders had to take their iron bars to the local smiths on the Gambia to make sure that they were the right length for use.

In Cacheu, by the end of the seventeenth century, the requirement (set by African traders) that iron bars be at least 18 palms was registered in a list of goods legally to be taken for trade in the port.

It was the African peoples of Greater Senegambia who gradually pushed up the volumes of iron needed for trade, something that shows the political control of West African rulers over their territory.

Yet, while this facilitated the growth of African political institutions, it also created broader economic patterns that would ultimately undermine West Africa’s economic position. Key to this was the nature of this trading relationship with the Europeans.

As Greater Senegambia’s trade became ever more closely concentrated on enslaved captives, systems of credit were developed that would enable traders to go up and down the rivers and through the forests of the region with trade goods.

As Dela Courbe noted in 1685, on the Gambia, the English and French ‘present them with merchandise to go and trade upriver and in the creeks, and then they return to sell them what they have brought back, making at least half of the credit back in profit’.

These goods, produced in the main in Europe (though much cloth was also imported from India), became fundamental to European economies, with the bulk of the profits on the trade in enslaved persons made through the purchase and sale of European manufactured goods.

Incentives were created, therefore, for the overproduction of these goods, which were ‘dumped’ in West Africa in the credit framework outlined by Dela Courbe above; and required in consequence a greater volume of enslaved persons for sale in exchange to make up for the growing merchandise and ensure a ‘balance of payments’.


Thus, the credit cycle, with its growing volumes of imported currencies and other goods, went hand in hand with the expansion of the trade in captives.

An example of the sheer volume of goods being imported by the 1620s comes from an extraordinary list of goods imported in a Dutch fleet of 1624.

Iron remained important as the financial lubricant of Senegambian trade, with the fleet carrying 14,328 iron bars.

But also on board were many different types of Indian cloths, as well as satin, silver and floral brocade, 264 pieces of English serge, and 1,039 Irish blankets (not to mention copper basins and cauldrons, and over 15,000 pounds in weight of copper bars).

These goods were advanced to African traders on credit, and by and by these traders would return to port with human beings, ivory, wax and provisions for trade.

By the end of the seventeenth century, therefore, an economic system had been established across Greater Senegambia that favoured the emergence of small, powerful kingdoms at the expense of larger ones such as Jolof.


The economy of the region was based around trade and exchange, and depended fundamentally on credit, in common with slave-trading economies throughout the Atlantic Basin, where, as soon as a credit source dried up, so did the trade.

However, the weight of these currencies as set against global currencies was in decline, and thus West African kings did not have the economic power to resist the dumping of increasing volumes of cheaply manufactured goods.

Nor did they want to, for these goods facilitated greater trade, and it was through control of these trading networks that their power had grown.


The authority that went with ruling was one that the new trading patterns had tended to increase, entrenching the local aristocracies.

This cycle of credit from the Atlantic economy created growth – as economic credit does – but it could be cashed out only through the violence involved in the increased export of enslaved captives.

The economic differential between Senegambian and Atlantic-world economies, therefore, grew throughout this period, as capital accumulation accelerated outside West Africa. MONEY, PRESTIGE AND INEQUALITY By the later seventeenth century, the power that went with ruling a state like Kaabu was not one that any of its rulers wanted to let go.

Power was central to the identities of the new warrior aristocracies that ruled the region.

Authority over trade, settlement and decision-making was concentrated in the aristocracy, and fundamental to the retention of such power was the place of aristocratic warriors, such as the nyantios in Kaabu.

The nyantios were privileged; the oral accounts tell us how ‘these people also, the time they became nyancho / because of their pride and how they reserved themselves, / they always feed on other people. / They do nothing.’ Thus, hierarchy was everything: ‘There was a well in Badora / Which was called Nyampeng Njai. / It was surrounded by pawpaw trees and by silkcotton trees with smoothish earth. / The women of the princely house used to draw water from it. / Poor women did not draw water from it.’

Those who were nyantios had access to the best water, and they were able to ‘feed’ off the vital energy, and labour, of others.

This increasing social division had accompanied the rise of the trade in enslaved persons and political violence.

Desolation would often follow; the Dutch sailor Willem Schouten described a surprising human absence near the Magrabomba River of Sierra Leone: ‘We cast anchor about a league from the coast, and went ashore, to find a desert and uninhabited land.

His colleague Jacques Le Maire sailed shortly to a nearby river, ‘and saw no people, just wild Cattle, monkeys, and Birds’.

The following day, on 24 August 1615, several crew members went ashore, and ‘our people went in to several rivers, and touched land, to find people or some provisions . . . and they saw lots of turtles and crocodiles, but no people.

Yet, fifty years earlier, the Magrabomba River was a destination for slave-trading ships from the New World, where human captives could readily be secured.

The consequence of that had been insecurity and the flight of people away from the creeks and rivers by the coast, where the ships used to arrive.

North of the lion-shaped jungle-covered headland, which fell dramatically into the sea (the Leone of Sierra Leone, which can still be picked out today just south of Freetown), the flat creeks and swamps nearby had emptied.

To the south some islands rose offshore, straight out of the ocean, and, by the later eighteenth century, ‘Banana Island’ would become a cruel depot for captives awaiting the Atlantic crossing; here John Newton, who later composed ‘Amazing Grace’, himself lived in captivity for several years, and began to rethink his path in life.

The fundamental dynamic at play across the whole region was of the concentration of political power, with the wealth derived from trade goods becoming a source of status and a marker of inequality.

Increased trade did not, therefore, bring an equal benefit to the peoples of Greater Senegambia.

It was a source of greater political violence, social insecurity and insubordination for many; whereas for the new elites, through control of trade, they were able to exercise and display their power. And resentment of the arbitrary power of the new aristocracies was beginning to emerge. The Atlantic trade was thus highly disruptive of existing institutions.

In Greater Senegambia, the Jolof ‘Empire’ was fragmenting, while the Empire of Kaabu was rising; in Sierra Leone, during the sixteenth century, the Kingdom of the Sapes was overcome by migrants, known as the Manes, from the collapsing Mali Empire.

Everything changed: when political systems were large scale and complex, they often fell apart; when they were smaller and weaker, they became stronger.

The fundamental place of the Atlantic trade in West African political life was not, therefore, universal, but depended on pre-existing conditions.


The unifying theme was the disruption that it had introduced.

Beyond disruption, another important unifying theme across the region was the place of long-distance trade, just as we have already seen in the Sahel.

The great traders across Senegambia were the Mandinga dyula traders, who had dispersed here from Mali’s centre, just as they had also moved to Kano and Borno.

Writing in the 1620s, the Cape Verdean trader André de Donelha noted that ‘the greatest traders that there are in this whole region [Guiné] are the Mandinga [from Mali], especially their bixirins, who are their priests . . . it would be impossible to find any port of the Jolofs, in the region of [Guinea-Bissau] and right up to Sierra Leone, in which you did not find these bixirins.’ Or, as the oral historian Al-Hadji Ibrahima Cissé put it, ‘In stock trading, / Mandinkas did some trading. / [The Christians] gave goods to / the Mandinkas, the Mandinkas did the tradings.

The spread of the Mandinga traders throughout these regions went with the expansion of their networks and of the volume of goods traded.

The inflation in currency values was also an important feature, noted by slave-trading officials, with one saying in 1616 that ‘what used to be enough to buy two slaves a short time ago is now only enough for one.

As monies became more widespread, traders proliferated, and the intensity of exchanges went with them.

A major characteristic of this huge expansion of trading frameworks was the place of the money that enabled the whole system to work.


Greater supplies of ready cash made it much easier for markets to expand.


Alongside the iron bars already discussed, the most important form of currency in Greater Senegambia consisted of strips of locally produced cloth.

Almada described how, in the 1570s, ‘along all this coast, from the Jolof to the Mandinga lands, there is very good cotton cloth, dark and white cloths, and many other types and styles, and the dyes are so fine that they can even blind those who see them.

This cloth was often produced in Gambia, and by the Jolof in Senegambia, and further south in Geba and the surrounding regions of what is now Guinea-Bissau.

By the time that the slave trader Manuel Bautista Pérez was living in Cacheu in the 1610s, local cloths had become a standard unit of account.

By this time, Manoel Álvares tells us, the houses of the Portuguese in Cacheu ‘[were] mostly big and square in shape, well located, some of them with an upper storey, the walls made of adobe covered with palm fronds . . . [and] the roofs covered first with wood and then earth’.

In this prosperous slave-trading port, figures like Bautista Pérez lived ‘very luxuriously . . . covered with silks and other sorts of expensive clothing . . . and various types of Damask from India and China . . . walking around with offensive and defensive weapons, daggers and swords’.


They bought and sold people, wax, ivory and food provisions, but it was cloths that were the key unit of value in their account books: the price of such basic activities as renting a house, buying provisions such as couscous, and purchasing wine, shirts or jam were all accounted for in Bautista Pérez’s accounts according to their value in panos (the Portuguese word for cloths).

Thus, cloths were accounting units as well as tangible objects that people could wear, hang on their walls or place in burial.

To terms of the broader theme of this book related to West Africa’s economic place in the world, this use of cloth money was very important.

As we have seen, the role of iron bars was a long-standing one in financial exchanges, and the terms were set by West African rulers and their smiths, who used the bars to fashion agricultural tools and weaponry.

It was the West African demand for iron that established the importance of the bar as a form of currency; there had, of course, been local iron production, but the Atlantic trade expanded access to the ore and also the ability of rulers to take control of this. By the early seventeenth century, Ruyters wrote that all the way from what is now Dakar to the Gambia Estuary, and beyond, trade took place in the same way and for the same trade goods.

Hey a quickie wiki data mine is not enough to confirm your assumptions, hence Get the Book!!

Like I said the demand for the bars was to augment their own, not because they viewed their own products as inferior.

The Europeans ended up flooding the market to get a cheaper prices for enslaved persons.

Hope you get the context that's what matters most.

[Tukuler al~Takruri]

May 10, 2010 14:02:53 GMT -5 Tukuler al~Takruri said:

Iron working is an independent invention of West Africans from ~5000 BP.


... the African process produces
iron and steel from the same kilning. Steel production remained an
unknown outside of Africa and India until somewhere between the
14th and 19th centuries.

Unlike other continents, or in Meroe itself, iron was shrouded by
mystic underpinnings thought integral to its making yet served
to disable it from further advancements in production, use, and
distribution of a kind that led to the industrial age (the Bassari
were on their way to overcoming the non- technical limitations).
Still, African iron remained the superior product. This iron, or rather
carbon steel, was manufactured in furnaces attaining temperatures
sometimes exceeding 1800°C (3275°F). It was exported to India
where it was used in the synthesis of the famous ukku (wootz)
steel for weapons manufacture.


Eeeeeeeeee blacksmiths are numerous,
Aaaaaaah but those who can melt iron from stone have grown rare.
Beekillers are many.
Lionhunters are few.
-West African Song

Smelters from rock are indeed among THE LAST AFRICANS

It was cheaper to import inferior European products.
Not only true for iron, but for other things as well.
Europe moved onto industrialization leaving Africa in
the dust. Mali relied on homemade iron into the 1960s
when cheaper to produce European iron took over the
free trade market.


Forging A Knife From Primitive Iron Age Technology Steel Part 1; 5 minutes



Inagina: The Last House of Iron - PREVIEW; 11 minutes



Smelting iron in Senufo country; 12 minutes



Blacksmiths Working in Forge, Mali, West Africa (Long version); 15 minutes


*
Black Hephaistos: exploring culture and science in African iron working (1995; 48 mins)



Dokwaza: Last of the African Iron Masters (1988; 49 mins)



IRON VILLAGE: The Mossi Village of Dablo in Burkina Faso; 56 minutes



Smelting Iron in Africa (A DEMONSTRATION); 1 hour 45 minutes



Much more @ www.youtube.com/results?search_query=africa+iron

[mansamusa]

The advantage of having Africans interested in African history results in this kind of scholarship:

"The debate on West African metallurgies cannot be properly understoodwithout reference to the colonial template that featured Africa as the receiving partner inall crucial social, economic, and technological development. The interesting debate thattook place in West Africa during the Colonial Period was more meta-theoretical thanfactual. These conflicting glosses, despite their lack of empirical foundations, have con-strained the nature of archaeological research and oversimplified the dynamics of the manyfacets of technological innovation. The relative boom in archaeological research that tookplace from the 1960s onwards resulted in an exponential growth of factual information.Challenging evidence has emerged from Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, CentralAfrican Republic, Gabon, Togo, and Senegal. The picture that emerges from this surveycalls for more sophisticated explanations for the origins of West African metallurgies awayfrom the single non-African source hypothesis."

www.researchgate.net/publication/226180393_Early_West_African_Metallurgies_New_Data_and_Old_Orthodoxy