responsible for dealing with currency exchange and credit. Cowries were bulky and difficult to transport, and hence landlords vouched for sales and purchases of commodities, taking a commission on sales but also safeguarding both commodities and cash. Landlords were therefore essential to the operation of trade because of the vagaries of currency supplies and liquidity. They also warehoused the goods of long-distance trade, provisioned caravans, and provided other services to itinerant merchants, including feeding them and tending livestock.53
In addition to this dispersed commercial structure, the interior of West Africa was also held together through the transhumance migrations of Fulbe cattle herders and desert nomads, particularly the Tuareg and the Maure, which also helped integrate West Africa. Like the merchants, these nomadic peoples also relied on Islam as a means of unification, drawing on the Islamic legal system to regulate community relationships and to settle disputes in the absence of centralized states.54 Although the Fulbe originated in the Senegal River valley, they came to monopolize cattle rearing across all of West Africa by the sixteenth century. Cattle were moved across the open savanna in a generally northerly and southerly pattern to follow pastures and available supplies of water, and in the course of this transhumance they gradually drifted eastward as far as Lake Chad and eventually even farther east. The Toronkawa, to which the family of ʿUthmān dan Fodio belonged, settled in the Hausa region before the eighteenth century, for example. Because they traced their origins to the Senegal valley, as other Fulbe did, they could rely on clan ties, linguistic compatibility, and other cultural traits to reinforce an ongoing interaction. The Fulbe leadership thereby amassed considerable resources that derived from the retention of common traditions arising from this economic niche. The elite controlled the herds of cattle, horses, goats, and sheep but also invested in landed estates that relied on slave labor to produce agricultural products and provide bases of operations for nomadic herds.
Similarly, desert nomads, whose dominance of tracts of land in the Sahara and the Sahel was based on the rearing of camel herds but also other livestock, followed their own transhumance patterns of migration. In the course of moving herds in search of water and pasture, they also took advantage of the transport capacity of the camels to move commodities to market, particularly various types of salt processed at desert and Sahelian locations, grain (especially sorghum and millet), textiles, leather goods, agricultural tools, and other commodities, including kola nuts. Like the Fulbe, the desert nomads also invested heavily in agriculture through the establishment of slave estates on often marginal lands that could be very productive in good seasons but risked poor harvests in years of little rain. Hence the Kel Gress, Itisen, and Kel Ewey, among other Tuareg, established economic corridors of trade and production that fed desert salt into savanna markets and moved agricultural output from areas of surplus to markets. They hired out transport services while their camel herds remained in the savanna during the long dry season. The nomads also supplied camels for trans-Saharan trade, which usually followed a relay network that involved other nomads who lived farther north in the Sahara to connect with Morocco and the Ottoman domains of the Mediterranean. These networks also facilitated the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Hijaz. The rearing of donkeys and horses was equally important; the donkeys were needed for transport, sometimes over considerable distances, while horses formed the military backbone of the many warlords who controlled the savanna.
This desert-side economy based on transhumance thereby encouraged migration and interaction over considerable distances, which meant that the cultural unity of West Africa was far more secure than the fragmentation of the political landscape might suggest. After the collapse of Songhay in 1591–92, the many walled towns across West Africa allowed local elites to hold sway over limited tracts of territory. Despite the criticisms of Muslim intellectuals that these elites did not promote Islam sufficiently and oppressed the peasantry, in fact, these states provided security for local peasant production of grain, cotton, and other agricultural commodities. The manufacture of textiles and the curing of leather goods enabled regional industrial output for markets that encompassed most of West Africa and even stretched across the Sahara. Ecologically, trade and production followed a gradient from desert to rain forest; the presence of tsetse flies limited where livestock were to be found, and the seasonal fluctuations in rainfall guaranteed a symbiosis between nomads and sedentary farmers.
The friction that inevitably existed in this political economy pitted the rulers of towns and states against the heads of the nomadic livestock herders because of claims to taxation and efforts to avoid exactions by nomadic herders. Wherever Fulbe clan leaders and desert nomads established agricultural estates, it was necessary to work out arrangements with warlords who controlled the territory. When these arrangements broke down, nomads could migrate, but in doing so, they might lose control of slaves who were settled on the land in any particular state. The risks of raiding, confiscation, and outright theft were therefore a constant impediment to political unification and consequently exacerbated the cultural divisions between nomads and sedentary populations. Once again, adherence to Islam became a means of addressing this friction, particularly when the call to jihād was directed at transforming the political landscape.
The early jihāds of Senegambia and the highlands where many of the rivers of West Africa originate addressed the perceived injustices of the established governments of the region, particularly the indiscriminate use of military force in the subjugation of the populace. The opposition to the non-Muslim governments of Segu and Kaarta in the region among the rivers has long been recognized. The interpretations in virtually all historical analysis pit Muslims against these Bambara states. In fact, the term “Bambara” as an ethnic category and their identification as non-Muslims reflected the tensions that moved West Africa toward jihād. Unlike governments closer to the coast, the ruling elites of the interior relied on military force based on cavalry and inevitably employed slaves to tend the horses and to staff the military. Bambara referred both to an ethnicity that was not considered Muslim and to the political authority of states that were also charged with harassing Muslims. Muslim merchants used the term to justify the purchase and sale of slaves who were implicitly identified as non-Muslims or who were classified as not being Muslims. The people of Segu and Kaarta, the “Bambara” states, were Bamana ethnically, their language was a dialect of the Mande languages of the region, which also included Malinke and Juula, and they were often recognized in the Americas as Mandingo or Mandinga if they were Muslims. This confusion in terminology has affected the study of slave culture in the Americas. Unpacking these terms and establishing their historical context is part of the task of figuring out how West Africa fitted into Atlantic history and the age of revolutions.
Slavery underpinned the confusion over ethnic, religious, and political terminology. To be “Bambara” in West Africa meant that a person could be enslaved as far as Muslims were concerned. The Muslims who held such views included the merchants of the Muslim commercial diaspora, the intellectual elite, and those who championed jihād. This ethnic labeling that was associated with slavery can be traced back to Aḥmad Bābā in the early seventeenth century and his predecessors before then. Aḥmad Bābās scholarship, which was influential in the jihād movement, was the culmination of a tradition that emphasized jurisprudence and syntax and was associated with the Baghayogho, a Soninke clan that spread throughout the Malinke regions of Mali and then the Songhay Empire and was also referred to as Wangara.55 The term “Bambara” usually referred to those identified as Bamana who lived between the upper Niger River and the Senegal River and who became subjects of Segu and Kaarta and their non-Muslim governments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Linguistically and culturally, other than allegiance to Islam, they shared many features in economy and society with Mandinka and Soninke, whose affiliation with Islam was assumed on the basis of ethnicity.
Other distinctions of ethnicity were similarly ephemeral. Wolof and Fulbe in the Senegal valley shared allegiance to Islam and spoke mutually intelligible languages but were distinguished on the basis of economy. Wolof identified with the sedentary states of the Senegal region, including Waalo, while the nomadic population identified as Fulbe. The jihād movement changed this pattern; the states of Fuuta Bundu and Fuuta Toro emerged as states dominated by the Fulbe, as the designation “Fuuta” indicated. Various dichotomies characterized the cultural and political complexion of
